“Storytelling gives us the power to bring order to the chaos of the real under our own sign, and in this it isn’t very far from political power.” – Elena Ferrante

The Russian brand of fake news arrived in my life this way: In late June 2014, I was trading loving emails with a man I had been seeing. Travel had separated us, and we anxiously anticipated our reunion. These messages were sweet, down to noting the reverberation of shortening proximity.

On the eve of my return, he sent an email with an entirely different tone. He had dined with a friend. The friend had enlightened him about how the US had wronged Putin by essentially forcing him to invade Ukraine. After the dinner, the man I was dating had begun scouring the internet for more clues.

ELENA FERRANTE DOES NOT require privacy. She lays out her psychosexual-emotional range for all the world in multiple languages. She does not lock down her time, although she controls its use: one written interview in each language with each book. What she avoids is the parade, the opportunity for outsiders to evaluate aspects of her she is not ferociously driven to present. That is why she wrote a letter to her publishers in 1991, before they released her first novel, Troubling Love, before she knew whether she would find one reader or one million. In the letter, she gently refused to appear in person for press opportunities or readings. Instead, she would send her novels into the world to make their own way.

In 2016, after her epic Neapolitan quartet had been published to international acclaim, the Italian investigative reporter Claudio Gatti decided to unmask her. His justification: she had lied. He cited a letter she had written in 2002 to her publisher, subsequently printed in a collection of miscellaneous writings, Frantumaglia, in which she said she found lies useful on occasion “to shield my person, feelings, pressures.” Accusing a fiction writer of lying is like accusing a magician of cheating, but with his indignation afire, Gatti proceeded to track her by surreptitiously obtaining her publisher’s financial documents, vague though that information was.

Our nation has always depended on these heavyweights to guide us, but are they still with us, and if so, who are they?

In the wake of the Brexit vote and the election of President Trump, the experts and commentators whose ideas shape the ideas of others have tried to pinpoint the cause of the populist fervor that upended many expectations. In op-eds and books (see The Death of Expertise) the consensus seems to be: The egghead is dead.

This painful conclusion weighs heavily on public intellectuals, who created the country during the 116 steamy days of the 1787 Constitutional Convention, when Alexander Hamilton, James Madison and crew crafted a new nation entirely out of words. Then they bolstered it with 85 newspaper columns under the pen name Publius, now known as the Federalist Papers, to explain and defend their work.

For a time, it seems, Americans mixed with public intellectuals in their everyday lives. They were our preachers and teachers, discovering their voice in times of crisis. Ralph Waldo Emerson blasted our embrace of slavery, while his fellow clergyman Henry Ward Beecher saved the Union cause by traveling to Europe to deliver a series of riveting speeches that quelled the continent’s desire to recognize the Confederacy.

Intellectualism got a boost after the Second World War, when the G.I. Bill enabled universities to massively increase capacity. In this fertile period, before specialization fully took hold, philosophers, historians and sociologists explained the postwar world to the new hordes of college-educated women and men hungering for mental stimulation.

Editor’s note: One day after this story was published, the WNT filed a civil-rights complaint against US Soccer citing violation of the Equal Pay Act. The Equal Employment Opportunity Commission will now launch an investigation.

THE GLASS LABYRINTH
Last July, when the 24 members of the U.S. Women’s National Team rolled down New York City’s Canyon of Heroes, they had every reason to believe they were on top of the world. Days earlier the team had trounced Japan to capture its third Word Cup and now the city was honoring them with a ticker-tape parade, the first ever for a women’s sports team. Their World Cup medals around their necks, the beaming players basked in the admiration of their rapturous fans. Carli Lloyd — who would later be named 2015’s world player of the year — hoisted the World Cup trophy for all to see. Alex Morgan posted photos of herself waving an American flag to her 2 million Twitter followers. Hope Solo, the edgy superstar, snapped selfies with her beaming teammates, confetti dancing around them.

In trying to overcome obstacles created by the very organizations that ostensibly serve to foster and develop their sport, the members of the Women’s National Team — along with players in the National Women’s Soccer League — must contend with systemic biases that devalue and obscure their contributions to the game. Many of these practices are questionable and untenable at best and, quite possibly, illegal.

As the most visible international symbol of women’s soccer, the WNT has readily accepted a leadership role in this fight for fair play. It puts them in the company of Billie Jean King and Venus Williams, pioneering athletes whose off-the-court endeavors rivaled their athletic accomplishments. In the case of the WNT, it is a bid to push for more equal — or, at least, less grossly unequal — treatment in a sport long dominated by men. And it’s a battle they’re waging on multiple fronts, from compensation and working conditions to representation in the sport’s decision-making organizations.

Gay Talese never met an interview subject he didn’t like. Or at least never one he couldn’t sympathize with. He hunts down losers, outcasts, criminals. He etches them into elegantly written books and articles that seem to normalize almost any possible human behavior. “I don’t find anything so unusual,” he says. “If you ask me, What shocks you? I can’t think of anything. I am not judgmental.” He seems almost repentant when admitting his lack of interest in reform, like an adult confiding that he can’t read. It’s a quality that makes him seem either hopelessly behind the times or far ahead of them.

Nevertheless, over the past few months critics have sought to reform Talese. In April, he trended on Twitter when he failed to cite more than one female nonfiction writer who inspired him as a youth. He irritated a New York Times magazine staff writer when he asked her how she got her job, and if she would be headed to a nail salon after a symposium. At 84, he should be enjoying his status as a long-time bestselling author and architect of such journalistic classics as “Frank Sinatra Has a Cold,” collecting honors as a national treasure. But Talese has always set off firebombs. Now, he’s in a mess with an unreliable voyeur.

THE MYSTERIOUS AUTHOR who goes by Elena Ferrante first discussed her idea for a novel that would become the now-legendary Neapolitan series with her Italian publishers over a lakeside lunch on a sunny summer afternoon in 2009.

“She told us that she wanted to write the story of two friends, middle-aged, and in Naples,” recalls Sandra Ozzola Ferri, Ferrante’s editor and the co-founder, with husband Sandro Ferri, of the Italian publishing house Edizioni E/O. Ferrante had been thinking about her own relationship with a friend who had died, and had envisioned a pivotal wedding scene. Most of the novel’s characters are gathered in one tableau, a group the narrator, Elena, hopes to escape. Sandra continues: “When Elena looks at the crowd and says, ‘Ah, these are the plebes, the ignorant ones and, not only poor, but vulgar.’ Everything is dirty — the floor, the people — and she is really very frightened. This is what she wanted. It was practically one of her first ideas.”

It took Ferrante less than five years to create her epic tale, which sprawls to nearly 1,700 pages. Her impulse to conjure her deceased friend had wired her to crowds of other ghosts, political street violence, abusive industrial conditions, birth, death and betrayal. Sometimes the writing would go so smoothly, she would carry on for 50 to 100 pages without going back to reread or rewrite.

Sandra recalls how odd it was that Ferrante wrote what is now being called a masterpiece with no outline. “She had only the beginning and the end,” Sandra says.

“Practically no notes,” Sandro Ferri adds. “Only in her head.”

Tommy Safian remembers the moment he knew he needed to go for the big job.

As a branding and marketing consultant, he had been called in to offer advice to a startup teaching homeless people how to build furniture. The nonprofit was switching its focus to people who were getting out of prison. Safian had once run a popular furniture store, Nova Zembla, in Brooklyn Heights. So he invited a supplier he had worked with, Cisco Pinedo, to give his perspective from having trained formerly incarcerated people at his furniture company in Los Angeles.

During one of their meetings, which included the organization’s board members, the executive director took a phone call and returned with big news. While the employment rates for former inmates who’ve been out of prison for one year usually stand at 25%, the numbers for their clients—supported by big donations, tons of attention, and strong cheerleading—had reached 30% rates.

“We thought they were going to be wringing their hands. But instead they were pounding their chests and giving each other fist bumps,” marvels Safian. “Cisco and I were looking at them like it was Alice in Wonderland. How could people who are so talented and spend their careers and their free time on all this be so ecstatic with those numbers?”

If Safian and Pinedo had merely been visitors to this world of former inmates, they might have accepted the low expectations. But they both had worked with people re-entering society and knew better. Pinedo had set up shop in South Central L.A. soon after the 1992 riots and given plenty of reentrants a shot. So when they sat down to plot a strategy for the nonprofit, they realized they should try to do the job themselves and prove that the typical re-entry could be vastly improved upon. “We spend over a trillion dollars on criminal justice in this country and we are not getting a return,” says Safian. “We’re keeping our taxes high and guaranteeing failure.”

John Gomes doesn’t break stride as he rushes across the black marble lobby of his West Village apartment building. He waves a strong arm to indicate I am to fall in immediately as he’s in a hurry to his day’s first meeting. Even from 50 feet away, underneath the lobby’s colossal, 24-foot ceilings, Gomes seems taller than his 6-foot-1 frame. With his shaved bald head, he resembles a more fashionable Daddy Warbucks: stylish, but not flashy, in a soft, gray felt jacket with suede elbow patches, bright tie and brown wingtips. It’s 9:30 a.m. and Gomes has an appointment downtown to discuss the details of a new condo development that could ultimately yield $113 million in contracts.

He bounds into the back seat of his black Mercedes S550 sedan, tricked out with custom, chocolate-brown leather interior. His driver, Douglas, pulls into the heavy traffic, and Gomes hits the button to lower the passenger-window privacy shade, then the window, and thrusts his smooth head fully out into the cold damp May air, like a dog. “I’m sorry,” he says, eyes closed, a beatific expression on his Buddha-like face. “I know this looks weird, but I need to cool down.” This is just one of his morning rituals.

Routine helps keep his driven life on track. He wakes naturally before the 6 a.m. alarm, puts in 20 minutes of Transcendental Meditation and one hour with a personal trainer. For breakfast, it’s muesli with almond milk and Keurig coffee in front of “Good Morning America,” while dispersing hundreds of overnight emails to his assistant or the assistant of his assistant, followed by a long hot steam to clear yesterday’s construction dust from his pores.

Gomes, 44, and his business partner Fredrik Eklund, 39, are the top brokers of luxury new residential development for Douglas Elliman, the biggest real-estate firm in New York City. Riding Manhattan’s building boom, the duo sells multi-million dollar condominiums — many of them outrageously appointed penthouse units perched atop brand-new, gleaming towers — to the very rich, the very very rich and the GDP-hoarders.

I. DREAM TRIP

The meteorologists of Louisville, Kentucky, could not quite believe how perfectly calibrated the barometric pressure was that first Saturday in May 1999. The skies were as blue as the bottom of a freshly painted pool. The white clapboard steeples of Churchill Downs, which had loomed over thoroughbred races since the turn of the century, were brilliant in the sunshine. That spring, La Nina, the rare weather phenomenon chilling the waters of the equator thirty-five hundred miles away, had communicated its meteorogical message north, and now Louisville, and more specifically, the crowds gathering for the last Kentucky Derby of the millennium, were wallowing in heat and happiness. I was there with a man whom I adored. He was tanned, gaining muscle, and proudly cultivating a head of baby-soft hair. It was the first time we had ever been to a thoroughbred track and a perfect day to fall in love with racing.

Only nine weeks earlier, this man—Chuck Fulgham—had emerged from the hospital after a second month of chemotherapy treatments without hair, eyelashes, eyebrows; with fingernails peeling off at the thickened tips. Over those many weeks of his treatment for leukemia at Baylor Hospital in Dallas, he had dwindled around his bones until he was just a six-foot four-inch wraith who got winded walking across a room. But he had rallied back in that vivid, love-infused spring, and it was for that reason Chuck and I felt our very presence among the drunken, happy hordes of the Churchill Downs infield was a victory, no matter what happened for us at the betting windows.

If Kate Moss were to open her ripe, Cupid’s-bow mouth to make a public statement, it would go something like this: “I’m not anorexic, I’m not a heroin addict, I’m not pregnant – all the shit they fucking say about me is not true. It’s a load of lies the media made.” Moss pauses for breath.

She is a lot of life when you meet her outside a picture.

Moss is not making a statement. She’s enduring an interview, a process she hates because she doesn’t want to give any more of herself away. This is the girl who was stripped of makeup and clothes, and pinned up everywhere; who appeared in such profusion throughout the pages of Harper’s Bazaar that it seemed like a family album; who, preserved by Calvin Klein in the silence of photographs, has waited with us for buses, has lingered against the walls of buildings, gazed out from Times Square – the kind of repetition of image that world leaders as savvy as Marshal Tito have employed to hold the savage, furious fragments of their nations together, and which, in our country, sells perfume and underpants.

Ask parents if they feel sorry for their childless counterparts, and the response is almost always yes. Parents know how annoying they sound singing the praises of parenthood, but they can’t help it. “What is wrong with them?” one mother I know confesses thinking of non-parents. “How empty is your life? Why do you exist?” She’s only half-joking. What childless people suspect about self-righteous parents is true: no matter how successful you are or how happy you claim to be, they pity you.

I was never particularly dewy-eyed about parenthood. I’d au-paired for a summer, seen eight nieces and nephews from their first day at the hospital to high school. I’d spent bleary-eyed afternoons monitoring toddlers negotiating the jungle gym with the speed of sloths, and nights rocking the high-strung no-sleepers until their parents returned. I liked kids. I loved some kids deeply. But I didn’t understand the unabashed covetousness of the parental state.

But then I got pregnant, and I began to think maybe my old ambivalence was more the result of teenage antsy-ness or because the kids weren’t my own. I began to expect a torrent of nonstop pleasure. I would never be bored or annoyed or frustrated. Acquaintances warned me that I wouldn’t be able to just run out to grab a beer on a whim anymore, but that didn’t seem like a calamitous loss of freedom.

One day in 1934, Pinchus Kahanovitch, a fifty-one-year-old Ukrainian writer of Yiddish stories, fairy tales, and criticism, decided he did not want to disappear. Within a group of novelists and short story writers that included David Bergelson, Peretz Markish, and Moyshe Kulbak, Kahanovitch had been something of an idol, having published in the great Y.L. Peretz’s journal, Yudish, in the 1910s under the pen name Der Nister (meaning “the Hidden One”). The novelist Israel Joshua Singer later recalled a visit to Kiev around 1920 in which a member of the Culture League announced during a meeting that, “had writers of the whole world been given a chance to read Der Nister’s work, they would have broken their pens.”

The clique’s reverence, however, provided little insurance for Der Nister in the Soviet Union of the mid-1930s. The Soviet government looked suspiciously on any group that set itself apart from the main social body. Though the government officially acknowledged Yiddish—mainly to show a peaceable face to the international community—as the language of a Jewish minority, libraries were throwing out Yiddish books, Yiddish schools and institutes were being shuttered, and newspaper presses stopped. In 1934, Der Nister explained to his brother in a letter, “The writing of my book is a necessity; otherwise I am nothing; otherwise I am erased from literature and from life.”

The book Der Nister labored over would not be a revolt against the modern Yiddish literary tradition, but revolutionary in its adherence to that tradition during a time when Yiddish culture was under attack. That book, The Family Mashber, was conceived as an epic tale of at least three volumes, relating how a generally happy, successful Jewish family in the Polish-Ukrainian town of N (actually Der Nister’s hometown, Berdichev) lost that happiness completely within one short year in the 1870s.

At least that is how the book ends now.

Let’s say a racehorse is a gelding—in other words, the end of the line. His worth, his entire value, lies only in himself. No colts or fillies will trail him on the pedigree tree. Either he performs or he fails. He might find himself one day in an air-conditioned stall in Dubai being massaged, hoof to top line, by the best masseuse in the equine business, fed his preferred twenty-two or so pounds of oats, nine pounds of hay, and thirteen gallons of water. He might take a dip in his pool after a workout. That is, if he can run.

If he can’t run, he might find himself watching a questionable stranger screwing a broken lightbulb above his moldy stall as lightning flashes, and then feel the switch of a whip. When his frantic nose hits the wiring and he falls to the hay electrocuted, he’ll become tomorrow’s insurance settlement. Or he might find himself holding together a child’s diorama, because indeed horses still can be rendered for glue.

What exactly goes on in their brains? Apparently not much flows between right and left lobe, but they are keenly sensitive to the emotions and desires of humans. Take Clever Hans, for example, a turn-of-the-century horse thought to have extraordinary mathematical abilities because he could tap out the answers to difficult equations with his hoof. He toured Germany on that talent. But when a commission decided to investigate the claims, they found that this horse could guess the right answer only if he could see his questioner and if the questioner knew the answer. Clever Hans would judge small shifts in body language, an angled head, a stiffening neck, cues the questioner didn’t even know he was giving.

Horses might not be geniuses, but they know a lot about us humans.

Six years ago, Chaplain Jim Brazzil reported for his first day of his new job at the Huntsville prison in Texas. Called to the Lord at age 9 in his hometown of Temple, Texas, he’s been ministering since he was 17 and has served as a Baptist pastor since 20. He has worked in a tuberculosis ward in a Ukrainian maximum-security prison and has seen all manner of physical horrors as a paramedic. But that day, at age 45, his assignment daunted him for the first time. “By the way,” the administrators told him in passing, “there is an execution tonight, and we need you to handle it.”

“I can’t even explain the experience,” Brazzil says now, in his soft drawl. “It was extremely traumatic. It was extremely religious. It opened my eyes and my life to things I had never even dreamed of, as far as being alive. Back then, they were still executing at midnight, so it was a long, hard day.”

On the campaign trail, George W. Bush has had to explain why Texas puts more people to death than any other state, with over 130 executed during his tenure as governor. But Brazzil faces more pressing questions from the 131 men and women he has counseled in the last two weeks of their lives, through the last full day of their lives, to the moment that he puts his hand on their leg and watches their last breath.