Somewhere in the hills above Malibu, drenched in California sunshine and sitting side by side in a used white Volkswagen bug, two teenage boys realized they were lost. They’d been looping their way along an open road, past shady groves and canyons, and in doing so they’d gotten turned around. This was the early 1960s, and the boy driving the car was Albert Einstein—yes, this really was his given name, years before he changed it to Albert Brooks. Riding shotgun was his best friend and classmate from Beverly Hills High School, Rob Reiner.

Brooks had inherited the car from one of his older brothers, and he’d made it his own by removing the handle of the stick shift and replacing it with a smooth brass doorknob. After several failed attempts to find the Pacific Coast Highway, which would take them home, Brooks and Reiner came upon a long fence surrounding a field where a single cow was grazing. Albert “stopped the car and he leaned out the window and he said, ‘Excuse me, sir! Sir?’ and the cow just looked up,” Reiner told me. “And he said, ‘How do you get back to the PCH?’ And the cow just did a little flick of his head, like he was flicking a fly away, and went back to eating.” Without missing a beat, Albert called out, “Thank you!” and confidently zoomed away. “I said, ‘Albert, you just took directions from a cow!’ And he said, ‘Yeah, but he lives around here. He knows the area.’ ”

Reiner is telling me this story, dissolving into laughter as he does, to make two points. The first point is that Albert Brooks has impeccable comic timing, a quality that, among other talents, has made him a hero to multiple generations of comedians, actors, and directors who are themselves legends. The second point is that Brooks has always been this way.

Reiner remembers exactly his first impression of Brooks (Wow, this guy is arrogant ) and also his immediate second impression (This arrogant guy is mortified ). They both did high-school theater, and got to talking after their first class together. Brooks began to casually brag about the famous people he had met—they were Beverly Hills kids, after all. “He comes up to me, and in his cocky kind of way he says, ‘I know Carl Reiner,’ ” Rob Reiner told me. “And I said, ‘Yeah, I know him too. He’s my father.’ Oh my God, he was so embarrassed.” They instantly became friends, and have been close ever since—even living together for a stretch. One acquaintance described them to me as more like twins than brothers.

[Read: Adrienne LaFrance interviews Albert Brooks]

But although Brooks and Reiner pursued careers in the same industry, and both found great success, they didn’t choose the same path—personally or professionally. Brooks’s decisions over the years occasionally confounded his oldest friend, and worried him. Looking back now, however, something has become startlingly clear. If it is the case that by high school a person is already on some fundamental level the person they are destined to become—and Reiner believes this to be “totally true” of Brooks—then Brooks was fated to be not just the godfather of American comedy but also a man who would prove that humor in the face of catastrophe can sometimes save your life.

One thing you notice if you spend any amount of time with Brooks is that his manner of speaking—in musical swells that rise and fall—is not just something that his characters do, but something that he does. Think of Brooks in Broadcast News, the pitch of his voice going higher for emphasis as his character tries to persuade the woman he’s crazy about not to go out with another man: “I’ve never seen you like this with ANYbody. And so DON’T get me wrong when I tell you that TOM, while being a very NICE guy, is”—here he shifts into a whisper-shout—“THE DEVIL.” Off camera, this way of speaking, depending on the topic at hand, comes off as relieved, annoyed, insistent, or pleading. When you agree with him, he will often respond, “This is what I’m SAYing.” And when he disagrees with you, it’s “no NO,” always no twice, always with the emphasis on the second no.

The director and Simpsons co-creator James L. Brooks (no relation) spent part of this past winter directing Albert in the forthcoming Ella McCay, a political comedy set in the recent past. James told me that he knew he had to cast Albert based on just two words in the script: Sit, sit. “Which to me is very Albert,” James said. “It’s just the most Albert line.” The scene involves a classically Brooksian mode of imploring condescension—a quality deployed perfectly, for example, in the opening scene of Modern Romance, when Brooks’s character is dumping his girlfriend: “You’ve heard of a no-win situation, haven’t you? … Vietnam? This? ”

Brooks is tall, and often dresses monochromatically. A go-to outfit is black pants and a dark button-up shirt over a black tee, with a black fedora. He talks with his hands, and when he’s not gesturing with them, he fidgets. This comes off less as nervousness than as a kind of perpetual motion. When Brooks wants something, he is relentless. And he is impatient. He has a reputation for being extremely difficult to say no to. “Because he’s persuasive,” Reiner told me. “And he’s right 90 percent of the time.”

[Watch: Rob Reiner on the burden of his name]

But Brooks himself has no trouble saying no. He has repeatedly turned down the various Hollywood luminaries who asked him to star in their films—parts that ultimately went to Tom Hanks, Billy Crystal, Robin Williams, and Steve Martin, and in several cases altered the trajectory of their careers. He was offered the role Hanks played in Big (1988), the role Crystal played in When Harry Met Sally (1989), and the role Williams played in Dead Poets Society (1989), to name only a few. (Brooks was somewhat reluctant to discuss this with me, as he didn’t want to sound “stuck up, because there are so many of them.”)

Instead, he went his own way, and has single-handedly shaped modern American entertainment to an astonishing degree. Pick a random moment in film or television from the past half century, and Brooks is often nearby. He was a repeat guest on Johnny Carson’s Tonight Show in the golden era of late-night television. Lorne Michaels asked him to be the permanent host of Saturday Night Live before it launched. (In declining the offer, Brooks suggested the rotating-guest-host format that has defined the program ever since.) Brooks wrote a satirical short called The Three of Us for SNL that seemed to predict the premise of Three’s Company, two years before Three’s Company existed. His first role in a big film was in Martin Scorsese’s Taxi Driver (1976). His mockumentary (Real Life, 1979) came out five years before Reiner’s This Is Spinal Tap. And for The Associates, the sitcom that gave Martin Short one of his first breaks, Brooks composed the theme music.

Brooks in 1977 during an interview with Rob Reiner, who was guest-hosting The Tonight Show (Tom Ron / NBCU Photo Bank / NBCUniversal / Getty)

Then there is the string of critical hits that he wrote, directed, and starred in, including Modern Romance (1981), about a man who breaks up with his beautiful girlfriend, then spends the rest of the film trying to get her back; Lost in America (1985), about a yuppie couple who quit their jobs to travel across the country in a Winnebago; and Defending Your Life (1991), a comedy about what happens when you die, which also starred Meryl Streep. Plus his role in Broadcast News (1987), which earned him an Oscar nomination for Best Supporting Actor. He was considered a lock for another Oscar nomination after he played a vicious L.A. gangster alongside Ryan Gosling in the gorgeously shot film noir Drive (2011), but it didn’t happen. (“I got ROBBED,” Brooks tweeted the morning the nominations were announced. “I don’t mean the Oscars, I mean literally. My pants and shoes have been stolen.” What he’s actually pissed off about, he told me, is that he can’t get more roles as villains. He loves playing the bad guy.) He was the voice of the father clown fish in Finding Nemo (2003) and did the voices for Hank Scorpio and Jacques (among many others) in The Simpsons. Petey, the decapitated parakeet from Dumb and Dumber (1994), was inspired by Petey the cockatiel in Modern Romance.

[Read: James L. Brooks on journalism, the Oscars, and Broadcast News]

Although he’d wanted to be an actor since he was a child, Brooks didn’t want to be just an actor. He was and is a writer first, and tends to prefer seeing his stories to completion by acting in and directing them. Brooks is beloved, in part, for the big-eyed, wrinkled-brow, heart-on-his-sleeve quality he brings to many of his characters—part puppy dog, part … what, exactly? “You know, you’re talking about the secret sauce, so it’s hard,” James L. Brooks told me. “There’s an intrinsic vulnerability to him.” In real life, however, Brooks is far more confident—if still highly methodical. “He’s cautious about everything,” Reiner told me. “He can get obsessed about every little thing.”

Civilization-destroying earthquakes, for one, are never far from Brooks’s mind. (“Only because it’s going to happen, and I don’t know if it’ll happen in my lifetime,” he told me.) He is something of a hypochondriac. (“If I lived with a physician, they would have left me.”) He worries about an uprising of the nation’s youth against the Baby Boomers. (The plot of his 2011 novel, 2030: The Real Story of What Happens to America, hinges on all three of these fears: A 9.1-magnitude earthquake nearly destroys Los Angeles; the superrich are the only ones who can afford decent health care; young people plot a violent revolt against “the olds.”) There are more mundane worries: He is fastidious about avoiding saying or doing things that could make him seem cocky, or stupid, or bougie. He also fears nuclear war. (“You know, I’m old-fashioned.”)

On film, death comes quickly, and hilariously, for Brooks. In Defending Your Life, which he wrote and directed, his character buys himself a new BMW on his birthday and is hit head-on by a bus almost immediately upon taking it out for a spin. He is, at the time, singing along to the West Side Story soundtrack, belting out Barbra Streisand’s rendition of “Something’s Coming.” In Private Benjamin (1980), the story begins with Brooks’s character marrying a woman played by Goldie Hawn, then dying while in the act of consummation on their wedding night, less than 11 minutes into the film (the consummation itself takes seconds). In a 2021 cameo on Curb Your Enthusiasm, Brooks throws his own funeral, so that he can watch a livestream of his friends eulogizing him while he is still alive.

While reporting this story, I talked with Brooks numerous times over many months. We met in person in L.A., we talked on the phone, we texted. For the conversations we’d planned ahead of time, he was never once late, not even by a minute. He’s the kind of person who will text you back instantly, no matter the hour or time zone. This is a quality I gather he expects from others in return. “Albert loves hyper-preparedness,” the actor Sharon Stone told me.

[Read: The brutal cynicism of Lost in America still resonates]

Stone co-starred with Brooks in The Muse, the 1999 film—which Brooks also wrote and directed—about a director who finds out that Hollywood’s best ideas all come from one woman. (Brooks’s co-writer was Monica Johnson, a close friend and collaborator who died in 2010.) Stone described Brooks to me as an “intellectual giant” who has no time for people who don’t work hard, but who never lost his temper on set. She also described him as peerless, basically. I had asked her where she would situate him among other movie stars roughly of his generation—say, Bill Murray or Steve Martin—and she told me none of them even comes close. (Murray doesn’t have the focus and Martin can’t keep his head out of the clouds, she said. Plus, neither can direct.) The only person she could think of who approached Brooks’s brilliance, she said, was Garry Shandling, who died in 2016. “There are people who have great talent,” Stone told me, “but there aren’t many people who can take that talent and have the discipline and the huge ability to be the general, and put a huge project together and then push it all the way through.”

Stone loved working with Brooks, and she particularly appreciated his bias toward action. If somebody wasn’t prepared, he would decisively and calmly move on without them—not exactly Zen about it, but sanguine. “He doesn’t have any patience if you’re not ready, if you don’t know your lines, if you don’t have your shit together,” Stone said. Later, she put it to me this way: “Albert’s a winner. And if you were running a relay race with Albert and you handed him the torch and the person next to him fell on the ground, Albert could jump over that person and run to the finish line … Someone would say, ‘You know, you jumped over that person,’ and he would say, ‘People who lay on the ground don’t win races.’ ”

I asked her if others found this quality off-putting. “People who lay on the ground would think Albert is mean,” she said. Also, she said, “he’s super bored by people who aren’t smart.” Despite his improvisational skills (see: his many voice appearances on The Simpsons, where he is a legend in the writers’ room for his riffing), Brooks is not one for winging it. Or, as he once put it to me: “Come anally prepared and let’s do the silliness on purpose when we want to.”

Another time, when I asked Brooks if it irritated him to be around people who aren’t as quick or clever as he is, he demurred, unconvincingly. A low tolerance for people who cannot keep up would be understandable. His mind gallops through conversations—there is never a missed opportunity for a joke, yet his joke-telling doesn’t come off as striving, only calibrated to the moment. One friend of his likened this quality to watching a professional athlete in a flow state. Consider this exchange, from when Brooks appeared on Larry King’s radio show in 1990, which left King gasping with laughter:

King: Do you ever order from 800 numbers late at night from on television? I get the feeling you do.
Brooks: Do you?
King: I don’t, but I think you do.
Brooks: I bought a wok and a vibrator. Actually, it was the same thing. A vibrating wok.

The people who know Brooks best still marvel at how naturally humor comes to him. James L. Brooks told me the story of a party he attended sometime in the late 1970s, where he’d noticed a small crowd gathering around a table to watch some guy doing card tricks. The guy was oozing charisma, and had charmed the people around him out of their wits. But it took him a minute to realize what was actually happening. “This guy doing card tricks had no idea how to do card tricks. He was just talking about 45 miles an hour. It was Albert Brooks. And he was just being hilarious.”

Rob Reiner told me about another party, where Brooks was so funny that people almost felt they were witnessing the birth of a new art form. “People were screaming laughing,” Reiner said. “And when he finished, it was like he’d been on a stage. He left the party, and a half hour later, the hostess of the party comes up to me and says, ‘Albert’s on the phone. He wants to talk to you.’ And so I get on the phone and I said, ‘Albert, what’s up?’ And he said, ‘Listen, Rob, you gotta do me a big favor.’ I said, ‘What is it?’ He said, ‘I left my keys in the house there and I can’t come back to get them.’ Because he’d finished his performance. He didn’t want to come back. So he had been wandering around for, like, 20 minutes trying to figure out what to do … That’s the way his mind works.” Reiner grabbed Brooks’s keys and went outside to find his friend.

Last year, Reiner released a documentary about Brooks’s career called Defending My Life, a project Reiner had wanted to pursue for years, inspired by My Dinner With Andre, Louis Malle’s famous 1981 film featuring the theater director André Gregory and the actor and playwright Wallace Shawn having a sprawling conversation at Café des Artistes, in Manhattan. For years, Brooks said no to the idea before finally relenting. “I’ve always felt he is the most brilliant comedian I’ve ever met,” Reiner said. The two have sometimes drifted apart, but they always drifted back together, Reiner told me. One argument in particular stands out in Reiner’s memory.

“I remember this distinctly,” Reiner said. “He would always ask me, ‘How does my hair look?’ And, you know, when he was young he had that Jew fro. And it looked the same every time. Every time he asked me, ‘How’s my hair look?’ And I would say, ‘Albert, it looks fine.’ And then one time we’re in the car and he kept asking me, ‘How does my hair look?’ And I said, ‘Albert, it looks the same! It looks the same every single time I look at it! It’s always the same!’ And he got so mad at me, he threw me out of the car. He said, ‘Get out of this car!’ He got mad at me because I wouldn’t tell him how his hair looked.”

Brooks remembers a different argument they had, decades ago, about the enduring star power of classic film actors—“the Cary Grants, the Clark Gables.” Reiner had remarked on how stars like that were immortal, the kind of leading men who “will never go away,” Brooks recalled. “And I said, ‘Everyone’s going away.’ And, you know, my kids don’t know who Cary Grant is unless I force them and say, ‘That’s Cary Grant.’ Every generation has their own people. And it’s remarkable how fast everything else goes away.”

The term comic’s comic is overused. But with Brooks, it fits. Judd Apatow, Conan O’Brien, Sarah Silverman, Chris Rock, and too many others to name have all cited him as a formative influence. James L. Brooks told me the story of standing in the living room at some gathering with Steve Martin when Martin spotted Brooks and got starstruck—“nervous, like a kid at Christmas,” he said.

While the critics who love Brooks often lament that his films have not enjoyed more commercial success—“Albert almost intentionally makes noncommercial movies,” Sharon Stone told me—what they miss is that he has, over the course of his career, repeatedly chosen fealty to his own artistic vision over anyone else’s desires, for him or for themselves. And he has done so with the clarity of a man racing against time, someone who knows that we only get one go-round, and tomorrow is never promised.

Big, When Harry Met Sally, Dead Poets Society—all became generational cinematic hits, as close to timeless as they come. But to Brooks, the decision to turn down these roles was obvious. With Big, he just couldn’t see himself playing a little boy. And anyway, he’d been actively trying to avoid New York City since at least the 1970s, back when Lorne Michaels had come calling. “What I really was not going to do was go to New York and stay up until 11:30 to be funny, and risk getting addicted to coke,” he told me. Later, as he read the script for When Harry Met Sally, which Reiner was directing, he knew right away that he shouldn’t do it. “I was being called ‘the West Coast Woody Allen,’ ” Brooks told me. “And I read this lovely script that felt like a Woody Allen movie—the music and everything. And I thought, If I do this, I’m Woody Allen forever.”

The Woody Allen comparisons make only a superficial kind of sense. It’s true that both Allen and Brooks write, direct, and star in their own films. Both are self-deprecating leading men. Both write unforgettably funny dialogue on a line-to-line level. (They’re also both frequently described as neurotic—an adjective that, as Brooks once acidly complained to me, is simply the lazy film critic’s code for “Jew.”)

But where Allen’s films are oriented inward—self-deprecating, yes, but also self-obsessed bordering on narcissistic—Brooks’s films radiate outward, almost galactically, an expanding universe all unto themselves. Again and again, he poses the most profound questions possible—What does it mean to live a good life? Where do we go when we die? What if we weren’t afraid?—then filters them through his sense of humor, and explodes them into a meditation on the human condition.

So New York was out of the question. And anyway, why bother starring in a film you didn’t write? Why let somebody else direct something you did write? And why direct something you can’t star in? More than that, Why wait ? Wasn’t that the lesson he learned the hard way when he was only 11 and a half?

The movie posters for Real Life (1979), Modern Romance (1981), Lost in America (1985), Broadcast News (1987), and Defending Your Life (1991) (Paramount Pictures / Everett Collection; Columbia Pictures /
Everett Collection; Geffen Pictures / Everett Collection; 20th Century Fox Film Corp. /
Everett Collection; Warner Brothers / Everett Collection)

Not many people can pinpoint the exact moment when they became who they are, the formative experience from which the rest of their life unspools. But Brooks can: November 23, 1958. The Sunday before Thanksgiving. His mother, Thelma; father, Harry; and one older brother, Cliff, left home for the Beverly Hilton to attend a roast put on by the local Friars Club, which his father helped run. The event was in honor of Lucille Ball and Desi Arnaz, Hollywood royalty whom Harry Einstein introduced—in a perfect deadpan that made the audience roar—as his very close personal friends “Danny” and “Miss Louise Balls.” (In a recording of the roast, you can distinctly hear Arnaz’s honking laugh rise above the hysterics of the crowd.)

Einstein was a superstar comedian himself, known for his dialect humor and for his popular radio alter ego Parkyakarkus (say it aloud to get the joke). Over the next 10 minutes, he had the audience members in tears. When Einstein finished, he made his way back to the dais, where he was seated next to Milton Berle. With the audience still clapping for him, the color suddenly drained from Einstein’s face, and he slumped over onto Berle. Frantic attempts to resuscitate him began right away, and in the panic, the singer Tony Martin took the microphone in an attempt to distract people with one of his hit songs. Meanwhile, a doctor in the audience made an incision in Einstein’s chest with somebody’s pocketknife, and another doctor fashioned a makeshift defibrillator by peeling the insulation off a nearby lamp cord. None of it worked. Einstein, at 54 years old, was dying of a heart attack while Martin sang a song that took on dark—and to Brooks, in retrospect, darkly funny—meaning: “There’s No Tomorrow.” Arnaz eventually grabbed the microphone: “They say the show must go on,” he said. “But why must it?” With that, the evening was over.

Although Einstein’s death was shocking—it made national headlines—it was not unexpected. He had suffered from a serious spinal issue and a related heart condition, and was by then using a wheelchair. When he did walk, Brooks remembers, he lumbered “like Frankenstein.” He looked terrible. And life in the Einstein household was largely oriented around accommodating his ill health. Brooks’s earliest memories of his father, though, are happier ones. They would take long drives out to Santa Paula, past orchards where the tree branches were heavy with oranges and lemons. Back at home, they would goof off. “Sometimes at the dinner table, he would be more like a kid and play with a fork,” Brooks recalled. “And my mother would get angry like she would with a kid. And we would all laugh.”

The Einstein household seems to have been genetically predisposed for humor. One of Brooks’s brothers, Bob Einstein, grew up to have a successful comedy career. You may remember him as his stuntman character, Super Dave Osborne, or as Marty Funkhouser on Curb Your Enthusiasm. (He died in 2019.) Their mother, Thelma Leeds, was also in show business—she and Harry met in 1937 on the set of a film they were starring in. After Brooks’s film Mother came out in 1996, Entertainment Weekly asked her to write a review, including a grade of the film. Brooks was convinced that she’d give it a middling review just to be funny. “I said, ‘Listen to me’—and this is not a joke—‘you have to give it an A,’ ” Brooks recalled. (She ended up giving it an A+++.) Despite his parents’ comedic gifts, he insists that they didn’t name him Albert Einstein as a joke. “I swear to God, it was like, ‘You know, he’s a wonderful man. Let’s give him that name.’ ”

For Brooks, the death of his father was not just a tragedy but the inevitable realization of a long-held premonition. He had been bracing for it for as long as he could remember. “From the moment I could conceive anything, this is what I was expecting. So, you know, then you start trying to fool God,” he told me. “You tell yourself, Well, I’m just not going to get close. And You’re not going to take anyone from me. I’m just not going to love him. You know, you do whatever you have to do, to make it okay. It forced early thoughts of the end before the beginning.”

“I never felt he didn’t love me,” Brooks told me later. “I just felt it was going to be quick. That, I think, colors a part of your life.”

Brooks as a child, with his father watching him from a lounge chair (Courtesy of Albert Brooks)

The actor and director Jon Favreau, who is close friends with Brooks, can relate to what he went through. Favreau’s mother died of cancer when he was a child. “The idea that catastrophe could be just around the corner is something that is baked into your psyche when you experience something that grave that early,” Favreau told me. That attitude, expressed artistically, can take many forms. “It can go different places with different people, but with Albert it definitely went to This has to be funny. I want to bring the house down. And that’s where I think somebody like Albert finds that he has a superpower. Through his intellect and through his humor and through whatever experiences made him who he is, what comes out of that machinery is laughter and amusement and human insight that allows you to deal with subjects—mortality—that are presented within the framework of something that is hilarious.” That, Favreau told me, is Brooks’s “magic trick.”

After his father died, Brooks settled into a new kind of normal. He and his friends would spend hours recording mock interviews on giant tape recorders, pretending to be radio stars like his dad was. “I was really sort of doing these shows for no one for a long time,” he told me. He played football and sometimes hitchhiked to school. He watched television—as many hours a day as he could get away with. He was also music-obsessed, and amassed a prized collection of records, building his own stereo with quadraphonic surround sound. This was in the early days of stereophonic recording, and Brooks still remembers the first stereo album he bought to show off the new technology: Stan Kenton’s version of West Side Story. “They were really doing the right-left thing,” he said. “You know, DA-dah, BA-dah, DA, dah! Right speaker! Left speaker! Right speaker! Ba-dah-dah-dah-dahhhh, ba-dah-bah-dah-ba-dah-daaaah ba-doo ba-doo. Your head would be moving like a tennis match.”

Brooks is prone to spontaneously breaking out into song, or more accurately, breaking out into sound, without the lyrics, perhaps an artifact of his theater roots. After high-school graduation, in 1965, Brooks and Reiner did summer theater in Los Angeles. After that, Brooks went to L.A. City College before winning a scholarship to attend the drama program at Carnegie Mellon (then called Carnegie Tech), in Pittsburgh. A shoulder injury from his football days kept him out of the Vietnam War, an injury he now sees as his life’s blessing. After a year in Pittsburgh, he dropped out and returned to Los Angeles.

“When he came back from Carnegie Tech, he wasn’t thinking about comedy, and I couldn’t believe it,” Reiner told me. “He wanted to change his name to Albert Lawrence—his middle name is Lawrence. And I said, ‘Albert, what are you doing? You’re the funniest guy I know. You’re going to tell me that now all you want to do is be a serious actor?’ The fact is, he is a great serious actor. But I said, ‘You can’t throw away that gift you have. You make people laugh better than anybody.’ ”

Then, in 1973, something frightening happened that left Brooks forever changed. He had just come out with a comedy album, Comedy Minus One, and was on the road promoting it—something he hated doing—with endless performances in dingy clubs and interviews with local journalists. One of these conversations, with a radio DJ, left Brooks feeling deeply unnerved. “A morning man in Boston said to me, ‘Albert Brooks, let me ask you a question,’ ” Brooks recalled. “ ‘Jonathan Winters went crazy. Do you think that’s going to happen to you?’ ” Winters, the superstar comedian and television actor, had been hospitalized years earlier after scrambling up the rigging of an old three-masted sailing ship docked in San Francisco Bay and refusing to come down, insisting that he was “a man from outer space.” Brooks remembers stumbling through an answer: “I don’t know. I hope not. I don’t—I don’t know.”

Later that night, he had his first performance at a jazz club in the Back Bay, where he was supposed to do two shows a night for a week, with an opening act by the singer-songwriter Leo Sayer, who dressed up for his performances as a 17th-century Pierrot clown, complete with heavy makeup. Sayer’s whole record company showed up, and in a surreal demonstration of devotion, “everybody in the audience was dressed as a clown,” Brooks told me. (This may sound like some sort of chemically induced hallucination, but Brooks assured me it was not. “No drugs. None,” he said.)

He did his first show and went back to his hotel across the street to get ready for the next one. But when he got there, “I had, like, a brain explosion,” Brooks told me. “I mean, something happened. All of a sudden, you know, my life was different. I don’t know how to describe it. I was standing in the bathroom. I was holding a toothbrush. And all I could think about is who invented this and why are there bristles on this end? And why are there bristles at all? And isn’t there a better way to brush your teeth? And how come there are sinks? I was starting to unravel, questioning everything. And that in turn made me really scared that I had gone nuts.”

He begged his manager, and the club owner—who by then had come across the street to see what was wrong—to let him skip the second show. The club owner told him he could cancel every other show that week, but he had to go through with the show that night. People had bought tickets! They were already sitting there, waiting in their seats. So Brooks agreed to get back onstage. “I was so detached from my body,” he told me. “Every single word was an effort and was not connected to anything. I was just standing there saying what sounded like English words.” Years later, on a trip to New York, he ran into someone who told him he’d been at the show that night in Boston, and wondered in passing if something had been off. “Did you have the flu?” the person asked. Yeah, something like that.

What actually happened, Brooks told me, is that after he somehow kept his body upright and made his mouth say words until he could get offstage again, he cracked open. After the death of his father—and, frankly, probably before that—he’d built a mental wall so sturdy that he was emotionally untouchable. This wasn’t all bad. “It was very advantageous for the beginning of my career,” Brooks said. He remembers his earliest live television appearances, when friends would be floored by his coolheadedness, his total absence of nerves. “Ed Sullivan, 50 million people live, waiting to go on,” Brooks recalled. “My heart didn’t race. I never thought of it. And I loved that. But the reason for that is I wasn’t open, and I was forced open in that one moment. It was like all the stuff you hadn’t dealt with is here. And, you know, that stuff ’s not meant to be dealt with all at once.”

Confronting the great tragedy of your life this way is suboptimal, especially if it hits you when you’re standing onstage staring at a bunch of clowns. “But it opened up my mind,” Brooks told me. “It made me question everything. It made me much more worried about everything. But it also made me deal with it. And it took a long time to, you know, deal with it.” Looking back now, he said, that night in Boston is what led to everything else. Without that experience, “I don’t think I could have written anything” that came after—at least not anything of real depth and complexity. “I think I would have been a non-nervous, pretty surface person.” Brooks never saw it coming. And there’s a lesson in that, too. “You get humbled by life in one second,” he said. If you’re lucky, the terrible thing that surprises you is something you can survive. His father didn’t get that chance. But Brooks did, and he knew exactly what he wanted to do with it.

Albert Brooks, for the record, is not interested in contemplating what might have been. He doesn’t believe in do-overs. He’s not into time-travel movies (though he appreciates the elegance of the original Twilight Zone, which he sometimes watches on YouTube), or imagined alternative histories, or dwelling on the past. “ ‘What if ?’ is terrible,” he told me, “because what are you going to DO with it, you know?” He swears he isn’t a grudge holder—I asked him specifically about this because I had a hard time believing otherwise. People as meticulous as Brooks sometimes struggle to let things go. “No,” he insisted, “because there’s nothing I can DO.” Worrying about the past is “the biggest waste of time,” he said. “I mean, over the years, the best thing I’ve done for myself is learn to worry about what I can fix.”

This is partly his pragmatism but also his attitude as a writer—writing, he once said, is just a series of solving one problem after the next. He doesn’t believe in writer’s block, not really. “Writing is like building a house,” he told me. “Once you start, you have to finish. It’s a funny concept that there’d be a block in other professions. If you hired an architect and a year later you said, ‘What happened?’ And he said, ‘I don’t know, I was blocked.’ You’d say, ‘What?!’ ” Also, when you write, you’re fully in control. “It’s one of the last things, except maybe painting, that you can do without permission,” he said.

Thirty years ago, if you’d have asked Brooks what he was most focused on fixing, it may have been his love life. He worried, “Oh, I’ll never meet anybody,” he told me. This may seem strange—movie stars don’t typically have a hard time attracting partners—but many of his friends envisioned Brooks staying single, too. “I thought, This guy will never get married,” Reiner told me. “I find it hard to even imagine Albert married,” Sharon Stone told me, not because of how intense he can be but because he is so particular. “It’s that he can’t have this, and he doesn’t like that, and it has to be like this, and he can’t be around this, and it can’t be like that,” she said.

Brooks is a person who is comfortable alone. In the early days of his career, he would workshop jokes by just performing them to himself, in a mirror. He went through a phase when he bought one of those radios that picks up people’s phone conversations, and put it by his bed so he could listen to other people’s problems as he drifted off to sleep. (“It was the greatest soap opera,” he recalled. And also a great way to train your ear for writing realistic dialogue. “That was heaven,” he said with a laugh.) He’s gone through long stretches of solitude over the years.

Brooks likes to joke that he knew he didn’t want to get married until he met someone he could stand getting divorced from. Reiner put it another way: “I don’t know if it applies to Albert, but my mother and father were celebrating their 60th wedding anniversary, and I asked my mother, ‘What’s the secret?’ ” Reiner told me. “And she said, ‘Finding someone who can stand you.’ ”

The painter Kimberly Shlain, it turned out, could stand Brooks. She already knew and loved his films when they began dating. They were married in March 1997 at a synagogue in San Francisco. Their reception was filled with calla lilies and white tulips, and their guests ate lemon cake. For their first dance, a live band played “Someone to Watch Over Me.” (He was 49; she was 31.) The couple have two children, Jacob and Claire, both now in their 20s.

In Defending Your Life, Brooks finds the perfect woman—played flawlessly by Meryl Streep—only once he’s already dead. “We’re opening the door, God forbid, to Albert’s brain,” she said in a 1991 interview about the film. Defending Your Life tells the story of a man who dies young and finds himself among the other recently deceased in Judgment City, a version of purgatory that resembles a New Jersey office park, where you can eat whatever you want without gaining weight and see who you were in various past lives as you await a decision from a supernatural judiciary about whether you lived a good-enough life to move forward in the universe. (If not, you’re sent back to Earth to do better next time.) For Brooks’s character, the key question of his life’s trial is whether he wasted his time letting his fears dominate him. Streep said in the same 1991 interview that when Brooks had come over to persuade her to take the part—they’d first met through Carrie Fisher, a mutual friend—he paced for two hours while explaining the concept of the film to her, but wouldn’t let her read the script.

Stone told me about how after The Muse wrapped and Brooks sent her a copy to watch, she sent him some notes, as she generally did with other directors. “Albert wasn’t interested in my notes,” she said. “In fact, I don’t think he liked that I sent him my notes. I think he was a little bit offended by my notes. And I think it’s because he makes all of his decisions about his films in a quite solitary way. He’s the only director that ever sent me a film to preview that didn’t want notes … He didn’t understand. Like, what did I think I was doing, right? Why would I need notes from you, cupcake? ”

Another time, he’d gotten advice from Stanley Kubrick about how to navigate the business side of Hollywood, and the frustration that comes from having to work with people who care more about money than art. Kubrick had reached out to Brooks to say how much he loved Modern Romance, and asked to see the draft of the script Brooks was writing at the time. So Brooks sent it along, and Kubrick sent it back with notes. “He said, ‘Here, I read the script,’ ” Brooks told me. “You know what? I think he had the WORST comment in the world. And I said, ‘Gee, I don’t think I could do that.’ ”

As I reported this story, legendary comedians kept dying. First there was Norman Lear, who died within hours of a conversation Brooks and I had about how wonderful it was that Lear, at 101, was still alive. Then Richard Lewis died. (“Terrible,” Brooks texted me.) Occasionally, when Brooks experiences some unusual bodily pain, an unwelcome thought will materialize: “I worry, Is this the end? I mean, something’s going to take me down,” he said. For a while, he was just trying to reach the age his father was when he died. Turning 55 was, as a result, “very weird,” he said. When the first of his older brothers died, it was like the loss of a “genetic touchstone,” he said. He’d sometimes try to reassure himself by imagining that he got all of his genes from his mother, who lived into her 90s. He turns 77 in July. “Then you’re in no-man’s-land, you know. My father didn’t come near this age.”

[Read: Norman Lear’s many American families]

Brooks doesn’t believe in immortality, whether in life or on film. Plenty of writers and directors fool themselves into believing that what they make will last forever. Most works of art, even extraordinary ones, do not. Creatively, Brooks was never motivated by wanting to make something lasting, but instead by seeing art generally—and film specifically—as the ultimate form of human connection. Plus, there was always something beautiful to him about how making a movie and watching a movie required deliberateness on both sides of the screen. “People got in their cars, which meant there was an effort made,” he said. “The lights went down. People were there because they wanted to be there.”

Sometimes Brooks thinks back to one of the original endings he wrote for Defending Your Life. This was before Streep was cast in the film. Before he had conceived of the actual ending, which, as it turns out, is one of the great climaxes in all of film history, complete with a sweeping cinematic score, that feels both enormous and also perfectly earned. “The one I liked the best that I didn’t use was that the movie ended in a pasture, and in the distance was a cow,” Brooks told me. In this version, Brooks’s character didn’t get redemption. He didn’t fall in love. He didn’t get the girl. He didn’t overcome his fears. He didn’t move on in the universe. Instead, he lived his life, then came back to Earth … as a cow. It would have been absurd to end things that way. And funny. Because, really, who knows? But that’s not how the story went.

This article appears in the June 2024 print edition with the headline “The Godfather of American Comedy.” When you buy a book using a link on this page, we receive a commission. Thank you for supporting The Atlantic.

In the criminal case now unfolding in a Manhattan courtroom, Donald Trump is accused of having a sexual encounter with Stormy Daniels, finding a way to pay her to keep quiet about it, and then disguising those payments as a business expense. The facts are all very tabloid-y. They also took place before the 2016 election, long before January 6 or the “Stop the Steal” movement, or any of the more serious threats to democracy we associate with Trump.

But the Stormy Daniels case has distinct and simple advantages: In the other, more sprawling cases that deal directly with election interference, Trump’s lawyers have been remarkably successful at piling on delay tactics and are unlikely to go to court any time soon. But in the Stormy Daniels trial, the defendant has been summoned, the jury is being selected, witnesses have been called. And the D.A., Alvin Bragg, has honed his argument that the hush-money payments were in fact an attempt to interfere with the election.

In his indictment, Bragg lays out a detailed case for why the former president, in hiding the payments, intended to violate both state and federal election laws. It’s a comparatively indirect case that he has no guarantee of winning. It will not bring legal resolution to the central question of whether Trump interfered in the 2020 election. But it makes the trial much harder to dismiss as just an old grudge about an affair.

In this episode of Radio Atlantic, staff writer David Graham tests the importance of the Stormy Daniels case with the Al Capone model: Can you most effectively address the most serious question of our political moment with the arguably least serious case? And he explains how, whatever the outcome, Trump might benefit from, and even enjoy, this new form of courtroom campaigning.

Listen to the conversation here:

Subscribe here: Apple Podcasts | Spotify | YouTube | Google Podcasts | Pocket Casts

The following is a transcript of the episode:

[Music]

Newscaster 1: Donald Trump is facing more legal trouble.

Newscaster 2: He’s now facing four different felony trials as he runs for president.

Newscaster 3: Donald Trump is facing 37 criminal counts over retaining national-defense information.

[Overlapping news audio]

David Graham: It’s been overwhelming covering these cases. At the beginning, it was very exciting and sort of surreal, and then as they piled up, it became really hard to keep track of all of them.

[Music]

Hanna Rosin: This is David Graham, the Atlantic staff writer who’s following all of Trump’s legal entanglements.

You may remember the civil trials Trump faced in Manhattan. Now on appeal, they total over half a billion dollars in judgments.

But Trump also faces criminal charges in four separate cases: one in Florida about classified documents, one in D.C. about attempting to subvert the 2020 election, another about election subversion (that one is in Georgia), and, lastly, the one we are talking about today.

It involves hush-money payments to Stormy Daniels. And the main and very important distinction between this case and all the others? Trump’s lawyers have failed to bog it down with infinite delays. It’s actually underway, right now—the first criminal trial of a former president.

I’m Hanna Rosin. This is Radio Atlantic. And this week, why this one matters.

[Music]

Rosin: So this week is the first time a former president has faced a criminal trial. What’s happening, and how big of a deal is it?

Graham: You know, it’s funny. What’s happening now is just jury selection. So we say the trial has started, but in a lot of ways, the main event is still to come. And this is kind of the dry, boring stuff—but dry, boring stuff that matters so much down the line. But here we are, you know, in this case about Trump paying hush money and whether he covered that up and whether it was an attempt to interfere with the election, as prosecutors say.

Is it a big deal? I mean, it is. It’s so weird. In the Trump era, I feel like, we’re like, Is it a big deal for the former president to be on trial for this particular charge? Which is both a valid question and also kind of a bonkers one. Of course it’s a big deal, but also not as much of a big deal as some of the other things. So I have a hard time calibrating it myself.

Rosin: Well, we can even start more elemental. Is it a big deal that a former president is sitting in the defendant’s chair at a criminal trial? Like, is that alone a big deal? Never mind the substance of the trial, which we will get to.

Graham: I think that is a big deal. And I think it’s a big deal that has been a little—we’ve been already acclimated a little bit to that by him sitting in the defendant’s chair for so many civil trials, and it’s possible to maybe even overlook what a big deal it is just for him to be there.

Rosin: Although the penalty in a civil trial is money. The penalty in a criminal trial is a conviction, like an actual criminal conviction. So even on those grounds alone, this seems unprecedented.

Graham: Oh, absolutely. In those cases, what he stood to lose was money. And in this case, he stands to lose potentially his freedom and certainly his clean criminal record, and I think that’s pretty different.

Rosin: Can you give me a brief explanation of the case? What is this case about?

Graham: It is a little bit arcane. Let me see if I can sum it up without missing anything, but also not getting bogged down.

Rosin: And also tabloidy. It’s simultaneously arcane, tabloidy, and important.

Graham: Well, it’s literally tabloidy too. I mean, this involves tabloids. You know, people may remember the case: So, Trump had these sexual liaisons with Stormy Daniels and other women, allegedly. He denies them. But the basic allegation is that Trump paid to keep their stories quiet. This is a complicated maneuver involving these “catch-and-kill” deals, where the National Enquirer would pay for the rights to the story with the express purpose of not running it.

And then money. Trump would also pay them—the money would come from Trump via Michael Cohen, who was then his fixer. And these things were recorded as business expenses. And what the prosecution alleges is that, in fact, this was political: The whole goal here was to keep the public from knowing about these allegations of sexual relationships, and that was an attempt to interfere with the election.

Rosin: So, essentially, it’s two steps. The first step—the first allegation—is business fraud. Like, you’re paying money and covering it up. It’s like an accounting scheme.

Graham: Right.

Rosin: So that in and of itself is a crime, but in the scheme of things not a deeply serious crime. Maybe the reason this takes on a different level of importance is because the prosecutor, the D.A. Alvin Bragg, is trying to link that to a form of election interference.

Graham: Right. And so there have been all these complaints: Well, you know, this case isn’t all that serious. It’s often compared to the classified-documents case in federal court in Florida or the election-subversion case in federal court in Washington, D.C., in an unflattering way. And what Alvin Bragg has tried to say is, No, guys. This is also an election-interference case. Trump was trying to keep the public from learning this information, which would interfere with voters. And so this is just as serious as these other cases. This too is election interference.

And I think that’s maybe more of a moral point than it is about the actual substance of the law. But when we’re thinking about how serious this is, I think a question that people have to think about is, you know, what are the stakes in this case? And that’s the prosecution’s argument.

Rosin: Right. We do have all these complicated cases, like the one in Georgia about election interference. But people see the one in New York as less serious because if he’s convicted there, it would be for bookkeeping and for under half a million dollars.

Graham: Yeah, this is what I call the Al Capone objection. You know, they got Al Capone for tax fraud, not for being a notorious mobster. I don’t know what to say to that, because I think it is true and also not true. Like, you know, let’s be serious. This is not as serious as the election subversion we saw in 2020. But also, you know, if they’re able to prove that he broke the law, then he broke the law.

Rosin: So, can we stick with the Al Capone example for a minute? Because I think it’s, actually, a pretty important way to think about this. I’m not calling our former president a mobster, so just leave that aside for now. It’s just a useful legal metaphor. In cases involving RICO statutes and extremely complicated crimes, like the election-interference cases—they’re unbelievably complicated and, in fact, the president’s legal team has managed to bog them down for months and months and, in some cases, years.

Graham: Right.

Rosin: It seems like, just like Al Capone and tax evasion, here you have a case that, even though less on paper is at stake, it’s straightforward and achievable.

Graham: I think that’s exactly right.

Rosin: And so you do end up getting Al Capone on tax evasion for a reason, because that’s a gettable offense.

Graham: Right.

Rosin: And none of these other cases are likely to move along before the election, right?

Graham: That seems right. You know, we just don’t know. I think the wild card there is what happens in the election-subversion case. The Supreme Court is going to hear that next week. We’ll see how fast they rule. It’s possible that we could see that case moving before the election. But you know, unless they move really fast, I think it’s easy to imagine not.

Rosin: Right. I think the last thing I want to say about this Al Capone metaphor is: So is the idea that if there is cause to hold Trump accountable for not playing by the rules, for any kind of attempt to interfere in democratic elections, this case is the last chance to do it? The only chance to do it?

Graham: It seems that way.

Rosin: Yeah. Okay. So is that a reason why this case is important? Maybe.

Graham: Yes.

Rosin: Okay. So who’s convinced who now, at the end of this?

Graham: I don’t know. I think over time, I have become more convinced of this case being serious. And part of that is, you know, we heard these challenges early on to the statute of limitations and the application of the law, and there’s still places where Bragg’s team could lose this, but he’s cleared some of those bars, including, notably, the statute of limitations. So I think he’s quietly proven that this case is a little stronger than some of its critics said at the outset, and that has helped to convince me.

Rosin: Let’s get into the implications for the election. What does this mean for his campaign? What does it change for him having to sit in that defendant’s chair for the next few weeks?

Graham: You know, we’ve heard of a whistle-stop campaign or a front-porch campaign, and now he’s running a courtroom campaign.

Rosin: Did you make that up, or does everyone say that?

Graham: I don’t know if someone else has made it up, but I did just come up with it on the spot as far as I know.

Rosin: That’s good. Courtroom campaignTM.

Graham: He can’t be out holding rallies. He can’t be out doing events. He can’t be out glad-handing. And, you know, this looks like an impediment to him. It may actually be something he likes. He has been holding not that many rallies so far this season. They’re expensive. I think they’re a hassle. He drones on. They’re not necessarily always that successful.

And, you know, he can go to this trial, where there are gonna be dozens and dozens of cameras on the courtroom and on the courthouse when he’s coming in and out. And he’s using that to try to get attention. So he has to run in a different way, but maybe this is actually to his advantage and allows him to sort of create the kind of media spectacle that he loves.

Rosin: Interesting. So it’s to his advantage because, one, it’s a free media spectacle. Like, we’re talking about this. There’s probably hundreds of reporters in New York. He is going to get a lot of coverage. Are there ways that he’s leaning into it, making that part of his message?

Graham: Oh, totally. He is just loving playing the victim. You get this in his fundraising emails. He’s always been sort of a high-volume spammer on emails. But the kinds of emails we’ve seen the last couple months, I think, are a different thing. He talks about miscarriage of justice, and They’re persecuting me, and They’re coming for me because I’m between you and them. And there’s just tons of this stuff. And so there’s both that stuff, and then I think you see him trying to draw the court system into battles that he thinks will benefit him politically.

Rosin: What do you mean?

Graham: Oh, anytime he picks a fight with a judge. So in this case, he’s been going after Juan Merchan, you know, saying his daughter’s a Democratic operative, saying that he can’t be impartial, blah blah blah.

Rosin: So [he’s] trying to portray the justice system—I don’t know if it’s part of the deep state—but as a kind of political cabal organized against him.

Graham: Right. Well, I guess it works in a bunch of ways. Like, one, he’s saying that Alvin Bragg is George Soros’s favorite prosecutor. So he’s saying this is biased, and he’s saying that, you know, this is a Biden prosecution. There’s no evidence that Joe Biden is directing this. In fact, Joe Biden is trying to stay as quiet as possible about this. But that’s what he does.

Then he wants to draw the judge into things. And I think that works in two ways: One, he can argue that the proceeding is totally, you know—it’s a kangaroo court, and they’re out to get him. And then, if he can draw the judge into engaging, maybe he can make that point even more salient.

And so that’s what we saw, I think, in the civil case with Justice Arthur Engoron. He, you know, wanted Engoron, it seemed like, to fine him, to gag him, to say critical things about him. Because then he can say: Look. See, I told you. I told you they were out to get me, and the way he’s behaving proves that they’re out to get me.

Rosin: Yeah. I mean, do you have a sense, or has it been reliably polled, how this plays outside with his audience? Because, for example, the mugshot. Like, he’s gotten so much mileage from that mugshot. It’s on a lot of T-shirts.

Graham: I think this works like a lot of Trump rhetoric going back to the 2016 campaign, where it really revs up his base. And you see in the polling, they think he’s being persecuted. They think the justice system is biased. They think that these judges are tools of the Democratic deep state, or whatever.

And on the other hand, it doesn’t do that well with other voters. It’s not winning over many independents. It’s turning some of them off. So, you know, he’s really good at turning up the temperature for the base but often at the expense, potentially, of turning off other people. And I think that’s going to be the case here, too.

Rosin: Interesting. And do we have any idea, in greater detail, how that could play out?

Graham: You know, it seems to be the case that a high-turnout election probably helps Trump. And there’s a lot of people who support Trump but are infrequent voters. And so he really does need to get those people fired up. But, you know, there’s a risk to it on the other side.

Rosin: Right. I see. One other thing I’ve noticed in keeping with this theme, as I’ve seen him on the campaign trail and in rallies the last couple months, is how much he closely identifies all of a sudden with the January 6—as he calls them, “the hostages”—talking about all of them as a group being unfairly persecuted. I feel like that’s coming up more and more in his speeches.

Graham: That’s exactly right. And he’s done that a little bit for a while, but it is becoming, really, a central part of his rallies. He’ll play these recordings of the January 6 choir. He talks about this hostage or sort of martyr attitude, and it’s become the centerpiece of a lot of these rallies.

Rosin: Yeah, and when I’ve seen him do it, I have to say, it feels less, who can know—I’m talking about intent here—less strategic than it is deeply felt and furious. It doesn’t feel like a ploy. It feels angry.

Graham: I think that’s right. I mean, it’s been interesting with a lot of Trump things that started out seeming like shtick and have started to feel like he really believes them, insofar as he believes anything. You know, I think about this with the way he talked about the media. Like, he blasted the media in 2016, and it was nonsense.

He loves the media, and he can’t resist calling reporters. But, over time, I think it curdled into a pretty serious enmity. And I think that’s true of the kind of deep-state rhetoric, and I think it’s true now about the court system. You know, after January 6, there was a certain amount of opportunistic talking about these people.

Rosin: Theatrics.

Graham: Yeah. I mean, and he waffled. He was like, On the one hand, I told them to go home. I called for a peaceful rally. But also, Why are they going after them? And also, Antifa revved this up. And you could see him sort of grasping for what the right messaging was. And as the court system has zeroed in on him, you see him coming around to that sort of hostage rhetoric.

[Music]

Rosin: Alright, well, depending on how long jury selection takes, this trial could be a matter of weeks. It could even stretch to a couple of months. After the break, David and I get into the meat of the trial.

[Music]

Rosin: So let’s get into it. How has Trump behaved in the run up to this trial?

Graham: He’s mostly been focused, as far as I can tell, on impugning the prosecutor and impugning the judge. So rather than going after the specifics of the evidence, he’s saying this is a political prosecution, this judge is biased.

And then, of course, [he’s] going after Michael Cohen, who we expect to be the star witness, who was his fixer, who was involved in these payments, lied about the payments to Congress, and was convicted of perjury for that and now has turned against Trump. And he’s saying, This guy can’t be trusted. He’s a convicted perjurer. Which has the benefit of being true.

We don’t see him so much going after the evidence. And part of that, I think, is a question of whether Bragg has evidence up his sleeve that we don’t yet know about. And so that’s one of the things I’m most interested to see: Does he bring something new to bear on this, or is it kind of a rehash of already public information?

Rosin: Right. Now, looking at the case, there are two parts of it, as we talked about. One is proving that the hush-money payments happened, that there was this complicated scheme involving the executives at National Enquirer to kind of shift money around—and Michael Cohen to shift money around, pay Stormy Daniels, and sort of hide that money and make it look like a legitimate payment. There’s so much public-record evidence that that occurred. Right?

Graham: Yeah. Like, the outline, you know—we’re gonna get details, but the outlines of that have been clear since fall 2016, when The Wall Street Journal first reported it.

Rosin: So is the difficult part of the case the second part of the case?

Graham: Yes. It’s tying this to politics and showing these weren’t a business expense, because it’s not against the law to pay someone hush money. It might be unsavory, but it’s not criminal. The question is whether there’s a falsification of business records and if the purpose was for political gain.

Rosin: So what’s in the public record is the existence of hush money. What remains to be proven is falsification of records and tying that falsification of records to election interference.

Graham: Right. And some of that falsification—you know, we have some of that. When Cohen appeared before Congress and perjured himself, some of that information came out. We saw some things that hint at what the case might look like. There have been, I don’t even want to say, like, intimations, but there’s speculation that Bragg has more evidence along those lines to prove that, you know, there was chicanery inside the business and this was a concerted effort. And that is something that we just, you know, we don’t know yet, and I think that will be really interesting to see.

Rosin: For you and others who are watching this case, what counts as a smoking gun? Like, what would be an incredible piece of evidence that the prosecutor could pull out?

Graham: You know, the gold standard would be a recording.

Rosin: And a recording saying what?

Graham: A recording of Trump saying, you know: Hey, Michael. Make sure we pay off Stormy Daniels. And then we’re going to put it in the books this way, so make sure that we do it that way so that nobody knows it’s to keep it out of the election.

Rosin: Right, right. All the way to the word “election.” That’s like the real smoking gun.

Graham: Yeah. You know, failing that, I think they’re going to have to rely a little bit more on witnesses like Cohen to say, This was the purpose, and potentially other executives inside the Trump organization or inside National Enquirer or—you know, or possibly Daniels. I don’t know.

Rosin: So this is a hard case to prove, both elements of it.

Graham: It’s a complicated case. I don’t know how hard it is, but it’s definitely complicated. This is, I think, where the Al Capone metaphor breaks down a little bit because if you’re evading taxes, you’re evading taxes. And it’s a little bit easier to pay that, but this is a multistep process.

And it’s a little bit more complicated. So yeah, it’s elaborate.

Rosin: Mm-hmm. Okay. How does this fit, then, into the broader constellation of other Trump cases? Can we do just a very brief rundown of the cases so we know where to place this one and how to think of them all together?

Graham: I mostly tend to think of them in terms of gravity.

Rosin: Okay, so let’s do them in terms of gravity.

Graham: Okay, so I think this is good. I think this is, although for all the reasons we’ve said, totally a relevant case and one that’s important, also the least grave.

Next up, I would say, is the classified-documents case. People became aware of this in August 2022, when the FBI went to Mar-a-Lago to collect these documents. But, as we now know, it was the culmination of a long process where the National Archives recognized they were missing things—like a letter from Kim Jong Un to Trump—and asked Trump to return them. And Trump, allegedly, over a period of months, refused and tried to hide them, claimed he didn’t have them, wouldn’t cooperate with a subpoena to return them.

And that’s, in fact, what he’s charged with here: not so much absconding with these documents but trying to hide from the government that he had them and trying to obstruct them, including documents that were, apparently, really sensitive national-security documents dealing with things like nuclear defense and foreign militaries and who knows what else.

Rosin: So that’s serious for a different reason, not for the reason of election interference.

Graham: Correct.

Rosin: Right. Okay. Next one.

Graham: So we have these two cases that both deal, in one way or another, with Trump’s attempts to steal the 2020 election: the federal case on election interference and the Fulton County election-interference case, in Georgia.

Rosin: And is there another one? Have we covered them? That’s it.

Graham: That is all, for now. (Laughs.)

Rosin: I guess the one thing that allows this one to rise in importance, even if the facts being discussed aren’t as important, is that it’s happening before November. Like, that fact alone makes it important.

Graham: Yeah, exactly. I mean, people have a right to know if the person they’re considering voting for president committed a felony or, for that matter, a serious misdemeanor before they go to the voting booth, if it’s going to happen soon after. And this might be the only chance for them to get that.

Rosin: Right. Although, David, do you think, maybe, we’re putting too much on this case? I feel like we’re maybe overlaying everything we know about January 6 and the 2020 election onto this criminal trial, which is actually about 2016.

Graham: I think that’s exactly right. Because the other cases seem bogged down and because we have seen Trump’s behavior and we saw January 6 and we saw what came before January 6, it’s impossible not to kind of see it in that light. And I think Trump is involved, kind of on the flip side of that, in the same way, because he is making all of these cases to be part of the same supposed conspiracy against him—you know, They’re all out to get him, and each of these is a tendril of that.

And also his argument that he can’t be held legally accountable—in all of these cases, he’s arguing that he shouldn’t be held legally accountable for one reason or another. And so, insofar as he is making it a question about rule of law, I think it’s hard not to also think about it as a sort of basic rule-of-law question from the other side.

Rosin: Yeah, I guess what’s hanging out there—both in the way that he’s delayed these cases and conducted himself in other ways—is: Is he above the law? So that’s the cultural question being tested. It’s not exactly the question that’s being asked by the prosecutor.

Graham: Yeah.

Rosin: Is it a weird, rare advantage that he’s running for president? Because he can just delay cases until he’s in office. I mean, that’s another incredibly unusual thing that we haven’t talked about.

Graham: Yes. So he can delay all of these cases, and then it plays in different ways if he gets reelected. If he gets reelected, he can, basically, instruct the Justice Department to end the two federal cases against him, and that would be that. And, you know, it’s not quite as simple as he picks up a phone, but it’s pretty close to that.

And you hear people threatening, Oh, it would be the Saturday Night Massacre. You would have all these people resigning. And I think what we’ve seen of the Trump team is they would say, And? So what?

It’s a little bit murkier in this case and in the Fulton County case. But you can totally be sure that if he wins, he will then say, I can’t be sitting in court. I can’t be defending these cases. I am the president of the United States, and I am busy doing this, and it’s improper to interfere with this. You’ve got to let me free on these things too, or you have to wait ’til after I’m president, or you name it.

Rosin: Right. So that would be yet another way in which things that were unimaginable X years ago were now perfectly routine.

Graham: Right. I mean, could you imagine, also, if Trump is president but has to be going to a Fulton County courthouse three or four days a week to sit in his trial while also trying to administer the country? I mean, I just can’t imagine how it would work.

Rosin: Yeah. I can’t, but I also couldn’t have imagined that somebody would be conducting a presidential campaign from the defendant’s chair in a courtroom. So lots of things we couldn’t previously imagine.

Well, David, thank you so much for walking us through this trial.

Graham: Oh, my pleasure.

[Music]

Rosin: This episode was produced by Kevin Townsend, edited by Claudine Ebeid, engineered by Rob Smierciak, and fact-checked by Sam Fentress. Claudine is the executive producer of Atlantic audio. Andrea Valdez is our managing editor.

I’m Hanna Rosin. Thanks for listening.

On February 15, Ron Ruggless was sitting in his home office in Dallas, listening to a Wendy’s earnings call—something he does every quarter as an editor and reporter for Nation’s Restaurant News. When the new CEO of Wendy’s mentioned that the company might introduce “dynamic pricing” in 2025, Ruggless wasn’t surprised; many restaurants have started adjusting prices depending on the time of day or week. It seemed like minor news, so he wrote up a brief report. He didn’t even bother to post it on social media.

About 10 days later, Ruggless saw that Wendy’s was going viral. The Daily Mail and the New York Post had picked up the story, framing the new policy as “surge pricing.” On X, Senator Elizabeth Warren called the plan “price gouging plain and simple.” Burger King trolled Wendy’s: “We don’t believe in charging people more when they’re hungry.” Wendy’s went into damage control. In a statement, it claimed that it wasn’t planning to raise prices during high-demand times, but rather to lower prices during low-demand times. That distinction was lost on most observers—including, frankly, this one—and the narrative took hold that Wendy’s was the next Uber.

The anti-Wendy’s backlash made sense. Who wants to pull into a drive-through without knowing how much the food is going to cost? But it was also selective. Dynamic pricing is hardly new. Airlines have been charging flexible fares for decades. Prices on Amazon change millions of times a day. Grocery stores have begun using digital displays to adjust prices on the fly. The list grows by the week.

Prices aren’t just changing more often—they’re getting more complex, too. Fees, long the specialty of banks and credit-card companies, have proliferated across industries. Previously self-contained products (toothbrushes, movies, Microsoft Word) have turned into subscriptions, while previously bundled items (Wi-Fi at hotels, meals on airplanes) are now sold separately. Buying stuff online means navigating a flurry of discount codes, often just expired. Meanwhile, prices are becoming more personalized as companies hoover up customer data.

We’re used to thinking of prices as static and universal. Sure, they might rise with inflation or dip during a sale, but in general, the price is the price, and it’s the same for everyone. And we like it that way. It makes our economic lives predictable, and, perhaps more importantly, it feels fair. But that arrangement is under attack from two directions. The first is obfuscation: the breaking down of prices into components and the piling on of fees. The second is discrimination: the charging of different prices to different customers at different times.

Contempt for fees is strong enough to unite even Republicans and Democrats, and price discrimination isn’t any more popular. One survey showed that half of customers think of dynamic pricing as price gouging; surge pricing in rideshare apps leads to more customer complaints; and polls show that shoppers are worried about companies collecting their data to shape prices.

The battle is not just between businesses and consumers, but also between economists, who prize efficiency, and the rest of us, who care about fairness. And right now, efficiency is running away with it. For every Wendy’s, there are a thousand companies quietly implementing similar schemes, in an ongoing quest to get every last burger—or car, or ink cartridge, or hotel room—into every last hand, for every last penny. Despite the occasional outcry, the era of the single price is rapidly fading into the past. In many ways, it’s already gone.

Pricing occupies a murky space between the mind and the gut. Some early philosophers thought the price of a thing should be determined by its “intrinsic” value, whatever that means, while others argued that its utility mattered most. Plato was against variable pricing. “He who sells anything in the agora shall not ask two prices for that which he sells, but he shall ask one,” he wrote in Laws. He also inveighed against the hotel fees of his day, condemning people who show hospitality to travelers but then extract “the most unjust, abominable, and extortionate ransom.”

The rise of the market economy shifted the understanding of price to be whatever someone is willing to pay for it. But even then, price remained attached to our sense of right and wrong. John Wanamaker, the Philadelphia entrepreneur credited with inventing the price tag in the 1800s, was a devout Christian whose advertisements promised “no favoritism.” According to a hagiographic history of the Wanamaker empire from 1911, “One price to all was neither more nor less than the application to merchandising of the immortal note of equality sounded in the second sentence of the Declaration on Independence.” The price tag had practical benefits, too: You didn’t have to train employees to haggle.

Modern pricing “innovation” took off with the airlines. From the late 1930s through the 1970s, airfares were set by the government, so airlines competed on the basis of amenities. (In 1977, the syndicated columnist George F. Will reflected on his preference for United Airlines because it offered macadamia nuts instead of peanuts. “The macadamia nut is one of God’s more successful efforts,” he wrote. “It has a cachet that the pedestrian peanut cannot match.”) That changed with the Airline Deregulation Act of 1978, which preceded decades of “fare wars.” Discount carriers like People Express were soon undercutting the legacy airlines and encroaching on their routes. This forced the old-timers to revamp their pricing practices.

In his book Revenue Management: Hard-Core Tactics for Market Domination, the pricing consultant Robert Cross recalls watching a Delta employee hand out discounts for the last empty seats on a flight in the early 1980s. Cross knew the plane would fill up with business travelers at the last minute, so he suggested holding those seats and charging a higher fare. This idea—selling seats for a lower price if you book early and a higher price later—transformed the airline industry, and saved the legacy airlines.

[Ganesh Sitaraman: Airlines are just banks now]

From there, the field of revenue management, or adjusting price and availability based on real-time shifts in supply and demand, boomed. Multitiered pricing spread to airline-adjacent industries like hotels and cruise lines, and then beyond to telecoms, manufacturing, and freight. Companies adopted sophisticated software to track real-time supply and demand, and started hiring pricing consultants or even in-house pricers.

The internet, as you may have heard, changed everything. Consumer advocates hailed it as the great leveler, predicting that online shopping would facilitate price comparison and push prices down. Like many early forecasts about the internet, this one looks painfully naive in hindsight. Companies wasted little time making it harder for customers to compare prices. In 2004, the MIT economists Glenn and Sara Fisher Ellison found that online vendors were advertising the cheapest version of a product, then steering customers toward a pricier one. Websites also learned to block web crawlers that allowed their competitors to detect price changes.

One of the more powerful forms of price obfuscation was the fee. Retail platforms often listed products in order of price. “So, of course, certain retailers realized they could charge one cent for a video camcorder, and shipping would be $250,” Sara Fisher Ellison told me. Fees were often obscured until the end of a transaction—a practice dubbed “drip pricing.”

The airlines, having pioneered the use of dynamic pricing, now refined the art of the fee. In 2008, American Airlines began charging $15 for checked luggage. The practice spread and soon became a major driver of airline profits. In 2023, the airlines raked in $33 billion from baggage fees, and even more from other ancillary fees like seat selection, meals, and in-flight Wi-Fi. These add-on fees drove down the prices that were displayed to customers, thus making the offerings look more competitive. It was a win-win arrangement, with both wins going to the airlines.

The rest of the travel and events industry followed suit. Mysterious “resort fees” appeared on hotel bills. Car renters burned time poring over “facility fees,” transponder fees, and third-party insurance. Ticketing websites charged markups as high as 78 percent for concerts. Some fees sounded like jokes. In 2014, an airport in Venezuela charged customers a fee to cover its ventilation system, a surcharge widely mocked as a “breathing tax.” And fees mingled with the broader trend of digitization-enabled unbundling. Want to “unlock” your Tesla’s full battery life? In 2016, that cost an extra $3,250.

If the rise of the fee broke the expectation that prices are transparent, dynamic pricing challenged the assumption that they’re fixed. When Uber rolled out surge pricing in the 2010s, the company billed it as a way to lure more drivers when demand was high. But the phrase was perhaps too honest. It evoked a sudden price increase in response to extreme circumstances, and riders accused the company of gouging during emergencies. “It’s a term I tried to stamp out when I was at Uber,” said Robert Phillips, a pricing expert who worked there for almost two years. “It sounds like a digestive problem—I’ve got a little surge going on.”

At least old-school dynamic pricing applies equally to everyone at a given moment. That’s not the case with personalized pricing, which is made possible by the explosion of customer data available to firms. Everyone knows that companies use our data to target ads and decide which products we see. But the use of that data to set prices—to charge each person a different amount based on their calculated willingness to pay—is still taboo.

That doesn’t mean it’s not happening. Back in 2015, for example, The Princeton Review was caught charging higher prices to students who lived in zip codes with large Asian populations. Since then, the data that can be used to customize prices have become more fine-grained. Why do you think every brand suddenly has an app? Because if you download the Starbucks app, say, the company can access your address book, financial information, browsing history, purchase history, location—not just where you live, but everywhere you go—and “audio information” (if you use their voice-ordering function). All those data points can be fed into machine-learning algorithms to generate a portrait of you and your willingness to pay. In return, you get occasional discounts and a free drink on your birthday.

“Often, personalized pricing is embedded as part of a loyalty program,” Jamie Wilkie, a partner at McKinsey & Company who advises consumer and retail firms, told me. “If there’s a high-value customer who’s price sensitive, you may be able to give them a personalized offer. If they’re a lower-value customer, you may just want to reach out to them.” The New York Times recently reported that airlines—of course—are migrating to a ticket-sales platform that allows them to target consumers “with personalized fares or bundled offers not available in the traditional systems.”

Perhaps you don’t like the idea of being designated a lower-value customer, and missing out on the best deals as a result. Perhaps you don’t want companies calculating the precise amount of money they can squeeze out of you based on your personal data or a surge in demand. That’s a perfectly natural way to feel. Unless, that is, you’re an economist.

In a classic 1986 study, researchers posed the following hypothetical to a random sample of people: “A hardware store has been selling snow shovels for $15. The morning after a large snowstorm, the store raises the price to $20.” Eighty-two percent said this would be unfair.

Compare that with a 2012 poll that asked a group of leading economists about a proposed Connecticut law that would prohibit charging “unconscionably excessive” prices during a “severe weather event emergency.” Only three out of 32 economists said the law should pass. Much more typical was the response of MIT’s David Autor, who wrote, “It’s generally efficient to use the price mechanism to allocate scarce goods, e.g., umbrellas on a rainy day. Banning this is unwise.”

The gap between economists and normies on this issue is huge. To regular people, raising the price of something precisely when we need it the most is the definition of predatory behavior. To an economist, it is the height of rationality: a signal to the market to produce more of the good or service, and a way to ensure that whoever needs it the most can pay to get it. Jean-Pierre Dubé, a professor of marketing at the University of Chicago Booth School of Business, told me the public reaction to the Wendy’s announcement amounted to “hysteria,” and that most people would support dynamic pricing if only they understood it. “It’s so obvious,” he said: If Wendy’s has the option to raise their prices when demand is high, then customers can also benefit from lower prices when demand is low.

[Read: How money became the measure of everything]

Economists think about this situation in terms of rationing. You can ration a scarce resource in one of two ways: by price or by time. Rationing by time—that is, first come, first served—means long lines during periods of high demand, which inconvenience everyone. Economists prefer rationing by price: Whoever is willing to pay more during peak hours gets access to the product. According to Dubé, that can benefit rich people, but it can also benefit people with greater need, like someone taking an Uber to the hospital. You can find academic studies concluding that Uber’s surge pricing actually leaves consumers better off.

When you think about it, though, dynamic pricing is a pretty crude way to match supply and demand. What you really want is to know exactly how much each customer is willing to pay, and then charge them that—which is why personalized pricing is the holy grail of modern revenue management. To an economist, “perfect price discrimination,” which means charging everyone exactly what they’re willing to pay, maximizes total surplus, the economist’s measure of goodness. In a world of perfect price discrimination, everyone is spending the most money, and selling the most stuff, of all possible worlds. It just so happens that under those conditions, the entirety of the surplus goes to the company.

Economists I spoke with pointed out that perfect price discrimination is all but impossible in real life. But technology-enabled personalized pricing is pulling us in that direction. Adam Elmachtoub, an associate professor of engineering at Columbia who studies pricing and fairness (he also works for Amazon), told me that personalization can be good or bad for consumers, depending on how you apply it. “I think we can agree that if personalized pricing worked in a way that people with lower incomes got lower prices, we’d be happy,” he said. “Or we’d say it’s not evil.”

Elmachtoub pointed to the example of university tuition. By offering financial aid to different groups, universities engage in personalized pricing for the purpose of creating a diverse student body. “We agree it’s a good idea in this setting,” he said. Likewise, he noted, it’s good that drug companies can sell medications for lower prices in poor countries.

Dubé argues that personalized pricing should benefit the poor overall, since, in theory, people with less money would exhibit lower willingness to pay. “By and large, when you personalize prices, the lowest-income consumers are getting the lowest prices,” he told me. Plus, he pointed out, there’s another, less controversial term for personalized pricing: negotiation. Consumers pay a personalized price every time they buy a car from a salesperson, who’s likely sizing them up based on the car they already drive, what they’re wearing, how they talk, and other factors. Data-driven personalized pricing merely automates that process, turning more and more transactions into miniature versions of going to a car dealership. Which, again, economists seem to believe is a point in its favor.

Most economists, but not all.

In a 2014 survey, prominent economists were asked whether they agreed or disagreed that surge pricing like Uber’s “raises consumer welfare” by boosting supply and allocating rides more efficiently. Out of 46 economists, only two disagreed. (Four were uncertain, and one had no opinion.)

One of those two was Angus Deaton, a Princeton economist who won the Nobel Prize in 2015 for his work on poverty, and who in recent years has publicly questioned the way his discipline looks at the world. Deaton argues that when it comes to pricing, economists are too focused on maximizing efficiency, without taking fairness into account. In a world of scarce resources, perhaps rationing by time is fairer than rationing by price. We all have different amounts of money, after all, whereas time is evenly distributed. Then there’s the way economists decide what’s good. The mainstream economist thinks that the best policy is the one that maximizes total economic surplus, no matter who gets it. If that benefits some people (companies) at the expense of others (consumers), the government can compensate the latter group through transfer payments. “A lot of free marketers say you can tax the gainers and give it to the losers,” Deaton says. “But somehow, miraculously, that never seems to happen.”

In other words, economics doesn’t pay enough attention to power. In the real world, corporations and consumers are rarely on equal footing. The more complex and opaque prices get, the more power shifts from buyer to seller. This helps explain why, in practice, poor people are often charged more than rich people for the same product or service. The poor pay higher rates for mortgages, bank loans, and other financial services. Wealthy Americans pay less on average for broadband internet. Neighborhoods with fewer grocery stores often have higher prices.

Or take Elmachtoub’s example of college tuition. Yes, poor students who get a free ride thanks to financial aid benefit from personalized pricing. But colleges also collaborate with a thriving “enrollment management” industry that bases financial-aid offers not on students’ need, but on how much an algorithm suggests they and their parents will be willing to pay. This can have perverse effects. As the higher-education expert Kevin Carey wrote for Slate in 2022, “parents of means who themselves have finished college are often sophisticated consumers of higher education and are able to drive a hard bargain, whereas lower-income, less-educated parents feel an enormous obligation to help their children move farther up the socioeconomic ladder and blindly trust that colleges have their best financial interests at heart.” Accordingly, many colleges offer more money to wealthier admitted students than they do to poorer ones.

The concept of willingness to pay contains endless potential for mischief. “I worry about a hotel website knowing that you absolutely must travel to get to a funeral that has recently been scheduled, or a situation where your kid urgently needs some medicine or supplies,” Rohit Chopra, the director of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau and former FTC commissioner, told me. Improvements in AI technology make that process even easier and more opaque. When a bank denies you a loan, it has to provide a reason, Chopra pointed out. But with AI-based pricing, there’s no such transparency, as algorithms make pricing decisions that humans can’t understand.  

According to Tim Wu, a professor at Columbia Law School who helped lead antitrust efforts as a special assistant to President Joe Biden, opacity is the point. The explosion of complex revenue-management schemes allows companies to increase their margins by innovating on pricing, rather than by improving their products or service. The closer we get to personalized pricing, Wu told me, the more we inhabit a world in which “everything in life is like paying for beer at the Super Bowl: Everything’s at your maximum willingness to pay.” There’s a joy—or, in economic terms, a utility—in paying less for something than you might have. “In that model,” Wu said, “you get none of it.”

Is there any way to reverse the march toward ever-more-vampiric pricing schemes?

Tackling junk fees is the low-hanging fruit. Most people, including economists, agree that companies should not charge fees that don’t correspond to actual services, especially when those fees are hidden or disguised. Even the CATO Institute, the libertarian think tank that never saw a regulation it liked, acknowledges that consumers “shouldn’t be charged for products without their consent, and businesses should disclose mandatory fees before purchases are made.” (It still opposes the Biden administration’s anti-junk-fee initiative, which it calls “incoherent” and overbroad.)

The problem is that the incentives are too powerful for companies to resist on their own. In 2014, StubHub switched to an “all-in” pricing model, in which customers saw full ticket prices up front. Revenues went down, so they switched back. “There’s a collective-action problem,” says Shelle Santana, assistant professor of marketing at Bentley University, who has studied drip pricing. If one company refuses to switch to all-in pricing, it can undercut the rest.

[Read: Hotel booking is a post-truth nightmare]

Such a clear, popular case for government intervention is rare, and the Biden administration has pounced. New rules and guidances have poured out of the FTC, the CFPB, and the White House over the past year, capping late fees for credit cards and limiting surprise charges at car dealerships, among other measures. Biden mentioned fees four times in his recent State of the Union.

But industry groups are pushing back. The U.S. Chamber of Commerce says the crackdown will make inflation worse by increasing compliance costs. (In other words, the costs of not charging excessive fees will be higher than charging excessive fees.) A lobbyist for the major airlines said the new transparency rules around add-on fees would cause “confusion and frustration” for customers. Live Nation, the company that owns Ticketmaster, promised to display the full cost of tickets up front for events at venues that it controls, but it has drawn criticism for not extending that policy to cover all events for which it sells tickets. Credit-card issuers are resisting limits on late fees, saying they’d be forced to reduce rewards for other customers, and Republicans in both chambers oppose the cap. Court battles could drag on for years.

And that’s the easy stuff. “The next frontier is going to be price,” Samuel Levine, the FTC’s director of consumer protection, told me. “Because that’s the dream, if companies can actually set personalized prices to maximize profits.”

Ultimately, preventing the dystopia of perfect price discrimination—or some more realistic approximation of it—means cutting off companies’ access to the data they use to determine how much to charge us. This isn’t complicated; it’s just a politically heavy lift. Getting Americans fired up about their personal data has been notoriously difficult, which helps explain why we still have no federal digital-privacy law. Perhaps if more voters understood that strong privacy protections would also protect them from price discrimination, Congress would feel more pressure to get something done. (A glimmer of hope appeared earlier this month when lawmakers announced a bipartisan bill that would limit the user data that companies can collect.)

Near-term solutions might depend on the companies themselves. If prices become too complex, that creates an opening for a firm to commit itself to clear, simple pricing, Bentley University’s Shelle Santana says. For example, Southwest Airlines allows two free checked bags. Mark Cuban’s pharmaceutical wholesaler, Cost Plus Drugs, markets itself as a transparent alternative to the usual stress of buying medicine. Boring Mattress Co. promises to help customers “escape mattress hell” by offering a simple flat-rate mattress with free shipping. Santana cited JetBlue’s early marketing. “Their whole campaign was, We like our customers,” she said. “As a flier, you’re like, You don’t even have to love me. Just don’t make me feel like I’m in hell.” In a world of constantly shuffling prices, could predictability become a competitive advantage?

Wendy’s might already be on it. A week after the dynamic-pricing flap, the chain announced that it would offer $1 burgers to celebrate March Madness. All you had to do was download the Wendy’s app.

Which players impressed our football pundit Garth Crooks enough to make his latest Team of the Week?

Earlier this year, two California residents filed a class-action lawsuit against the French luxury design company Hermès. Their grievance was that although they could afford a coveted Birkin bag made by the company, they could not buy one. The bags are genuinely rare, because they are still handmade by specially trained artisans. Wait lists are long. And the company, according to the lawsuit, gives wide discretion to salespeople at individual boutiques to determine who gets one next. This practice creates scarcity and pumps up the resale market, where some Birkins go for the price of a Ferrari. But the result, for some rich people, is the bitter taste of rejection.

In this episode of Radio Atlantic, staff writer Amanda Mull talks about the lawsuit and the current state of the luxury market. If these customers win this lawsuit, will they eliminate the preciousness of the item they so covet? What do we actually want from luxury these days? Is there even such a thing anymore as a rare luxury good? And what handbag is Amanda carrying?

Listen to the conversation here:

Subscribe here: Apple Podcasts | Spotify | YouTube | Google Podcasts | Pocket Casts

The following is a transcript of the episode:

Hanna Rosin: What’s the most expensive handbag you personally own?

Amanda Mull: I purchased, in 2012, I want to say—on my credit card, at the time, which was very stupid—a Proenza Schouler PS1 Bag that was pre-fall 2012, 2013?

Rosin: I’m looking it up now just to see how much it costs.

Mull: Yeah, it was a blanket-print bag, and it was in the large size. And I think that full-price it was $2,400? And I wrote for a handbag-industry publication at the time, and I waited it out until it went down to $1,900? And then I bought it, which I had no business doing, but I still have it. I love that bag. I think it’s an absolutely beautiful piece of design, and I have held on to it. I always will.

Rosin: I’m looking at it. It’s actually pretty cool. Looks practical and—

Mull: Yeah, it fits a laptop.

Rosin: It fits a laptop, exactly.

Mull: Yeah.

Rosin: This proud owner of a Proenza Schouler is Amanda Mull. Also an Atlantic staff writer.

Mull: The bag that I carry to work today costs $50.

Rosin: Right, right.

Mull: It’s canvas, it is very practical. I don’t buy expensive handbags anymore, but it can take a while to deprogram yourself.

Rosin: Mull recently wrote about a different bag: a Birkin bag. If bags were restaurants, the canvas tote would be a fast-casual chain. And the Birkin would be a three-star Michelin spot with a mysterious, almost mythical reservation system.

Mull: The Birkin bag dates to the 1980s. It’s not quite as old as the company itself. There’s a very perhaps apocryphal backstory to how it came about. The then-Hermès CEO was seated next to Jane Birkin on an Air France flight. Jane Birkin was, at the time, famous for carrying her possessions in a basket. And they got to talking about handbags, and they got to talking about handbags and what she needed and what she wanted from a handbag. And the Hermès CEO took that information back to the company and they created the Birkin bag.

Rosin: What I love about that story, and I have no idea if it’s true or not, is that the way they tell that story now is like, It’s über-practical. She was a mom. She needed places to put her mom things inside her bag, you know?

Mull: Yes.

Rosin: Now, nearly 50 years later, the Birkin bag is at the center of a class-action lawsuit filed in February by people who can afford the bag but cannot get one—a lawsuit that reveals, inadvertently, this very strange moment we are in with the luxury market.

I’m Hanna Rosin. This is Radio Atlantic. And today, a dispatch from up in thin air. To those of us who can not afford a Birkin bag, it all looks the same up there. But to someone like Amanda Mull, who’s a close observer of Americans and their buying habits, the lawsuit is a rare window into divisions within the rich. Because the history of luxury handbags is a pretty good stand-in for the history of Western social wealth.

Rosin: I’m going to now Google—do you have your computer with you? I want to see how much Birkin bags cost. (Laughs) This is insane—the first one that pops up costs half a million dollars. That can’t be true. Wow.

Mull: Yeah, the How much does a Birkin cost? is a $64,000 question, which is perhaps the answer to it in some situations. But Hermès keeps things very close to the vest as far as their pricing, and especially for their most sought-after products, of which the Birkin is the absolute most sought-after. And then you look on the resale market, and almost all of these bags—the smallest, most basic leather Birkin is going to cost around $11,000 and go up from there. You can hit six figures. You can get versions that have solid-gold hardware that are pave-diamond-encrusted hardware.

Rosin: I saw the diamond-encrusted one.

Mull: Yes.

Rosin: I was like, Okay, that must be the top, top, top.

Mull: Yes, those get very expensive. And all of them are going to sell at above retail prices on the resale market, so How much does a Birkin cost? is sort of a fabulously complicated question.

Rosin: Yeah. I think I’m going to land it somewhere between a used Honda Accord and a condo in Washington, D.C. That’s about the range.

Mull: Yes, that’s where you’re looking at.

Rosin: Why are they so coveted?

Mull: There are a thousand answers to that question. Part of it, I think, genuinely is because Hèrmes does make exceptionally nice products. Hèrmes is one of the few leather-goods companies out there. And in my experience, it is the only one of the major leather-goods companies that makes things by hand en masse. All of their handbags are made by hand. They’re stitched by hand. They use really fine materials. They employ their own leather workers. They train their own leather workers. They run a whole academy in France to create the workforce that they need to create these types of bags at scale. And they stand behind them for a lifetime. You can send your handbag back to the Hèrmes spa, which is what their loyal clientele refer to as sending their bag back to get refreshed or fixed or something. It goes to the spa. And one of their leather workers will tighten the stitches, will polish the hardware, will remove the scuffs, things like that, for the life of the bag.

Rosin: A facelift, the bag equivalent of a facelift.

Mull: Yes. But another reason is that the fact that they’re exceptionally well made puts a very real cap on how many can be made per year. There are very few places within the consumer-goods economy, even within luxury goods, that there is real scarcity—not fake scarcity, not limited edition, not, like, Oh, we did this collab with this celebrity or with this other brand. Hermès, it can only produce so many of them. And when there’s a hard limit on something, rich people really want to get into it. (Laughs.)

Rosin: Okay, what you just described makes Hermès—and honestly, I have always thought of them this way—as the hero of a certain kind of story. Like, luxury has gone through conglomeration, and there’s a glut of luxury, and who even knows what luxury is anymore? And then you’ve got this one used-to-be equestrian French company that’s holding the guard. They pay their craftsmen living wages, and they live up to their promises, and all the things that luxury companies really don’t do anymore.

Mull: Absolutely. It is very, very hard to even straightforwardly and dispassionately describe what it is that Hermès does and how it makes its products without sounding like you’re on the Hermès payroll.

Rosin: (Laughs.) Exactly. Exactly. And you’re like, Oh my God, they hand—I mean, you sort of forget about the fact that all of this labor that goes into a bag makes it only available to the very, very, very rich, and then not even, you know? Okay, of what story are they the villain? I’ll ask the question that way. What happened?

Mull: Well, the fact that Hermès does everything that it does in an old-fashioned handcraft way means that its products are (a) extraordinarily expensive and (b) genuinely a lot of them are pretty scarce, and nothing they make is more scarce than the Birkin. It’s become a pop-culture icon. There are storylines about it in Sex and the City; it is, like, a brass ring of personal style and wealth; and it is something that people want to buy and want to own in order to demonstrate that, not only are they personally successful, financially successful, and people of taste, but that they do that at the highest echelon possible. They aren’t just regular rich, they are carry-a-Birkin, have-Birkins rich, which puts you at a particular echelon, even within rich people.

Rosin: And not, like, tacky, not following fads. Like, classic, but interesting,

Mull: And the Birkin has gotten so popular that I think that on some level its own success threatens that idea that it is classic, it is not tacky, it is not nouveau riche, it is not new money, it is not arriviste. Arriviste? No French-pronunciation capability here.

Rosin: Arriviste, yeah. You mean it threatens that, or what did you mean by that?

Mull: I think that it has become an icon of arriving in such a way that it is so broadly desired that it threatens to be a mark of striving in that way.

Rosin: Oh my God, that’s so confusing.

Mull: Yes, it is.

Rosin: Like, it’s such a mark of having arrived that it’s become a mark of trying too hard to arrive.

Mull: Exactly.

Rosin: That is very confusing.

Mull: It is so confusing. Luxury brands walk a very narrow line between whipping up this level of aspiration and this level of desire for their products and ensuring that their products don’t become too readily identifiable as a mark of aspiration. And it is very, very difficult to stay on the straight and narrow when trying to sell as many of these products as possible. But the Birkin, because of its genuine scarcity, it has been this thing that even when you can get everything else, even when you can walk into a Louis Vuitton boutique and buy whatever you want, when you can walk into Chanel and buy whatever you want, you can’t necessarily do that with Hermès. because there are only so many bags and there are so many more people who want them and who can plausibly afford them than there are people who can have them, because there just aren’t that many bags.

Rosin: So if I have all the money in the world and I walk into an Hermès store and I want a Birkin, I can’t necessarily get one.

Mull: Probably not. Not that day.

Rosin: Probably not?

Mull: Probably not.

Rosin: After the break, how to get a Birkin. Which may or may not involve getting a lawyer.

[Break]

Rosin: For a chance at a Birkin bag, Amanda Mull says you have to play something called the “Hermès Game.” Hermès didn’t respond to a request for a comment from The Atlantic. But aspiring customers have pieced together some clues, which basically add up to: Salespeople at each boutique seem to have broad discretion over who gets a bag and who gets off the waitlist.

Mull: Like, somebody will show up on Reddit or on a forum and say, I went to this boutique on this day, I talked to this person, or This is what I saw somebody else offered or saw somebody walk out of a store with, or This is what I was able to glean. And in most of these situations, what people say that you’re likely to hear is that these bags that are referred to as quota bags, which means that—

Rosin: (Laughs.) It’s just, like, this language imported into this context. It’s so funny.

Mull: Yes. So what people online say that you will generally hear when you walk into an Hermès boutique off the street and ask for a Birkin is that Birkins are prioritized to people who have a purchase history with the brand or who support the brand or who are brand-loyal who have relationships with a sales associate, things like that. Which basically means that if a truck pulls up and the store gets four Birkins, then what the sales associates at that store will probably do is look at their client rosters and go, This person expressed to me a year ago that they wanted to know if we got in a blue Birkin, and there’s a blue Birkin in this set, and they haven’t been offered a bag before. So I’m going to call this person up and see if they want this bag instead of just giving it to a person who shows up and says, “I’d like a Birkin. You got any?”

Rosin: Okay. So the way you just described that was pretty value-neutral. Good job. There’s two ways to imagine or—if you were to do a movie about that scene—there’s two ways that you could pitch that scene: One could be a scene of high snobbery, like a sales person looking down upon the person who just walks off the street and has no brand loyalty or history with that store and just squires the bag off to the back. And another way, totally straightforward, like: There’s a waitlist, you know, and on the waitlist is Mrs. So and So, and she’s been waiting for a year and a half, so get in line.

Mull: Right. There really are two legitimate ways to see this. And part of it is that there’s a lot of people who want these bags and a lot of people who asked before you.

Rosin: Right, which seems like there’s waitlists for a lot of things, you know?

Mull: Right. And something that Hermès has to deal with is that the fact that these bags all sell for above retail on the secondhand market means that they deal with something that a lot of other areas of the consumer market that where there’s scarcity also deals with, right? Like Ticketmaster—

Rosin: Mm-hmm.

Mull: They do sell something that there is a genuine supply-and-demand mismatch for—Taylor Swift tickets or Bruce Springsteen tickets or whatever. And at a certain point, it is just hard to figure out how you allocate fairly a scarce product to a very large potential group of buyers. And one way that you can do that is to sell to people with purchase histories. So, in one sense, Hermès is trying to prioritize actual customers, and the best way to do that is to look at people who have been actual customers in the past. The other way to look at that is that in order to be offered the opportunity to buy this extraordinarily expensive thing, you have to pledge fealty to this brand by buying all of this other extraordinarily expensive stuff first before you will be given an opportunity to buy the thing you actually want.

Rosin: Right, right, right. Like, you have to buy a scarf, and you have to buy some menswear, and you have to buy a belt, and then you will have proven that you’re a loyal customer. Wow. I don’t even know if that’s legal? Is that legal?

Mull: Well, that is the subject of a lawsuit that was filed in February in California. These two plaintiffs are seeking class-action status over essentially not being offered the opportunity to buy a Birkin. One of the people who filed this lawsuit, it appears, actually did buy a Birkin from Hermès in the past and seems to be upset that she wasn’t offered immediately a second one. And then the other person in the lawsuit appears to have bought a bunch of Hermès stuff and never been offered a Birkin and is mad about that. And I think that being mad about that is reasonable, but also, there’s a lot of people who want a Birkin.

Rosin: But it’s so funny because the people suing them, don’t they understand that winning that right would kind of destroy the rarity of the object they desire and make it not rare?

Mull: I don’t think that they understand that. I think the flip side of that phenomenon is that rich people have been flattered, especially by luxury brands, into a belief that they will always be in the in-group. And suddenly finding out that scarcity sometimes is going to exclude you, that there are people who are a higher priority than you are is—when you have enough money that you want to buy multiple 14,000 handbags—

Rosin: It’s crushing and shocking and intolerable.

Mull: Yes. It is, like, the worst thing that has happened to you in recent memory, finding out that there are things your money can’t buy you immediately.

Rosin: I think what this has led me to think about, this lawsuit, is: What do we want and do we understand what we want? How did we get to a point now where we’re glutted with luxury and luxury becomes a lot more meaningless, and so you have to manufacture scarcity?

Mull: So the beginning of luxury goods as we know them arguably started, like, at Versailles.

Rosin: The most grippingly luxurious palace ever, yeah.

Mull: Yes. This is during that era of France. Clothing and really, really high-end clothing were really important to the social stratification of royalty, the aristocracy. And that is where you get the origins of the French luxury business. And then you see further into the 19th century, as travel became more possible, aristocracies started to travel more. And they needed all kinds of stuff to travel with. You get brands that start emerging to supply those travel items—that’s where Louis Vuitton comes from. It was a trunk maker for the wealthy in the 19th century. Hermès also comes about in this era where it made equestrian supplies.

Rosin: Oh, okay. Okay.

Mull: Yes.

Rosin: I did not put those together. I was wondering why they’re all either equestrian or trunk makers. Interesting.

Mull: Yes, yes. The history of luxury goods is a social history of wealth because all of these companies were founded to, especially in this era, to solve particular problems of modernity. Things are bespoke, they are couture, they are customized to your wishes.

Rosin: So truly rare. Truly rare.

Mull: Yes.

Rosin: Okay.

Mull: Truly rare. And you start to see the luxury industry start changing a little bit, because production capabilities have ramped up and the luxury industry starts to arrange itself—not necessarily arrange itself; people are arranging it—into conglomerates for the first time. In the 1980s, you get Bernard Arnault taking control of Louis Vuitton. And Bernard Arnault and LVMH, the conglomerate that he still runs, is enormously influential in creating the luxury industry that we have today. What Arnault was—and is—really, really good at is understanding how to market luxury brands and vastly increase their production capabilities using modern methods.

Rosin: Is this the beginning of the end? Is this when everything changes?

Mull: Yes. Once Bernard Arnault gets in there, his vision is really to make the luxury business a global, corporatized, huge, profitable behemoth, and he does it.

Rosin: So in the old vision of luxury, scarcity was implied. I’m not sure it was explicit, but it was implied that it wasn’t available to a lot of people. In the new post-Arnault vision of luxury, luxury is a story about luxury.

Mull: Yes, I think that luxury is a story about exceptionalism. Something that Arnault and LVMH know better than anybody is that there are other ways to project scarcity besides not having enough stuff to sell. And this is where you get a lot of limited-edition releases, collaborations with celebrities or with other brands, so that keeps the brand in people’s minds. If you are somebody who maybe wants to buy your first Louis Vuitton bag, then you are probably paying attention to larger fashion and style and pop-culture media, and you were gonna brush up against news about all of these releases that are like, It’s sold out, it’s very limited edition, it’s not available, etc., etc. And those particular very small releases might indeed be genuinely scarce, but there are Louis Vuitton boutiques in every major city in the world that are full of the regular stuff, and all of that regular stuff has the halo of those scarce releases around it.

Rosin: Given everything you’ve described about fake scarcity and the complicated democratization of luxury, do you yourself have more respect for the Hermès way, where you genuinely keep these ways of handcrafting and genuine scarcity, or the other way, in which more people have access to it, but it’s less perfect?

Mull: Yeah. I am not a person who I would say respects a lot of companies.

Rosin: (Laughs.) Yeah.

Mull: But I feel like I do have to have this grudging respect for Hermès because they make products that are what they say they are.

Rosin: Yeah.

Mull: If it takes a guy in a French warehouse 40 hours of work to put together my bag, and he has a good salary and a pension and job security and safe working conditions, then yeah, that bag is just going to be a lot more expensive and there’s just not going to be very many of them. I think that Hermès could charge more for most of its products based on what the market will bear, which is wild because those handbags are so expensive.

Rosin: Yeah. I’m so with you, and I really don’t want to be. The only natural conclusion of the conversation we’ve just had is that the hero of the guilds and the working people of France is a company that sells handbags for $16,000. But that is the way it is.

Mull: Right. And I think that that is indicative of how off-kilter our consumer market is, because it was not that long ago that a lot more of the stuff that we bought was produced in that way. And the production end of the stuff that we buy has gone so far off the rails that it is now truly rare to buy something that was made by somebody with a pension.

Rosin: Right. And so the ability to buy with integrity is also a luxury of being rich. That’s nice. All right, well, Amanda, thank you so much for going through the logic of luxury with me. I really appreciate it. I still can’t afford and won’t buy a Birkin bag, but maybe someday. You never know.

Mull: You never know. If I won the lottery, I’d probably buy one, because they are really nice bags and you’ve got to carry something. But for now, I will stick to my $55 canvas tote.

Rosin: This episode of Radio Atlantic was produced by Jinae West. It was edited by Claudine Ebeid, fact-checked by Yvonne Rolzhausen, and engineered by Rob Smierciak. Claudine Ebeid is the executive producer of Atlantic audio, and Andrea Valdez is our managing editor.

I’m Hanna Rosin. Thank you for listening.

Which players impressed our football pundit Garth Crooks enough to make his latest Team of the Week?

Photographs by Gary Shteyngart

Day 1

MY FIRST GLIMPSE of Royal Caribbean’s Icon of the Seas, from the window of an approaching Miami cab, brings on a feeling of vertigo, nausea, amazement, and distress. I shut my eyes in defense, as my brain tells my optical nerve to try again.

The ship makes no sense, vertically or horizontally. It makes no sense on sea, or on land, or in outer space. It looks like a hodgepodge of domes and minarets, tubes and canopies, like Istanbul had it been designed by idiots. Vibrant, oversignifying colors are stacked upon other such colors, decks perched over still more decks; the only comfort is a row of lifeboats ringing its perimeter. There is no imposed order, no cogent thought, and, for those who do not harbor a totalitarian sense of gigantomania, no visual mercy. This is the biggest cruise ship ever built, and I have been tasked with witnessing its inaugural voyage.

“Author embarks on their first cruise-ship voyage” has been a staple of American essay writing for almost three decades, beginning with David Foster Wallace’s “A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again,” which was first published in 1996 under the title “Shipping Out.” Since then, many admirable writers have widened and diversified the genre. Usually the essayist commissioned to take to the sea is in their first or second flush of youth and is ready to sharpen their wit against the hull of the offending vessel. I am 51, old and tired, having seen much of the world as a former travel journalist, and mostly what I do in both life and prose is shrug while muttering to my imaginary dachshund, “This too shall pass.” But the Icon of the Seas will not countenance a shrug. The Icon of the Seas is the Linda Loman of cruise ships, exclaiming that attention must be paid. And here I am in late January with my one piece of luggage and useless gray winter jacket and passport, zipping through the Port of Miami en route to the gangway that will separate me from the bulk of North America for more than seven days, ready to pay it in full.

The aforementioned gangway opens up directly onto a thriving mall (I will soon learn it is imperiously called the “Royal Promenade”), presently filled with yapping passengers beneath a ceiling studded with balloons ready to drop. Crew members from every part of the global South, as well as a few Balkans, are shepherding us along while pressing flutes of champagne into our hands. By a humming Starbucks, I drink as many of these as I can and prepare to find my cabin. I show my blue Suite Sky SeaPass Card (more on this later, much more) to a smiling woman from the Philippines, and she tells me to go “aft.” Which is where, now? As someone who has rarely sailed on a vessel grander than the Staten Island Ferry, I am confused. It turns out that the aft is the stern of the ship, or, for those of us who don’t know what a stern or an aft are, its ass. The nose of the ship, responsible for separating the waves before it, is also called a bow, and is marked for passengers as the FWD, or forward. The part of the contemporary sailing vessel where the malls are clustered is called the midship. I trust that you have enjoyed this nautical lesson.

I ascend via elevator to my suite on Deck 11. This is where I encounter my first terrible surprise. My suite windows and balcony do not face the ocean. Instead, they look out onto another shopping mall. This mall is the one that’s called Central Park, perhaps in homage to the Olmsted-designed bit of greenery in the middle of my hometown. Although on land I would be delighted to own a suite with Central Park views, here I am deeply depressed. To sail on a ship and not wake up to a vast blue carpet of ocean? Unthinkable.

Allow me a brief preamble here. The story you are reading was commissioned at a moment when most staterooms on the Icon were sold out. In fact, so enthralled by the prospect of this voyage were hard-core mariners that the ship’s entire inventory of guest rooms (the Icon can accommodate up to 7,600 passengers, but its inaugural journey was reduced to 5,000 or so for a less crowded experience) was almost immediately sold out. Hence, this publication was faced with the shocking prospect of paying nearly $19,000 to procure for this solitary passenger an entire suite—not including drinking expenses—all for the privilege of bringing you this article. But the suite in question doesn’t even have a view of the ocean! I sit down hard on my soft bed. Nineteen thousand dollars for this.

The author tries to make friends at the world’s largest swim-up bar at sea. (Gary Shteyngart)

The viewless suite does have its pluses. In addition to all the Malin+Goetz products in my dual bathrooms, I am granted use of a dedicated Suite Deck lounge; access to Coastal Kitchen, a superior restaurant for Suites passengers; complimentary VOOMSM Surf & Stream (“the fastest Internet at Sea”) “for one device per person for the whole cruise duration”; a pair of bathrobes (one of which comes prestained with what looks like a large expectoration by the greenest lizard on Earth); and use of the Grove Suite Sun, an area on Decks 18 and 19 with food and deck chairs reserved exclusively for Suite passengers. I also get reserved seating for a performance of The Wizard of Oz, an ice-skating tribute to the periodic table, and similar provocations. The very color of my Suite Sky SeaPass Card, an oceanic blue as opposed to the cloying royal purple of the standard non-Suite passenger, will soon provoke envy and admiration. But as high as my status may be, there are those on board who have much higher status still, and I will soon learn to bow before them.

In preparation for sailing, I have “priced in,” as they say on Wall Street, the possibility that I may come from a somewhat different monde than many of the other cruisers. Without falling into stereotypes or preconceptions, I prepare myself for a friendly outspokenness on the part of my fellow seafarers that may not comply with modern DEI standards. I believe in meeting people halfway, and so the day before flying down to Miami, I visited what remains of Little Italy to purchase a popular T-shirt that reads DADDY’S LITTLE MEATBALL across the breast in the colors of the Italian flag. My wife recommended that I bring one of my many T-shirts featuring Snoopy and the Peanuts gang, as all Americans love the beagle and his friends. But I naively thought that my meatball T-shirt would be more suitable for conversation-starting. “Oh, and who is your ‘daddy’?” some might ask upon seeing it. “And how long have you been his ‘little meatball’?” And so on.

I put on my meatball T-shirt and head for one of the dining rooms to get a late lunch. In the elevator, I stick out my chest for all to read the funny legend upon it, but soon I realize that despite its burnished tricolor letters, no one takes note. More to the point, no one takes note of me. Despite my attempts at bridge building, the very sight of me (small, ethnic, without a cap bearing the name of a football team) elicits no reaction from other passengers. Most often, they will small-talk over me as if I don’t exist. This brings to mind the travails of David Foster Wallace, who felt so ostracized by his fellow passengers that he retreated to his cabin for much of his voyage. And Wallace was raised primarily in the Midwest and was a much larger, more American-looking meatball than I am. If he couldn’t talk to these people, how will I? What if I leave this ship without making any friends at all, despite my T-shirt? I am a social creature, and the prospect of seven days alone and apart is saddening. Wallace’s stateroom, at least, had a view of the ocean, a kind of cheap eternity.

Worse awaits me in the dining room. This is a large, multichandeliered room where I attended my safety training (I was shown how to put on a flotation vest; it is a very simple procedure). But the maître d’ politely refuses me entry in an English that seems to verge on another language. “I’m sorry, this is only for pendejos,” he seems to be saying. I push back politely and he repeats himself. Pendejos ? Piranhas? There’s some kind of P-word to which I am not attuned. Meanwhile elderly passengers stream right past, powered by their limbs, walkers, and electric wheelchairs. “It is only pendejo dining today, sir.” “But I have a suite!” I say, already starting to catch on to the ship’s class system. He examines my card again. “But you are not a pendejo,” he confirms. I am wearing a DADDY’S LITTLE MEATBALL T-shirt, I want to say to him. I am the essence of pendejo.

Eventually, I give up and head to the plebeian buffet on Deck 15, which has an aquatic-styled name I have now forgotten. Before gaining entry to this endless cornucopia of reheated food, one passes a washing station of many sinks and soap dispensers, and perhaps the most intriguing character on the entire ship. He is Mr. Washy Washy—or, according to his name tag, Nielbert of the Philippines—and he is dressed as a taco (on other occasions, I’ll see him dressed as a burger). Mr. Washy Washy performs an eponymous song in spirited, indeed flamboyant English: “Washy, washy, wash your hands, WASHY WASHY!” The dangers of norovirus and COVID on a cruise ship this size (a giant fellow ship was stricken with the former right after my voyage) makes Mr. Washy Washy an essential member of the crew. The problem lies with the food at the end of Washy’s rainbow. The buffet is groaning with what sounds like sophisticated dishes—marinated octopus, boiled egg with anchovy, chorizo, lobster claws—but every animal tastes tragically the same, as if there was only one creature available at the market, a “cruisipus” bred specifically for Royal Caribbean dining. The “vegetables” are no better. I pick up a tomato slice and look right through it. It tastes like cellophane. I sit alone, apart from the couples and parents with gaggles of children, as “We Are Family” echoes across the buffet space.

I may have failed to mention that all this time, the Icon of the Seas has not left port. As the fiery mango of the subtropical setting sun makes Miami’s condo skyline even more apocalyptic, the ship shoves off beneath a perfunctory display of fireworks. After the sun sets, in the far, dark distance, another circus-lit cruise ship ruptures the waves before us. We glance at it with pity, because it is by definition a smaller ship than our own. I am on Deck 15, outside the buffet and overlooking a bunch of pools (the Icon has seven of them), drinking a frilly drink that I got from one of the bars (the Icon has 15 of them), still too shy to speak to anyone, despite Sister Sledge’s assertion that all on the ship are somehow related.

[Kim Brooks: On failing the family vacation]

The ship’s passage away from Ron DeSantis’s Florida provides no frisson, no sense of developing “sea legs,” as the ship is too large to register the presence of waves unless a mighty wind adds significant chop. It is time for me to register the presence of the 5,000 passengers around me, even if they refuse to register mine. My fellow travelers have prepared for this trip with personally decorated T-shirts celebrating the importance of this voyage. The simplest ones say ICON INAUGURAL ’24 on the back and the family name on the front. Others attest to an over-the-top love of cruise ships: WARNING! MAY START TALKING ABOUT CRUISING. Still others are artisanally designed and celebrate lifetimes spent married while cruising (on ships, of course). A couple possibly in their 90s are wearing shirts whose backs feature a drawing of a cruise liner, two flamingos with ostensibly male and female characteristics, and the legend “HUSBAND AND WIFE Cruising Partners FOR LIFE WE MAY NOT HAVE IT All Together BUT TOGETHER WE HAVE IT ALL.” (The words not in all caps have been written in cursive.) A real journalist or a more intrepid conversationalist would have gone up to the couple and asked them to explain the longevity of their marriage vis-à-vis their love of cruising. But instead I head to my mall suite, take off my meatball T-shirt, and allow the first tears of the cruise to roll down my cheeks slowly enough that I briefly fall asleep amid the moisture and salt.

The aquatic rides remind the author of his latest colonoscopy. (Gary Shteyngart) Day 2

I WAKE UP with a hangover. Oh God. Right. I cannot believe all of that happened last night. A name floats into my cobwebbed, nauseated brain: “Ayn Rand.” Jesus Christ.

I breakfast alone at the Coastal Kitchen. The coffee tastes fine and the eggs came out of a bird. The ship rolls slightly this morning; I can feel it in my thighs and my schlong, the parts of me that are most receptive to danger.

I had a dangerous conversation last night. After the sun set and we were at least 50 miles from shore (most modern cruise ships sail at about 23 miles an hour), I lay in bed softly hiccupping, my arms stretched out exactly like Jesus on the cross, the sound of the distant waves missing from my mall-facing suite, replaced by the hum of air-conditioning and children shouting in Spanish through the vents of my two bathrooms. I decided this passivity was unacceptable. As an immigrant, I feel duty-bound to complete the tasks I am paid for, which means reaching out and trying to understand my fellow cruisers. So I put on a normal James Perse T-shirt and headed for one of the bars on the Royal Promenade—the Schooner Bar, it was called, if memory serves correctly.

I sat at the bar for a martini and two Negronis. An old man with thick, hairy forearms drank next to me, very silent and Hemingwaylike, while a dreadlocked piano player tinkled out a series of excellent Elton John covers. To my right, a young white couple—he in floral shorts, she in a light, summery miniskirt with a fearsome diamond ring, neither of them in football regalia—chatted with an elderly couple. Do it, I commanded myself. Open your mouth. Speak! Speak without being spoken to. Initiate. A sentence fragment caught my ear from the young woman, “Cherry Hill.” This is a suburb of Philadelphia in New Jersey, and I had once been there for a reading at a synagogue. “Excuse me,” I said gently to her. “Did you just mention Cherry Hill? It’s a lovely place.”

As it turned out, the couple now lived in Fort Lauderdale (the number of Floridians on the cruise surprised me, given that Southern Florida is itself a kind of cruise ship, albeit one slowly sinking), but soon they were talking with me exclusively—the man potbellied, with a chin like a hard-boiled egg; the woman as svelte as if she were one of the many Ukrainian members of the crew—the elderly couple next to them forgotten. This felt as groundbreaking as the first time I dared to address an American in his native tongue, as a child on a bus in Queens (“On my foot you are standing, Mister”).

“I don’t want to talk politics,” the man said. “But they’re going to eighty-six Biden and put Michelle in.”

I considered the contradictions of his opening conversational gambit, but decided to play along. “People like Michelle,” I said, testing the waters. The husband sneered, but the wife charitably put forward that the former first lady was “more personable” than Joe Biden. “They’re gonna eighty-six Biden,” the husband repeated. “He can’t put a sentence together.”

After I mentioned that I was a writer—though I presented myself as a writer of teleplays instead of novels and articles such as this one—the husband told me his favorite writer was Ayn Rand. “Ayn Rand, she came here with nothing,” the husband said. “I work with a lot of Cubans, so …” I wondered if I should mention what I usually do to ingratiate myself with Republicans or libertarians: the fact that my finances improved after pass-through corporations were taxed differently under Donald Trump. Instead, I ordered another drink and the couple did the same, and I told him that Rand and I were born in the same city, St. Petersburg/Leningrad, and that my family also came here with nothing. Now the bonding and drinking began in earnest, and several more rounds appeared. Until it all fell apart.

[Read: Gary Shteyngart on watching Russian television for five days straight]

My new friend, whom I will refer to as Ayn, called out to a buddy of his across the bar, and suddenly a young couple, both covered in tattoos, appeared next to us. “He fucking punked me,” Ayn’s frat-boy-like friend called out as he put his arm around Ayn, while his sizable partner sizzled up to Mrs. Rand. Both of them had a look I have never seen on land—their eyes projecting absence and enmity in equal measure. In the ’90s, I drank with Russian soldiers fresh from Chechnya and wandered the streets of wartime Zagreb, but I have never seen such undisguised hostility toward both me and perhaps the universe at large. I was briefly introduced to this psychopathic pair, but neither of them wanted to have anything to do with me, and the tattooed woman would not even reveal her Christian name to me (she pretended to have the same first name as Mrs. Rand). To impress his tattooed friends, Ayn made fun of the fact that as a television writer, I’d worked on the series Succession (which, it would turn out, practically nobody on the ship had watched), instead of the far more palatable, in his eyes, zombie drama of last year. And then my new friends drifted away from me into an angry private conversation—“He punked me!”—as I ordered another drink for myself, scared of the dead-eyed arrivals whose gaze never registered in the dim wattage of the Schooner Bar, whose terrifying voices and hollow laughs grated like unoiled gears against the crooning of “Goodbye Yellow Brick Road.”

But today is a new day for me and my hangover. After breakfast, I explore the ship’s so-called neighborhoods. There’s the AquaDome, where one can find a food hall and an acrobatic sound-and-light aquatic show. Central Park has a premium steak house, a sushi joint, and a used Rolex that can be bought for $8,000 on land here proudly offered at $17,000. There’s the aforementioned Royal Promenade, where I had drunk with the Rands, and where a pair of dueling pianos duel well into the night. There’s Surfside, a kids’ neighborhood full of sugary garbage, which looks out onto the frothy trail that the behemoth leaves behind itself. Thrill Island refers to the collection of tubes that clutter the ass of the ship and offer passengers six waterslides and a surfing simulation. There’s the Hideaway, an adult zone that plays music from a vomit-slathered, Brit-filled Alicante nightclub circa 1996 and proves a big favorite with groups of young Latin American customers. And, most hurtfully, there’s the Suite Neighborhood.

Left: The Icon leaves a giant wake in its path. Right: Docked at Royal Caribbean’s own Bahamian island, known as the Perfect Day at CocoCay. (Gary Shteyngart)

I say hurtfully because as a Suite passenger I should be here, though my particular suite is far from the others. Whereas I am stuck amid the riffraff of Deck 11, this section is on the highborn Decks 16 and 17, and in passing, I peek into the spacious, tall-ceilinged staterooms from the hallway, dazzled by the glint of the waves and sun. For $75,000, one multifloor suite even comes with its own slide between floors, so that a family may enjoy this particular terror in private. There is a quiet splendor to the Suite Neighborhood. I see fewer stickers and signs and drawings than in my own neighborhood—for example, MIKE AND DIANA PROUDLY SERVED U.S. MARINE CORPS RETIRED. No one here needs to announce their branch of service or rank; they are simply Suites, and this is where they belong. Once again, despite my hard work and perseverance, I have been disallowed from the true American elite. Once again, I am “Not our class, dear.” I am reminded of watching The Love Boat on my grandmother’s Zenith, which either was given to her or we found in the trash (I get our many malfunctioning Zeniths confused) and whose tube got so hot, I would put little chunks of government cheese on a thin tissue atop it to give our welfare treat a pleasant, Reagan-era gooeyness. I could not understand English well enough then to catch the nuances of that seafaring program, but I knew that there were differences in the status of the passengers, and that sometimes those differences made them sad. Still, this ship, this plenty—every few steps, there are complimentary nachos or milkshakes or gyros on offer—was the fatty fuel of my childhood dreams. If only I had remained a child.

I walk around the outdoor decks looking for company. There is a middle-aged African American couple who always seem to be asleep in each other’s arms, probably exhausted from the late capitalism they regularly encounter on land. There is far more diversity on this ship than I expected. Many couples are a testament to Loving v. Virginia, and there is a large group of folks whose T-shirts read MELANIN AT SEA / IT’S THE MELANIN FOR ME. I smile when I see them, but then some young kids from the group makes Mr. Washy Washy do a cruel, caricatured “Burger Dance” (today he is in his burger getup), and I think, Well, so much for intersectionality.

At the infinity pool on Deck 17, I spot some elderly women who could be ethnic and from my part of the world, and so I jump in. I am proved correct! Many of them seem to be originally from Queens (“Corona was still great when it was all Italian”), though they are now spread across the tristate area. We bond over the way “Ron-kon-koma” sounds when announced in Penn Station.

“Everyone is here for a different reason,” one of them tells me. She and her ex-husband last sailed together four years ago to prove to themselves that their marriage was truly over. Her 15-year-old son lost his virginity to “an Irish young lady” while their ship was moored in Ravenna, Italy. The gaggle of old-timers competes to tell me their favorite cruising stories and tips. “A guy proposed in Central Park a couple of years ago”—many Royal Caribbean ships apparently have this ridiculous communal area—“and she ran away screaming!” “If you’re diamond-class, you get four drinks for free.” “A different kind of passenger sails out of Bayonne.” (This, perhaps, is racially coded.) “Sometimes, if you tip the bartender $5, your next drink will be free.”

“Everyone’s here for a different reason,” the woman whose marriage ended on a cruise tells me again. “Some people are here for bad reasons—the drinkers and the gamblers. Some people are here for medical reasons.” I have seen more than a few oxygen tanks and at least one woman clearly undergoing very serious chemo. Some T-shirts celebrate good news about a cancer diagnosis. This might be someone’s last cruise or week on Earth. For these women, who have spent months, if not years, at sea, cruising is a ritual as well as a life cycle: first love, last love, marriage, divorce, death.

[Read: The last place on Earth any tourist should go]

I have talked with these women for so long, tonight I promise myself that after a sad solitary dinner I will not try to seek out company at the bars in the mall or the adult-themed Hideaway. I have enough material to fulfill my duties to this publication. As I approach my orphaned suite, I run into the aggro young people who stole Mr. and Mrs. Rand away from me the night before. The tattooed apparitions pass me without a glance. She is singing something violent about “Stuttering Stanley” (a character in a popular horror movie, as I discover with my complimentary VOOMSM Surf & Stream Internet at Sea) and he’s loudly shouting about “all the money I’ve lost,” presumably at the casino in the bowels of the ship.

So these bent psychos out of a Cormac McCarthy novel are angrily inhabiting my deck. As I mewl myself to sleep, I envision a limited series for HBO or some other streamer, a kind of low-rent White Lotus, where several aggressive couples conspire to throw a shy intellectual interloper overboard. I type the scenario into my phone. As I fall asleep, I think of what the woman who recently divorced her husband and whose son became a man through the good offices of the Irish Republic told me while I was hoisting myself out of the infinity pool. “I’m here because I’m an explorer. I’m here because I’m trying something new.” What if I allowed myself to believe in her fantasy?

Left: Seafood pizza. Right: The author’s special T-shirt. (Gary Shteyngart) Day 3

“YOU REALLY STARTED AT THE TOP,” they tell me. I’m at the Coastal Kitchen for my eggs and corned-beef hash, and the maître d’ has slotted me in between two couples. Fueled by coffee or perhaps intrigued by my relative youth, they strike up a conversation with me. As always, people are shocked that this is my first cruise. They contrast the Icon favorably with all the preceding liners in the Royal Caribbean fleet, usually commenting on the efficiency of the elevators that hurl us from deck to deck (as in many large corporate buildings, the elevators ask you to choose a floor and then direct you to one of many lifts). The couple to my right, from Palo Alto—he refers to his “porn mustache” and calls his wife “my cougar” because she is two years older—tell me they are “Pandemic Pinnacles.”

This is the day that my eyes will be opened. Pinnacles, it is explained to me over translucent cantaloupe, have sailed with Royal Caribbean for 700 ungodly nights. Pandemic Pinnacles took advantage of the two-for-one accrual rate of Pinnacle points during the pandemic, when sailing on a cruise ship was even more ill-advised, to catapult themselves into Pinnacle status.

Because of the importance of the inaugural voyage of the world’s largest cruise liner, more than 200 Pinnacles are on this ship, a startling number, it seems. Mrs. Palo Alto takes out a golden badge that I have seen affixed over many a breast, which reads CROWN AND ANCHOR SOCIETY along with her name. This is the coveted badge of the Pinnacle. “You should hear all the whining in Guest Services,” her husband tells me. Apparently, the Pinnacles who are not also Suites like us are all trying to use their status to get into Coastal Kitchen, our elite restaurant. Even a Pinnacle needs to be a Suite to access this level of corned-beef hash.

“We’re just baby Pinnacles,” Mrs. Palo Alto tells me, describing a kind of internal class struggle among the Pinnacle elite for ever higher status.

And now I understand what the maître d’ was saying to me on the first day of my cruise. He wasn’t saying “pendejo.” He was saying “Pinnacle.” The dining room was for Pinnacles only, all those older people rolling in like the tide on their motorized scooters.

And now I understand something else: This whole thing is a cult. And like most cults, it can’t help but mirror the endless American fight for status. Like Keith Raniere’s NXIVM, where different-colored sashes were given out to connote rank among Raniere’s branded acolytes, this is an endless competition among Pinnacles, Suites, Diamond-Plusers, and facing-the-mall, no-balcony purple SeaPass Card peasants, not to mention the many distinctions within each category. The more you cruise, the higher your status. No wonder a section of the Royal Promenade is devoted to getting passengers to book their next cruise during the one they should be enjoying now. No wonder desperate Royal Caribbean offers (“FINAL HOURS”) crowded my email account weeks before I set sail. No wonder the ship’s jewelry store, the Royal Bling, is selling a $100,000 golden chalice that will entitle its owner to drink free on Royal Caribbean cruises for life. (One passenger was already gaming out whether her 28-year-old son was young enough to “just about earn out” on the chalice or if that ship had sailed.) No wonder this ship was sold out months before departure, and we had to pay $19,000 for a horrid suite away from the Suite Neighborhood. No wonder the most mythical hero of Royal Caribbean lore is someone named Super Mario, who has cruised so often, he now has his own working desk on many ships. This whole experience is part cult, part nautical pyramid scheme.

[From the June 2014 issue: Ship of wonks]

“The toilets are amazing,” the Palo Altos are telling me. “One flush and you’re done.” “They don’t understand how energy-efficient these ships are,” the husband of the other couple is telling me. “They got the LNG”—liquefied natural gas, which is supposed to make the Icon a boon to the environment (a concept widely disputed and sometimes ridiculed by environmentalists).

But I’m thinking along a different line of attack as I spear my last pallid slice of melon. For my streaming limited series, a Pinnacle would have to get killed by either an outright peasant or a Suite without an ocean view. I tell my breakfast companions my idea.

“Oh, for sure a Pinnacle would have to be killed,” Mr. Palo Alto, the Pandemic Pinnacle, says, touching his porn mustache thoughtfully as his wife nods.

“THAT’S RIGHT, IT’S your time, buddy!” Hubert, my fun-loving Panamanian cabin attendant, shouts as I step out of my suite in a robe. “Take it easy, buddy!”

I have come up with a new dressing strategy. Instead of trying to impress with my choice of T-shirts, I have decided to start wearing a robe, as one does at a resort property on land, with a proper spa and hammam. The response among my fellow cruisers has been ecstatic. “Look at you in the robe!” Mr. Rand cries out as we pass each other by the Thrill Island aqua park. “You’re living the cruise life! You know, you really drank me under the table that night.” I laugh as we part ways, but my soul cries out, Please spend more time with me, Mr. and Mrs. Rand; I so need the company.

In my white robe, I am a stately presence, a refugee from a better limited series, a one-man crossover episode. (Only Suites are granted these robes to begin with.) Today, I will try many of the activities these ships have on offer to provide their clientele with a sense of never-ceasing motion. Because I am already at Thrill Island, I decide to climb the staircase to what looks like a mast on an old-fashioned ship (terrified, because I am afraid of heights) to try a ride called “Storm Chasers,” which is part of the “Category 6” water park, named in honor of one of the storms that may someday do away with the Port of Miami entirely. Storm Chasers consists of falling from the “mast” down a long, twisting neon tube filled with water, like being the camera inside your own colonoscopy, as you hold on to the handles of a mat, hoping not to die. The tube then flops you down headfirst into a trough of water, a Royal Caribbean baptism. It both knocks my breath out and makes me sad.

In keeping with the aquatic theme, I attend a show at the AquaDome. To the sound of “Live and Let Die,” a man in a harness gyrates to and fro in the sultry air. I saw something very similar in the back rooms of the famed Berghain club in early-aughts Berlin. Soon another harnessed man is gyrating next to the first. Ja, I think to myself, I know how this ends. Now will come the fisting, natürlich. But the show soon devolves into the usual Marvel-film-grade nonsense, with too much light and sound signifying nichts. If any fisting is happening, it is probably in the Suite Neighborhood, inside a cabin marked with an upside-down pineapple, which I understand means a couple are ready to swing, and I will see none of it.

I go to the ice show, which is a kind of homage—if that’s possible—to the periodic table, done with the style and pomp and masterful precision that would please the likes of Kim Jong Un, if only he could afford Royal Caribbean talent. At one point, the dancers skate to the theme song of Succession. “See that!” I want to say to my fellow Suites—at “cultural” events, we have a special section reserved for us away from the commoners—“Succession! It’s even better than the zombie show! Open your minds!”

Finally, I visit a comedy revue in an enormous and too brightly lit version of an “intimate,” per Royal Caribbean literature, “Manhattan comedy club.” Many of the jokes are about the cruising life. “I’ve lived on ships for 20 years,” one of the middle-aged comedians says. “I can only see so many Filipino homosexuals dressed as a taco.” He pauses while the audience laughs. “I am so fired tonight,” he says. He segues into a Trump impression and then Biden falling asleep at the microphone, which gets the most laughs. “Anyone here from Fort Leonard Wood?” another comedian asks. Half the crowd seems to cheer. As I fall asleep that night, I realize another connection I have failed to make, and one that may explain some of the diversity on this vessel—many of its passengers have served in the military.

As a coddled passenger with a suite, I feel like I am starting to understand what it means to have a rank and be constantly reminded of it. There are many espresso makers, I think as I look across the expanse of my officer-grade quarters before closing my eyes, but this one is mine.

Two enormous cruise ships at the Perfect Day at CocoCay, a private island with many of the same amenities as the ship itself (Gary Shteyngart) Day 4

A shocking sight greets me beyond the pools of Deck 17 as I saunter over to the Coastal Kitchen for my morning intake of slightly sour Americanos. A tiny city beneath a series of perfectly pressed green mountains. Land! We have docked for a brief respite in Basseterre, the capital of St. Kitts and Nevis. I wolf down my egg scramble to be one of the first passengers off the ship. Once past the gangway, I barely refrain from kissing the ground. I rush into the sights and sounds of this scruffy island city, sampling incredible conch curry and buckets of non-Starbucks coffee. How wonderful it is to be where God intended humans to be: on land. After all, I am neither a fish nor a mall rat. This is my natural environment. Basseterre may not be Havana, but there are signs of human ingenuity and desire everywhere you look. The Black Table Grill Has been Relocated to Soho Village, Market Street, Directly Behind of, Gary’s Fruits and Flower Shop. Signed. THE PORK MAN reads a sign stuck to a wall. Now, that is how you write a sign. A real sign, not the come-ons for overpriced Rolexes that blink across the screens of the Royal Promenade.

“Hey, tie your shoestring!” a pair of laughing ladies shout to me across the street.

“Thank you!” I shout back. Shoestring! “Thank you very much.”

A man in Independence Square Park comes by and asks if I want to play with his monkey. I haven’t heard that pickup line since the Penn Station of the 1980s. But then he pulls a real monkey out of a bag. The monkey is wearing a diaper and looks insane. Wonderful, I think, just wonderful! There is so much life here. I email my editor asking if I can remain on St. Kitts and allow the Icon to sail off into the horizon without me. I have even priced a flight home at less than $300, and I have enough material from the first four days on the cruise to write the entire story. “It would be funny …” my editor replies. “Now get on the boat.”

As I slink back to the ship after my brief jailbreak, the locals stand under umbrellas to gaze at and photograph the boat that towers over their small capital city. The limousines of the prime minister and his lackeys are parked beside the gangway. St. Kitts, I’ve been told, is one of the few islands that would allow a ship of this size to dock.

“We hear about all the waterslides,” a sweet young server in one of the cafés told me. “We wish we could go on the ship, but we have to work.”

“I want to stay on your island,” I replied. “I love it here.”

But she didn’t understand how I could possibly mean that.

Day 5

“WASHY, WASHY, so you don’t get stinky, stinky!” kids are singing outside the AquaDome, while their adult minders look on in disapproval, perhaps worried that Mr. Washy Washy is grooming them into a life of gayness. I heard a southern couple skip the buffet entirely out of fear of Mr. Washy Washy.

Meanwhile, I have found a new watering hole for myself, the Swim & Tonic, the biggest swim-up bar on any cruise ship in the world. Drinking next to full-size, nearly naked Americans takes away one’s own self-consciousness. The men have curvaceous mom bodies. The women are equally un-shy about their sprawling physiques.

Today I’ve befriended a bald man with many children who tells me that all of the little trinkets that Royal Caribbean has left us in our staterooms and suites are worth a fortune on eBay. “Eighty dollars for the water bottle, 60 for the lanyard,” the man says. “This is a cult.”

“Tell me about it,” I say. There is, however, a clientele for whom this cruise makes perfect sense. For a large middle-class family (he works in “supply chains”), seven days in a lower-tier cabin—which starts at $1,800 a person—allow the parents to drop off their children in Surfside, where I imagine many young Filipina crew members will take care of them, while the parents are free to get drunk at a swim-up bar and maybe even get intimate in their cabin. Cruise ships have become, for a certain kind of hardworking family, a form of subsidized child care.

There is another man I would like to befriend at the Swim & Tonic, a tall, bald fellow who is perpetually inebriated and who wears a necklace studded with little rubber duckies in sunglasses, which, I am told, is a sort of secret handshake for cruise aficionados. Tomorrow, I will spend more time with him, but first the ship docks at St. Thomas, in the U.S. Virgin Islands. Charlotte Amalie, the capital, is more charming in name than in presence, but I still all but jump off the ship to score a juicy oxtail and plantains at the well-known Petite Pump Room, overlooking the harbor. From one of the highest points in the small city, the Icon of the Seas appears bigger than the surrounding hills.

I usually tan very evenly, but something about the discombobulation of life at sea makes me forget the regular application of sunscreen. As I walk down the streets of Charlotte Amalie in my fluorescent Icon of the Seas cap, an old Rastafarian stares me down. “Redneck,” he hisses.

“No,” I want to tell him, as I bring a hand up to my red neck, “that’s not who I am at all. On my island, Mannahatta, as Whitman would have it, I am an interesting person living within an engaging artistic milieu. I do not wish to use the Caribbean as a dumping ground for the cruise-ship industry. I love the work of Derek Walcott. You don’t understand. I am not a redneck. And if I am, they did this to me.” They meaning Royal Caribbean? Its passengers? The Rands?

“They did this to me!”

Back on the Icon, some older matrons are muttering about a run-in with passengers from the Celebrity cruise ship docked next to us, the Celebrity Apex. Although Celebrity Cruises is also owned by Royal Caribbean, I am made to understand that there is a deep fratricidal beef between passengers of the two lines. “We met a woman from the Apex,” one matron says, “and she says it was a small ship and there was nothing to do. Her face was as tight as a 19-year-old’s, she had so much surgery.” With those words, and beneath a cloudy sky, humidity shrouding our weathered faces and red necks, we set sail once again, hopefully in the direction of home.

Inside the AquaDome, one can find a food hall and an acrobatic sound-and-light aquatic show. (Gary Shteyngart) Day 6

THERE ARE BARELY 48 HOURS LEFT to the cruise, and the Icon of the Seas’ passengers are salty. They know how to work the elevators. They know the Washy Washy song by heart. They understand that the chicken gyro at “Feta Mediterranean,” in the AquaDome Market, is the least problematic form of chicken on the ship.

The passengers have shed their INAUGURAL CRUISE T-shirts and are now starting to evince political opinions. There are caps pledging to make America great again and T-shirts that celebrate words sometimes attributed to Patrick Henry: “The Constitution is not an instrument for the government to restrain the people; it is an instrument for the people to restrain the government.” With their preponderance of FAMILY FLAG FAITH FRIENDS FIREARMS T-shirts, the tables by the crepe station sometimes resemble the Capitol Rotunda on January 6. The Real Anthony Fauci, by Robert F. Kennedy Jr., appears to be a popular form of literature, especially among young men with very complicated versions of the American flag on their T-shirts. Other opinions blend the personal and the political. “Someone needs to kill Washy guy, right?” a well-dressed man in the elevator tells me, his gray eyes radiating nothing. “Just beat him to death. Am I right?” I overhear the male member of a young couple whisper, “There goes that freak” as I saunter by in my white spa robe, and I decide to retire it for the rest of the cruise.

I visit the Royal Bling to see up close the $100,000 golden chalice that entitles you to free drinks on Royal Caribbean forever. The pleasant Serbian saleslady explains that the chalice is actually gold-plated and covered in white zirconia instead of diamonds, as it would otherwise cost $1 million. “If you already have everything,” she explains, “this is one more thing you can get.”

I believe that anyone who works for Royal Caribbean should be entitled to immediate American citizenship. They already speak English better than most of the passengers and, per the Serbian lady’s sales pitch above, better understand what America is as well. Crew members like my Panamanian cabin attendant seem to work 24 hours a day. A waiter from New Delhi tells me that his contract is six months and three weeks long. After a cruise ends, he says, “in a few hours, we start again for the next cruise.” At the end of the half a year at sea, he is allowed a two-to-three-month stay at home with his family. As of 2019, the median income for crew members was somewhere in the vicinity of $20,000, according to a major business publication. Royal Caribbean would not share the current median salary for its crew members, but I am certain that it amounts to a fraction of the cost of a Royal Bling gold-plated, zirconia-studded chalice.

And because most of the Icon’s hyper-sanitized spaces are just a frittata away from being a Delta lounge, one forgets that there are actual sailors on this ship, charged with the herculean task of docking it in port. “Having driven 100,000-ton aircraft carriers throughout my career,” retired Admiral James G. Stavridis, the former NATO Supreme Allied Commander Europe, writes to me, “I’m not sure I would even know where to begin with trying to control a sea monster like this one nearly three times the size.” (I first met Stavridis while touring Army bases in Germany more than a decade ago.)

Today, I decide to head to the hot tub near Swim & Tonic, where some of the ship’s drunkest reprobates seem to gather (the other tubs are filled with families and couples). The talk here, like everywhere else on the ship, concerns football, a sport about which I know nothing. It is apparent that four teams have recently competed in some kind of finals for the year, and that two of them will now face off in the championship. Often when people on the Icon speak, I will try to repeat the last thing they said with a laugh or a nod of disbelief. “Yes, 20-yard line! Ha!” “Oh my God, of course, scrimmage.”

Soon we are joined in the hot tub by the late-middle-age drunk guy with the duck necklace. He is wearing a bucket hat with the legend HAWKEYES, which, I soon gather, is yet another football team. “All right, who turned me in?” Duck Necklace says as he plops into the tub beside us. “I get a call in the morning,” he says. “It’s security. Can you come down to the dining room by 10 a.m.? You need to stay away from the members of this religious family.” Apparently, the gregarious Duck Necklace had photobombed the wrong people. There are several families who present as evangelical Christians or practicing Muslims on the ship. One man, evidently, was not happy that Duck Necklace had made contact with his relatives. “It’s because of religious stuff; he was offended. I put my arm around 20 people a day.”

Everyone laughs. “They asked me three times if I needed medication,” he says of the security people who apparently interrogated him in full view of others having breakfast.

Another hot-tub denizen suggests that he should have asked for fentanyl. After a few more drinks, Duck Necklace begins to muse about what it would be like to fall off the ship. “I’m 62 and I’m ready to go,” he says. “I just don’t want a shark to eat me. I’m a huge God guy. I’m a Bible guy. There’s some Mayan theory squaring science stuff with religion. There is so much more to life on Earth.” We all nod into our Red Stripes.

“I never get off the ship when we dock,” he says. He tells us he lost $6,000 in the casino the other day. Later, I look him up, and it appears that on land, he’s a financial adviser in a crisp gray suit, probably a pillar of his North Chicago community.

Despite the prevalence of ice cream, the author lost two pounds on the cruise. (Gary Shteyngart) Day 7

THE OCEAN IS TEEMING with fascinating life, but on the surface it has little to teach us. The waves come and go. The horizon remains ever far away.

I am constantly told by my fellow passengers that “everybody here has a story.” Yes, I want to reply, but everybody everywhere has a story. You, the reader of this essay, have a story, and yet you’re not inclined to jump on a cruise ship and, like Duck Necklace, tell your story to others at great pitch and volume. Maybe what they’re saying is that everybody on this ship wants to have a bigger, more coherent, more interesting story than the one they’ve been given. Maybe that’s why there’s so much signage on the doors around me attesting to marriages spent on the sea. Maybe that’s why the Royal Caribbean newsletter slipped under my door tells me that “this isn’t a vacation day spent—it’s bragging rights earned.” Maybe that’s why I’m so lonely.

Today is a big day for Icon passengers. Today the ship docks at Royal Caribbean’s own Bahamian island, the Perfect Day at CocoCay. (This appears to be the actual name of the island.) A comedian at the nightclub opined on what his perfect day at CocoCay would look like—receiving oral sex while learning that his ex-wife had been killed in a car crash (big laughter). But the reality of the island is far less humorous than that.

One of the ethnic tristate ladies in the infinity pool told me that she loved CocoCay because it had exactly the same things that could be found on the ship itself. This proves to be correct. It is like the Icon, but with sand. The same tired burgers, the same colorful tubes conveying children and water from Point A to B. The same swim-up bar at its Hideaway ($140 for admittance, no children allowed; Royal Caribbean must be printing money off its clientele). “There was almost a fight at The Wizard of Oz,” I overhear an elderly woman tell her companion on a chaise lounge. Apparently one of the passengers began recording Royal Caribbean’s intellectual property and “three guys came after him.”

I walk down a pathway to the center of the island, where a sign reads DO NOT ENTER: YOU HAVE REACHED THE BOUNDARY OF ADVENTURE. I hear an animal scampering in the bushes. A Royal Caribbean worker in an enormous golf cart soon chases me down and takes me back to the Hideaway, where I run into Mrs. Rand in a bikini. She becomes livid telling me about an altercation she had the other day with a woman over a towel and a deck chair. We Suites have special towel privileges; we do not have to hand over our SeaPass Card to score a towel. But the Rands are not Suites. “People are so entitled here,” Mrs. Rand says. “It’s like the airport with all its classes.” “You see,” I want to say, “this is where your husband’s love of Ayn Rand runs into the cruelties and arbitrary indignities of unbridled capitalism.” Instead we make plans to meet for a final drink in the Schooner Bar tonight (the Rands will stand me up).

Back on the ship, I try to do laps, but the pool (the largest on any cruise ship, naturally) is fully trashed with the detritus of American life: candy wrappers, a slowly dissolving tortilla chip, napkins. I take an extra-long shower in my suite, then walk around the perimeter of the ship on a kind of exercise track, past all the alluring lifeboats in their yellow-and-white livery. Maybe there is a dystopian angle to the HBO series that I will surely end up pitching, one with shades of WALL-E or Snowpiercer. In a collapsed world, a Royal Caribbean–like cruise liner sails from port to port, collecting new shipmates and supplies in exchange for the precious energy it has on board. (The actual Icon features a new technology that converts passengers’ poop into enough energy to power the waterslides. In the series, this shitty technology would be greatly expanded.) A very young woman (18? 19?), smart and lonely, who has only known life on the ship, walks along the same track as I do now, contemplating jumping off into the surf left by its wake. I picture reusing Duck Necklace’s words in the opening shot of the pilot. The girl is walking around the track, her eyes on the horizon; maybe she’s highborn—a Suite—and we hear the voice-over: “I’m 19 and I’m ready to go. I just don’t want a shark to eat me.”

Before the cruise is finished, I talk to Mr. Washy Washy, or Nielbert of the Philippines. He is a sweet, gentle man, and I thank him for the earworm of a song he has given me and for keeping us safe from the dreaded norovirus. “This is very important to me, getting people to wash their hands,” he tells me in his burger getup. He has dreams, as an artist and a performer, but they are limited in scope. One day he wants to dress up as a piece of bacon for the morning shift.

Epilogue

THE MAIDEN VOYAGE OF THE TITANIC (the Icon of the Seas is five times as large as that doomed vessel) at least offered its passengers an exciting ending to their cruise, but when I wake up on the eighth day, all I see are the gray ghosts that populate Miami’s condo skyline. Throughout my voyage, my writer friends wrote in to commiserate with me. Sloane Crosley, who once covered a three-day spa mini-cruise for Vogue, tells me she felt “so very alone … I found it very untethering.” Gideon Lewis-Kraus writes in an Instagram comment: “When Gary is done I think it’s time this genre was taken out back and shot.” And he is right. To badly paraphrase Adorno: After this, no more cruise stories. It is unfair to put a thinking person on a cruise ship. Writers typically have difficult childhoods, and it is cruel to remind them of the inherent loneliness that drove them to writing in the first place. It is also unseemly to write about the kind of people who go on cruises. Our country does not provide the education and upbringing that allow its citizens an interior life. For the creative class to point fingers at the large, breasty gentlemen adrift in tortilla-chip-laden pools of water is to gather a sour harvest of low-hanging fruit.

A day or two before I got off the ship, I decided to make use of my balcony, which I had avoided because I thought the view would only depress me further. What I found shocked me. My suite did not look out on Central Park after all. This entire time, I had been living in the ship’s Disneyland, Surfside, the neighborhood full of screaming toddlers consuming milkshakes and candy. And as I leaned out over my balcony, I beheld a slight vista of the sea and surf that I thought I had been missing. It had been there all along. The sea was frothy and infinite and blue-green beneath the span of a seagull’s wing. And though it had been trod hard by the world’s largest cruise ship, it remained.

This article appears in the May 2024 print edition with the headline “A Meatball at Sea.” When you buy a book using a link on this page, we receive a commission. Thank you for supporting The Atlantic.

Suppose the president asked you to design the ideal piece of legislation—the perfect mix of good politics and good policy. You’d probably want to pick something that saves people a lot of money. You’d want it to fix a problem that people have been mad about for a long time, in an area that voters say they care about a lot—such as, say, health care. You’d want it to appeal to voters across the political spectrum. And you’d want it to be a policy that polls well.

You would, in other words, want something like letting Medicare negotiate prescription-drug prices. This would make drugs much more affordable for senior citizens—who vote like crazy—and, depending on the poll, it draws support from 80 to 90 percent of voters. The idea has been championed by both Bernie Sanders and Joe Manchin. Turn it into reality, and surely you’d see parades in your honor in retirement communities across the country.

Except Joe Biden did turn that idea into reality, and he seems to have gotten approximately zero credit for it. Tucked into the Inflation Reduction Act of 2022 was a series of measures to drastically lower prescription-drug costs for seniors, including by allowing Medicare to negotiate drug prices. And yet Biden trails Donald Trump in most election polls and has one of the lowest approval ratings of any president in modern American history.

In that respect, drug pricing is a microcosm of Biden’s predicament—and a challenge to conventional theories of politics, in which voters reward politicians for successful legislation. Practically nothing is more popular than lowering drug prices, and yet the popularity hasn’t materialized. Which raises an uncomfortable question: Politically speaking, does policy matter at all?

High drug prices are not a fact of nature. In 2018, the average list price of a month’s worth of insulin was $12 in Canada, $11 in Germany, and $7 in Australia. In the U.S., it was $99. America today spends more than seven times per person on retail prescription drugs than it did in 1980, and more than one in four adults taking prescription drugs in the U.S. report difficulty affording them.

Short of direct price caps, the most obvious way to address the problem is to let Medicare—which, with 65 million members, is the nation’s largest insurer—negotiate prices with drug manufacturers. Just about every other rich country does a version of this, which is partly why Americans pay nearly three times more for prescription drugs than Europeans and Canadians do. Price negotiation would slash costs for Medicare beneficiaries, while cutting annual federal spending by tens of billions of dollars.

The pharmaceutical industry argues that lower prices will leave companies with less money to invest in inventing new, life-saving medicines. But the Congressional Budget Office recently estimated that even if drug companies’ profits dropped 15 to 25 percent as a result of price negotiation, that would prevent only 1 percent of all new drugs from coming to market over the next decade.

[Ezekiel J. Emanuel: Big Pharma’s go-to defense of soaring drug prices doesn’t add up]

Medicare drug-price negotiation has nonetheless had a tortured three-decade journey to becoming law. Bill Clinton made it a central plank of his push to overhaul the American health-care system, an effort that went down in flames after a massive opposition campaign by all corners of the health-care industry. Barack Obama campaigned on the idea but quickly abandoned it in order to win drug companies’ support for the Affordable Care Act. In 2016, even Donald Trump promised to “negotiate like crazy” on drug prices, but he never did.

Joe Biden accomplished what none of his predecessors could. The Inflation Reduction Act is best known for its clean-energy investments, but it also empowered Medicare to negotiate prices for the drugs that seniors spend the most money on. In February of this year, negotiations began for the first 10 of those drugs, on which Medicare patients collectively spend $3.4 billion out of pocket every year—a number that will go down dramatically when the newly negotiated prices come into effect. The IRA will also cap Medicare patients’ out-of-pocket costs for all drugs, including those not included on the negotiation list, at $2,000 a year, and the cost of insulin in particular at $35 a month. (In 2022, the top 10 anticancer drugs cost a Medicare patient $10,000 to $15,000 a year on average.) And it effectively prohibits drug companies from raising prices on other medications faster than inflation. “Right now, many people have to choose between getting the care they need and not going broke,” Stacie Dusetzina, a cancer researcher at Vanderbilt University, told me. “These new policies change that.”

Yet they don’t seem to have caused voters to warm up to Biden. The president’s approval rating has remained stuck at about 40 percent since before the IRA passed, lower than any other president at this point in their term since Harry Truman. A September AP/NORC poll found that even though more than three-quarters of Americans supported the drug-price negotiation, just 48 percent approved of how Biden was handling the issue of prescription-drug prices. A similar dynamic holds across other elements of the Biden agenda. In polls, more than two-thirds of voters say they support Biden’s three major legislative accomplishments—the IRA, the CHIPS Act, and the bipartisan infrastructure bill—and many individual policies in those bills, including raising taxes on the wealthy and investing in domestic manufacturing, poll in the 70s and 80s.

All of this poses a particular challenge for the “popularism” theory. After Biden barely squeaked by Donald Trump in 2020, an influential group of pollsters, pundits, and political consultants began arguing that the Democratic Party had become associated with policies, such as “Defund the police,” that alienated swing voters. If Democrats were serious about winning elections, the argument went, they would have to focus on popular “kitchen table” issues and shut up about their less mainstream views on race and immigration. Drug-price negotiation quickly became the go-to example; David Shor, a political consultant known for popularizing popularism, highlighted it as the single most popular of the nearly 200 policies his polling firm had tested in 2021.

One obvious possibility for why this has not translated into support for the president is that voters simply care more about other things, such as inflation. Another is that they are unaware of what Biden has done. A KFF poll from December found that less than a third of voters knows that the IRA allows Medicare to negotiate drug prices, and even fewer are aware of the bill’s other drug-related provisions. Perhaps that’s because these changes mostly haven’t happened yet. The $2,000 cap on out-of-pocket costs doesn’t come into effect until 2025, and the first batch of new negotiated prices won’t kick in until 2026. Or perhaps, as some popularists argue, it’s because Biden and his allies haven’t talked about those things enough. “I’m concerned that Democrats are dramatically underperforming their potential in terms of talking about healthcare policy and making healthcare debates a salient issue in 2024,” the blogger Matthew Yglesias wrote in October.

When I raised this critique with current and former members of the Biden administration, the sense of frustration was palpable. “The president is constantly talking about things like lowering drug prices and building roads and bridges,” Bharat Ramamurti, a former deputy director for Biden’s National Economic Council, told me. “We read the same polling as everyone else. We know those are popular.” He pointed out that, for instance, Biden has spoken at length about lowering prescription-drug prices in every one of his State of the Union addresses.

The problem, Ramamurti argues, is that the press doesn’t necessarily cover what the president says. Student-debt cancellation gets a lot of coverage because it generates a lot of conflict: progressives against moderates, activists against economists, young against old—which makes for juicy stories. The unfortunate paradox of super-popular policies is that, almost by definition, they fail to generate the kind of drama needed to get people to pay attention to them.

Both sides have a point here. It’s true that Biden’s drug-pricing policies have received relatively little media coverage, but it’s also up to politicians and their campaigns to find creative ways to generate interest in the issues they want people to focus on. Simply listing policy accomplishments in a speech or releasing a fact sheet about how they will help people isn’t enough. (The same problem applies to other issue areas. According to a Data for Progress poll, for example, only 41 percent of likely voters were aware as of early March that Biden had increased investments in infrastructure.)

[Ronald Brownstein: Americans really don’t like Trump’s health-care plans]

For the White House, the task of getting the word out may become easier in the coming months, as voters finally begin to feel the benefits of the administration’s policies. The cap on annual out-of-pocket drug costs kicked in only at the beginning of the year (this year, it’s about $3,500, and it will fall to $2,000 in 2025); presumably some Medicare-enrolled voters will notice as their medication costs hit that number. In September, just in time for the election, Biden will announce new prices for the 10 drugs currently being negotiated.

Another assist could come from efforts to stop the law from taking effect. Last year, multiple pharmaceutical companies and industry lobbying groups filed lawsuits, many in jurisdictions with Trump-appointed judges, to prevent Medicare from negotiating drug prices; meanwhile, congressional Republicans have publicly come out against the IRA overall and drug-price caps in particular. As the failed effort to repeal the Affordable Care Act in 2017 showed, few things rally support for a policy like the prospect of it being taken away.

The more pessimistic outlook is that voters’ impressions of political candidates have little to do with the legislation those candidates pass or the policies they support. Patrick Ruffini, a co-founder of the polling firm Echelon Insights, pointed out to me that, in 2020, when voters were asked which presidential candidate was more competent, Biden had a nine-point advantage over Trump; today Trump has a 16-point advantage. “I don’t know if there’s any amount of passing popular policies that can overcome that,” Ruffini said.

That doesn’t make the policy stakes of the upcoming election any lower. If he’s reelected, Biden wants to expand Medicare’s drug negotiation to 50 drugs a year and extend the out-of-pocket spending caps to the general population. Trump, meanwhile, has said he is going to “totally kill” the Affordable Care Act and that he intends to dismantle the IRA. There’s some drama for you. Whether it will get anyone’s attention remains to be seen.