When I first met [Elaine] Pagels, she reminded me of a caricature Einstein – the dreamy academic heading down Nassau Street, his keys falling out of one pocket, a pen leaking in the other. Pagels, too, presents a deceptively absentminded face to the world. Because she is forever rushing from one commitment to another, she is often late, forgetting things, dropping things, a little helpless. Her acquaintance with the world of the ordinary seems, at times, unsure. When we traveled together from Princeton to Harvard, train schedules and airport gates seemed to baffle her. In a retro sort of way, she invites help. You can't resist carrying her bag, or checking her forehead to see if she has a fever. And yet she is enormously strong. Pagels not only survived two tragedies in the space of fifteen months but since then has written another book, reared her children, taught her many students. She is, by all reports, a good colleague, a devoted friend. Her mind is quick and generous. At fifty-two, she has a mild, earnest appearance (a rounded, friendly face, windblown blond hair), and yet in conversation she is absolutely fierce, focused, picking apart the careless question, delighted by the unexpected one. When she delivers her lectures for an undergraduate course on the New Testament – Monday and Wednesday mornings at ten – she does not so much pace the room as prowl it. Pagels radiates so much intensity that you somehow imagine a fast-burning cigarette in her hand. There is none. She does not smoke. She smolders.

from The Devil Problem,
The New Yorker,
April 1995

The man who opened the door looked exactly like Stalin: a little thinner, perhaps, his mustache more a pencil line than a hairbrush, but, still, the resemblance was chilling. He was in full military dress and, at first, conducted himself with the formality of a Politburo member. We entered a room that had several portraits of Stalin on the wall and a bookcase crammed with Party and military histories published in the Stalin era. There was a simple table and on it a stack of fresh paper and several sharpened pencils.

"So, what is question number one?" he said as he stared hard at me across the table. This was not a naïve man. He was not so foolish as to think that an American reporter was visiting in order to do anything other than harm – and, in this, I suppose, he was right. But there was no point in confronting him. I simply asked him what he thought about his grandfather, what he thought of the attacks in the press and within the Party. It was the question he had expected.

"I always adored Stalin," he said. "No congress, no book or magazine article is ever going to change that and make me doubt him. He is my grandfather, first of all, and I adore him."

Solzhenitsyn was "an immoral scum," and, as for Gorbachev, "The party's authority has fallen, this is obvious. They say the fish rots from the head . . . ."

Djugashvili had a nasty word to say for all the obvious people – Shatrov, Afanasyev, Sakharov, Yeltsin, the leaders of Memorial. He went on for a while, too, about the latest plays and television programs that had slandered his grandfather. He clearly kept up with it all . . . "Enough!" he said, slamming his hand down on the table. His face broke into a weird grin. "I like you! I have decided that! Now I will make you my real guest!" . . .

Djugashvili yanked a jerry can out from under a table. "Here is cha-cha," he said, lifting the moonshine. Then he put a watermelon in my arms, and we marched back to the living room.

"Pour out two glasses of cha-cha," he said. Djugashvili cut thick slices of the watermelon with a curved dagger and salted them. He stood and lifted his glass and waited. I stood.

"We shall drink to friendship between nations!" he said. Fair enough, I thought, and we both downed the cha-cha, a home brew from Tbilisi. On first gulp, the drink did not seem as obvious or as strong as Russian vodka.

Djugashvili stood again. "In a Georgian house," he said, "the host makes all the toasts, and in my house, the second toast is always to Stalin!"

I felt a wave of nausea sweep through me and weaken my knees. But I kept my glass high and my eyes fixed on my host's. "The Soviet Union took on the brunt of the war, and Stalin was at the head of all that," he went on. "He took a backward country, with peasants in felt boots, and made it great. And yet we still curse him. These people should be punished and their lies exposed! I think there will come a day when the Soviet people will give their evaluation. And so . . . to Stalin!"

"To Stalin," I said. And may God forgive me.

from Lenin's Tomb, 1993

If the numbers continue to go his way, [Marion] Barry will prove to be more resilient than Richard Nixon; he will pull off the most bizarre victory since James Michael Curley managed to return as mayor of Boston half a century ago after serving time in prison for mail fraud. But unlike Nixon or Curley, Barry does not ask voters to look past his flaws. He would prefer, in a sense, that they focus on them. In Barry's telling, his downfall was the result of personal weakness and, more profoundly, relentless persecution by racist "power structures": the FBI, Congress, the district attorney's office, The Washington Post. Using a campaign vocabulary that combines aspects of the Baptist Church, Afrocentrism, and twelve-step recovery programs, Barry means to run as a representative man, one who "has been there and back, just like so many folks." He has made his campaign an in-your-face Bible story in which the Deity is both Savior and precinct captain. To deny Barry would somehow be unforgiving, un-Christian, an apostasy against truths holier than any solution to the District's budget crisis. As for those who choose not to vote for him, he says, "That's between you and your God."

from The Situationist,
The New Yorker,
September 1994

At Newsweek, [Ben] Bradlee had been an average, if high-profile, reporter, an ordinary writer. ("Port Said is now an ugly, festering sore on the mouth of the Suez Canal.") But upon his arrival at the Post, Bradlee, having promised Katharine Graham no small part of his anatomy, became a genius of an editor. Nothing unprecedented here: Angelo Dundee couldn't much fight; Vince Lombardi was an unspectacular bruiser at Fordham. Generalship is not about fighting the battle; it's about inspiring the enlisted.

from Last of the Red Hots,
The New Yorker,
September 1995

We order and excite our mental lives with stories. Mostly, they are the same stories over and over again. The tabloids (in print and, now, on television) have their set of stories: the wealthy brought low, betrayal in marriage and commerce, the murder of the innocent, the humbling of the celebrity, the ordinary man's triumph. They differ from the novels of, say, Dreiser, or the plays of Shakespeare, in the richness of detail, the complexity of thought and incident, the wealth of language, but in the story of O.J. Simpson (the tabloid story of the millennium) there were surely elements of An American Tragedy and Othello. There are other textures of mental life – the analytical, the pure emotions of lust or rage – but stories, the telling and listening, are much of what we are.

from the preface to The Devil Problem and other True Stories,
a collection of magazine stories
mostly from The New Yorker

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