For a few years of my childhood, Kwanzaa was a big deal. I recall attending three Kwanzaa celebrations hosted by Mt. Lebanon Baptist Church in Baltimore. My cousin Olivia Moyd Hazell, at the time the church’s director of Christian education, organized them. About 50 church members and friends, many wearing kente cloth, would file into a softly lit basement the weekend after Christmas. We’d listen to good music: Black R&B standards, Soul Train dance lines, and traditional djembe performed live. We’d eat familiar food, like collard greens and red beans and rice. And we’d speak unfamiliar words such as umoja and ujima. The mood was festive, but with a focus on giving everyone, children especially, time to speak about how the principles of Kwanzaa applied to their lives.

Then it all just kind of stopped. My family participated in this big Kwanzaa tradition, and then we didn’t. But, as fringe and out of style as Kwanzaa may be, I wish we’d take it up again.

Kwanzaa, which begins on December 26, is a seven-day, nonreligious holiday inspired by African “first fruits” festivals that focus on appreciation for what the earth provides. There’s a candleholder, or kinara—Swahili is the chosen language of the holiday—with seven candles representing the seven principles of Kwanzaa: unity, self-determination, collective work and responsibility, cooperative economics, purpose, creativity, and faith. The holiday had a moment in the ’70s, and then again in the ’90s. But by the time my family was celebrating, in the 2000s, Kwanzaa was decisively on the decline. The reported numbers of Kwanzaa observers have varied widely since its inception—from half a million to 12 million—with recent reports suggesting that about one-fifth of Black Americans celebrate, which seems like an overestimate.

[Elijah Anderson: Black success, white backlash]

The holiday’s fortunes have tracked broader trends in African American life. Kwanzaa was born in 1966, during the ascendancy of the Black Power movement and the rise of Afrocentricity. Those ideas have since faded within the Black community, and so has the attraction of Kwanzaa. As the Gift of Gab rapped in 1999, “And them red, black, and green medallions / Was all just part of a trend, I guess / Hardly ever seem them around brothers’ necks no more.”

Kwanzaa’s legitimacy also suffered from the reputation of its creator, Maulana Karenga, who conceived of the holiday in the aftermath of the Watts riots in Los Angeles, where he lived. Five years later, Karenga was convicted of kidnapping and torturing two women within the Black-nationalist organization that he co-founded. He served four years in prison.

When I asked some of my family members why we stopped observing Kwanzaa, nobody brought up Karenga. Instead, the question was met with sighs and shrugs. “I think once the newness of it wears off, you might want to do something else,” my grandma told me. “And with the celebration that they just did for Christmas—by that time, they was all celebrated out.” My mother, who used to display a kinara in our house every December, said that no single moment or event made her drop Kwanzaa cold turkey. She thinks the momentum fizzled out after Cousin Olivia stopped throwing public parties through church, instead hosting them at her home.

Whatever the reason for its decline, today Kwanzaa feels like a punch line: a Black Nationalist pseudo-holiday, a pastiche of Christmas and Hanukkah in which Black Americans with flimsy cultural connections to West Africa play dress-up in the generalized attire of a vast and diverse region. It isn’t taken seriously as an annual ritual in the way that Thanksgiving and even Valentine’s Day are. From a national perspective, Kwanzaa seems to have become an eccentric and slightly corny footnote. The viral fame of Sandra Lee’s infamously unappetizing Kwanzaa cake—which featured canned apple-pie filling and, inexplicably, a hefty sprinkle of corn nuts—might be the last time the holiday had any national relevance.  

But Kwanzaa still has so much to offer. It’s the only holiday that attempts to create and sustain a sense of shared Black identity. True, the “Black community” is not monolithic—but neither is the Catholic or Jewish or Mexican or Irish American community. And that’s kind of the point: A cultural holiday can help forge common bonds among the heterogeneous members of the same group. That’s especially important for Black Americans, whose ancestral knowledge was violently stolen from us for hundreds of years.

[Peniel E. Joseph: How Black Americans kept reconstruction alive]

Does it feel a little strange, as a third generation Baltimorean, to put on a kente tunic once a year and light some multicolored candles? Yeah. But there’s a deeper meaning to it. Seeing a bunch of Black people packed snugly in a church basement, talking about Africa and building a strong community, had a real effect on me as a kid, and I want more Black people to have that feeling. Kwanzaa helps us acknowledge where we came from, and reminds us that our history didn’t start in the hulls of slave ships or on the banks of Virginia. As welcome as the recent spike in interest in fighting anti-Black racism has been, Blackness involves much more than that struggle. Kwanzaa’s principles of self-determination and collective responsibility emphasize that we are more than just the victims of oppression; while knowing our past is vital, our identity doesn’t revolve around white folk and the many sins they’ve committed against us.

I can understand why so many Black people feel uncomfortable with the overt Afrocentricity of Kwanzaa. Why should Black diasporans with European names who have never set foot on African soil have any reason to “reaffirm and restore African heritage and culture,” as Karenga put it? As Robbyn Mitchell wrote for the Tampa Bay Times in 2015, “My history is America’s history. Africa is an ocean away, and I feel no need to look there for inspiration.”

To me, this is a false choice. Black people can celebrate our Africanness without diminishing our Americanness. In fact, our understanding of the latter is incomplete if we lose sight of the former. The drum patterns that West African slaves used to communicate with one another when they were first taken to North America became the foundations of jazz—one of the crowning artistic achievements of American culture, not just Black culture—and later of hip-hop. We still taste the influence of West African cooking in the traditional dishes we eat today. Yes, it’s fair to criticize people who celebrate Kwanzaa for conflating different West African traditions and being hazy on their African history. But a people that has no real way to specify its origins needs to work with what it has. Nor should Black Americans feel embarrassed because they can’t pinpoint the precise region their ancestors were stolen from.

So this year, among my friends and family, Kwanzaa is coming back. We may not come close to duplicating my cousin Olivia’s old events, and we may not even observe all seven days of Kwanzaa. But, while working on this article, I pestered my mother so much that she decided to bring the kinara out of storage, and that’s a good start. Next year, who knows—maybe we’ll rock the kente cloth, too.

The wind washed over the rows of white tombstones and carried the last leaves of autumn on its breath. I held the map of Arlington National Cemetery up to my face, clinging to its edges as its corners fluttered. I looked up, and saw the statue I was searching for in the distance, encircled by tall steel fencing that caught and held the light from the afternoon sun. Inside the fence, concentric circles of tombstones surrounded the memorial—gravestones of the more than 200 Confederate soldiers buried beneath. Workers in white construction hats and highlighter-yellow vests moved about while security officers in dark sunglasses and black uniforms stood along the fence’s edge. To my left was a massive yellow crane whose engine rumbled steadily as it sat staring at the bronze memorial before it.

I had come to the Confederate Memorial at Arlington on Monday in anticipation of the statue’s removal. Following a review from the Department of Defense’s Naming Commission, the memorial had been scheduled to come down this week, but as I arrived, I received an alert on my phone that a federal judge had just issued a temporary restraining order at the request of a group named Defend Arlington. The group argued that the decision to take down the monument had been too hurried, that it would damage the surrounding tombstones, and that the DOD had failed to comply with federal law by not preparing an environmental-impact statement. What would happen next was unclear.

The limbo of the situation was evident in the bodies of the workers. Many of them stood in conversation or sat on the ground, leaning back against the fence. I walked over to a group of them chatting around a large stack of wooden planks. I asked when they thought the statue would be coming down. They turned to one another, exchanging skeptical glances, before one of them looked at me and said, “To be determined.”

According to the Southern Poverty Law Center, as of April 2023, nearly 500 Confederate symbols have been removed, renamed, or relocated since Dylann Roof massacred nine people in a Charleston, South Carolina, church in 2015. The Confederate memorial here, in one of the nation’s largest cemeteries, surrounded by the graves of some 400,000 people, is perhaps the most significant to face the possibility of removal.

[Read: A memorial at the barn]

The statue was paid for and erected by the United Daughters of the Confederacy, a group of southern white women who were the wives, widows, and descendants of Confederate soldiers. The organization was responsible for erecting hundreds of Confederate monuments across the country in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. It was built by the sculptor Moses Jacob Ezekiel, a former soldier in the Confederate army, and unveiled by President Woodrow Wilson on June 4, 1914, which was the day after the 106th anniversary of the birth of Confederate President Jefferson Davis. The statue’s most dominant image is of a woman—symbolizing the South itself—who wears an olive wreath atop her head. The monument also features depictions of two Black people that reify the subservient positions they occupied under slavery and the Confederacy. Arlington National Cemetery acknowledges:

Two of these figures are portrayed as African American: an enslaved woman depicted as a “Mammy,” holding the infant child of a white officer, and an enslaved man following his owner to war. An inscription of the Latin phrase “Victrix causa diis placuit sed victa Caton” (“The victorious cause was pleasing to the gods, but the lost cause to Cato”) construes the South’s secession as a noble “Lost Cause.” This narrative of the Lost Cause, which romanticized the pre–Civil War South and denied the horrors of slavery, fueled white backlash against Reconstruction and the rights that the 13th, 14th and 15th Amendments (1865–1870) had granted to African Americans.

For decades, southern politicians claimed that the statue was simply a part of a larger project of reconciliation, a way for political leaders to solidify national unity at a time when the wounds of the Civil War were still fresh. In some ways, they were right. It was intended as a symbol of reconciliation and unity. But for whom? Certainly not for Black Americans, who, in the decade leading up to the erection of this statue, had been terrorized by more than 700 lynchings across the country.

The United Daughters of the Confederacy did not conceal what they meant by reconciliation. To them, reconciliation meant demanding that Reconstruction—which is to say, any efforts oriented toward pursuing Black social, political, or economic equality—was acknowledged to have been a mistake. The best way to achieve national unity, they thought, was to allow southern white people to govern themselves, with no repercussions from the federal government for the routine torture, destruction, and murder of Black people. As the Confederate veteran and former secretary of the Navy Hilary A. Herbert wrote on behalf of the UDC when the statue was unveiled in 1914:

In 1867, the seceding States were subjected to the horrors of Congressional Reconstruction, but in a few years American manhood had triumphed; Anglo-Saxon civilization had been saved; local self-government under the Constitution had been restored; ex-Confederates were serving in the National Government, and true patriots, North and South, were addressing themselves to the noble task of restoring fraternal feeling between the sections.

According to Samantha Baskind, an art-history professor at Cleveland State University and the author of a forthcoming biography of Ezekiel, the United Daughters of the Confederacy didn’t want just anyone to construct this statue; they specifically wanted him. Ezekiel, the first Jewish student ever to attend the Virginia Military Institute, was a veteran of the famous Battle of New Market. In the battle, 257 institute cadets, some as young as 15 years old, were ordered to help close the Confederate line. They did so, and against the odds, forced Union troops to retreat. So many soldiers lost their boots in the mud caused by days of rain that the battlefield became known as the “Field of Lost Shoes,” and the victory would take on an outsize, mythologized importance in Confederate memory. “Ezekiel is a famous sculptor, a famous southerner, a famous veteran—who could be better in their mind?” Baskind told me.

Whether or not Ezekiel intended it, the particular images he used have come to be understood as Confederate propaganda. The image of the Black servant following his white master into battle, for example, has been used by groups such as the Sons of Confederate Veterans to perpetuate the myth that Black men served as soldiers for the South during the war. This idea, as the historian Kevin M. Levin writes in his book Searching for Black Confederates, was used to buttress the claim that the Civil War had been fought not over slavery but over states’ rights. If Black people served in the Confederate army, the logic goes, then the war could not have been about their enslavement.

[Tom Nichols: The mysterious return of a Soviet statue in Russia]

“There is no question that Ezekiel used iconography that is unacceptable,” Baskind told me. And in doing so, she believes, he took what could have been a true opportunity to create a meaningful site of national reconciliation and ruined it. “He’s the one who really has doomed the monument in the 21st century,” she said. “It was supposed to be the premier symbol of sectional reunion, but it has white-supremacist origins in its iconography.”

In 2017, following the murder by a white nationalist of Heather Heyer in Charlottesville, Virginia, a group of Ezekiel’s descendants wrote a letter demanding that the Arlington statue come down. “Like most such monuments, this statue intended to rewrite history to justify the Confederacy and the subsequent racist Jim Crow laws. It glorifies the fight to own human beings, and, in its portrayal of African Americans, implies their collusion,” they wrote. “As proud as our family may be of Moses’s artistic prowess, we—some twenty Ezekiels—say remove that statue.”

The statue stayed up—but in 2020 a plaque was placed nearby, explaining to visitors that the memorial contained “highly sanitized depictions of slavery.” Then, in 2021, Congress created the Naming Commission to devise a framework to effect the removal of Confederate monuments and memorials at military facilities—and as a military cemetery, Arlington was included. After the decision was made to take down the statue, more than 40 Republican congressional representatives sent a letter to Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin, urging him to intervene. Nevertheless, the Pentagon said that the statue needed to be removed by January 1, 2024.

Making sense of Arlington’s Confederate Memorial is impossible without understanding the larger history of the land it sits upon. Although many people today think of Arlington National Cemetery as a place to commemorate the lives of fallen American soldiers, that was not its original purpose. Before the land became the national cemetery, it was the plantation of Confederate General Robert E. Lee. Prior to the Civil War, about 200 enslaved people lived and worked there.

Lee had come to own the plantation through his wife, Mary Curtis, whose father, George Washington Parke Custis, had built the mansion that sat at the edge of the plantation to memorialize his adoptive grandfather, President George Washington. The marriage of Mary Curtis and Robert E. Lee brought together two of the most powerful families in the South. But in 1861, as the Civil War began, Lee and his family fled from their Arlington plantation, which was soon seized by Union soldiers. The estate served as an important strategic outpost for the Union army throughout the war. Three years into the conflict, in 1864, the first military burial took place, and the land began to evolve into the cemetery it is today. One of the cemetery’s goals, from the beginning, was to establish justice for the Union cause, which, as I looked up at the statue, makes the presence of a memorial glorifying the Lost Cause all the more perplexing.

I made my way from the Confederate Memorial to the Robert E. Lee Memorial at Arlington House, the white mansion that sits on a hill and has a panoramic view of Washington, D.C., that I had never encountered. Why this place had become so valuable to the Union during the Civil War was clear: Officers would have been able to see any army approaching the city from miles away.

Behind the home were former slave quarters, spaces that had been transformed into exhibits documenting the lives and stories of those who had been enslaved there. I began to wonder what the families who had once lived in those quarters would think about the Confederate Memorial—its presence, and now its removal.

I called Stephen Hammond, a scientist emeritus at the U.S. Geological Survey who is a descendant of the Syphax family, one of several families that were enslaved on the plantation. He is a family genealogist and docent at Arlington House, where he tries to ensure that his family’s story and the stories of other Black people who once lived there are preserved.

[From the December 2023 issue: The Confederate general whom all the other Confederates hated]

“I’m conflicted,” Hammond told me, when I asked about the memorial’s removal. “I think it’s important to be able to tell the entire history of a space,” he said, before pausing. “And yet, there are aspects of that memorial that are very offensive to me, and I feel like they don’t represent what our country is about.”

Although the Confederate Memorial did provide an opportunity for historians, docents, and visitors to discuss the wider history of the cemetery, Hammond told me, he does not subscribe to the idea that the statue’s purpose was unity. “On the news this week, I’ve heard people saying we shouldn’t tear it down, because it’s a ‘reconciliation monument,’” he said. “That couldn’t be farther from the truth.”

When Hammond walks through the cemetery, he attempts to hold all of its complexities together—the cognitive dissonance of its being the final resting place of the enslavers and the enslaved, a place that tells the story of those who fought for the Union and those who fought to destroy it. Although doing so is not always easy, he told me, he tries to extend empathy and grace to all, in the same way he hopes visitors will extend them to his own ancestors.

“I honor those that have died in that space,” Hammond said of the memorial, “but I also recognize that not more than two or three football fields away, my family members were enslaved, and were forced to labor and serve other people for exactly the reasons that the war was fought.”

“I don’t want history to be lost by the removal of something that creates a gap,” he went on. “But at the same time, what was filling that gap is not reflective of what history really was.”

This is why, for Hammond, the issue of who is commemorated at the cemetery, and how, goes beyond the Confederate Memorial. He is currently leading an effort to remove Robert E. Lee’s name from the Arlington House site. In a 2022 op-ed for The Washington Post, Hammond and Lee Crittenberger Hart, a descendant of Lee, wrote, “Our families realize that the name ‘The Robert E. Lee Memorial’ focuses solely on one side of those who lived at Arlington House and excludes and diminishes the lives and histories of those who were enslaved.”

[Clint Smith: Donald Trump vs. American history]

Earlier this year, Representative Don Beyer and Senator Tim Kaine, both Democrats of Virginia, introduced legislation that would change the name to the Arlington House National Historic Site. Hammond is hopeful that the law will pass. In the meantime, he continues with his personal effort to inform visitors about the full history of Arlington House, giving an account of those whose stories went unacknowledged for so long.

“People get off of the trolley,” he said, referring to the small hop-on-hop-off bus tours that bring people around the cemetery, “and they walk over to see that beautiful view, and they have no idea what that space really is.”

On Tuesday, Judge Rossie Alston, the federal judge who’d earlier issued the stay, visited the site and, saying he “saw no desecration of any graves,” cleared the way for the memorial’s removal. Judge Alston—who is Black and was appointed to the bench in 2019 by President Donald Trump—commented that the memorial contains a depiction of a “slave running after his ‘massa’ as he walks down the road. What is reconciling about that?”

In something of a full-circle moment, Virginia Governor Glenn Youngkin, who had argued against removing the memorial, announced that the statue would be relocated to land owned by the Virginia Military Institute at the New Market Battlefield State Historical Park, where Ezekiel and his fellow cadets fought the battle that made them Confederate legends.

On Thursday, I traveled back to Arlington to see the remainder of the memorial taken down before it was packed up and transported to its new home. The crane was now swinging its neck inside the fence. After the workers secured the final section, one of them signaled to the operator, and the bronze was lifted from the memorial’s stone base, floating above our heads like an asteroid caught in a new orbit. Some of the workers pulled out their phone to record the moment.

Before I left, I took one last look at the stone base upon which the statue had stood for more than a century. The space was not conspicuous in its emptiness. I took a photo and turned around to make my way back toward the main road.

The memorial is gone. But the question of how we remember who we’ve been isn’t going anywhere.

The ugly news broke during the last week of November: A Florida woman alleged that the chair of the state Republican Party had raped her at her home. The assault had occurred after he and his wife had planned, according to police, to meet her for a three-way sexual rendezvous, as they had previously.

These were stunning claims given the power couple involved: The GOP chair, Christian Ziegler, who has denied the assault and said the encounter was consensual, is a prominent state political consultant. His Republican-activist wife, Bridget Ziegler, is a founder of Moms for Liberty, the conservative political organization whose members have made school-board meetings partisan battlegrounds across America for the past two years.

The allegations have sparked a fusillade of condemnations, complaints of hypocrisy, and “Moms for Libertines” jokes. But the situation has also provided a window into the machinations of the movement that helped make the Zieglers so significant in Republican politics—thanks especially to the rapid rise of Moms for Liberty as a national organization.

Bridget Ziegler started Moms for Liberty with Tina Descovich and Tiffany Justice in January 2021, but she was soon wooed away. Within months, she was hired to help run school-board-campaign trainings at the Leadership Institute, an obscure but influential nonprofit.

The institute was founded in 1979 by Morton Blackwell, a longtime GOP activist—so longtime that in 1964, he was the youngest elected delegate for Barry Goldwater in his run for the Republican nomination. Blackwell’s participation in the emerging New Right made him a crucial figure in the Reagan Revolution, Richard Meagher, a political-science professor at Randolph-Macon College, told me. Now 84, Blackwell still serves as president of the Leadership Institute, and is the Virginia GOP’s national committeeman.

The mission of Blackwell’s institute is to recruit and train conservative activists for positions of influence in politics and the media. Its website lists dozens of classes about get-out-the-vote strategies, digital campaigning, and fundraising tips, but its true value, Meagher told me, lies in its connections. “The Leadership Institute trains people and then plugs them into various networks, whether it’s think tanks or in Congress, in nonprofit groups or advocacy groups,” he said.

The institute claims to have tutored more than a quarter of a million conservative operatives over the past five decades, including Karl Rove, Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, and former Vice President Mike Pence. Newly elected House Speaker Mike Johnson has also credited Blackwell for his career in Congress. And few people in Florida were as plugged-in as the Zieglers. But many institute alums are relatively unheralded political players, experts told me. These activists might be the technologists behind campaigns and nonprofits, the staffers for senators, or the drafters of policy.

When the coronavirus pandemic prompted school administrators to keep kids at home, the institute developed new programs for training suburban women to wage school-board campaigns to keep schools open and masks off—a development that led to the recruitment of Bridget Ziegler, the tall, blond face of this new public arena of conservative activism. (Ziegler did not respond to requests for comment for this story.)

The Leadership Institute exists alongside dozens of similar but better-known groups, such as the Heritage Foundation, a think tank; Turning Point USA, a youth organization; and the Family Research Council, a social-conservative group. Many of these organizations and their leaders are members of a conservative umbrella organization called the Council for National Policy, of which Blackwell was a founding member. The CNP is a secretive, invitation-only group that gathers conservative activists to coordinate political strategy, Anne Nelson, the author of Shadow Network, told me. Think the Conservative Political Action Conference, but less performative.

The CNP’s purpose is to “bring fellow travelers together” to coordinate strategy and messaging, Meagher said. Hillary Clinton popularized the phrase “vast right-wing conspiracy,” but “it’s not a conspiracy—it’s all out in the open,” Meagher said. “They are very well connected, and there’s lots of crossover between different institutions.” The Democratic Party, of course, has similar resources for training progressive candidates and furthering policy goals. But, Meagher said, the Democratic-aligned constellation is not nearly as ideologically coherent or disciplined as the groups that make up the CNP: “There is no analogy to that on the left.”

This interlocking structure of funding, training, and schmoozing is key to understanding the quick success of Moms for Liberty in American politics.

According to Ziegler and her colleagues, the organization was initially launched to address concerns that parents had about school closures and mask policies during the pandemic. But Moms for Liberty was quickly absorbed into the conservative movement’s broader network. Within days of its creation, Moms for Liberty was featured on Rush Limbaugh’s radio show. By June 2021, the group was hosting the political commentator Megyn Kelly for a “fireside chat” at Cape Canaveral, Florida. This early success and financial capability suggest that the group “had a lot of resources available that just are not available to other grassroots groups,” Maurice T. Cunningham, the chair of the political-science department at the University of Massachusetts at Boston, told me.

Now, after only two years in existence, the group has become a mandatory campaign stop for Republican political candidates. At Moms for Liberty’s summit this year in Philadelphia—only its second-ever national gathering—every major presidential-primary candidate stopped by to speak to the crowd, including Donald Trump.

“It might’ve been for five minutes that the moms were selling T-shirts and having bake sales,” Joshua Cowen, an education-policy professor at Michigan State University, told me. “But it was very quickly, within months, that they scaled up to the right-wing avatar they are today.” Recently, the group’s focus has shifted toward advocating against the teaching of gender, sexuality, and race in school curricula, and banning from school libraries certain books that mention those themes. This new front in the group’s campaigning has placed the allegations of sexual impropriety against the Zieglers in sharp relief. (“Never, ever apologize,” Christian Ziegler said during a presentation on dealing with the media at this year’s Mom’s for Liberty summit. “Apologizing makes you look weak.“)

The Leadership Institute has been an integral sponsor of both of Moms for Liberty’s annual summits—donating at least $50,000 in 2022 and serving again as a lead sponsor of the event in 2023—and it has provided training sessions to members. In short, Cunningham told me, “if there’s no Leadership Institute, there’s no Moms for Liberty.” Every year, the group awards a “liberty sword” for parents’-rights advocacy; this year in Philadelphia, Blackwell got the sword.

That recognition now appears unreciprocated. In the past three weeks, Bridget Ziegler seems to have been scrubbed, Soviet-style, from the Leadership Institute; her name has disappeared from the online staff directory. (As of Friday morning, the Leadership Institute had not responded to a request for comment.) Ziegler has also been asked to resign from the Sarasota School Board.

There’s no question that her reputation in conservative politics has taken a hit. Even Moms for Liberty’s influence may have peaked for now, given some recent failures in school-board elections. But “what isn’t waning,” Cowen said, “is the influence of the groups behind them.”

Photographs by Phil Jung

The Schweitzer brothers see John Gonsalves everywhere now.

In the small towns on the eastern tip of Hawaii’s Big Island, everyone knows everyone, and if you’re not from here, you might never fit in. Everywhere the brothers go, they see Gonsalves’s truck. He’s a small man with a scraggly beard, and runs a business building fences on properties up and down the coast. Rumor has it the business isn’t doing so well. Rumor also has it he funded that business with the reward money he took for sending the Schweitzer brothers to jail.

Sometimes, at traffic lights or in parking lots, Gonsalves sees them too. On these occasions, he smiles a little. Sometimes he even waves. The brothers can’t believe it. He’s waving? They turn and head in the other direction, fast. If they didn’t leave, they have no idea what they might say to the man they believe ruined their lives.

Albert Ian Schweitzer is 52 now—short and wide and muscular, with Popeye forearms, a deep tan, and a close-cropped, graying buzz cut. He walks with the rugged, unfluid strides of a guy who spends most of his time at the gym, which is an accurate if incomplete way of describing how he’s spent the past 25 years of his life. Until January, he was lifting weights during every available hour in a federal prison yard in Arizona. Now he is back home, on the porch of his brother’s house, his nieces milling around him.

In idle moments, Ian, who goes by his middle name, seems to stare at his surroundings, as if trying to focus. “Three months ago I was sitting in a prison cell, you know?” he said when I visited in April. “I can’t even wrap my head around it.” He and his brother, Shawn—also muscle-bound but taller and four years younger—are dealing with the damage of the past several decades. Ian is trying to figure out how to be free after so much time. Shawn, after serving more than a year, kept on living in the area, enduring decades of stares, his employment prospects grim, the stigma surrounding him seeping out and tainting his wife and children.

Downtown Hilo

Everyone had been convinced that the brothers were the culprits in one of the most notorious criminal cases in the modern history of Hawaii: the rape and murder of a 23-year-old woman named Dana Ireland on Christmas Eve, 1991. At the time, Ian was 20 and Shawn was 16. Neither had a record, and their parents were law-abiding citizens. For three years, no one came to them to talk about this case. But in 1994, the police, acting on a tip, began investigating them both, latching on to a theory that implicated them even when the physical evidence—the blood, the semen, the tire tracks—all pointed elsewhere.

Wrongful convictions can result from any number of cascading errors, blatant oversights, and outright slipups—some conscious and deliberate, some structural and circumstantial. Over 32 years, the investigation and prosecutions of the Schweitzers seem to have incorporated every possible one of them. There was intense media attention putting pressure on police to make an arrest—the “dead white girl” phenomenon. There was cultural bias against Native Hawaiians like the Schweitzers—the legacy, well known to Hawaiians, of lynchings of native men for alleged attacks on white women. There was investigative tunnel vision—going after the Schweitzer brothers even after the facts failed to support that case. There was blind faith in jailhouse informants—a slew of them, all hoping for special favors from prosecutors in return for their testimony. There was junk science—about teeth marks, and tire treads. There even may have been prosecutorial misconduct—a state lawyer misleading a judge about the outcome of one of the brothers’ polygraph tests.

[From the November 2022 issue: Jake Tapper on a Philadelphia teenager and the empty promise of the Sixth Amendment]

Now that Ian has been exonerated, he needs to reacclimate to life in the world. He had to get a driver’s license and learn how to use a smartphone. He needs to get comfortable around people again. These towns were small enough already. For decades the Schweitzers were the area’s greatest villains; now they run into people and those people are nice. At the market and at restaurants, they congratulate Ian and ask if they can give him a hug. It’s weird. He can’t help but think: Where were those people for the past 30 years? But he knows there are others out there too—people who benefited from accusing him of a crime they knew he hadn’t committed. Chief among them is John Gonsalves.

As our conversation meandered over a sunny afternoon, Ian allowed himself to wonder about Gonsalves. What must it be like for him now, to know that the lie didn’t hold? If the brothers ever did confront him, what would he say?

The place where Dana Ireland’s body was found is less than a half-hour drive from the Schweitzer family’s home, a rundown ranch house in a development called Hawaiian Beaches enshrouded by low palm trees and lush, tropical ferns. The homes are built close enough to one another that you can see and hear most anything your neighbor is up to.

The Schweitzer family always stood out here. Ian and Shawn’s parents, Jerry and Linda Schweitzer, moved to the sleepy east coast of the Big Island in the 1970s from the more populated island of Oahu, where Jerry owned an auto body shop. Linda found work at a bank and later in the local prosecutor’s office, as a victim counselor. Other families in the subdivision were on public assistance; the Schweitzers didn’t need that. Ian and Shawn were the kids whose parents sprang for equipment for the whole little league so that everyone could afford to play. Ian saved enough money from his paper route to buy his own car—a used Volkswagen Beetle—which he fixed up himself before he was old enough to drive it. The Schweitzers “just had a little more than the next person,” Ian told me. “I think we were hated on right from the gate.”

One night in June 1991, Linda and Jerry found themselves in a confrontation with their across-the-road neighbor, a known drug dealer named Timmy Gonsalves. Timmy was in his mid-20s, and had friends going in and out of his house at all hours. Some of Timmy’s younger cousins went to the same high school as Shawn. Both families were Hawaiian with mixed ancestry: The Gonsalves came from Puerto Rico, while the Schweitzer brothers have Portuguese and German ancestors (hence their last name). Linda and Jerry often heard screaming and loud music from Timmy’s house, which the police would raid now and then. Sometimes, Linda and Jerry were the ones who called the cops.

Across the street from the Schweitzers’ home (left) is the house where Timmy Gonsalves used to live (right).

On this particular night, Timmy stood in front of their house and started yelling, goading the Schweitzers to “come to the roadway and fight,” according to a police report filed that night. Once Linda told the officer that the conflict had been going on for years, Timmy was charged with harassment. An encore performance took place a few months later; Timmy and his cousin Wayne threw rocks onto the Schweitzers’ roof and beer cans at their garage. Linda tape-recorded that confrontation for the police, who heard the cousins threatening her and her family. This time, both Gonsalveses were charged with harassment.

No one characterized what was happening as anything deeper than an everyday beef between neighbors. It would come to seem significant to the Schweitzers—something that could, perhaps, explain the unexplainable—only later, after a young white woman, visiting from the mainland, was raped and left dying on Christmas Eve, and the police were desperate for leads.

Dana Ireland was just out of college when she came to Hawaii from Virginia for an extended stay in October 1991. Dana’s older sister, Sandra, had been living on the east coast of the Big Island, and their parents came to join the sisters for the holidays. That area, south of Hilo, the county seat, is not one of the most obvious tourist destinations for mainlanders, but it’s beautiful, with secluded beaches and fishing spots known only to the locals. The Irelands rented a place in a subdivision called Vacationland, a sleepy neighborhood joined by heavily forested dirt roads that are best traveled by bicycle.

Dana biked on her own a lot. On the afternoon of Christmas Eve, while her parents were getting dinner ready, she biked to a friend’s house. She was seen on the way back passing the warm springs in Kapoho and open fields of lava flows. She never made it home.

Just before 5:30 p.m., someone found Ireland’s bike in the brush by the side of a road and called the police. At 5:47 p.m., someone else called the police about an injured girl in Wa‘awa‘a, a remote neighborhood several miles away. A woman making dinner in her cottage had heard an engine gunning, and then muted screams for help. She walked out to a beach-access road and saw Ireland on the ground, bleeding, her denim shorts wrapped around her ankles, her shirt pulled up to her shoulders. Wa‘awa‘a had no electricity or phone service. Flagging down a passing car on the road to ask for help took the woman almost an hour. An ambulance didn’t make it down the rutted dirt road until almost 7. Dana Ireland died at Hilo Hospital overnight.

The entire state of Hawaii seemed to erupt in outrage. A young woman raped and killed on Christmas Eve. A killer on the loose. The police spent much of 1992 canvassing the area, interviewing longtime residents—many of whom were caught up in trouble of some sort, and looking for a way out.

One was a man named Frank Pauline Jr., who happened to be a member of the Gonsalves family. Timmy Gonsalves, the Schweitzer family’s angry neighbor, was his cousin. On March 17, an anonymous tip led the police to question Pauline about Ireland. He supplied as his alibi a Christmas Eve party at his family’s house. And then he gave them something more: He said he’d been at a local park just a week earlier and had overheard someone—he said he didn’t know who—yelling at Ian Schweitzer, accusing him of raping and murdering Ireland.

Ian and Shawn both have said they knew of Pauline but never spent time with him. They say they have no idea why he brought up Ian’s name that day. But it wouldn’t be the last time he did.

In February 1993, police picked up Pauline for questioning in a burglary case and again asked him about the Ireland murder. This time he said he knew nothing about it but would keep his ears open for information. The cop applied pressure by telling Pauline that some people said he was the killer himself. “Yeah, people like to blame me,” Pauline replied.

Then, in July, Pauline was arrested and charged with the rape of a different woman. And a month later, prosecutors mounted what at the time was called the largest cocaine-trafficking case in the Big Island’s history against three of Pauline’s close relatives: his cousin Timmy; his mother, Pat Pauline; and a half-brother, John Gonsalves, whom the indictment described as “a major distributor of cocaine.”

Practically the entire Gonsalves family was in trouble, just as the Ireland family was pushing officials to make an arrest in Dana’s murder. In August 1993, her parents wrote open letters accusing prosecutors of “timidness”: “We believe the police know the identities of the perpetrators,” they declared in one. “There must be those who can supply the evidence the police need.” The family offered a $25,000 reward for information leading to a conviction.

In December 1993, a tipster told police that Pauline was saying he and a group including two brothers who were not the Schweitzers took part in the rape and murder. Those other brothers were questioned and polygraphed and eventually excluded as suspects. The following May, John Gonsalves—out on a $10,000 bail but still facing charges for the cocaine case—called the police and claimed that Pauline had witnessed the attack.

By now, Pauline had established himself as, in the words of the prosecutor working the Ireland case, a “walking crime wave.” In 1994 he’d started a 10-year prison sentence for the other rape case when he gave his courtroom guards the slip, fleeing to Honolulu for a weekend before the cops tracked him down. Now he was behind bars again. And this time, when the police met with Pauline in prison to talk again about the Ireland case, he put it all on the Schweitzer brothers.

He said that he had been along for the ride in the back of the Schweitzer brothers’ car that Christmas Eve when Ian, high on crack, ran the girl over, loaded her into the trunk, drove around with her for 10 or 15 minutes, and then pulled over and raped her. He mentioned Ireland being beaten with a tire iron. He insisted that Ian was the ringleader, Shawn was following Ian’s directions, and he, Pauline, was just a witness.

The police interviewed a few people who thought that Shawn was harmless, just a kid, but had more to say about Ian. A woman who’d once dated Wayne Gonsalves (brother to John and half-brother to Pauline, and the one who’d thrown beer cans at the Schweitzers’ garage) told police that Ian was into coke, something Ian has always denied. Never mind that Ian and Shawn said they had never partied with any Gonsalves family member. Never mind that the Gonsalveses seemed engaged in a slow-burning conflict with Ian and Shawn’s parents. The police took the rumors and, when all their other leads fell away, ran with them.

Case files and a photograph of Ireland The area where Ireland’s body was found

Over the next two years, Pauline would speak with the police at least seven times about the murder. The details changed each time. First they were driving a friend’s blue pickup truck, then a VW Bug. (The Schweitzers have owned various VWs over the years; Ian has always maintained that his only remote connection to the Gonsalves family was that he and Wayne occasionally traded VW parts.) Pauline had trouble saying exactly where they supposedly first saw Ireland, or where she was run over. The roles each of them allegedly played in the rape and murder seemed strangely fluid. And certain obvious details seemed to escape him. In June, he said that, on orders from Ian, he’d hit Ireland with a tire iron, and yet he did not remember what she looked like, apart from the “blood coming out of her eyes, her mouth, and her nose.”

The police let Pauline talk, knowing that the story implicated him more than he seemed to understand. He was focused on what he would get in return, continually making demands to improve his lot in jail. Sure enough, even after failing a polygraph, Pauline got some benefits—additional phone calls to his girlfriend, promises of special visitation rights, a transfer to a more desirable prison.

John Gonsalves would benefit from his cooperation too: He and the other family members received deals in their pending cocaine case, and late in 1994, Gonsalves was sentenced to only probation. All he had to do, it seemed, was get his brother to insert himself in one of the most high-profile murder cases in modern Hawaii history.

The police seized the Schweitzers’ car—a VW they’d bought a couple of years earlier—and interviewed Shawn, who had by then graduated from high school and was already settling down with his childhood sweetheart. A few days later, officers spoke with Ian on Kauai, where he’d found a job as a nurse at a hospital. Both brothers were stunned and denied everything, but Ian was especially indignant. When asked why Pauline would point to him, he said that he could not think like Pauline or his family—that he could not drop his mentality down to their level. “The kid got a lot of nerve,” Ian said.

By early 1995, Pauline’s story leaked out into the news. But the more the media learned about Pauline, the less reliable he seemed. Even Pauline’s own grandmother had once told a state investigator that he was “a liar, a thief, and spoiled little brat.” “The Ireland slaying case,” a columnist for the Hawaii Tribune-Herald wrote, “now rests on the memory of a man whose attorney once described him as so drunk and loaded on cocaine that he did not remember the 1993 rape incident that took him to prison.” And when Pauline himself was interviewed by reporters, he was happy to acknowledge that he’d come forward only at the suggestion of his brother John Gonsalves.

Gonsalves did his part to reinforce Pauline’s narrative. He told police he saw the Schweitzer brothers pull up to the party his family threw on Christmas Eve, the night Ireland was killed. The brothers, he said, were driving a VW Bug Ian had just bought. But the front end of the car was damaged, and the guys didn’t seem happy about it.

The Schweitzers disputed everything. They said they hadn’t even owned that car on Christmas Eve—and they produced paperwork to show that Ian had bought it later. Besides, they said they’d never be caught dead at a Gonsalves party. “Never associated with him once. Never,” Ian told me, referring to Pauline. “He said what he said to save John Gonsalves and his mom from doing prison time.”

But to the police, a simple narrative locked into place: Bad local boys, all tied up with drugs, all the same, had gang-raped and killed the white girl.

That didn’t change even when Pauline walked his story back. He seems to have belatedly realized that volunteering himself as a participant, even a minor one, in the Ireland killing wouldn’t just get him favors in prison—it might get him a new conviction too. With each interview, he’d tried to cast Ian as the coked-up instigator and himself and Shawn as cowed underlings. But of course, saying that he’d hit Dana Ireland with a tire iron, even under orders, was hardly a good look.

On April 22, 1995, Pauline said that, actually, his brother Wayne was the one who did it. The police weren’t biting. On July 6, 1996, he completely recanted, saying he’d told the police what they wanted to hear, that his story about the Schweitzer brothers was completely made-up—that John Gonsalves had struck a deal with prosecutors to persuade Pauline to talk with them about the Ireland case in exchange for them dropping his own drug charges.

The police were facing time pressure. The statute of limitations on two of the charges—kidnapping and sexual assault—was approaching. (Prosecutors had more time to bring a murder charge but feared it would be harder to prove, because Ireland had been alive when she was left on the road.) “I have now lost faith in the Hawaii County justice system,” John Ireland fumed in another letter to a Hawaii paper, “and I am now certain that those responsible for Dana’s violent murder will never be brought to justice.”

Pauline was indicted in July 1997. Three months later, the Schweitzer brothers were arrested and indicted too. By early 2000, both Pauline and Ian would be convicted of all three charges. Shawn, who by April of that year had spent two stints in prison for a total of 16 months, was offered a chance to plead guilty to kidnapping and manslaughter in exchange for time served. His parents and Ian encouraged him to take the deal. It wasn’t the truth. But Shawn had a wife and three young children. And the prosecutors were two for two.

“I thought, going into this, that there’s no way that the justice system was going to do this to us,” Shawn told me. “This whole scenario is so ridiculous that somebody’s got to be bound to see that this is wrong, you know? And I believed that all the way up until I see my brother get convicted.”

Shawn took the deal, and Ian went to prison. In the eyes of the court and the world and everyone at home, Pauline and the Schweitzer brothers were murderers.

Once upon a time, Ken Lawson was a high-powered criminal-defense attorney in Cincinnati. Lawson spent the 1990s working police-misconduct cases, civil-rights cases—change-the-world cases—and representing star clients such as Deion Sanders. He had a mansion, a motorcycle, and a yacht. He had a wife and five kids, and a career that seemed unstoppable. At the height of his success, he ran an ad in the Yellow Pages calling himself the “junk yard dog of justice.” Then it all fell apart.

He’d started drinking, and after he tore a rotator cuff at the gym, he got addicted to painkillers—first Percodan from a doctor, and next oxycontin obtained through a client, until the habit cost him $1,000 a day. Very quickly Lawson destroyed nearly everything he’d built. He was disbarred and spent almost two years in prison on a federal drug charge. His wife and family had moved to Hawaii, and after his release he moved into a halfway house on Oahu.

Lawson was starting his life over again. He couldn’t practice law, but he was invited to speak to some classes at the University of Hawaii’s law school. And through a connection there, he became a clerk for Hawaii’s Innocence Project, a nonprofit dedicated to exonerating the wrongly convicted. That’s where he learned about Ian Schweitzer.

Lawson’s background in misconduct cases gave him a fluency in the way that investigations go awry, the tunnel vision that can take over. He saw how all three men were presumed guilty before any were tried. Homemade Wanted: Dead posters with the Schweitzer brothers’ faces peppered the streets of Hilo. A local author wrote Murder in Paradise—a true-crime book about how the police finally got the killers. The brothers had a hard time hanging on to lawyers: Every time they tried to hire one, the prosecutor’s office would file a motion to have that lawyer conflicted out, based on involvement with the witnesses they planned to call. That witness list kept growing as more and more people implicated the Schweitzers, many of them in exchange for having their own legal troubles or prison conditions eased. Lawson saw in the files how everyone in the Pauline-Gonsalves circle recognized that getting the police to focus on Ian and Shawn was a way to get them off their own back.

Lawson zeroed in on the VW. He saw an engineer’s report saying a VW Bug’s bumper was too wide to make the damage seen on Dana Ireland’s bike—nor could a VW’s low-sloping front end have directly caused Ireland’s injuries. “If you go through the police reports, day by day, step by step,” Lawson told me, “you’ll see there ain’t nobody talking about Volkswagens at all for three years,” until Pauline changed his story to bring up the model of the Schweitzers’ car. The police were first looking for a small blue pickup truck, and then a tan van. Lawson couldn’t understand why the VW wasn’t more of an issue at Ian’s trial. “Based on the tread box and the tire distance, Ian would have had to customize and stretch the Volkswagen out, commit the crime, and then bunch it back to its normal size when the police came and seized it,” he said. “It’s just physically impossible.”

The prosecutors’ case had another glaring flaw—a failure to get a DNA match. In October 1998, an independent expert tested Ireland’s vaginal swab and the hospital gurney sheet that she was transported on. The sperm found on both items did not match any of the three men charged with her rape and murder. On October 20, the prosecutor dropped charges against the Schweitzers.

But within months there were whispers that they’d soon be reindicted. Ireland’s family, members of Congress, the governor, the public—all wanted the case resolved. “You can see the change,” Lawson told me. “Rather than seek justice, we need a conviction. They knew the witnesses were lying, but they wanted the conviction anyway.” Once the DNA test came back negative, they went in another direction. “That’s when they go out and get the informant testimony.” And in May 1999, the reindictment came along with a new star witness: a fellow inmate of Ian’s named Michael Ortiz, who said Ian had confessed to the murder.

For the Schweitzers, Michael Ortiz’s arrival in the case is further proof that John Gonsalves was the puppet master behind everything. Ortiz isn’t a Gonsalves. But his ex-girlfriend, the mother of his child, was married to one: John Gonsalves himself.

Gonsalves seemed so determined to follow through even after Pauline recanted that he testified against Pauline at his trial in 1999, again telling the story that Pauline now was saying was fiction. “He told me that he and Ian and Shawn was driving,” Gonsalves said, “and they saw this girl on a bike, and they were giving her gestures, and when she refused, Ian got all mad … He went and banged the girl. He ran over her, supposedly ran over her again, and they grabbed her and took her.”

Left: John Gonsalves at Frank Pauline’s trial. Right: Pauline. (William Ing/AP)

On the stand, Gonsalves insisted that he wasn’t throwing his own brother under the bus to get a deal for himself. “In Hilo, everybody talks that I turned my brother in. I’d never do that. I would never sell my brother out. But the truth is the truth,” he said, “and I feel for the family.”

Gonsalves’s testimony, along with Ortiz’s, clinched the prosecution’s case, giving the jury more of a reason to ignore the lack of DNA evidence. At trial, the prosecutors explained away the fact that the DNA didn’t match any of the three accused men by arguing that the semen must have been from a mysterious fourth participant in the killing—they called him “Unknown Male No. 1”—and that it must have “masked” semen from the Schweitzers or Pauline.

After Pauline was convicted, it became clear what else Gonsalves had been expecting from his testimony. He wrote the Ireland family a long letter asking for the $25,000 in reward money.

“I feel the reward should be released to me,” Gonsalves wrote. “If it wasn’t for me, none of this would have been settled.” He anticipated that the Irelands might not want his testimony in the two upcoming trials against Ian and Shawn to be tainted by the fact that he’d received the reward. So he proposed an elegant work-around, suggesting they put the money “under my aunty’s name.” That way, he wrote, “there would be no proof that I got it.”

He got the money.

The first few years were the worst for Ian. His appeals lawyer wouldn’t even take his calls. In time, he studied to be a paralegal and got a relatively easy work assignment in the recreation area (though in Arizona that meant some 110-degree days). As he got older, the younger guys started to call him “Uncle.”

At home, Shawn was free, but for years he couldn’t get a job. “People I’ve known my whole life just kind of laughed and said, ‘Shawn, I cannot help you. There’s no way my boss could let me hire you.’” He got a commercial driver’s license and was hired by a construction company that fired him as soon as they learned who he was. “Everybody read the paper.”

Shawn and his wife and kids moved in with his in-laws to save money. They’ve never left. He finally found a road-maintenance job, and then a construction job where the boss gave him a chance. He’s been working there ever since. The stigma has trickled down to his children. When one of his daughters was in eighth grade, her teacher assigned her class Murder in Paradise, the true-crime book. After another girl called Shawn a rapist, a fight broke out, and his daughter was suspended for five days. “Suspended for defending her dad,” he said.

“For a long time, I was angry—an angry person,” Shawn said. “And you know, you had people like John Gonsalves, waving at you and throwing it in your face.” Shawn swears he wasn’t out looking for Gonsalves, but there he was. “Like, every morning when I would go to work, I would pass him, you know? Whatever he was doing, he would wave—for years. I was just like, this guy—something’s wrong in his brain.”

Ian says Pauline once wrote to him—a letter apologizing for making up the story about him and Shawn. They had a run-in around 2005, when for a short time they both were in the same Mississippi prison. Pauline was trying to appeal. “He said something like, ‘I’m sorry, and I’m working on getting you off,’” Ian remembered. “I wanted to beat him up.”

Pauline would never get out. On April 27, 2015—his 42nd birthday—he was hit with a rock on the back of the head during a fight in the yard of a New Mexico prison. He died from his injuries. Afterward, Pauline’s mother, Pat, came to Ian’s parents’ home. Jerry and Linda Schweitzer had been crushed, Ian told me, “financially and mentally” by their sons’ convictions. Pat started to speak to Jerry: “I just want to say sorry for ruining your family and your sons’ lives.” She asked if he and Linda could “find it in your heart to forgive us, because we’re getting really bad luck.”

“I’m sure he was stunned,” Ian said of his father. “But his exact words were ‘The day my son walks out of prison, that’s the day I can start to forgive you.’”

After Ken Lawson joined the Hawaii Innocence Project, he spent years examining how flimsy the government’s case was against Ian—the jailhouse informants, the VW, the mysterious DNA. Lawson joined the full-time faculty at the University of Hawaii law school, and often took students out to the spot where Ireland was found to test out various prosecution theories. Everything about the case seemed so obviously staged. Even Michael Ortiz, who’d said Ian had confessed to the murder, subsequently received a reduced prison sentence. But how to get the convictions overturned?

Ken Lawson at the Hawaii Innocence Project offices

Lawson approached the prosecuting attorney on the Big Island, Mitch Roth, and laid out the problems he’d uncovered, proposing a joint reinvestigation of the case. Roth agreed. In 2019, his office gave Lawson’s team access to more than 100 bankers boxes of files and all of the physical evidence.

Although the Innocence Project is famous for DNA-based exonerations, this case was unusual: Here, the jury had known that Ian’s DNA was not a match for the blood or semen from the crime scene and had convicted him anyway. But the lawyers had seen this in a few other cases, the most famous being the Central Park Five. The thing to do was to apply as much new technology to the evidence as possible. That would require a new round of DNA testing. “They only were looking at nine locations on the DNA” in the late 1990s, says Susan Friedman, a lawyer with the New York office of the Innocence Project who, along with one of the group’s founders, Barry Scheck, served as co-counsel on the case. “Today, we look at between 20 and 24.”

[Read: How the ‘Central Park Five’ changed the history of American law]

The team reanalyzed everything, including all semen found on the victim and a man’s T-shirt that had been covered in Ireland’s blood. The new testing dispensed with the “masked” DNA theory, confirming that the only DNA present was Ireland’s and that of Unknown Male No. 1. Bite-mark evidence also fell away when a new expert essentially dismissed prior analyses as junk science, concluding that the mark on Ireland’s body was made not by a human but probably by an object instead.

One more domino was left to fall. In late 2022, lawyers from the Innocence Project and the prosecutor’s office met in a video conference to discuss the case. There they learned from Keith Shigetomi, who had represented Shawn during the prosecution, that something strange had happened when Shawn had entered his guilty plea in 2000. In order for the judge to accept the plea, Shawn had had to answer questions about his participation in the assault during a polygraph test. Shigetomi now told the assembled group that, in confessing to the crime, Shawn had actually failed that polygraph. Faced with this hurdle, Shigetomi said, he asked the polygraph specialist if he would designate his report as “inconclusive,” which would be just good enough to allow for the guilty plea. (“To this day, nobody can find that report,” Shigetomi told me. He’s not sure whether a report was ever formally submitted.) And in court, the prosecutor, Lincoln Ashida, told the judge that Shawn had passed the polygraph—which in hindsight clearly seems deceptive.

When this all came out in 2022, Shigetomi told me, the prosecutors were dumbfounded. “Their whole support of the case was based upon Shawn’s statement,” he said. “Nobody knew.”

On January 24, 2023, after a more than seven-hour-long hearing, Third Circuit Court Judge Peter Kubota ruled that Ian’s lawyers’ new evidence “conclusively proves that in a new trial, a jury would likely reach a new verdict of acquittal.” Ian was a free man.

His family surrounded him with hugs. Before the media, Ian was emotional, but also indignant. “I feel like they murdered 25 years of my life,” he said. “I feel like they kidnapped me away from my family.”

Ashida, who has since moved on from the prosecutor’s office into private practice, declined to comment for this story, explaining that speaking with the press is prohibited by his professional code of conduct. A spokesperson for the prosecutor’s office said, “There is no evidence to substantiate allegations against any of the prosecutors or investigators who worked on these cases,” and assured me that the office continues “to re-investigate the kidnapping, rape, and murder of Dana Ireland.” They still hope to find Unknown Male No. 1, whose DNA has not turned up any hits in CODIS, the genetic database that law enforcement uses in many rape and murder cases. “There’s still frustration we don’t know whose DNA it is,” Mitch Roth, the prosecutor who’d agreed to reopen the case and who is now mayor of the Big Island, told the Honolulu Star-Advertiser.

Left: Posters calling for the Schweitzer brothers’ death were put up all over Hilo around the time of the trial. Right: A Hawaiian flag hanging at Shawn’s house

Who killed Dana Ireland? Ken Lawson told me that most of the women and girls who are abducted on the island are native Hawaiians. Plenty of those cases have gone unsolved, and yet none have generated the same coverage as the Ireland murder. But her case seems, in one respect, not so different from the others. Whoever attacked Ireland, Lawson pointed out, made an effort to transport her from the site of the assault toward the shore. “I think whoever was driving that far with her body was taking her to the ocean,” he told me. “It’s easy to get rid of a body in the ocean.” Maybe, he said, when they got there, they saw somebody fishing. So they dumped her “and took off.”

Susan Friedman of the Innocence Project believes that the killer might not have shown up in the database for a few reasons. “One of two things could have happened,” she told me. “Either the person died, and so never went on to potentially commit another crime, or the person never committed another crime.” Dana Ireland’s parents are dead, and no one else in the family has commented on Ian Schweitzer’s exoneration. If the killer is still out there, no one is writing letters to the editor anymore to demand the police track him down.

Overnight, Ian went from being a local kid swept up in a once-in-a-generation murder case to being a Central Park Five–level exoneration star. He has traveled to the mainland for celebrations and galas in honor of exonerees. Everyone expects that the civil suit his lawyers are prepping will make him rich. But any settlement, if it happens at all, might take years. Until then, working, dating, and the other everyday aspects of a normal life all seem far out of reach to him. “This morning I lost my contacts,” he told me, laughing about his confounding new iPhone. Everywhere he goes, there are the hugs of strangers, and John Gonsalves’s truck at the stoplight.

“Personally, I’m tired of explaining myself, because they keep twisting it around,” John Gonsalves told me. “I’ve got to be careful, too, because I don’t want nothing to come back to me.”

I called him the second I left the Schweitzers’ place, expecting to leave a voicemail. When he picked up, we both were a little surprised. During that call, Gonsalves spoke more or less unprompted for several minutes, his voice growing more stressed and defiant—and, it struck me, a little fearful. Since Ian’s exoneration, many people in the area have been looking at Gonsalves the same way they once looked at the Schweitzers: suspiciously. Gonsalves is furious about this.

“This whole thing is a sham. It’s ridiculous. Ridiculous. And then I get threats! People threatening to kill me, kill my kids? … Honest to God—I mean, No. 1, if they want to try something to me, I’m game. I don’t care. I’ve always been this way. But I didn’t attack the Schweitzers.” He said he just repeated what Pauline had told him way back then.

I said I’d like to learn more. He agreed to meet three days later, at 9 a.m. on a Thursday, at a McDonald’s. He was waiting when I got there. He is in his mid-50s now, a grandfather, tough and solid, with the weathered look of someone who has worked outdoors his entire life.

Ian and Shawn have a story they tell themselves about Gonsalves—the informant who chose them for no reason, orchestrated their downfall, made money off it, got his freedom on their backs, and escaped scot-free. But as Gonsalves talked, it became clear that he is operating inside a different narrative. It’s the story of a perpetual victim, caught up in something he never really controlled.

Michael Ortiz, the jailhouse informant who testified against Ian, for instance, is the last person Gonsalves ever would consider a friend. Gonsalves may have raised Ortiz’s child, but he despises the man. If Ortiz made up stories about Ian in prison, it had nothing to do with Gonsalves. As for Frank Pauline, Gonsalves now says that whatever his brother told the police about the murder was entirely his own doing. Gonsalves was just the one who kindly encouraged him to come clean. “He said, ‘You know, John, I’ve been getting nightmares. I can’t sleep.’ He said, ‘I just need you to help me. You know, maybe you can call the detective and just tell him that I’m willing to come forward.’ And he started telling me everything and I was just—my head was just spinning.”

Gonsalves’s probation, he said, had nothing to do with any deal he may have made with the police. “I never asked for anything,” he said. “The secret deal was between my brother Frank and the state of Hawaii.” The fact that Gonsalves walked away from the island’s biggest coke-dealing bust, he said, only meant that the case was weak. He told me he never dealt drugs. “You can’t call me a drug dealer,” he said, “if I wasn’t convicted of it.”

The reward money? That, he says, was Pauline’s idea too. “He told me, ‘John, you know what, just go get the reward. Because they’re going to have to give it to you—because if not, everybody else is going to take it.’”

And what, finally, about the Schweitzer brothers? “In my heart, I believe they did it,” Gonsalves had told me on the phone when we first spoke. He said he still believed everything his brother had said in that first call from prison in 1993. Now I wanted to know more. Did he believe there was a fourth attacker, as the DNA indicated?

“Absolutely,” Gonsalves said.

But Pauline never mentioned a fourth man when he accused the Schweitzers. How could Gonsalves have believed everything Pauline said when it seemed so clear now that his brother hadn’t told the truth?

“I have no idea,” Gonsalves said. I got the sense that he’d spent 20 years not being contradicted and had no idea how to handle it. He equivocated. “When he gets mad, he doesn’t think whether it’s true or not,” he said about Pauline. “Who did it? I’ll never know.”

I asked again: Does he still think Ian and Shawn Schweitzer raped and killed Dana Ireland? He took a moment before answering.

“It’s tough,” Gonsalves said. “I mean, I hate to say yeah. And I hate to say no. So I think I’ll just leave that neutral. Because I can say whatever I want. It’s just my opinion. You know, everybody has the right to their opinion.”

The shoreline near where Dana Ireland’s body was left

It took 10 months—until this October—for the same judge who’d exonerated Ian to overturn Shawn’s conviction, too. All that time, Ian tried to stick to a routine: workouts at the gym, helping his parents out at home. Just a few weeks before the second exoneration came through, he called me excitedly. He’d run into Gonsalves at the grocery store.

“You know those glass automatic doors?” Ian said. “I met face-to-face with him coming into the store.”

He’d seen Gonsalves around town plenty, of course, but always in his truck, or across a parking lot—not up close like this. He was surprised by how different he looked from how he’d imagined: “Small, little guy. I thought he was a big guy. He’s small. Short.”

Did Gonsalves recognize Ian? “Oh, yeah,” he said. “He just fucking froze.”

So did Ian. In his fantasies, he’d done any number of things in this moment—acted out, vented his anger. Instead, he only stared. Gonsalves put his head down, Ian said. “He’s stuttering. He was like, ‘Ah-ah-ah-ah—how you, Schweitzer?’” And then he rushed past Ian, out the door. “He fucking walked away.”

Ian could hardly believe it. Twenty-five years of being blamed for murder. Twenty-three years in a federal prison. Decades of imagining a moment like this. And all for what? “How you, Schweitzer?”

“That was it,” Ian said. “He couldn’t even look me in the face.”

Washington Wizards fans didn’t need a new reason to be miserable. As a Wizards diehard, I’m used to following their annual descent in the NBA standings. But I experienced a fresh sort of pain at the recent announcement that the team would be moving from its convenient downtown-D.C. home to a new, $2.2 billion “world-class Entertainment District” in the Virginia suburb of Alexandria. What’s so sad about my terrible team leaving the emptiest arena in the NBA for a gleaming palace across the Potomac? Sit down and let me explain—right here, in row G, seat 11, because I couldn’t find anyone else to go to the game with me.

In many cities, having NBA season tickets is a status symbol. Not in D.C. lately. I’ve had Wizards season tickets for the past 10 years, a fact that tends to be met with the sort of pitying curiosity that I assume is familiar to Civil War reenactors and ferret owners. I love this team. I really do. I follow the Wizards religiously, by which I mean: regular attendance, tithing, and a vague promise of salvation through suffering. That suffering stretches back 45 years. The then–Washington Bullets won the franchise’s only NBA title in 1978. The following year they went back to the finals but lost. Since that season, the team has never made it past the second round of the playoffs and hasn’t even made it to 50 regular-season wins, the longest such streak in the league by two decades. (Last season alone, six teams won more than 50 games.) The median age in the United States is about 39 years old, meaning most Americans have never existed at the same time as a relevant Washington basketball team.

For my first five years as a season-ticket owner, the Wizards weren’t great, but they were at least competitive, with some exciting young talent. They even made it to 49 wins once! Back then, the arena was loud and the city was paying attention. Now they’re one of the very worst teams in the league, and the seats are empty. The beautiful thing about sports, though, is that winning cures everything. Improving the vibes would seem straightforward: Build a better team. Instead, the owner, Ted Leonsis—who, through his company, Monumental Sports and Entertainment, also owns the NHL’s Washington Capitals and the WNBA’s Washington Mystics—would rather put a $2.2 billion cart before the horse. Maybe building a flashy new arena with the help of Virginia taxpayers is a way to sidestep the “winning basketball games” thing. (Laurene Powell Jobs, a minority owner of Monumental Sports, is the founder of Emerson Collective, which is the majority owner of The Atlantic.)

[Prashant Rao: Why it’s good that Americans don’t dominate in basketball]

The new complex will be only about six miles from the Wizards’ current Chinatown digs, but emotionally the team might as well be moving to Alexandria, Egypt. Capital One Arena is easily accessible from nearly anywhere in the region, walking distance from every subway line, and close to bars, restaurants, and museums. The new location is slotted between the Potomac River, a big Target, and acres of current and upcoming construction just south of the still-in-progress Amazon HQ2. In addition to the arena for basketball and hockey, the site plans envision a performing-arts venue, a TV studio, corporate offices, and a “fan plaza,” which is developer-speak for “a big sidewalk.”

The complex that Leonsis wants to build is the dream of sports owners and developers everywhere: a city without the city. It’s a big, walkable, transit-accessible area full of tall buildings and bright lights without any of the annoyances that arise from crowded civilization. There’s no loud music blasting, except what the company pumps through the speakers. There’s no vice, except for the company-owned bars and gambling parlors. There’s no theft, except for the likely extortionate price of everything inside.

Having the Washington Wizards play in the heart of Washington, D.C., isn’t just convenient; it weaves the team into the city’s culture, making every win and loss a matter of civic pride or civic shame. When I reached out for comment, Monumental Sports officials stressed to me that they weren’t abandoning D.C. Under the proposed plan, the WNBA’s Mystics would move to the Wizards’ old arena in Chinatown, and Monumental would put money into improvements that would allow it to host more college sports, concerts, conferences, and other events. But the company just built a partially publicly funded arena for the Mystics and the Wizards’ minor-league team that only opened in 2018 and was supposed to spur redevelopment in the economically depressed, predominantly Black neighborhood of Congress Heights. Now, only five years later, it’s supposedly overcrowded and outdated.

At the new arena’s rollout event, Leonsis gestured to the airport that sits about a mile from the proposed site. “It’s no secret that this great airport here was considered Washington National, and yet it’s in Virginia,” he said. It was an inadvertently apt comparison. An annoying trip out to a sterile complex where everything costs more than it should? Future Wizards games already sound like trips to the airport.

The surprise Alexandria announcement came after Leonsis unsuccessfully asked the city of Washington for $600 million to renovate Capital One Arena, which was built with minimal public investment and opened in 1997. The new arena still isn’t a done deal. It needs approval from local and state representatives, and many who live in Alexandria and nearby aren’t happy with the idea of an “entertainment district” bringing even more traffic through their city. Leonsis’s agreement with Virginia is nonbinding, and he’s still allowed to negotiate with D.C. going forward. Meanwhile, Washington Mayor Muriel Bowser prepared a last-ditch plan that would keep the Wizards and Capitals in Chinatown in exchange for $500 million in public funding.

As a longtime fan and D.C. resident, I should be rooting for the Virginia deal to fall through. But what if that option feels just as bad? A “win” for D.C. would cost half a billion dollars that could be spent on, well, anything other than fixing up a billionaire’s property. It’s nearly as much as the city plans to “invest in affordable housing, support community redevelopment, and provide shelter” over the next five years, according to its fiscal-year-2024 budget. Worried about the state of Chinatown after the Wizards and Capitals leave? Maybe the city could put some of that money toward supplementing the $70 million earmarked to “support the District’s economic recovery and growth.” If Monumental takes Bowser’s deal, stays put, and has me back in my usual seat at a renovated Capital One Arena, I can’t imagine looking around the stadium and seeing anything but better uses for my city’s tax dollars. Sure, the schools need new computers, but have you seen the size of the new Jumbotron?

The argument for spending the money is that an arena brings people downtown, and those people in turn spend money, providing tax revenue. But crediting arenas with all that revenue means assuming that those people wouldn’t go out and spend their money anywhere in the city unless they visited the arena—and that the city couldn’t get better results by investing the money directly into neighborhoods. Monumental Sports officials say that all public spending on the new arena complex will be offset by future tax revenue from it—$1.35 billion in funding from Virginia, potentially the largest arena subsidy in American history, would actually be free. But among economists, who disagree on nearly everything, there is broad consensus that sports stadiums don’t contribute much to the local economy. These projects tend to do a better job of obfuscating cost than preventing it, says Nate Jensen, a University of Texas professor who researches government economic-development strategies. He has found that public-school budgets tend to be hit hard, due to their reliance on the sort of property taxes that are often waived to fund new arenas. “It’s probably one of the worst bets you can make in terms of economic development,” he told me. “The economic impact of most stadiums is about the same as a Target store.” (That’s bad news for Alexandria, where developers are considering knocking down the Target next door to make room for more stadium-adjacent development.)

[Read: Sports stadiums are a bad deal for cities]

In economic terms, moving the Wizards to Virginia would actually be a big win for me as a D.C. resident. My subway ride to games would be longer, but the billion dollars in funding, the traffic issues, and the potential legal battles would be Virginia’s problem—with apologies to my friends who teach at Alexandria City High School. I would be a free rider, which, economically speaking, is the best thing to be. But that doesn’t feel like a win either. If I operated from a place of pure, cold logic, I wouldn’t be a Wizards fan.

I can think of one more option, though—one that no one has discussed, because, I presume, it is utterly unprecedented in its civic genius. The city of Washington, D.C., should seize the Washington Wizards through eminent domain. The city code outlines the right to acquire private property for condemnation or other reasons in the public interest after paying a satisfactory price to the current owner. If you’re willing to pay half a billion dollars to fix up the arena, why not kick in another couple billion and just take the franchise? The case could certainly be made that the current Wizards team is a form of urban decay.

Government ownership of a sports franchise might sound bizarre and un-American. But consider that, earlier this year, the Qatari sovereign-wealth fund bought a 5 percent stake in Monumental Sports. Why should a foreign nation get to own part of the Wizards while the city they play in gets nothing? Mayor Bowser and the D.C. city council should declare the team a public utility, pump the NBA’s massive TV revenue back into the city, and make the front office run for reelection every four years. I’ll leave it to the lawyers to figure out whether any of this is actually legal. I’m more interested in the principle. D.C. residents infamously don’t get to vote for representation in Congress. At least let us vote for our basketball team.

For the past few years, the right has worn itself out decrying “cancel culture”—claiming that left-wing mobs have destroyed the career of artists, writers, and freethinkers—and equating it with censorship. Liberals have typically been the first to point out that this is absurd. If someone says or does something that offends your sensibilities, you are of course free to avoid supporting that person’s professional or creative endeavors with your time and money. That is not censorship—it’s merely a consequence.

But in response to the Israel-Hamas conflict, something has shifted. Compared with the tremendous suffering in the region, the opinions of American makers and consumers of art are a trivial concern. And yet the war has torn apart long-standing alliances in the arts and revealed ways of thinking that are, I believe, fundamentally dangerous to our democracy.

It began with the 92nd Street Y “incident.” The Pulitzer Prize–winning author Viet Thanh Nguyen—who has long-endorsed a boycott of Israel—was scheduled to speak at the Jewish cultural institution about his new memoir. However, in the days prior to the event, Nguyen signed an open letter criticizing Israel’s treatment of Palestinians that did not mention the October 7 attacks by Hamas. On the day of the event, 92NY announced that Nguyen’s appearance would be postponed. Controversy, as you might expect, ensued. Writers pulled out of future events and staffers resigned in protest. The organization was accused of suppressing free speech.

I saw it very differently. Perhaps that’s because my worldview was shaped by the 15 years I spent as an entrepreneur running an artistic enterprise—I was a high-end event producer and designer. Or perhaps it’s because I went into the profession with no economic safety net, as a single woman living in one of the most expensive cities in the world. Either way, I have always been keenly aware that the creative professional in a capitalist society has a great deal of freedom, but she is not free from the consequences of her choices. Vocally supporting a political candidate or cause can ostracize you from potential clients on the other side of the issue. That doesn’t mean you shouldn’t stand up for what you believe. The question is simply one of personal values: Is taking this position more important to me than the potential consequences, even if they affect my bottom line?

Every artist must exist in two realms: as the art maker, who thinks and ponders and creates work of radical honesty (an activity that one could argue is inherently political), and as the art mover, who, however reluctantly, must be part showman and part businessperson. Both come together every time a writer walks onstage. Because book talks have cultural value, it can be easy to forget that they are in fact commercial opportunities—performances designed to be entertaining in the hope of moving books.

When I look at it this way, I see that Nguyen, the art maker, has not been censored at all. Nguyen, the art mover, has simply lost one economic opportunity—the chance to sell a large number of books in 92NY’s 900-seat auditorium. The Y invited Nguyen knowing his anti-Israel politics. It postponed the event, presumably, because Nguyen criticized Israel without acknowledging the Hamas attack, which has traumatized many members of the Y’s community and its donors. The event organizers decided it was the wrong moment to offer Nguyen their stage. That is their right. Just as signing the letter was Nguyen’s.

This question of censorship versus consequence was also raised in an open letter published in Artforum, signed by many artists, that called for Palestinian liberation and demanded a cease-fire. (It was later updated with a coda, but the original did not mention the October 7 attack either.) After the letter came out, many of the signatories said they faced retaliation. Nan Goldin, who recently canceled a project with The New York Times in protest of its coverage of the war, said that artists were being “blacklisted” and that it was “chilling.” Others said they’d been pressured by their gallerists to stay silent about their pro-Palestinian views for fear of offending collectors. Some industry insiders have proposed selling off the work of artists who signed the letter—perhaps even at a lower value than they bought it for—as a kind of punishment that would “diminish the artists’ status.”

At first glance, I found this a bit chilling myself. Just because a collector buys a painting for a huge sum of money doesn’t mean she owns the artist. Should selling a sculpture condemn an artist to having her speech policed in perpetuity? You have their art. What more does the artist owe you? This is no longer the patronage system, after all.

Except, in many ways, it is.

All of this was once a lot more straightforward. Artists were craftspeople sustained by the Church, and later by nobility. You knew what you had to do: paint some Pietàs, maybe a fresco or two, a royal portrait. Don’t blaspheme or insult any kings.

But of course, artists have always been human beings with temperaments and opinions. Renaissance painters, says Marie-Louise Lillywhite, an art historian at Oxford, created “these incredible masterpieces within a climate of compromised freedom.” She told me the story of a Venetian painter, Melchiorre Galluzzi, who wanted to depict Christ kneeling at his baptism. His patron did not think it appropriate to show Jesus on his knees. The painter solicited outside opinions and was assured by fellow artists and clergymen that there was no religious issue with a kneeling Christ. But guess whose preference won out? We know the artist made the change, Lillywhite said, “because in the end, Christ is shown standing.”

Alex Taylor, an art historian at the University of Pittsburgh, studies the transformation of the art market from commissioned portraiture to the works of renegade geniuses. Historically, he told me, “artists and patrons were in the messy work of sorting this out together. They were disagreeing; they were coming to compromises.” Put another way, for a long time, the art maker and the art mover not only had to coexist; they had to collaborate with the patrons commissioning their work.

As artists became stars in their own right, more middlemen got involved. Dealers, and then galleries, began to manage the scheduling of shows; marketing, advertising, and publicity; and much of the legal, financial, and logistical work of selling artists’ art. Some also began to act as social directors—getting their artists in front of collectors to help foster relationships and interest in the artists’ work. They served as proxies for the art movers, allowing artists to simply be the art makers that most of us crave to be. And in exchange, they often took 50 percent of the proceeds, making them in effect equal business partners.

“Most artists now are happy to be protected from those pressures,” Taylor told me. Galleries and museums “make it possible for artists to imagine that their work is unhampered by controls or restrictions.” In fact, this whole idea of artistic freedom, he said, is “often somewhat of a myth.”

Taylor’s book Forms of Persuasion: Art and Corporate Image in the 1960s recounts the origins of the art collection that David Rockefeller, the chairman and CEO of Chase Manhattan, created for the bank. Rockefeller very much wanted a Mark Rothko piece included in the gargantuan office building. Rothko, known for being anti-establishment and leaning socialist, was notoriously prickly about where and how his art was displayed. He famously pulled a series of murals he’d created for the Four Seasons Restaurant after dining there, stating, “Anybody who will eat that kind of food for those kinds of prices will never look at a painting of mine.” He wasn’t going to like the idea of selling his work to a bank. But the curator serving as the go-between believed that Rothko might sell to Rockefeller himself. “Whether it’s owned privately or by the company,” Taylor told me, “doesn’t really matter. But at some level, there was a sense that that difference really might matter to the artist.” They were right: In 1960, Rockefeller acquired Rothko’s White Center (Yellow, Pink and Lavender on Rose) for almost $10,000; it ended up on the wall of his office at Chase Manhattan.  

I write novels—a mass-market art. Although I enjoy seeing a photo of a celebrity with my novel in hand, it does little for the book’s long-term reputation. For artists building a career, however, whom they sell a painting to is almost as important as selling the painting at all. Being held by the right collectors or cultural institutions increases the artists’ value. On the secondary market, the provenance of a work of art can matter as much as, if not more than, its quality.

The Rockefeller Rothko broke auction records, by the way, in 2007. Sotheby’s estimated that it would sell for $40 million, The New York Times reported—“a gamble that the Rockefeller name will make the painting more valuable.” It went for almost twice that.

Between artist and collector runs what the writer and NYU professor Amy Whitaker refers to as “reputational tether.” The tether goes both ways. An artist who got a career boost years ago by having a piece acquired by, say, Harvey Weinstein, might find herself discomfited to be in his collection today. That artist might have even asked their gallerist to quietly arrange a sale to another collector. More and more young artists are exerting a say in whom they would like to own their works and what might happen to them down the line.

Similarly, a collector might feel hurt or offended by a stance an artist takes on social media or in an open letter. This might shift their perception of holding on to or acquiring more of the artists’ work. To go further, it might actually change their perception of how they see the art—enough that they no longer wish to own it.

No one is stopping the artist from making art about anything that they want, or from publicly or privately taking whatever political stance they want about Israel, Palestine, or the United States. But artists who make a living from their work are also entrepreneurs, and entrepreneurs can face consequences. This is not censorship; it is, like it or not, capitalism.

Censorship is a fun word. It’s a dramatic word. And as an artist, I love to be dramatic. But by throwing it around, we risk taking for granted our privileges as Americans. The artist Katsu once mounted a New York gallery exhibition featuring portraits of tech billionaires, including Mark Zuckerberg, rendered with Katsu’s own feces. No one stopped him. We can post memes or write poems about Biden’s age, or Hunter’s laptop. If we are truly idiotic, we can go on TikTok and wax poetic about the wonders of Osama bin Laden’s “Letter to America,” and never give it a second thought.

We also risk dulling ourselves to the true acts of censorship that have been imposed by our government. In the 1920s, Virginia had a board of censors that reviewed films in order to prevent people from encountering depictions of Black and white Americans being treated equally. People are often shocked when I tell them about the Gag Law of Puerto Rico, which in the late 1940s made it a criminal offense to sing songs critical of the United States government or to make art featuring the Puerto Rican flag (let alone to fly the flag itself). Many American citizens were jailed as a result.

Real censorship continues today. El Museo del Barrio in New York, which receives government funds, recently changed its mind about displaying an artwork it commissioned because the artists included a Palestinian flag. Beyond the arts, states are restricting the teaching of African American history and policing speech through Florida’s “Don’t Say Gay” law. Legislators across the country have repeatedly attempted to outlaw drag performances. School boards have stripped books from library shelves, and some states are putting into place criminal consequences for librarians and educators accused of violating these book bans. These are the kinds of actions that make me worry about the future of free speech and artistic expression in America—not the cancellation of a book talk or the drop in a painting’s value.

So, artists, let’s enjoy the relatively low-stakes consequences while they last. It’s called “taking a stand,” after all, because sometimes you get knocked down.

Illustrations by Adams Carvalho

This article is a collaboration between The Atlantic and The Trace.

One Saturday night in April 2017, Jenn Jacques and Bob Owens stayed up late drinking at an outdoor bar in Atlanta. They had worked together for more than two years, and Owens had become like an older brother to Jacques. On this Saturday, Owens seemed relaxed and was looking forward to the future; he talked about an upcoming family vacation. “That was such a special night,” Jacques told me. “I can say that there was no warning.”

They were both in their 40s, and had spouses and kids back home. Jacques lived in Wisconsin, and Owens in North Carolina. They were in town for the National Rifle Association’s annual meeting. Together, they edited a popular gun-rights news and opinion website called Bearing Arms.

As a blogger, Owens was often combative and blunt. He had a tendency to mock those who disagreed with him; he believed that gun-control advocates were performative and that they ignored inconvenient facts. A few days earlier, he’d written that protesters who were planning a “die-in” near the NRA convention were staging “a dramatic hissy fit.”

But the man Jacques knew was different. “His personality was as calm as his southern drawl,” she said. “The man was so levelheaded and thoughtful and kind, deliberate and generous.” Owens had coached his older daughter’s soccer team, and he went to equine therapy with his younger one, who had been diagnosed with autism. He had a sarcastic sense of humor, but he also sang karaoke and watched Disney movies with the kids and his wife, Christine.

Another time when he and Jacques were out drinking, Owens decided he didn’t like the way a man was talking to her. “Sir, I would never hope to get in a fight with anyone,” Owens said to him, “but I will take you down if you go near this woman again.” Jacques laughed and told him to stop. “He was so serious in protecting others,” she said.

That night in Atlanta, Owens and Jacques were in a reflective mood. They discussed their families and aging.

“My grandma is going to be 86,” Jacques said.

“I hope I make it that long,” Owens said.

At one point, the conversation drifted to suicide.

“The most selfish thing you can do is take yourself away from your kids,” Jacques said.

“I could never do it,” Owens replied.

From time to time, Owens wrote fiery posts about public figures he saw as antagonistic toward gun rights. One subject was a doctor named Arthur Kellermann, whose research had indicated a troubling link between guns and suicide.

In 1984, Kellermann, then 29, was earning a master’s degree in public health at the University of Washington in Seattle. One day, he was sitting in the student center between classes when he heard on the news that the singer Marvin Gaye had been fatally shot with a .38-caliber revolver by his own father.

Kellermann had grown up in a conservative household in Tennessee. His father owned guns, and had taught Kellermann to shoot at the age of 10. But Gaye’s shooting, which had happened at home, got Kellerman thinking about his recent experience working in an emergency room. He had seen a number of gunshot victims, but he couldn’t remember treating a single patient who had been shot while breaking into someone’s home.

[Daniel Levitin: The ineluctable logic of gun ownership]

This prompted Kellermann to seek out research measuring the risks and benefits of keeping a firearm in the home. But he couldn’t find much, so he decided to embark on a simple study of his own.

With the help of the local medical examiner, Kellermann reviewed every gunshot death that had occurred in King County, where the university was located, from 1978 through 1983. During that period, there had been 398 fatalities in homes that contained a firearm. Fifty had been homicides—and of those, only nine involved self-defense. Twelve shootings had been accidents, and three deaths couldn’t be categorized. The remaining 333 incidents—almost 85 percent of the deaths—were suicides.

Kellerman’s study, titled “Protection or Peril?”, was published in The New England Journal of Medicine in 1986. Because the data set was limited, he avoided drawing firm conclusions, but the numbers immediately attracted attention. A New York Times article summarizing the analysis began, “Keeping firearms in the home may endanger, not protect, the individuals who live there.” At the time, research suggested that half of all American households contained at least one gun.

Kellermann wanted to perform a case-control study, a methodology that would be more definitive. With CDC funding, he set out to investigate whether homes where guns are kept are more likely to be scenes of suicide than similar households without firearms. He and his team focused on the period from 1987 to 1990, in King County, Washington, and Shelby County, Tennessee, where Kellermann had moved. The researchers identified 565 suicides that occurred in or near a residence, almost 60 percent of which involved a gun. In 1992, the results were also published in The New England Journal of Medicine, and again the finding was clear: “The ready availability of firearms appears to be associated with an increased risk of suicide in the home.”

The danger was not unique to those who were known to have mental illness, or to those who had newly acquired a gun—most of the victims had owned their weapons for months or years. The article ended with a warning: People who keep a firearm in the home “should carefully weigh their reasons” against the “possibility that it may someday be used in a suicide.”

Kellermann’s results aligned with a long-running trend. From 1953 to 1978, the rate of gun suicide increased by 45 percent, while the rate of suicide by other methods remained steady. Gun suicide outpaced gun homicide, as it still does. Since 2017, firearm suicide has been the cause of roughly 25,000 deaths each year. Nearly 80 percent are white males ages 15 and older.

If you are having thoughts of suicide, please know that you are not alone. If you’re in danger of acting on suicidal thoughts, call 911. For support and resources, call the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline at 988 or text 741741 for the Crisis Text Line.

Social scientists and other researchers have looked extensively for explanations behind America’s swelling suicide rates: deindustrialization, addiction, a lack of new opportunities for working-class men, the breakdown of once-tight-knit communities. But the most crucial—and controversial—ingredient is the gun itself. Suicide is typically an impulsive act; the difference between life and death can thus turn on whether a person has access to a lethal weapon. In one study, survivors were asked at the hospital how much time had passed between ideation and attempt. About half said 10 minutes or less. And when a firearm is involved, according to a 2019 analysis in Annals of Internal Medicine, there is a 90 percent chance a suicide attempt will be fatal. One statistic is particularly clarifying: Only 5 percent of suicide attempts involve a firearm—but a gun is used in more than 50 percent of suicide deaths.

After Kellermann published his findings, the National Rifle Association told Americans that he could not be trusted. In an interview with The Morning Call, an NRA representative denounced Kellermann’s study as “dishonest,” adding, “Worldwide, nationwide, regionally there is no relationship between gun availability and suicide rates.” But in the three decades since, other studies have consistently echoed Kellermann’s conclusions.

The core of the gun-rights movement—and the firearms market—is made up of white men who live in suburbs or rural areas. These buyers are among the least likely to encounter gun violence, but the most likely to die by their own hand using a firearm. And yet the gun industry has so far avoided any real public reckoning over whether the strategy that keeps these customers buying could also be placing them in danger.

Bob Owens was the oldest of three boys, raised in a Christian household in Greenville, North Carolina. He grew up hunting deer, fishing, and playing soccer. His father liked to remind Owens and his brothers that they alone were responsible for their actions. “You made that bed,” he would say. “Now lie in it.”

As an undergraduate at East Carolina University, Owens majored in English, covered sports for the school paper, and aspired to be a novelist. An old classmate, who also worked on the newspaper, told me that she never heard him express strong political opinions or take a position on guns. He was mild-mannered, an introvert with a small circle of close friends.

One night, at a downtown pool hall, one of those friends introduced him to a nutrition major from New York named Christine. He’d seen her at parties; she had bright blue eyes, blond hair, and a warmth that made people feel comfortable and accepted. She loved music and played the violin. Christine worked at a restaurant, and when they started dating, Owens would hang out there during her shifts, just wanting to be nearby.

When the two had been together a year, Christine’s parents came to town for a birthday dinner at Owens’s childhood home. In front of both families, Owens revealed an engagement ring. “Will you?” he asked Christine. “He could barely get the words out,” she told me. “He was so nervous.”

In 1997, after they’d both graduated, the couple moved to Charlotte. Christine managed a restaurant; Owens went into IT. They liked spending time outdoors together, hiking in the North Carolina mountains. Owens kept a shotgun in the house for hunting, which was new for Christine, who hadn’t grown up with firearms and was uncomfortable around them. Mostly, the gun remained out of sight. Being a gun owner wasn’t yet a key part of Owens’s identity. “It was more of a history thing,” Christine said. “He knew the background and history of these old guns from wars … It was kind of a hobby.”

They got married in 1998 and had their first child, Maya, two years later. “Bob was over the moon,” Christine said. In 2001, she and Owens moved to Newburgh, New York, to live with her family, then rented a home of their own. The house had a lovely view of the Hudson River, but Newburgh, sitting at the intersection of two interstate highways, was a hub for crack-cocaine trafficking, and a frequent site of violent crime. The place next door to the Owens’s home was abandoned, and drug dealers and prostitutes hung out in the area. Owens and Maya tended to make their fun inside. They invented a game they called Table Ball; he would kneel in front of a table, acting as the goalie, and Maya would try to kick a ball underneath it.

When strangers loitered near their house for too long, Owens and Christine often called the cops, and sometimes Owens would go outside and confront people himself. He’d knock on a car window and ask whoever was inside to leave. At the time, he didn’t carry a gun.

Though Owens had been conservative his whole life, he wasn’t particularly outspoken about his political views until after 9/11. In the early 2000s, he was still working in IT, but he missed writing and was eager for an outlet. Then, in 2004, he started a blog called Confederate Yankee. Its slogan: “Because liberalism is a persistent vegetative state.”

In his early entries, Owens offered a vigorous defense of President George W. Bush and the Iraq War. His online writing had a brashness and a commanding authority, as if he were test-driving a new persona. In one post, Owens declared, “There is something inherent in the character of Americans that makes us want to fight for and nurture the freedom of others.” And yet the Democratic Party, he wrote, has “fought against this fine trait.”

Owens could be irreverent and contemptuous. His opponents were “idiots,” “morons,” or “dumb as a stump.” But he also strove for moral consistency, even when it was inconvenient. He was adamantly opposed to abortion while chastising “small-minded people who find a bit of satisfaction in the thought of an abortion doctor burning in Hell.” He called the military’s Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell policy “antiquated” and declared, “We’ve seen this kind of discrimination before from our military, but it is past time for it to stop.”  

Owens posted multiple times a week, and his following grew. On Christmas Day 2004, he was feeling joyful and gracious. He commanded his readers to “go spend time with those you love,” and assured them, “I’ll be back posting tomorrow as my regular obnoxious self.”

Bob Owens. Courtesy: Maya Owens

A year later, Owens discovered an essay titled “Tribes,” by the conservative author Bill Whittle. “Tribes” argues that people belong to one of two groups, “Pink, the color of bunny ears, and Grey, the color of a mechanical pencil.” The Pink tribe, Whittle writes, is concerned with “feeling good about yourself!” For the Grey tribe, “emotion is repressed because Emotion Clouds Judgment.” Whittle’s Grey tribe knows “that sometimes bad things happen, and that these instances are opportunities to show ourselves what we are made of.” He elaborates: “My people go into burning buildings. My Tribe consists of organizers and self-starters, proud and self-reliant people who do not need to be told what to do in a crisis. My Tribe is not fearless; they are something better. They are courageous.”

The piece ignited something in Owens. He called it “the single best essay I have ever read,” and wrote that it prompted him to do “a lot of soul-searching about what it means to be Grey.” Whittle incorporated ideas from an author and a former Army Ranger named Dave Grossman, who had become a prominent right-wing thinker on the psychology of violence. Reading “Tribes” led Owens to “On Sheep, Wolves, and Sheepdogs,” Grossman’s most influential essay, which divides society into three categories. Sheep are “kind” and “gentle,” and “can only hurt one another by accident.” They are prey to wolves, who “feed on the sheep without mercy.” And then there are sheepdogs—the animals that “live to protect the flock and confront the wolf.” Sheepdogs, Grossman says, have both “a capacity for violence” and “a deep love” for “fellow citizens.”

Owens republished Grossman’s essay on his blog in 2006. “I’ve been thinking a lot about sheepdogs lately,” he wrote. “Most of us can define where we fall in Grossman’s essay if we are honest with ourselves. Most won’t be honest of course, including many of you reading this. Dishonesty to one’s self is, after all, the defining characteristic of Sheep, even perfectly nice Sheep.”

By this time, Owens and his family had moved back to North Carolina and were living in a newly built home in Fuquay-Varina, a quiet suburb 30 minutes outside of Raleigh. The school system was good. Their middle-class neighborhood had fields and a brook, and there was a park near their house.

For a while, Owens had a part-time job working the gun counter at a sporting-goods store. He could talk at length about “00-buckshot” and its ability to “penetrate 22 inches of ballistic gelatin,” or a .410 pump shotgun, which, he once blogged, was ideal for home protection because the weapon’s “low-recoil, low-report” made “follow-up shots considerably easier than would a larger-bore shotgun.” One time, Owens wrote about customers who’d come into his store asking for a whistle to scare away potential muggers. He suggested a concealed handgun as a better option, but the customers were wary. When recounting the incident, Owens wrote, “Whistlers, however you cut it, are sheep.”  

Adams Carvalho for The Atlantic

In 2008, Owens got a permit to carry a concealed firearm, which he described as a transformative experience. “There’s a certain kind of freedom that comes with the responsibility of carrying arms that is hard to properly express to those who don’t,” he wrote. “Yes, guns can take lives. But far more often, experience truly bearing arms helps hone and reveal character.”

His timing coincided with a landmark Supreme Court decision, District of Columbia v. Heller, which declared that the Second Amendment guaranteed the individual right to own a firearm. One article about the decision, in Reuters, quoted Kellermann discussing the risks of keeping a loaded firearm in the home. The story infuriated Owens, who referred to Kellermann on his blog as a “radically anti-gun doctor.”

[Timothy Zick and Diana Palmer: The next fight over guns in America]

The next year, Barack Obama took office. For men like Owens, Bush represented the Grey tribe, and the new president represented the Pink. According to a former NRA staffer, who at the time was involved with membership communication and requested anonymity out of fear of retribution, “It was easy for [the] NRA to take an aggressive approach, and fearmonger.” The organization’s pitch, the former staffer said, was succinct and urgent: “Obama was coming for our guns.” Owens seemed to agree. He wrote that the president—who supported policies such as an assault-weapons ban while clarifying that he respected legal gun ownership—“continues to lie to the public about his intentions towards our Second Amendment rights.”

During the summer of 2009, a 29-year-old named Jennifer Perian was working for the NRA. She loved horses and baseball, and aspired to visit every Major League stadium in the country. Perian, who was from Colorado, hadn’t grown up around guns, but she attended George Mason University in Fairfax, Virginia, where the NRA is located. She took the job after graduating, and soon purchased a handgun.

Perian began dating someone new, but the relationship quickly grew tumultuous. Then one day Perian’s dad, Jim, was at work when the police called. Jen had fatally shot herself. “They said it was impulsive,” Jim told me. “They called it an ‘emotional suicide.’”

The NRA paid for the funeral and flew Jim out to Virginia. “They were very nice to me,” he said. “I can tell you that.”

Three years after Perian’s death, an NRA field representative named John quietly attended a Sandy Hook memorial ceremony near the small town in Indiana where he and his family lived. John, at 45, was tall and sturdy. He had two daughters in high school, and he had worked for the NRA for 10 years, running fundraising banquets in his region. Before that, John had been a field artillery officer in the Army. Now he was in the Reserves.

The NRA had hired him with the understanding that he could still be deployed overseas. In 2011, he was sent to Iraq for most of the year. He earned a Bronze Star, one of the highest honors bestowed by the armed services. According to his certificate, he was “engaged in stability operations under constant threat and frequent attack.”

But after he returned, John was clearly suffering. His wife, who asked that her name and her family’s surname be withheld, told me that the NRA made him feel like his job was in constant jeopardy. “The expectation was to jump right back in and have all of the other stressors on top of it,” she said. When Sandy Hook happened on December 14, 2012, John had been back at work for a year, and had earned his second Field Representative of the Year award. His wife said that her husband believed in the NRA with his “whole heart.” He would tell people: “This is not a traditional job, because this is a lifestyle. This is about our Second Amendment.”

[Read: 10 years after Sandy Hook, here we are again]

John’s wife was a teacher at a local high school and had helped organize the Sandy Hook memorial event; John attended to support his wife. “He wanted me to be very clear that, if anybody asked, he was there as himself, not as a representative of the NRA,” she said.

After the new year, John started drinking heavily. On April 5, he got arrested for a DUI while driving an NRA vehicle. “That just sent him over the edge,” John’s wife said. “He feared he was going to lose his job.” On April 7, he spent the day in his home office, working on NRA business. The next day, around lunchtime, he took one of his handguns, got on a bicycle, and rode half a mile into the woods near his home, where he shot and killed himself. “I’m not anti-gun,” John’s wife said, “but having a gun right there and accessible definitely made it easier.”

When she discovered that her husband had spent the last day of his life working for the NRA instead of with his family, she was livid. She remembers calling John’s boss and telling him, “You need to come and get this NRA stuff out of my house.” Twenty-four hours later, the boss and a colleague came and took the materials away. No one from NRA headquarters reached out to the family to express condolences, she told me.

A federal bill proposing expanded background checks for gun buyers was defeated in the Senate the following week. The NRA released a celebratory statement underscoring that the legislation would have undermined a “fundamental right,” but noted that the organization would continue to work on “fixing our broken mental health system.”

At least two more NRA employees would die by gun suicide after John. On a Monday in November 2019, Ryan Phipps, who worked in the NRA’s affinity-and-licensing department, did not show up for work. Phipps, 27, had been with the organization for half a decade. He enjoyed hunting and fishing. He played the drums and had built his own bicycle.

But privately, Phipps had a history of depression, according to a source who knew him well. Over the years, Phipps had sought treatment, and he’d seemed to be doing well until the day he used one of his own handguns to attempt suicide. He initially survived the shot, but died in the hospital two weeks later.

That same year, the NRA fired a program coordinator named Mark Richardson. HuffPost had published emails that showed him, in conversation with a prominent conspiracy theorist, raising questions about the 2018 Parkland high-school shooting. Richardson was almost 60, and he had worked at the NRA for a decade. His friend and former NRA colleague Stephen Czarnik invited him to live on his farm in West Virginia, where they raised chickens.

Richardson’s mental health was deteriorating, according to Czarnik. He was drinking alone. In October 2020, Czarnik recalled to me, another friend from the NRA was visiting the farm. He and Czarnik were hanging out in an upstairs room when Richardson walked in. Richardson embraced them and said, “God is good,” and that he loved them. “Then he ran downstairs,” Czarnik said, “and we knew something was wrong.” Czarnik and his friend followed Richardson, who dashed to the front porch. Before anyone could reach him, he shot himself with a handgun.

When Richardson died, it had been almost 30 years since the NRA had publicly disputed Kellermann’s research. Billy McLaughlin, an NRA spokesperson, said in an email that the organization “observes that according to many criminologists and researchers” Kellermann’s work is “interpreted as junk science.” He added that the NRA does not comment on its employees, and that there is “nothing more important to us” than the staff’s “safety and security.”

In 2013, Owens was out of work in IT, but his profile as a writer had risen. He was done with Confederate Yankee, and was now a regular contributor to the long-standing conservative site PJ Media, where he focused almost singularly on firearms. He was especially fixated on the trial of George Zimmerman, who, a year earlier, had fatally shot Trayvon Martin, a Black teenager who was unarmed. Owens seemed to identify with Zimmerman. Martin, he wrote, “was a very troubled young man who believed very strongly in impulsively trying to get whatever he wanted, and did not care if others were hurt if it made him feel better”; he found Zimmerman, meanwhile, to be a “generally honorable man with idealistic goals about the role good men should play in protecting their communities.”

Owens and Christine now had two children. Maya was in her early teens; their second, Kate, was 6. Owens took the family on trips to North Carolina’s western mountains, and cooked them pork butt on the grill. They attended church every Sunday. Owens always had a handgun on him, though the only real hazard in their neighborhood was the occasional car accident on a busy road called Judd Parkway. When that happened, Christine said, Owens was the first to rush outside and offer help.

On the night of the Zimmerman verdict, he tweeted to his thousands of followers, “Trayvon Martin tried to kill George Zimmerman. He just failed at that as he did everything else in his life.” Stephen Gutowski, a journalist who reports on firearms and was close with Owens, told me, “When he felt like a media narrative was developing that was unfair to gun owners, he would go and push back as hard as he could.”

[Read: Ta-Nehisi Coates on Trayvon Martin and the irony of American justice]

Christine recalled that Owens half-jokingly turned to Twitter for help finding full-time work, suggesting that there must be an organization out there that could use his skills. Katie Pavlich, a conservative commentator and friend, saw his tweet. She worked for a conservative media company called Townhall, which had recently launched BearingArms.com. It needed someone to run the site, and Pavlich thought Owens would be a good fit. He was soon hired at a salary of $80,000 a year. “This was like a dream job to him,” Christine told me.

The self-defense gun market is defined by contradiction. In a 2015 study conducted by the National Shooting Sports Foundation (NSSF)—the trade group for the firearms industry—white respondents had the highest level of gun ownership, and were the ones most likely to claim that they carried weapons out of a “duty to protect” family and worries over “random acts of violence.” But at the same time, they were also less likely than Black and Hispanic respondents to report that they actually live in dangerous neighborhoods.

These results aligned with other research. In his book Dying of Whiteness, Jonathan Metzl, a psychiatrist and sociologist, looks closely at gun owners in a Missouri county that is 85 percent white. He told me that many of his subjects “imagined a threat around every corner.” He added, “One guy was talking about ‘gangbangers’ who would come through his window and steal his television.” Another man “imagined that he could be carjacked at any moment.” Angela Stroud, a sociologist whose book, Good Guys With Guns, explores similar themes, writes that the men she interviewed were fixated on imagined violence. “Though they may never be in a position to carry out heroic fantasies of masculine bravery,” she wrote in her book, they were “positioning themselves as brave leaders of their families.”

At the NRA’s 2015 annual meeting, in Nashville, Tennessee, Dave Grossman held a seminar called “Sheepdogs! The Bulletproof Mind for the Armed Citizen.” “Of all the violence we could engage in, violence to protect our families, to protect our children, is what we’re wired to do,” he told attendees. “You are the Special Forces. We are at war.”

Nearly two-thirds of the roughly 40,000 annual gun deaths that were occurring at the time were suicides. The statistics were bleak enough that even the NSSF felt compelled to publicly address them. In August of 2016, the group launched a high-profile campaign aimed at combatting gun suicide, in partnership with the American Foundation for Suicide Prevention (AFSP), the largest private suicide-prevention organization in the country.

On its face, the partnership seemed promising. Robert Gebbia, the CEO of AFSP, said in a press release that his organization saw “this relationship as critical to reaching the firearms community.” That same press release quoted Stephen Sanetti, then the NSSF president, as saying that the effort placed the “firearms industry” at the “forefront of helping to prevent these deaths.”

But the written agreement between the two groups, which has never been reported on before, has a “conflicts of interest” provision that might have caused some concern had it been viewed by the public. The opening sentence promises that “the parties shall act in the best interests of the other” and “shall disclose any real or potential conflicts that are adverse to the interests of the other as they arise.” Such conflicts included “positions advanced by one party [that] do not align with the positions advanced by the other and the issuance of any public statement by a party that harms or could harm the other.” Given that one of the NSSF’s primary goals is to maximize profit for the firearms industry, such a policy would seemingly present a major limitation for the partnership. Stephanie Rogers, the chief communications officer at AFSP, told me in an email that the language merely calls for transparency, and “does not inhibit the action of either party.”

By 2018, the NSSF had a landing page for its partnership with the AFSP. Most suicide deaths involved a firearm, the program’s materials emphasized, because the presence of a gun almost guarantees that the attempt will be successful. In an introductory video, Sanetti described the deadly urge as often “spur-of-the-moment.” He ended his monologue with a simple statement of fact: “Temporarily preventing a person in crisis from accessing a firearm can help save lives.”

Sanetti was nodding toward a concept known as “means restriction.” If people are jumping off bridges, for instance, then the government builds barriers to prevent those deaths. Such solutions tend to work when they are externally imposed. But the NSSF and AFSP would not jointly recommend anything that could be construed as “gun control.” Instead, an AFSP spokesperson explained in an email, the two groups were “providing practical and accessible suicide prevention education.” The website suggested separately storing ammunition and firearms, which should be kept in safes or lockboxes. If more drastic measures were deemed necessary, the organizations said that “temporary off-site storage” was an option to “consider.” They were advocating for a do-it-yourself approach to a deeply complicated societal problem.

For the NSSF, it was still bold to acknowledge that separating someone from their firearm might be the key to survival. But a 2018 study funded by the group illustrates why it might have been—and likely remains—difficult for the industry to push for more forceful solutions. The NSSF surveyed gun owners who often carried concealed firearms, 81 percent of whom disclosed that they always kept a loaded one close by. “The more frequently a person carries a firearm,” the study found, “the more they spend on handguns, ammunition and carry equipment and accessories.” On average, respondents owned more than 10 guns. Roughly 80 percent of the participants were white men.

Adams Carvalho for The Atlantic

Jenn Jacques began working with Bob Owens in 2015. When she contacted him to ask if there might be a job for her at Bearing Arms, she was running a website for female gun owners. She’d been reading Owens’s writing for years; she admired his boldness and intelligence. Owens was working seven days a week, starting at six in the morning and often ending at 10 at night. Bearing Arms brought Jacques on as a volunteer at first, but after a year made her a full-time, salaried employee.

Owens and Jacques were each required to write seven posts a day if they wanted weekends off. Owens usually sat on a recliner in the living room, facing a window with a view of the woods. “We used to call him Barcalounger Bob,” Jacques told me.

By 2016, Owens had become a central voice in the gun-rights movement, regularly giving interviews on NRATV, which was then one of the gun group’s media platforms. “Bob was under so much pressure,” Christine told me. “The company always wanted more out of him. Always more, more, more.” She took care of the children while Owens was consumed by work. “When I think about it now,” Christine said, “I think Bob liked to look out the window because nature soothed him, calmed his nerves.”

Toward the end of 2016, the parent company of Bearing Arms asked Owens if he would like to write a book—something akin to a gun guide—that the company would publish through Regnery, its publishing house. He wasn’t offered a large sum, but the family needed extra money. Owens also held out hope that the book might lead to an opportunity to write a novel, so he agreed.

In January, Jacques and Owens attended the 2017 SHOT Show, the NSSF’s annual trade event in Las Vegas. Christine Moutier, the AFSP’s chief medical officer, was there to discuss her group’s partnership with the NSSF. She sat for an interview with Jacques, which Owens filmed. It was an intimate, polite chat. Jacques, in a neat striped shirt, sat close to Moutier. “What are a few of the signs of suicide?” Jacques asked. “Even those people who are presenting the strong happy face will show signs without intending to,” Moutier said. They might self-isolate, or become “more short-fused.” In the brief conversation, Moutier did not cover means restriction or the potential danger of keeping guns in the house.

Back home, as Owens worked on his manuscript, Christine noticed that he seemed newly moody. He started smoking, a habit he had dropped years earlier. He would get worked up about tiny things in a way he never had, snapping at Christine if she forgot something at the store. When he was frustrated, he’d say, “I have to go for a walk.” “He was always walking because everything was just irritating him,” Christine said.

Christine tried to reassure her husband that life would get easier when his book was finished. “I just kept saying, ‘You’re almost done. When this is done, you can relax.’” He was experiencing symptoms of depression. Christine asked him to see a therapist, and he did. He tried medication for about a week, but stopped taking it because he thought it made him feel worse.

To his readers, though, Owens was the same man he’d always been. That spring, he ran stories with headlines such as “Another Good Guy With a Gun: Detroit Man Shoots Sister’s Violent Stalker,” and “Armed Good Samaritan Runs Off Terrified Robber.” The NRA’s annual meeting—the one both Jacques and Owens attended in Atlanta—was in late April. Owens tweeted a photo of a revolver and ammo. “This is the Ruger LCR I’m carrying at #NRAAM2017,” he wrote.

On Friday, May 5, after Owens had returned from the event, Christine and Kate left for a Girl Scouts camping trip. Owens was “acting funny,” Christine said. “He was constantly texting to see how we were doing, and would get worried if I didn’t respond right away. I kept telling him, ‘We’re fine, we’re fine, but we’re out doing things.’” She noted that Owens was effusive, almost manic. “He was saying that I was the best wife, the best woman, and that when we got home, he would be the husband I deserve and things would change. He promised to cook us a steak dinner.”

On Sunday, Owens tweeted a meme featuring a heavily tattooed man and a little boy. Each had a speech bubble coming from his mouth. “Dad,” the boy says, “when I become a man, I want to be a Liberal.” The father responds, “Well, you have to choose one son. You can’t be both.” Owens added: “I admit it. I laughed.” That evening, after Christine and Kate returned, Owens grilled steak for the family. Everybody ate, and then he and Christine stayed up late into the night, discussing a possible winter trip to Las Vegas. His book was due in three days.

The following morning, Owens placed his cigarettes, Altoids, pepper spray, knife, phone, and wallet in his pockets. The holster clipped to his belt held the same revolver he’d carried a week earlier at the NRA’s annual meeting. He walked Kate to the school-bus stop and watched her board.

Owens had a few hours before he had to drive to Wake Tech Community College to pick up his older daughter, Maya, who was taking a final. So he kept walking. As he made his way down Sequoia Ridge Drive, he caught the attention of a neighbor, a woman who didn’t know him but was struck by the way he was hanging his head. That man, she thought, seems remarkably sad.

Eventually, Owens arrived at the intersection of Sequoia and South Judd Parkway, not far from his house. Cars whipped by rows of well-kept shrubs. Owens pulled out his phone to post a message on Facebook. “In the end, it turns out that I’m not strong,” he wrote. “I’m a coward, and a selfish son of a bitch. I’m sorry.”

When her father didn’t show up to get her, Maya tried calling. She couldn’t reach him, so she contacted her mom and explained that she was stranded. It was unlike Owens not to show.   

A 39-year-old Iraq War veteran drove by the corner of Sequoia and Judd. He noticed Owens lying in the grass, bleeding from a gunshot wound in the head. The vet parked and ran over. He felt for a pulse that was not there, then dialed 911.

Police told Christine what had happened. She was too distraught to drive home, so two detectives, along with Christine’s father, went to meet her. News of Owens’s death began to trickle out that evening. Jacques wrote on Facebook, “Life as I knew it ended this morning. It was a privilege and an honor to call Bob Owens my friend, co-editor and work hubby, so please know that I will do everything in my power to protect him in death as I did in life.” The next day, Jacques published a short post about Owens on Bearing Arms, but she did not disclose how he died. She wrote, “In the end, all that matters is [he] will be sorely missed, and the truth is that we will never know what truly happened.”

Owens’s employers at Townhall Media, which owns Bearing Arms and did not respond to a request for comment, sent Christine a condolence email and flowers. They also set up a GoFundMe page announcing that they’d “lost a friend,” soliciting donations from the public to help support Owens’s family. “We’d like to show our love and appreciation for Bob,” the page said. “Groceries, bills and college dreams will be a struggle—but we can help.” The campaign raised more than $36,000 from 608 donors. No Townhall executives attended her husband’s funeral. (On behalf of Owens’s mother and siblings, his father declined to comment for this article, citing his support for the Second Amendment.)

Jacques does not think the gun industry holds any responsibility for Bob’s death, or for gun suicide in general. “It really is a shame people may not be as comfortable reaching out for help because we’re attacked by the gun-control movement,” Jacques told me. Gutowski, the journalist who was friends with Owens, said that many gun owners are afraid to tell doctors about their mental-health struggles, because they worry someone will take their weapons away.

It’s been seven years since the AFSP and the NSSF announced their partnership, and more Americans are dying of gun suicide than ever before. The coronavirus pandemic and the summer 2020 protests after the murder of George Floyd spurred people to buy firearms in record-breaking numbers. In 2022, according to CDC data, there were 27,000 gun suicides, the highest number ever recorded in the United States. According to an analysis by Cassandra Crifasi, an associate professor of health policy and management at Johns Hopkins University, white men still make up nearly 80 percent of these deaths. “The risk typically starts to peak when they reach their mid-40s,” she said. Owens was 46 when he died.

In 2021, the NSSF, which declined to provide a comment for this story, hosted a webinar on suicide prevention for gun-range operators and firearms dealers. Two gregarious consultants—John “JB” Bocker and John “JC” Clark—ran the presentation. They ticked through the signs of depression, and gave some guidance on how to predict when a customer might be suicidal.

“How does your most common customer come into the store?” Clark asked. “They’re excited, right? They’re going to buy their first firearm, or they’re going to buy a new firearm, or something new to the market. Or they want to receive training. They’re excited about it. They have a certain amount of energy. So when you compare the atypical customer to these different scenarios, then you may have a situation where somebody is in crisis, where somebody needs help.” He continued, “Moving, speaking slowly, restlessness—all of these things could be signs you need to be aware of.”

“And, JC, we can’t forget understanding basic body language,” Bocker chimed in. “It may not always be verbal. It may not always be their direct approach about buying or not buying a gun. It just might be their quietness; it might be the way they’re looking or not looking.” He added, “Everything about their body language can be a telltale hint to them wanting to do something they shouldn’t do with a firearm.”

Bocker and Clark declined to be interviewed for this story. At my request, Amanda Spray, a clinical associate professor of psychiatry at NYU’s Grossman School of Medicine, reviewed a recording of their presentation. “Untrained individuals would find it very difficult to predict who is experiencing suicidal ideation,” she told me. She called the approach, with its inherent conflicts between sales and public health, “extremely unrealistic.”

Not long ago, I visited Christine in North Carolina and spent a day in the Owenses’ old neighborhood in Fuquay-Varina. The homes and lawns were meticulously maintained. Driveways had basketball hoops, and rocking chairs sat on porches. There were decorative signs with welcoming messages. One said Home on the Range. Another said Sit Relax Gossip.

Other than his Facebook post, Bob had not left a note. At the time of his death, Christine felt as though she were in a kind of limbo. She was desperate for clues and answers. She could not get into his phone, and Bob’s therapist could not divulge any details about her husband’s treatment. “Why didn’t he come to me?” Christine wondered. “We always worked it out, always worked through things. We worked on them together, always.”

One day, soon after Bob died, Christine opened his work bag and found a notebook. In it was a list: “Things That Are Stressing Me Out.” It stretched on for seven or eight pages, mentioning death threats, which were news to Christine, as were Bob’s concerns about his aging parents. A lot of it was familiar, just laid out at length. “So much about his job,” Christine described to me, “the book, things that were going on with the kids, being the provider.” She realized she hadn’t known the extent of his stress. “Bob really felt like he was stuck and didn’t know where to go,” she said.

Christine doesn’t view Bob’s suicide as a cautionary tale about gun ownership, and she does not think anyone else should view it that way, either. She herself carries a firearm when she goes out of town, in case her car breaks down. One day, while we were eating lunch at a Japanese restaurant, I asked if she was aware that gun suicide, according to the data, seemed to pose a unique threat to men like her husband. She set down her fork and folded her arms. “I know,” Christine said, but she believes the real problem is that so many boys are raised to equate vulnerability with weakness. “I don’t think it’s about guns. I think it’s about men and their feelings—they’re still bad at dealing with them.”

Bob, she said, wanted to take care of the people around him. Like many men, she went on, “he had to be tough.” She thinks her husband would have found a way to kill himself no matter what. “Besides,” she said, “how would I have kept Bob away from guns?”

This article is a collaboration between The Atlantic and The Trace. When you buy a book using a link on this page, we receive a commission. Thank you for supporting The Atlantic.

For all of my life, I thought eating breakfast with Santa was totally normal. Every year, he would come to my church in western New York and sit in the corner of the reception hall for a few hours. (Sometimes, he was played by my dad or my cousin Frank.) The kids would eat pancakes and drink hot chocolate in his presence and work up their courage. Whenever they felt ready, they could meet the big guy and discuss whatever they needed to. And then they would get a candy cane.

Random adult members of the congregation sometimes joined too, usually because they knew the man under the beard and had no complaint with a hot breakfast. It was all very casual. So I didn’t think it would be a big deal when I mentioned to my mother this year that my favorite minor-league baseball team, the Brooklyn Cyclones, was planning to hold a breakfast-with-Santa event at their stadium in Coney Island and that I intended to go. She is a woman who has, to this day, never conceded to me or my siblings that Santa does not exist (he finally left us a retirement note last year). I thought she would appreciate this and say something like “Fun!” Instead, she looked at me with concern and said, “It’s really not appropriate to go to that without children.”

Really? It’s not inappropriate to go to the Brooklyn Cyclones’ stadium at other times without children, but as soon as Santa gets there, I’m banned? I found myself polling friends and people at work about whether it was okay for me to go, and then I received a second surprise: Many people in my life hadn’t heard of breakfast with Santa at all. “Maybe it’s a Rust Belt or northern thing?” one suggested. Pancakes and Santa? A regional thing? A regional thing and only for children?

I contacted a Santa Claus expert—Jacqueline Woolley, a psychology professor at the University of Texas at Austin, who was at the time preparing for an academic conference about Santa—in hopes of finding some backup. She had never heard of breakfast with Santa. “When you mentioned it, I looked online and apparently it’s been around for many years,” she told me.

It has, all over the country, and I love it. But I’m now experiencing a small personal crisis. I don’t think I’m what one of my friends called a “Christmas adult,” a seasonal version of the so-called Disney adults who are obsessed with the Magic Kingdom. I think I’m just a woman who enjoys a special little outing at Christmastime. So, I decided to go to breakfast with Santa by myself this year in defiance of all those closest to me. The idea was to revisit a childhood tradition with the mind of a grown-up to see if it held up—and to see if partaking felt “inappropriate.” (The idea was also: pancakes on The Atlantic’s dime.) Could a case be made for breakfast with Santa, not just for children but for everyone?

[Read: I went to Disney World]

To maximize the intensity of the experience, I picked the breakfast with Santa on the sixth floor of Macy’s, the famous department store in Midtown Manhattan—arguably the birthplace of the modern concept of interacting one-on-one with Santa Claus (and of the set of Miracle on 34th Street, a charming but ultimately evil movie about manipulating your mother into leaving a gorgeous Manhattan apartment to move to Long Island). Breakfast would be $75—or $85 if I wanted a seat by the windows, which I did. I got an 8:30 a.m. reservation on Saturday.

One thing I couldn’t consider in so many words as a kid was the fact that Santa is an adult, a stranger, and a celebrity. Most people, if they’re normal, aren’t comfortable walking into a new room and immediately approaching someone like that with the goal of asking them for something. The idea of the breakfast is that you get a longer festive experience, plenty of time to adjust to your surroundings and to the task at hand before executing it. “Santa is not just a stranger,” the child psychologist and writer Cara Goodwin pointed out when I posed this to her. From the perspective of a child, he’s also a stranger who is potentially judging them.

Goodwin takes her own kids to a breakfast with Santa at a hotel in Charlottesville, Virginia. “Even if they’re not excited to meet Santa, you can say, ‘Okay, well, we’re going to have pancakes.’ That could be something they are motivated to do.” Then, while they’re eating their pancakes, Santa is just kind of walking around, so they get a chance to see him before they have to talk with him. This should take off some of the pressure, though the strategy is not without risk, obviously: If a kid is already starting to wonder whether Santa is real, they may find it suspicious that Santa is eating breakfast with them at a random hotel in Virginia.

This wouldn’t be an issue for me, because, if the real Santa were going to have breakfast somewhere, the Macy’s in New York City would actually make sense. But thinking about the pancakes did help me get out the door. To avoid seeming overzealous, I wore a black turtleneck and an ankle-length brown skirt—one of the drearier outfits that has ever been worn to a breakfast with Santa. On the way to Manhattan, I watched a YouTube video of a previous breakfast with Santa at Macy’s to see if anybody was eating alone. The answer was no.

[Read: The case for keeping up your Christmas tree until March]

I was seated, naturally, in between two families with young children. A little girl to my right, who was wearing the same red dress as her sister (classic) was trying to eat the whole ball of butter from the middle of the table (also classic). Three beautiful carolers in chic little white jackets, red gloves, and full stage makeup came over to sing “It’s the Most Wonderful Time of the Year” and “Rockin’ Around the Christmas Tree” to our table cluster. They were great. I thought they must be among the hardest-working women in New York City show business, just singing their way from one end of the Macy’s dining room to the other, then back again, then back again.

I was sorting through a generously full basket of mini pastries in the middle of my table when a woman in a suit came over and leaned down to my seated level. “Are you ready to meet Santa?” she asked me. I’m so glad she phrased it that way. “To meet Santa?” I said, stupidly. “No, actually, I’m not quite ready yet.” A few minutes later, a waiter brought me some coffee and asked, “Have you seen Santa yet?” I respected everybody’s commitment to talking with me about Santa as if he were real and actually there, even though there weren’t any children close enough to hear our conversation.

“Even if you’re not Christian, we’re all pretending that Santa Claus is a real person,” Thalia Goldstein, an associate professor at George Mason University who co-authored a 2016 study with Woolley on belief in Santa Claus, told me. (There is a rich body of academic research on the psychology of Santa Claus, going back to at least the 1970s.) Goldstein referred to Santa Claus as a type of “cultural pretend play” that both kids and adults engage in. Like the professionals at Macy’s, she argued, everyone makes casual reference to Santa as a basic fact of the world. (This reminded me that, when I texted a friend to ask if she would go to breakfast with Santa with me, she didn’t say, “No, Santa Claus isn’t real.” She said, “Unfortunately, I can’t interact with Santa.”) (Because she’s Jewish.)

“We as adults enjoy the tradition as well,” Woolley agreed when I repeated Goldstein’s point to her. Then I said that I had naturally been wary of coming off as an eccentric by attending breakfast with Santa alone. (The worst part about defying your mother is, of course, the possibility that she might be right.) There’s a thin but bright line between the totally acceptable behavior of referring casually to Santa as if he’s real—or implying that he is, by, for example, hanging a stocking on the mantel in your apartment—and the much more concerning act of appearing sincerely unable to give him up (“Christmas adults”). Woolley confessed that she had once been asked—as a Santa Claus expert with an impressive academic affiliation—to appear in a Macy’s ad campaign promoting belief in Santa Claus. They just wanted her to say “I believe in Santa Claus,” but she told them no. “I couldn’t make myself do that,” she said. She didn’t want to lie on TV, which seemed weirder than lying to her own children.

Lucky for me, I wasn’t on television. Also, nobody really cares what you’re doing, almost ever, and I was enjoying myself. After my pancakes and my mimosa and my two coffees and my four or five Tater Tots and my two pieces of sausage and my bites of scrambled eggs and my tiny yogurt parfait, I was full and ready to meet Santa. I had only three minutes left in my allotted one hour at breakfast, so I flagged down my waiter and asked if it was too late. He went to find a manager. I did some nervous texting. Finally, the woman in the suit came back for me and led me over to Santa’s corner. “Have fun,” she said, not rudely, as she deposited me in line. “Are you the next family?” a woman dressed as an elf asked. (They treated me like an entire family of four the whole time I was there, which was why I was served so much food.)

Santa and I had a warm and brief interaction. We took a photo together. He asked what I wanted for Christmas, and I said, “Oh, world peace,” to which he replied, “You have to find that within your heart.” This made no sense, but it was just right. I had a new Christmas memory: an irrational conversation with a guy in a fake beard who might have been younger than me, whose presence nevertheless added a whisper of magic to the experience of otherwise normal breakfast food and an otherwise dreary December day.

For many of us—the vitamin-D-deprived, the sugar-addled, perhaps the suddenly jobless or those dreading family gatherings—’tis the season not so much to be jolly, but just to be “in a season.” The phrase has become a common way of talking yourself through a sudden upheaval, or of explaining that you’ll be doing things a little differently for a while.

Diddy is in “a season of total independence” because he has “come too far to ask somebody that isn’t where I’m from about cultural and artistic things.” The expression can fend off societal pressures (“I’m in a season of really wanting to … enjoy this phase of our relationship,” the singer Becky G said in March after getting engaged) or tacitly ask for space (after the actor Lupita Nyong’o’s breakup in October, she found herself “in a season of heartbreak.”)

You might have noticed this phrasing if you are a Christian, or run in Christian-adjacent circles, where it seems especially prominent. Many believers tend to say that they are, for example, “going through a hard season” or are in a “season of singleness”—a reference to the Ecclesiastes verse “To every thing there is a season.” (“I’m in a season where the kids need the best of me, not the rest of me,” explained Elisabeth Hasselbeck when she left Fox News in 2015.)

This concept of “seasons” has now spread far beyond Christianity, to mainstream mental health and self-help. Invoking it has become a signal that you’re too overwhelmed to meet some expectation or another: “I’m in a season of not reading as much,” the artist Caroline Kent told The New York Times when asked, mid-pandemic, about her current book list.

Although it may seem cheesy or evasive on its face, the expression is a healthy way to interpret the times when doing it all or to pleasing everyone simply isn’t possible. In fact, thinking of life in terms of seasons might just be the best way to stay sane during times of change.

Often in life, we are firing on all cylinders, notching promotions, getting the holiday cards sent out before December 20. But each of us, invariably, goes through a slower season too. In her best-selling book Wintering, Katherine May explains that though we tend to wish that life would be an “endless, unvarying high season,” there will often come “a fallow period in life when you’re cut off from the world, feeling rejected, sidelined, blocked from progress, or cast into the role of an outsider.”

[Read: The surprising truth about seasonal depression]

She points out that, for most people, wintering is inevitable. For May, winter arrived at her 40th birthday, when both she and her husband fell ill and her son began refusing to attend school. But even if you never experience a serious illness or setback, your parents will die; your job will change; your plans will go awry, and something will have to give. Winter is coming, whether you want it to or not.

Even in a challenging time, though, the idea of “seasons” is hopeful, suggesting that there can be periods of your life when you emphasize different things—family, work, hobbies, friendship—and one or two of the other areas can shrink for a while. The birth of a baby is an obvious one, but many things can prompt a shift in seasons—a graduation, a breakup, a new job, moving to a new city.

This might mean that your life sometimes seems unbalanced, because you are out of necessity paying more attention to some realms than others. A layoff might make a career woman turn into, for a time, a stay-at-home mom. A demanding new job might make that same woman a less involved parent for a few months. But looking across the entirety of your life, the peaks and valleys of work, family, and self-care can even out to a balance. People tend to misinterpret balance as “needing to do everything,” says Brad Stulberg, an executive coach whose latest book is Master of Change. “I need to be the perfect partner, the perfect parent, the perfect employee, the perfect friend; I need to have orchids and follow Game of Thrones and have a fantasy football team and on and on … I think a much more realistic and attainable version is to have your priorities and your emphases ebb and flow with your life.”

Stulberg himself admits that, right now, his main work emphasis is promoting his book. That means he’s not starting new writing projects at the moment—and that’s okay. “I think it’s actually really empowering to realize,” he told me, “that you don’t have to give everything your all.”

This isn’t a new concept, of course, just one that seems to have gained traction recently among the burned-out keyboard class. Thousands of years ago, the Buddha taught that impermanence is one of the “marks of existence,” and that understanding this is one of the secrets to enlightenment. I once had a meditation teacher who liked to remind her students that “This too shall pass” is both relieving and somber: Nothing bad lasts forever, but neither does anything good.

No one is quite sure why “seasons” took off among Christians, only that it has. During the pandemic, Amber Reynolds, a history professor at Wheaton College, noticed a rise in email greetings that said something like,“I hope this finds you well in this season,” a nod to the difficult, temporary period we were all living through. Reynolds says this usage is meant to express, “this is a challenging time, but it’s an expectation that it will be temporary. God will put you through the winter of life, but there will be hope in the future.” Of course, you could just say you’re in a “phase of life,” or, taking a cue from Taylor Swift, an “era,” but these imply time horizons that are either too short or too long. “A season” feels more apt—a few months, give or take. The transitoriness is built into the word, and that makes it edifying.

[Read: How much can we bend seasons before they break?]

The phrase has now trickled out of religious circles and into secular mental-health spaces. Charlene Lenkart, a therapist in Alpine, Utah, sometimes uses the “seasons” analogy with her anxious clients. “Earth requires both periods of growth and periods of rest,” she told me. “If there was just growth constantly, then it would become destructive.” There will be times in your life when everything blooms, and times when it withers and fades.

This metaphor can be helpful if you, like me, struggle to endure an actual season of the year. I have seasonal affective disorder, which means that the winter draws me into depression, anxiety, and exhaustion. When the freezing rains of February lash the East Coast, it feels, to me, like winter will last forever.

It also sometimes feels that way to Daryl Van Tongeren, a psychology professor who grew up in California but now teaches in Michigan, at Hope College. “There are times in which winter honestly feels like it’s never going to end,” he told me. But eventually, tulips will push through the frost. Every single year, without fail, “we always manage to get out of winter,” he said. Winter, to us, is an interminable season, but it’s also only a season.

I’m probably not the only person who appreciates this notion but also, secretly, resists it. Most of us cling to the idea that everything good will only get better, and that there’s no excuse to ever drop any balls. As Marilynne Robinson put it, “the spirit of the times is one of joyless urgency.”

“I think it’s a little existentially threatening to think that everything lasts a season,” Van Tongeren said, “because then we might extrapolate that out to realize our life is just kind of a series of seasons that will also end.”

[Read: The only two seasons that matter now]

Eliminating or stepping back from things may feel unnatural because the human is not a minimalist animal. When faced with a problem, people are much less likely to remove elements than to add them, according to research by Leidy Klotz, a professor at the University of Virginia and the author of Subtract. People have a natural desire to exhibit competence, he says, and it’s harder to display your smarts by not doing things. In one experiment, he and his co-authors presented study participants with a packed itinerary for a day trip to Washington, D.C. Over 14 hours, the itinerary had the participants visiting six different buildings, three different memorials, a museum, a shop, and a bistro. Then, they gave the participants the option to add or subtract activities. Only about a quarter opted to remove some. Even when asked to improve an article—a.k.a. edit it—his study participants added words to it.

To overcome this tendency, Klotz recommends focusing on what you gain by subtracting—on what your life will look like when you have one less meeting to attend or one less kitchen tool to find space for. He suggests temporarily removing a standing commitment from your schedule, just to see if anything breaks. “We’re just going to try it, and if something bad happens, we just add the thing back in,” he explained in an interview. You can stop subtracting once you start missing what’s been cut.

The key, however, is to not let a season of pulling back on certain commitments mean that you never focus on those areas of your life again. Prioritizing work for a few months might be necessary, but prioritizing work for a lifetime could be pathological. And you should probably sneak in some time with your kids even while you’re sprinting through a work tunnel. Stulberg recommends viewing your identity as a house, one in which you might spend most of your time within just one or two rooms for a while. But you don’t want to let the other rooms go so unused for so long that they fall into disrepair. Even parenting, which seems like something you can’t overdo, eventually ends. When your kids move out, you’ll want other elements of your identity—hobbies, friends—to dwell in.

Or, take the analogy of a three-ring circus—put to me by Laura Vanderkam, an author who specializes in work-life balance. You might have one main event, but the other rings of your life still have something going on. “If you’ve got one ring where there’s a giant sphere where people are riding eight motorbikes around in the center of it,” Vanderkam told me, maybe, in one of the others, “there’s a clown juggling”—something simpler, but still extant. This can be useful advice for when you feel like the clown who’s juggling.

Sometimes this can mean changing your focus with the time of year—literally the season. Vanderkam, who has interviewed several accountants for her books, said they tend to go to the dentist and see all their friends in December, before clients start seeking their help in January. “Then they would kind of check out again until April,” she said. They settle in for their own personal winter: tax season.

Straddling the border of Virginia and North Carolina, the Great Dismal Swamp stretches 750 square miles and teems with thick, tangled vines. Lofty pine trees shade the sun; pools of standing black water snake a path to an expansive freshwater lake. In the 16th century, when Europeans began to colonize North America’s coast, this marshy interior became a haven for outcasts. “Self-emancipators,” the historian J. Brent Morris writes in Dismal Freedom: A History of the Maroons of the Great Dismal Swamp, “settled into new lives of freedom in a wilderness landscape deemed worthless and inaccessible by whites.” In these maroon settlements, which bloomed throughout the Atlantic world, formerly enslaved people raised livestock, built homes out of self-harvested timber, tended gardens, and occasionally raided the farms and slave camps of their neighbors.

Gabriel Bump’s second novel, The New Naturals, is set roughly in the present day. Though about a century and a half has passed since slavery ended in the U.S., society, of course, remains troubled and unequal. Early in the book, Rio, an ambitious young Black woman who works as a professor, takes a solitary walk in the woods near her home in Western Massachusetts. She’s unmoored by the loss of her newborn child—as well as by a creeping sense of purposelessness in her marriage and bourgeois existence in general. Even before the child’s death, Rio had felt the walls closing in. She’d made her husband get them “the fuck out of Boston,” disconnected from social media, and mounted a giant world map on a wall in their new home to track contemporary calamities, marking each with a large red X: wildfires, migrant shipwrecks, police killings.

In the woods, Rio sprints through a clearing and finds herself in front of an imposing mountain. On its peak sits an abandoned restaurant. She remembers stories of her forebears, who trekked from Georgia to Florida after emancipation: “all those Black people living in peace for the first time in their lives.” Suddenly, she is struck by a vision for a new world. They’d build underground, burrowing deep into the side of the mountain—a retreat for modern-day maroons. “A new world that could last forever,” separate from all the unease of the current one. They’d call it the New Naturals.

Much of Bump’s novel reads as commentary on the hopelessness of contemporary life, as characters react to cascading global crises and the stark, persistent divides among social classes. The book’s central premise treads a winding path to land at a restless conclusion: Human beings will always try to build new societies amid failing ones; they will also always end up re-creating those failures. Though Bump seems to argue that new worlds that form based on utopian ideals will likely erode, the residue of unsuccessful attempts often becomes the foundation for other experiments: new legislation, new norms. Think of the Black Panthers’ Free Breakfast initiative, which lives on in existing school-breakfast programs nationwide, or Marcus Garvey’s Universal Negro Improvement Association, which inspired Ghana, in the year 2000, to grant people of African descent born in the diaspora the right to reside in the country indefinitely.

[Read: A blueprint for Black liberation]

Rio’s husband, Gibraltar, is her reluctant co-conspirator. Soon they’re drawing up plans and calling on colleagues from the academy to fundraise. Most assume the couple has lost touch with reality, and Rio grows sick anticipating their failure. But just before she gives up, a benefactor appears, eager to fund their “attempt at perfection through isolation.” The unnamed funder, who’d earned a fortune in tech, is disenchanted with the frivolous monotony of her own life. She’s drawn to Rio’s vision; it reminds her of the fugitives of the Great Dismal and quilombos, communities of runaway slaves who created self-governed towns in the hinterlands of Brazil.

Bump spins a Möbius strip of a tale through the perspectives of unrelated characters whose stories eventually converge. He nods to real events and historical figures through the names he gives these characters, which are at once referential and quietly profound. One character, Sojourner, calls back to the famous abolitionist leader, who was born Isabella Baumfree. Bump’s Sojourner is a biracial, beer-guzzling reporter who feels burnt out by her job and her boyfriend. She’s won awards for investigating harmful lead poisoning in a small town, but she sees so little change in the conditions she exposes, and so much apathy in the newsroom, that her ambitions feel futile. Bump touches on these social realities but doesn’t fixate on them. Much like his first novel, Everywhere You Don’t Belong, The New Naturals is, in essence, a character study of misfits. In the earlier work, a Black boy named Claude comes of age on the South Side of Chicago after his parents abandon him. What could have been a social novel was instead something much more intimate, about love affairs, broken hearts, and personal dreams.

The New Naturals achieves a similar intimacy by probing the interiority of several characters individually, but it also threads a palpable yearning for a collective reality. Rio optimistically builds her underground world, planting carrots and apple trees in a greenhouse, stocking an enormous library with books by Frantz Fanon, Simone de Beauvoir, and Zora Neale Hurston. Seekers desperate for meaning arrive from everywhere. “Above ground,” Bump writes, “they were underpaid, overworked, overpaid, disillusioned, drained, depleted.” In the new world, there is jazz in the afternoons, and painting supplies, and, for a while, enough for everyone to eat.

The search for utopia defies time. In the early 20th century, branches of the International Peace Mission, founded by the preacher Father Divine, spread throughout the Northeast. Adherents, mostly African American, believed that they were creating an interracial paradise by feeding and employing their neighbors during the Great Depression. Religious leaders such as the faith healer and evangelist James F. Jones claimed that they could help their followers attain heaven on Earth. In the ’60s, Detroit’s Pan African Orthodox Christian Church built a community where residents pooled resources and educated their children on the principles of Black liberation and freedom.

A single charismatic figure galvanized many historical movements; Rio is the messianic center of the New Naturals. The group will “make a place for everyone,” Rio insists; like many past real-life experiments, she is angling toward a multicultural dream. “What if this is another Jonestown?” one character worries, evoking Jim Jones’s failed Guyanese utopia, where nearly 1,000 members died in a mass murder-suicide in 1978. (At least 70 percent of his followers were Black.) Jones’s shadow looms over the New Naturals, especially as the society begins to unravel—some of the prospective members become paranoid that their desire for a multiracial utopia may have blinded them to the makings of a cult. History suggests that separatist projects can possess noble aims and produce fresh ideas. But their isolation can also enable their doom; an inherent tension exists between their most gleeful dreams of freedom and the restriction such strident separation requires. And perhaps it is impossible to fully escape the human tendency to destroy, which lives not only in our societies but also within us.  

[Read: How to thrive in a dying world]

For some time, the group functions well. But before long, the stream of new additions begins to slow. Members fall ill, requiring contact with the outside and steeper investment in the community’s limited system of medical care. Soon, the benefactor is banned from using profits from her corporation to fund the project. Rio and her constituents (seemingly no more than a few dozen people) begin stealing to keep themselves stocked and fed. As the experiment descends into chaos, the novel takes on an apocalyptic tone. Bump fills these sections with haunting noises: Rio’s hacking cough from an unknown illness; stray gunshots from raids gone wrong; people yelling in agony, driven mad by hunger and deprivation.

In Heaven Is a Place on Earth, a study of past American utopian experiments, Adrian Shirk writes that utopias have “no real end.” Bump seems to suggest that true paradise is unattainable. But because it is an idea, utopia is eternal. So it isn’t a surprise when, years after the New Naturals fails, whispers of a “new attempt” begin again.