The Best American Magazine Writing 2020

by Sid Holt

  Warren agrees that her belief in Socratic dialogue informs how she instinctively engages with people professionally. In part, she said, Socratic teaching is about that back-and-forth, a breaking down of ideas and examining them from all angles. So when she and her policy team began discussing a wealth tax, she said, “I kept taking the side of the opposition: Wouldn’t this create a problem?… We’re pulling it apart to stress-test it, see if it would work.”

  When she was first doing town halls, after proposing a wealth tax, she said, “I’d look at the faces and think, I don’t think everybody is connecting. It’s not quite gelling. So I tried a couple of different ways, and then it hit me. I’d say, ‘Anybody in here own a home or grow up where a family owned a home?’ A lot of hands would go up. And I’d say, ‘You’ve been paying a wealth tax forever. It’s just called a property tax. So I just want to do a property tax; only here, instead of just being on your home, for bazillionaires, I want it to be on the stock portfolio, the diamonds, the Rembrandt, and the yachts.’ And everyone kind of laughs, but they get the basic principle because they’ve got a place to build from.”

  Warren has also remained a “cold-caller” in other corners of her professional life, running offices as she ran a classroom. Corey Stone, a former assistant director of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, worked with her for six months as she built the agency; he recalled that her former students who worked at the bureau had warned him that she was “the queen of the cold call and had high expectations that people have their facts in order.” In small meetings, he said, she’d ask direct questions of the people present, “and if we didn’t have the answer, it was not necessarily that we were dumb, just that there weren’t data to answer those questions. So it made us make sure that we had the research to answer the questions we couldn’t answer.”

  Consider too that, by some measures, Warren has brought the process of cold-calling into her fund-raising strategy: After vowing not to do closed-door fund-raisers with big donors, she began phoning small-dollar donors at random, mercifully not to ask them about case law. But it’s the same principle: The people coming in with structural advantages—money, confidence, experience navigating intimidating institutions or plying the powerful—should not have more access than those who don’t.

  One of Warren’s former students who declined to be named had a theory about the seeming paradox of a woman known as a bold political progressive adhering to an old-fashioned, rule-bound approach to teaching. It reminded him, he said, of Thurgood Marshall, who was known for being punctilious about civil procedure even as he broke revolutionary ground on civil rights. This student talked about how Marshall understood that rules could be used to enforce equality, and that as soon as you introduced flexibility and discretion, those with more power would take advantage of the wiggle room. Regulations, calling every name in a classroom, could serve as a set of guide rails, a system it would be harder to take advantage of. It’s easy to see how Warren’s fondness for just this kind of formal system jibes with her view of regulations in the financial industry. It is also true that teachers love rules.

  Along with the rules, there were the dogs. Good Faith (given to her by students and named after “good-faith purchasers,” those who didn’t use a contract and who, she had explained in class, were like golden retrievers: “empty head, good heart”) used to sit with Warren during office hours. After Faith came Otis. Alison Schary, who graduated in 2008 and is now an intellectual-property lawyer, recalled that Warren used to post office hours for Otis. “You could sign out Otis and take him for a walk around campus.”

  Her current dog, Bailey, has become a staple on the campaign trail, doing the work of any good politician’s pet: making the candidate more accessible to those she might otherwise intimidate.

  * * *

  For years, Warren served on Harvard Law School’s admissions committee. Shugerman briefly served alongside her and noted “how focused she was on giving special consideration to people who’d been first in their families to go to college, students who had been in the military, who’d had work experience outside of the academy.” Shugerman said it was striking that Warren chose the admissions committee, since big law-school muckety-mucks often preferred the hiring committees.

  This is part of how Ondersma came to Harvard and wound up in Warren’s office hours. It wasn’t pure serendipity: Warren headed the committee that had decided to admit Ondersma as a second-year law student from Arizona State. Warren knew exactly whom she was talking to when Ondersma first came to her office and, once she was there, took great satisfaction in persuading the young radical to focus her fight against injustice on the study of commercial law.

  When I asked Warren about her wooing of progressive students into her own traditionally more staid field, she rubbed her hands together, a cheerful spider in full command of her web. She told me a story about how she performed the same trick with Katie Porter, a student who flubbed an early answer in class, came to beg Warren not to give up on her, and blurted out, “I don’t care about any of this bankruptcy stuff!” Porter not only went on to study bankruptcy with Warren; she wound up teaching it as a professor and, in 2018, flipped an Orange County California House seat blue. Warren wants progressives, she said, “armed with maces and spears and sticks” in their fights for economic equality. Porter now performs viral eviscerations of bankers and bureaucrats on the House floor, reminiscent of what her mentor does in the Senate.

  Porter isn’t the only elected progressive to have emerged from Warren’s classes. Boston city-council member Michelle Wu was a Warren student; so, of course, was Joe Kennedy. And both Warren’s chief of staff, Dan Geldon, and her former policy director, Ganesh Sitaraman, are former students. She has, by some measures, used her time in the classroom to build a small army, which also includes prominent bankruptcy professors Dalié Jiménez and Abbye Atkinson.

  But there’s another student of Warren’s who now sits alongside her in the Senate: the bloodred Tom Cotton from Arkansas. Cotton once told Chuck Todd that, while he knew from her scholarship that she was a liberal, he hadn’t been able to divine her politics in class.

  Warren and Cotton appeared together at a 2017 panel at Harvard for senators associated with the school (at which Warren was the only woman and the only panelist without a Harvard degree in the all-white group). During the discussion, Warren was describing why she’d come to teach at Harvard, how “every day I got to walk into the classroom where [there was] such privilege, such opportunity, such incredible tools, but to say to people, ‘Come on, get better at what you’ve got and widen it out, because the only mistake you can make is not to get out there and do something with passion.’ ”

  Cotton interrupted her: “That’s not exactly the way I remember it,” he deadpanned, explaining that “she was teaching us that lesson by being very hard on us.”

  Warren leaned over and looked at her former student. “And are you sorry?” she asked him.

  Cotton backed down. “She was probably the best professor I had,” he conceded.

  * * *

  Writing about Warren in the Times Magazine earlier this summer, Emily Bazelon, herself a lecturer at Yale Law School, wrote that “Warren didn’t sound to me like a law professor on the trail, but she did sound like a teacher.” Bazelon worried, a bit, that “trying to educate people isn’t the easiest way to connect with them.”

  In a presidential context, the question of how women might make themselves “likable” looms large and perpetually unsolvable. Warren, like every other woman who speaks loudly in public, has already been tagged for being imperious and inauthentic, for faking her love for beer, for being too elite or too folksy. Male paths to presidential endearment—academic genius, a facility for languages, shows of muscularity, business acumen, bellowing, football jokes, and the plausible enjoyment of beer—are apparently off the table. So what are women going to do?

  The conviction that teaching—being a literal teacher—might be an answer feel
s, on some level, far-fetched. First, it is hard work when part of the education means schooling the public on the bias and exclusion that have left nonmale, nonwhite candidates on the margins to begin with. Warren’s colleague and competitor Kamala Harris recently observed—after engaging in a back-and-forth with Joe Biden over the history of busing—“there’s still a lot of educating to do about who we are” and acknowledged that those efforts can be draining. “In my moments of fatigue with it all, I’m like, ‘Look, I’m not running to be a history professor,’ ” Harris said.

  Then there’s the fact that it’s a very short step from clarifying truth teller to the emasculating scold who shames you or puts you in a time-out. I felt a shiver of dread when, during the second debate, she stared at a distracted and giggling audience in the midst of her story about activist Ady Barkan’s struggle to pay for his ongoing ALS treatment and admonished, “This isn’t funny. This is somebody who has health insurance and is dying.” Eep, I thought. But everyone shut up and listened.

  Here’s the thing: since there aren’t a lot of other easy models for powerful women to authoritatively communicate with masses of people they’ve never been encouraged to lead, why wouldn’t it make sense that the model by which a woman could emerge in a presidential sphere might be the same as the one that permitted women entry into the public sphere to begin with?

  It is, after all, no coincidence that many of the few women to have made serious approaches toward the presidency in the past found their first professional foothold in a classroom: Shirley Chisholm was a director of nursery schools and an early-education consultant who made early education central to her political agenda; Hillary Clinton was the second female law professor at the University of Arkansas; Margaret Chase Smith and Elizabeth Dole also did stints as teachers.

  It’s true that people may resent teachers. It’s also true that people are primed to resent teachers, because they resent women who might wield power over them, and it is still new and uncomfortable to think about women having political—presidential!—power. And yet: People who have had great teachers love them in ways that are intense and alchemical and irrational and sometimes difficult to convey—which is also, oddly enough, how some people love the politicians they believe in and choose to fight for.

  Ondersma, who was going to teach women’s studies and critical race theory, now teaches bankruptcy and commercial law at Rutgers, where many of her students are working-class children of immigrants and were first-generation college students. She cold-calls them, using the Socratic method to draw them in. Ondersma is still in touch with Warren, whom she talks about the way many people talk about the teachers who changed their lives. “Every time I messaged her, she always wrote back and said, ‘I’m proud of you,’ ” Ondersma said, calling those “the four most important words I’ve heard from almost anyone in my life.”

  It may be true that we don’t want a president who asks us to do homework. But we might want one who manages to see in us, somehow, potential.

  John Lee Clark

  Tactile Art

  Poetry

  WINNER—ESSAYS AND CRITICISM

  “We have DeafBlind artists, but do we have DeafBlind art?” asks John Lee Clark in this essay for Poetry. Clark answers in part by describing his encounters with objects admired or created by sighted people and then offers a more-meaningful alternative for DeafBlind people like him: tactile art. “True tactile art must have language,” writes Clark. “It should express and extract meaning. Texture, contour, temperature, density, give, recoil, adsorption, and many other elements are units in this language.” The judges who chose “Tactile Art” as the winner of the 2020 National Magazine Award for Essays and Criticism praised the keen intensity of Clark’s writing and described the essay as “startling and revelatory.” Clark is a poet and essayist whose most recent book is Where I Stand: On the Signing Community and My DeafBlind Experience. Founded in Chicago in 1912, Poetry previously won National Magazine Awards for General Excellence, in 2011 and 2014, and Podcasting, also in 2011.

  i

  Downtown St. Paul is home to one of the most extensive skyway systems in the world. The sprawling maze connects buildings via enclosed bridges above the streets. The skyway solves one of our challenges as DeafBlind people traveling through a city: crossing busy intersections. My family lived there for as long as we could afford to because it was such a joy to be a mouse racing inside and out, up and down, plying my long single whisker. Following my nose, I found all the best places to eat and, following other instincts, I infiltrated all the cleanest bathrooms hidden away from the masses.

  One day my partner, Adrean, an ASL Deaf artist, came home to tell me about something she’d spotted. It was a sculpture of a giant open Braille book. She had never gone that way before, but I’d passed by it several times. It stood in a building’s courtyard, some paces from the street. You had to see it to see it.

  A few days later friends from out of town were visiting. We took them out to our beloved Ruam Mit Thai, and after our feast we gave them a tour of the city. I remembered Adrean’s sighting and asked her to show us the public work.

  It turned out to be a huge sheet of metal propped up, its bottom edge near the ground and its top edge a foot taller than I. Each Braille dot was the size of a golf ball. This made it impossible to read the text, which was supposed to be a passage from a Walt Whitman poem. Although the sheet mimicked the open face of a book, with two facing pages, each line ran across both pages.

  There was a plaque with the title, artist name, perhaps a statement. Did the statement pay tribute to Braille? This information was not available in regular Braille.

  As I struggled to read what the golf balls had to say, a security guard trundled out of the building. He spoke no sign language but we got the message. One of the nice secret restrooms was close by, and we hurried there to wash our hands.

  ii

  Museums are difficult to get to. They don’t want me to touch anything. They require that I make an appointment—by phone, no less. So my information about mainstream aesthetics has largely come from ducks.

  They rule over gift shops, Goodwills, and garage sales. Squeaking rubber versions have long been infants’ first encounter with artifice. Minnesota’s state bird is the loon, and many homes and stores here feature wooden, ceramic, metal, stone, plush, and glass loons. Waterfowl are a favorite of woodcarvers. There is even a DeafBlind Canadian who whittles, paints, and sells ducklings. What they all have in common is a flat bottom. A goodly portion of their natural anatomy is taboo. They are meant to appear floating on the still waters of a tabletop, a windowsill, or a bookshelf.

  The hitch is that were I to handle a live duck paddling across a pond, I would be able to feel it as a whole, for water is not a tactile barrier as it is a visual one.

  Small wonder, then, that one of my definitions of beauty is a certain stuffed wood duck in the nature center at Richfield, Minnesota. A piece of ordinary taxidermy, its feathers are ridiculously soft. “Wood duck,” I was inspired to write in a slateku, a form I invented using the Braille slate, “I feel for you / You never had hands to stroke / Your own wings.” Even more bewildering are its round velvet bottom and granular webbed feet, which bespeak a master creator.

  iii

  “Here, you can touch my face.”

  “Thank you, no.”

  “No, it’s fine. Really.”

  “Nah. I just—”

  “I want you to.”

  Well, I want to tell them, what you are offering for my inspection is just a skin-covered skull.

  “A head,” jokes the eighteenth-century British comedian George Alexander Stephens, “is a mere bulbous excrescence, growing out from between the shoulders like a wen; it is supposed to be a mere expletive, just to wear a hat on, to fill up the hollow of a wig, to take snuff with, or have your hair dressed upon.”

  A friend once showed me a prized possession of his, an egg-shaped sculpture. I could feel its eyebrows, nose, and mouth, b
ut they conveyed nothing. For my sighted friend, it had an exquisite expression of serenity. Peace, it’s called.

  At least it was bald. The bust of Mark Twain in a museum I visited in New York had him wearing a futuristic helmet, with fantastical whorling grooves. A terrible tumor grows under his nose. Ulysses S. Grant was similarly helmeted but had an iceberg stuck up his jaw.

  Helmets notwithstanding, sculptors were onto something with nudity and gesture until the Victorians began to manufacture a statue for every philanthropist and politician. Of these “leaden dolls,” G. K. Chesterton grouses, “Each of them is cased in a cylindrical frock-coat, and each carries either a scroll or a dubious-looking garment over the arm that might be either a bathing-towel or a light great-coat.”

  iv

  You are the best one

  in the museum. You don’t

  try to be real. You

  are wise not to attempt

  hair. You have no face.

  Your clothes make you. You

  were inspired by a youth

  famous for pretending to be

  a statue. He would die

  five years later. But you

  are still here. We touch

  you. You do not flinch.

  —Cubist Statue, by John Lee Clark, after Jacques Lipchitz’s Matador, 1914–1915

  v

  We will call her Allie. Shortly after her death I learned from friends that she was a fake. It was one reason she had relocated some years earlier, to leave a local DeafBlind community that had caught on to her.