"<a class=\"internal-link\" href=\"00.02 Inbox/Cheek to Cheek (by Ella Fitzgerald Louis Armstrong - 1987).md\"> Cheek to Cheek (by Ella Fitzgerald Louis Armstrong - 1987) </a>",
"<a class=\"internal-link\" href=\"00.02 Inbox/Perfect Days (2023).md\"> Perfect Days (2023) </a>",
"<a class=\"internal-link\" href=\"00.02 Inbox/It's a Man's Man's Man's World (by James Brown - 1967).md\"> It's a Man's Man's Man's World (by James Brown - 1967) </a>",
"<a class=\"internal-link\" href=\"00.02 Inbox/Barry White Sings for Someone You Love (by Barry White - 1977).md\"> Barry White Sings for Someone You Love (by Barry White - 1977) </a>",
"<a class=\"internal-link\" href=\"00.02 Inbox/Images 1966–1967 (by David Bowie - 1973).md\"> Images 1966–1967 (by David Bowie - 1973) </a>",
"<a class=\"internal-link\" href=\"00.02 Inbox/Arena (by Duran Duran - 1984).md\"> Arena (by Duran Duran - 1984) </a>",
"<a class=\"internal-link\" href=\"00.02 Inbox/Dream of a Lifetime (by Marvin Gaye - 1985).md\"> Dream of a Lifetime (by Marvin Gaye - 1985) </a>",
"<a class=\"internal-link\" href=\"00.02 Inbox/Purple Rain (by Prince The Revolution - 1984).md\"> Purple Rain (by Prince The Revolution - 1984) </a>",
"<a class=\"internal-link\" href=\"00.02 Inbox/Nastradamus (by Nas - 1999).md\"> Nastradamus (by Nas - 1999) </a>",
"<a class=\"internal-link\" href=\"00.02 Inbox/Nastradamus (by Nas - 1999).md\"> Nastradamus (by Nas - 1999) </a>",
"<a class=\"internal-link\" href=\"00.02 Inbox/Nastradamus (by Nas - 1999).md\"> Nastradamus (by Nas - 1999) </a>",
"<a class=\"internal-link\" href=\"00.02 Inbox/Purple Rain (by Prince The Revolution - 1984).md\"> Purple Rain (by Prince The Revolution - 1984) </a>",
"<a class=\"internal-link\" href=\"00.02 Inbox/Galette des rois à la frangipane la recette légère et moelleuse de Christian Le Squer.md\"> Galette des rois à la frangipane la recette légère et moelleuse de Christian Le Squer </a>",
"<a class=\"internal-link\" href=\"00.02 Inbox/Fifth Sun.md\"> Fifth Sun </a>",
"<a class=\"internal-link\" href=\"00.02 Inbox/A Gaza Conundrum The Story Behind the Rise of Hamas.md\"> A Gaza Conundrum The Story Behind the Rise of Hamas </a>",
"<a class=\"internal-link\" href=\"00.02 Inbox/Why Parents Struggle So Much in the World's Richest Country.md\"> Why Parents Struggle So Much in the World's Richest Country </a>",
"<a class=\"internal-link\" href=\"00.02 Inbox/Was Frank Gore the Last NFL Running Back - ESPN.md\"> Was Frank Gore the Last NFL Running Back - ESPN </a>",
"<a class=\"internal-link\" href=\"00.02 Inbox/Fun is dead..md\"> Fun is dead. </a>",
"<a class=\"internal-link\" href=\"00.02 Inbox/How a Script Doctor Found His Own Voice.md\"> How a Script Doctor Found His Own Voice </a>",
"<a class=\"internal-link\" href=\"00.02 Inbox/For Greater Glory - The True Story of Cristiada (2012).md\"> For Greater Glory - The True Story of Cristiada (2012) </a>",
"<a class=\"internal-link\" href=\"00.02 Inbox/In the Heat of the Night (by Imagination - 1982).md\"> In the Heat of the Night (by Imagination - 1982) </a>",
"<a class=\"internal-link\" href=\"00.02 Inbox/East Saint Louis Toodle-Oo Black Beauty (by Duke Ellington And His Orchestra - 1936).md\"> East Saint Louis Toodle-Oo Black Beauty (by Duke Ellington And His Orchestra - 1936) </a>",
"<a class=\"internal-link\" href=\"00.02 Inbox/King of the Delta Blues Singers (by Robert Johnson - 1961).md\"> King of the Delta Blues Singers (by Robert Johnson - 1961) </a>",
"<a class=\"internal-link\" href=\"00.02 Inbox/Sings the Blues (by Lightnin’ Hopkins - 1995).md\"> Sings the Blues (by Lightnin’ Hopkins - 1995) </a>",
"<a class=\"internal-link\" href=\"00.02 Inbox/My Baby Just Cares for Me (by Nina Simone - 2012).md\"> My Baby Just Cares for Me (by Nina Simone - 2012) </a>",
"<a class=\"internal-link\" href=\"00.02 Inbox/Naked In The Summertime Volume 2 (by Prince - 2016).md\"> Naked In The Summertime Volume 2 (by Prince - 2016) </a>",
"<a class=\"internal-link\" href=\"00.02 Inbox/Naked In The Summertime Volume 1 (by Prince - 2016).md\"> Naked In The Summertime Volume 1 (by Prince - 2016) </a>",
"<a class=\"internal-link\" href=\"00.02 Inbox/The Dark Side of the Moon (by Pink Floyd - 1973).md\"> The Dark Side of the Moon (by Pink Floyd - 1973) </a>",
"<a class=\"internal-link\" href=\"00.02 Inbox/Joan Baez (by Joan Baez - 1960).md\"> Joan Baez (by Joan Baez - 1960) </a>",
"<a class=\"internal-link\" href=\"00.02 Inbox/Simon and Garfunkel’s Greatest Hits (by Simon Garfunkel - 1972).md\"> Simon and Garfunkel’s Greatest Hits (by Simon Garfunkel - 1972) </a>",
"<a class=\"internal-link\" href=\"00.02 Inbox/Louise attaque (by Louise Attaque - 1997).md\"> Louise attaque (by Louise Attaque - 1997) </a>",
"<a class=\"internal-link\" href=\"00.02 Inbox/Them Again (by Them - 1966).md\"> Them Again (by Them - 1966) </a>",
"<a class=\"internal-link\" href=\"00.02 Inbox/Rum Sodomy the Lash (by The Pogues - 1985).md\"> Rum Sodomy the Lash (by The Pogues - 1985) </a>",
"<a class=\"internal-link\" href=\"00.02 Inbox/The Best of The Pogues (by The Pogues - 1991).md\"> The Best of The Pogues (by The Pogues - 1991) </a>",
"<a class=\"internal-link\" href=\"03.05 Vinyls/I Can Understand It (by Bobby Womack - 1974).md\"> I Can Understand It (by Bobby Womack - 1974) </a>",
"<a class=\"internal-link\" href=\"03.04 Cinematheque/Perfect Days (2023).md\"> Perfect Days (2023) </a>",
"<a class=\"internal-link\" href=\"03.05 Vinyls/Reggae Rebel (by Bob Marley & the Wailers - 1981).md\"> Reggae Rebel (by Bob Marley & the Wailers - 1981) </a>",
"<a class=\"internal-link\" href=\"00.08 Bookmarks/Bookmarks - Gift ideas.md\"> Bookmarks - Gift ideas </a>",
"<a class=\"internal-link\" href=\"03.05 Vinyls/Reggae Rebel (by Bob Marley & the Wailers - 1984).md\"> Reggae Rebel (by Bob Marley & the Wailers - 1984) </a>",
"<a class=\"internal-link\" href=\"03.03 Food & Wine/Galette des rois.md\"> Galette des rois </a>",
"<a class=\"internal-link\" href=\"03.05 Vinyls/Reggea Rebel (by Bob Marley & the Wailers - 1984).md\"> Reggea Rebel (by Bob Marley & the Wailers - 1984) </a>",
"<a class=\"internal-link\" href=\"00.02 Inbox/Galette des rois.md\"> Galette des rois </a>",
"<a class=\"internal-link\" href=\"03.05 Vinyls/Hit The Road Jack (by Ray Charles - 2016).md\"> Hit The Road Jack (by Ray Charles - 2016) </a>",
"<a class=\"internal-link\" href=\"00.02 Inbox/Galette des rois à la r.md\"> Galette des rois à la r </a>",
"<a class=\"internal-link\" href=\"03.05 Vinyls/Cheek to Cheek (by Ella Fitzgerald Louis Armstrong - 1987).md\"> Cheek to Cheek (by Ella Fitzgerald Louis Armstrong - 1987) </a>",
"<a class=\"internal-link\" href=\"00.03 News/A Gaza Conundrum The Story Behind the Rise of Hamas.md\"> A Gaza Conundrum The Story Behind the Rise of Hamas </a>",
"<a class=\"internal-link\" href=\"03.05 Vinyls/It's a Man's Man's Man's World (by James Brown - 1967).md\"> It's a Man's Man's Man's World (by James Brown - 1967) </a>",
"<a class=\"internal-link\" href=\"00.03 News/Why Parents Struggle So Much in the World's Richest Country.md\"> Why Parents Struggle So Much in the World's Richest Country </a>",
"<a class=\"internal-link\" href=\"03.05 Vinyls/Barry White Sings for Someone You Love (by Barry White - 1977).md\"> Barry White Sings for Someone You Love (by Barry White - 1977) </a>",
"<a class=\"internal-link\" href=\"00.03 News/Was Frank Gore the Last NFL Running Back - ESPN.md\"> Was Frank Gore the Last NFL Running Back - ESPN </a>",
"<a class=\"internal-link\" href=\"03.05 Vinyls/Images 1966–1967 (by David Bowie - 1973).md\"> Images 1966–1967 (by David Bowie - 1973) </a>",
"<a class=\"internal-link\" href=\"00.03 News/Fun is dead..md\"> Fun is dead. </a>",
"<a class=\"internal-link\" href=\"03.05 Vinyls/Arena (by Duran Duran - 1984).md\"> Arena (by Duran Duran - 1984) </a>",
"<a class=\"internal-link\" href=\"00.03 News/How a Script Doctor Found His Own Voice.md\"> How a Script Doctor Found His Own Voice </a>",
"<a class=\"internal-link\" href=\"03.05 Vinyls/Dream of a Lifetime (by Marvin Gaye - 1985).md\"> Dream of a Lifetime (by Marvin Gaye - 1985) </a>",
"<a class=\"internal-link\" href=\"03.04 Cinematheque/For Greater Glory - The True Story of Cristiada (2012).md\"> For Greater Glory - The True Story of Cristiada (2012) </a>",
"<a class=\"internal-link\" href=\"03.05 Vinyls/Purple Rain (by Prince The Revolution - 1984).md\"> Purple Rain (by Prince The Revolution - 1984) </a>",
"<a class=\"internal-link\" href=\"03.05 Vinyls/In the Heat of the Night (by Imagination - 1982).md\"> In the Heat of the Night (by Imagination - 1982) </a>",
"<a class=\"internal-link\" href=\"03.05 Vinyls/Bobby Womack - I Can Understand It.md\"> Bobby Womack - I Can Understand It </a>",
"<a class=\"internal-link\" href=\"03.05 Vinyls/I’m Every Woman (by Chaka Khan - 1978).md\"> I’m Every Woman (by Chaka Khan - 1978) </a>",
"<a class=\"internal-link\" href=\"03.05 Vinyls/Barry White - Sings for Someone You Love.md\"> Barry White - Sings for Someone You Love </a>",
"<a class=\"internal-link\" href=\"03.05 Vinyls/East Saint Louis Toodle-Oo Black Beauty (by Duke Ellington And His Orchestra - 1936).md\"> East Saint Louis Toodle-Oo Black Beauty (by Duke Ellington And His Orchestra - 1936) </a>",
"<a class=\"internal-link\" href=\"03.05 Vinyls/King of the Delta Blues Singers (by Robert Johnson - 1961).md\"> King of the Delta Blues Singers (by Robert Johnson - 1961) </a>",
"<a class=\"internal-link\" href=\"03.05 Vinyls/Sings the Blues (by Lightnin’ Hopkins - 1995).md\"> Sings the Blues (by Lightnin’ Hopkins - 1995) </a>",
"<a class=\"internal-link\" href=\"03.05 Vinyls/My Baby Just Cares for Me (by Nina Simone - 2012).md\"> My Baby Just Cares for Me (by Nina Simone - 2012) </a>",
"<a class=\"internal-link\" href=\"03.05 Vinyls/Back to Black (by Amy Winehouse - 2006).md\"> Back to Black (by Amy Winehouse - 2006) </a>",
"<a class=\"internal-link\" href=\"01.03 Family/2023-12-18 Preparation for 2024.md\"> 2023-12-18 Preparation for 2024 </a>",
"<a class=\"internal-link\" href=\"03.05 Vinyls/Naked In The Summertime Volume 1 (by Prince - 2016).md\"> Naked In The Summertime Volume 1 (by Prince - 2016) </a>",
"<a class=\"internal-link\" href=\"01.03 Family/2023-12-21 Christmas with Papa.md\"> 2023-12-21 Christmas with Papa </a>",
"<a class=\"internal-link\" href=\"00.02 Inbox/2023-12-21 Christmas with Papa.md\"> 2023-12-21 Christmas with Papa </a>",
"<a class=\"internal-link\" href=\"03.05 Vinyls/The Dark Side of the Moon (by Pink Floyd - 1973).md\"> The Dark Side of the Moon (by Pink Floyd - 1973) </a>",
"<a class=\"internal-link\" href=\"03.05 Vinyls/Simon and Garfunkel’s Greatest Hits (by Simon Garfunkel - 1972).md\"> Simon and Garfunkel’s Greatest Hits (by Simon Garfunkel - 1972) </a>",
"<a class=\"internal-link\" href=\"02.03 Zürich/Bei Babette.md\"> Bei Babette </a>",
"<a class=\"internal-link\" href=\"03.05 Vinyls/Louise attaque (by Louise Attaque - 1997).md\"> Louise attaque (by Louise Attaque - 1997) </a>",
"<a class=\"internal-link\" href=\"03.05 Vinyls/Rum Sodomy the Lash (by The Pogues - 1985).md\"> Rum Sodomy the Lash (by The Pogues - 1985) </a>",
"<a class=\"internal-link\" href=\"02.03 Zürich/The Artisan.md\"> The Artisan </a>",
"<a class=\"internal-link\" href=\"03.05 Vinyls/The Best of The Pogues (by The Pogues - 1991).md\"> The Best of The Pogues (by The Pogues - 1991) </a>",
"<a class=\"internal-link\" href=\"03.05 Vinyls/Is This It (by The Strokes - 2003).md\"> Is This It (by The Strokes - 2003) </a>",
"<a class=\"internal-link\" href=\"02.03 Zürich/Zur Buech.md\"> Zur Buech </a>",
"<a class=\"internal-link\" href=\"03.05 Vinyls/Rage Against the Machine (by Rage Against the Machine - 1992).md\"> Rage Against the Machine (by Rage Against the Machine - 1992) </a>",
"<a class=\"internal-link\" href=\"03.05 Vinyls/Paris sous les bombes (by Suprême NTM - 1995).md\"> Paris sous les bombes (by Suprême NTM - 1995) </a>",
"<a class=\"internal-link\" href=\"03.05 Vinyls/Illmatic (by Nas - 1994).md\"> Illmatic (by Nas - 1994) </a>"
],
],
"Tagged":[
"Tagged":[
"<a class=\"internal-link\" href=\"00.02 Inbox/Bookmarks - Gift ideas.md\"> Bookmarks - Gift ideas </a>",
"<a class=\"internal-link\" href=\"03.03 Food & Wine/Galette des rois.md\"> Galette des rois </a>",
"<a class=\"internal-link\" href=\"00.02 Inbox/Galette des rois.md\"> Galette des rois </a>",
"<a class=\"internal-link\" href=\"00.03 News/A Gaza Conundrum The Story Behind the Rise of Hamas.md\"> A Gaza Conundrum The Story Behind the Rise of Hamas </a>",
"<a class=\"internal-link\" href=\"00.02 Inbox/A Gaza Conundrum The Story Behind the Rise of Hamas.md\"> A Gaza Conundrum The Story Behind the Rise of Hamas </a>",
"<a class=\"internal-link\" href=\"00.03 News/Why Parents Struggle So Much in the World's Richest Country.md\"> Why Parents Struggle So Much in the World's Richest Country </a>",
"<a class=\"internal-link\" href=\"00.02 Inbox/Was Frank Gore the Last NFL Running Back - ESPN.md\"> Was Frank Gore the Last NFL Running Back - ESPN </a>",
"<a class=\"internal-link\" href=\"00.03 News/How a Script Doctor Found His Own Voice.md\"> How a Script Doctor Found His Own Voice </a>",
"<a class=\"internal-link\" href=\"00.03 News/Fun is dead..md\"> Fun is dead. </a>",
"<a class=\"internal-link\" href=\"00.02 Inbox/By the Sea.md\"> By the Sea </a>",
"<a class=\"internal-link\" href=\"00.02 Inbox/By the Sea.md\"> By the Sea </a>",
"<a class=\"internal-link\" href=\"00.02 Inbox/How a Prison Gang Inspired by Hollywood Heists Stole $23 Million.md\"> How a Prison Gang Inspired by Hollywood Heists Stole $23 Million </a>",
"<a class=\"internal-link\" href=\"00.02 Inbox/How a Prison Gang Inspired by Hollywood Heists Stole $23 Million.md\"> How a Prison Gang Inspired by Hollywood Heists Stole $23 Million </a>",
"<a class=\"internal-link\" href=\"00.02 Inbox/Jacques Brel (by Jacques Brel - 2016).md\"> Jacques Brel (by Jacques Brel - 2016) </a>",
"<a class=\"internal-link\" href=\"00.02 Inbox/Naked In The Summertime Volume 2 (by Prince - 2016).md\"> Naked In The Summertime Volume 2 (by Prince - 2016) </a>",
"<a class=\"internal-link\" href=\"03.05 Vinyls/Is This It (by The Strokes - 2003).md\"> Is This It (by The Strokes - 2003) </a>",
"<a class=\"internal-link\" href=\"00.02 Inbox/HELP (by Danny Wright - 2020).md\"> HELP (by Danny Wright - 2020) </a>",
"<a class=\"internal-link\" href=\"00.02 Inbox/HELP (by Danny Wright - 2020).md\"> HELP (by Danny Wright - 2020) </a>",
"<a class=\"internal-link\" href=\"03.05 Vinyls/Barbara - Collection.md\"> Barbara - Collection </a>",
"<a class=\"internal-link\" href=\"03.05 Vinyls/Barbara - Collection.md\"> Barbara - Collection </a>",
"<a class=\"internal-link\" href=\"03.05 Vinyls/Bobby Womack - I Can Understand It.md\"> Bobby Womack - I Can Understand It </a>",
"<a class=\"internal-link\" href=\"03.05 Vinyls/Bobby Womack - I Can Understand It.md\"> Bobby Womack - I Can Understand It </a>",
@ -12612,63 +12910,60 @@
"<a class=\"internal-link\" href=\"00.02 Inbox/Why are Americans dying so young.md\"> Why are Americans dying so young </a>",
"<a class=\"internal-link\" href=\"00.02 Inbox/Why are Americans dying so young.md\"> Why are Americans dying so young </a>",
"<a class=\"internal-link\" href=\"00.02 Inbox/How Michael Cohen’s Big Mouth Could Be Derailing the Trump Prosecution.md\"> How Michael Cohen’s Big Mouth Could Be Derailing the Trump Prosecution </a>",
"<a class=\"internal-link\" href=\"00.02 Inbox/How Michael Cohen’s Big Mouth Could Be Derailing the Trump Prosecution.md\"> How Michael Cohen’s Big Mouth Could Be Derailing the Trump Prosecution </a>",
"<a class=\"internal-link\" href=\"00.02 Inbox/Les Combrailles, à la découverte de l’Auvergne secrète.md\"> Les Combrailles, à la découverte de l’Auvergne secrète </a>",
"<a class=\"internal-link\" href=\"00.02 Inbox/Les Combrailles, à la découverte de l’Auvergne secrète.md\"> Les Combrailles, à la découverte de l’Auvergne secrète </a>",
"<a class=\"internal-link\" href=\"00.02 Inbox/Fifth Sun.md\"> Fifth Sun </a>",
"<a class=\"internal-link\" href=\"00.02 Inbox/A Gaza Conundrum The Story Behind the Rise of Hamas.md\"> A Gaza Conundrum The Story Behind the Rise of Hamas </a>",
"<a class=\"internal-link\" href=\"00.03 News/Why Parents Struggle So Much in the World's Richest Country.md\"> Why Parents Struggle So Much in the World's Richest Country </a>",
"<a class=\"internal-link\" href=\"00.02 Inbox/Was Frank Gore the Last NFL Running Back - ESPN.md\"> Was Frank Gore the Last NFL Running Back - ESPN </a>",
"<a class=\"internal-link\" href=\"00.03 News/How a Script Doctor Found His Own Voice.md\"> How a Script Doctor Found His Own Voice </a>",
"<a class=\"internal-link\" href=\"00.03 News/Fun is dead..md\"> Fun is dead. </a>",
"<a class=\"internal-link\" href=\"03.04 Cinematheque/For Greater Glory - The True Story of Cristiada (2012).md\"> For Greater Glory - The True Story of Cristiada (2012) </a>",
"<a class=\"internal-link\" href=\"03.05 Vinyls/It's a Man's Man's Man's World (by James Brown - 1967).md\"> It's a Man's Man's Man's World (by James Brown - 1967) </a>",
"<a class=\"internal-link\" href=\"03.05 Vinyls/Cheek to Cheek (by Ella Fitzgerald Louis Armstrong - 1987).md\"> Cheek to Cheek (by Ella Fitzgerald Louis Armstrong - 1987) </a>",
"<a class=\"internal-link\" href=\"03.05 Vinyls/Hit The Road Jack (by Ray Charles - 2016).md\"> Hit The Road Jack (by Ray Charles - 2016) </a>",
"<a class=\"internal-link\" href=\"03.05 Vinyls/Space Is Only Noise (by Nicolas Jaar - 2011).md\"> Space Is Only Noise (by Nicolas Jaar - 2011) </a>",
"<a class=\"internal-link\" href=\"03.05 Vinyls/Barry White Sings for Someone You Love (by Barry White - 1977).md\"> Barry White Sings for Someone You Love (by Barry White - 1977) </a>",
"<a class=\"internal-link\" href=\"03.05 Vinyls/Images 1966–1967 (by David Bowie - 1973).md\"> Images 1966–1967 (by David Bowie - 1973) </a>",
"<a class=\"internal-link\" href=\"03.05 Vinyls/East Saint Louis Toodle-Oo Black Beauty (by Duke Ellington And His Orchestra - 1936).md\"> East Saint Louis Toodle-Oo Black Beauty (by Duke Ellington And His Orchestra - 1936) </a>",
"<a class=\"internal-link\" href=\"03.05 Vinyls/Purple Rain (by Prince The Revolution - 1984).md\"> Purple Rain (by Prince The Revolution - 1984) </a>",
"<a class=\"internal-link\" href=\"03.05 Vinyls/I’m Every Woman (by Chaka Khan - 1978).md\"> I’m Every Woman (by Chaka Khan - 1978) </a>",
"<a class=\"internal-link\" href=\"03.05 Vinyls/Dream of a Lifetime (by Marvin Gaye - 1985).md\"> Dream of a Lifetime (by Marvin Gaye - 1985) </a>",
"<a class=\"internal-link\" href=\"03.05 Vinyls/In the Heat of the Night (by Imagination - 1982).md\"> In the Heat of the Night (by Imagination - 1982) </a>",
"<a class=\"internal-link\" href=\"03.05 Vinyls/Nastradamus (by Nas - 1999).md\"> Nastradamus (by Nas - 1999) </a>",
"<a class=\"internal-link\" href=\"03.05 Vinyls/Ethiopian Modern Instrumentals Hits (by Various Artists - 2003).md\"> Ethiopian Modern Instrumentals Hits (by Various Artists - 2003) </a>",
"<a class=\"internal-link\" href=\"03.05 Vinyls/Les Vieux (by Jacques Brel - NaN).md\"> Les Vieux (by Jacques Brel - NaN) </a>",
"<a class=\"internal-link\" href=\"00.01 Admin/Templates/Template Music.md\"> Template Music </a>",
"<a class=\"internal-link\" href=\"03.05 Vinyls/Sings the Blues (by Lightnin’ Hopkins - 1995).md\"> Sings the Blues (by Lightnin’ Hopkins - 1995) </a>",
"<a class=\"internal-link\" href=\"00.02 Inbox/Nastradamus (by Nas - 1999).md\"> Nastradamus (by Nas - 1999) </a>",
"<a class=\"internal-link\" href=\"03.05 Vinyls/King of the Delta Blues Singers (by Robert Johnson - 1961).md\"> King of the Delta Blues Singers (by Robert Johnson - 1961) </a>"
"<a class=\"internal-link\" href=\"03.05 Vinyls/Nas - Nastradamus.md\"> Nas - Nastradamus </a>",
"title":":heavy_dollar_sign: [[hLedger]]: Update current ledger %%done_del%%",
"title":":heavy_dollar_sign: [[hLedger]]: Update current ledger %%done_del%%",
"time":"2024-01-05",
"time":"2024-04-05",
"rowNumber":422
"rowNumber":423
}
}
],
],
"05.02 Networks/Server Cloud.md":[
"05.02 Networks/Server Cloud.md":[
@ -65,11 +65,6 @@
}
}
],
],
"05.02 Networks/Server Tools.md":[
"05.02 Networks/Server Tools.md":[
{
"title":":hammer_and_wrench: [[Selfhosting]], [[Server Tools|Tools]]: Upgrader Standard Notes & Health checks %%done_del%%",
"time":"2024-01-18",
"rowNumber":601
},
{
{
"title":":desktop_computer: [[Selfhosting]], [[Server Tools|Tools]]: Upgrader Gitea & Health checks %%done_del%%",
"title":":desktop_computer: [[Selfhosting]], [[Server Tools|Tools]]: Upgrader Gitea & Health checks %%done_del%%",
"time":"2024-02-18",
"time":"2024-02-18",
@ -84,6 +79,11 @@
"title":":closed_lock_with_key: [[Selfhosting]], [[Server Tools|Tools]]: Upgrader Bitwarden & Health checks %%done_del%%",
"title":":closed_lock_with_key: [[Selfhosting]], [[Server Tools|Tools]]: Upgrader Bitwarden & Health checks %%done_del%%",
"time":"2024-04-17",
"time":"2024-04-17",
"rowNumber":593
"rowNumber":593
},
{
"title":":hammer_and_wrench: [[Selfhosting]], [[Server Tools|Tools]]: Upgrader Standard Notes & Health checks %%done_del%%",
"time":"2024-05-18",
"rowNumber":601
}
}
],
],
"05.02 Networks/Server VPN.md":[
"05.02 Networks/Server VPN.md":[
@ -101,13 +101,13 @@
"04.01 lebv.org/Hosting Tasks.md":[
"04.01 lebv.org/Hosting Tasks.md":[
{
{
"title":":fleur_de_lis: [[Hosting Tasks|Hosting]]: [[Hosting Tasks#Backup procedure|backup]] the DB & Files %%done_del%%",
"title":":fleur_de_lis: [[Hosting Tasks|Hosting]]: [[Hosting Tasks#Backup procedure|backup]] the DB & Files %%done_del%%",
"time":"2024-01-03",
"time":"2024-04-03",
"rowNumber":71
"rowNumber":71
},
},
{
{
"title":":fleur_de_lis: [[Hosting Tasks|Hosting]]: [[Hosting Tasks#PHP versioning|Check the php version]] of the website %%done_del%%",
"title":":fleur_de_lis: [[Hosting Tasks|Hosting]]: [[Hosting Tasks#PHP versioning|Check the php version]] of the website %%done_del%%",
"time":"2024-01-03",
"time":"2024-04-03",
"rowNumber":75
"rowNumber":76
},
},
{
{
"title":":fleur_de_lis: [[Hosting Tasks|Hosting]]: Explore the possibility of webhosting through [[Hosting Tasks#Decentralised hosting|decentralised services]] (Blockchain)",
"title":":fleur_de_lis: [[Hosting Tasks|Hosting]]: Explore the possibility of webhosting through [[Hosting Tasks#Decentralised hosting|decentralised services]] (Blockchain)",
@ -116,6 +116,53 @@ This section does serve for quick memos.
🚆: [[@@Paris|Paris]] à [[@@Zürich|Zürich]]
🚆: [[@@Paris|Paris]] à [[@@Zürich|Zürich]]
📖: [[Seven Pillars of Wisdom]]
📺: [[Babylon (2022)]]
 
| |
|---|
|## Si vous avez passé la journée à vous préparer<br><br>**Chaleur**: Météo France annonce que 2023 a été la 2e année la plus chaude jamais enregistrée en France (après 2022) avec une température moyenne de 14,4°C, +1,4° vs la période 1991-2020<br><br>**Jacques Delors**: Emmanuel Macron salue un_"grand Français et un__honnête homme européen"_qui a_"réconcilié véritablement la France avec l’Europe et l’Europe avec son avenir"_<br><br>**COP 29**: l'Azerbaïdjan (le pays hôte) désigne Mukhtar Babayev comme futur président de la COP (actuellement ministre de l'Ecologie, il a travaillé pendant 20 ans à la_Oil Company of Azerbaija_n, la compagnie pétrolière nationale)|
| |
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|\| \|<br>\|---\|<br>\|Pots de départ : selon BFM Emmanuel Macron devrait procéder à un remaniement d'ici à lundi après s'être entretenu avec Gérald Darmanin et Bruno Le Maire à l'Elysée\||
|## Tellement hâte<br><br>Une fois n’est pas coutume, ce week-end nous compterons toutes les secondes qui nous séparent du dimanche soir. Ce qui vaudra notre impatience pour cette combinaison jour/horaire reine du cafard ? La première de Rebecca Manzoni à la barre du_Masque et la Plume_pour une édition consacrées aux sorties ciné (_France Inter_, dimanche, 20h00) ! Celle que nous décrivons depuis des années comme_"la voix la plus intelligente de France Inter"_annonce des changements_"par petites touches"_…|
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|\| \|<br>\|---\|<br>\|… comme[le générique de début](http://go.timetosignoff.fr/lnk/AAAAADftk-IAActfFPYAALQTqh8AAAAAtZ4AAC8UAAk9yQBlmDLKKKWWeorUQjey6x1aceW6wAAIwzU/6/RVQO4mXtcJ5E16mZFyVn2w/aHR0cHM6Ly93d3cueW91dHViZS5jb20vc2hvcnRzL2cwN0ZEOXkyVjVB)(les premières mesures de_La Frileuse_de Mendelssohn resteront mais elles_"seront suivies d’une variation harmonique")_et des chroniqueurs plein de_"brio critique"_mais ne_"surplombant pas l’auditeur"_(on y compte bien !). Tellement, mais tellement hâte !\||
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|[En lire plus dans Télérama→](http://go.timetosignoff.fr/lnk/AAAAADftk-IAActfFPYAALQTqh8AAAAAtZ4AAC8UAAk9yQBlmDLKKKWWeorUQjey6x1aceW6wAAIwzU/7/52vnSY2d9P44azfeVeNLHg/aHR0cHM6Ly93d3cudGVsZXJhbWEuZnIvcmFkaW8vcmViZWNjYS1tYW56b25pLXJlcHJlbmQtbGUtbWFzcXVlLWV0LWxhLXBsdW1lLWplLW4tYWktcGFzLWVudmllLWRlLXRvdXQtcGFzc2VyLWEtbGEtc3VsZmF0ZXVzZS03MDE4NzQxLnBocA)|
|## Le Fiorentino de la semaine : Le paradoxe<br><br>_"Une bonne nouvelle pour les constructeurs de véhicules électriques chinois. BYD (acronyme de "Build Your Dreams". A l'origine, un simple fabricant de batteries électriques) a, pour la 1ère fois, produit plus de voitures électriques que Tesla au dernier trimestre de l'année 2023. Et pourtant les valeurs automobiles chinoises ont chuté cette semaine en bourse. La raison ? La concurrence qui s'exacerbe face à une demande qui ralentit"_.|
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|\| \|<br>\|---\|<br>\|Une fois par semaine, TTSO publie le sujet qu'il a préféré dans le Morning Zapping (la super newsletter de Marc Fiorentino)\||
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|[S'abonner à la newsletter de notre copain Marc Fiorentino→](http://go.timetosignoff.fr/lnk/AAAAADftk-IAActfFPYAALQTqh8AAAAAtZ4AAC8UAAk9yQBlmDLKKKWWeorUQjey6x1aceW6wAAIwzU/12/GDfiA2RE_Oau7Ys_gut64A/aHR0cHM6Ly93d3cubW9uZmluYW5jaWVyLmNvbS9yZF9wYXJ0LnBocD9wYXJ0PXR0c29fbmV3cw)|
It must have been three or four days after October 7 when the Hamas leader visited his hostages in one of the many tunnels under the Gaza Strip. “Hello, I’m Yahya Sinwar,” he said, introducing himself in fluent Hebrew. “Nothing will happen to you.”
Eighty-five-year-old Yocheved Lifshitz was one of the Israeli prisoners present for the meeting with Sinwar. She would be released at the end of October. According to the Israeli media, she asked Sinwar whether he wasn’t ashamed to be doing such a thing to the very people who had supported peace all these years. Together with her husband, she told Sinwar, she had personally helped bring Palestinians from the Gaza Strip to Israeli hospitals.
She says Sinwar didn’t answer.
Hamas leader Yahya Sinwar at a Hamas event in May 2021
Foto: Majdi Fathi/ NurPhoto/ Getty Images
“Conditions here are unbearable. An explosion is inevitable.”
Yahya Sinwar, head of Hamas
The visit to the hostages must have been a great moment in the life of this man, who has spent more than 20 years in Israeli prisons. Some describe him as a butcher and others as a psychopath, but for many, he is seen as a heroic resistance fighter.
The October 7 massacre is the bloody climax of Sinwar’s terrorist career. His men simply overran Israel’s ultra-modern border facilities surrounding the Gaza Strip simply overrun. They took the vaunted Israeli army, which took several hours to respond, completely by surprise and sent the whole of Israel into a state of shock after an attack the likes of which the Jewish state had never seen before: at least 1,200 dead in one day, shot, burned, beheaded – in addition to taking around 240 hostages, many women and children. And Hamas filmed the horror live and broadcast it to the world on social media.
### The Palestinian Question Returns To Center Stage
The attack is a turning point in the conflict between Israel and the Palestinians; a turning point after which little will be the same again – not only for the Israelis, but also the Palestinians. The massacre and Israel’s military response to it have created new traumas and reopened old ones. For the Israelis, the atrocities committed on October 7 are reminiscent of the bloody pogroms and the Holocaust. For the Palestinians, the Israeli response has evoked memories of the Nakba, the Arabic word for catastrophe, which the Palestinians use to describe their flight and expulsion following the founding of the Jewish state in 1948.
Buildings destroyed by Israeli airstrikes in the southern Gaza Strip
Foto: Said Khatib/ AFP
Since the attack, the Palestinian question has once again been at the center of global attention, while Israel has had to abandon the illusion that it can "manage” the conflict with the Palestinians. Talks on normalizing relations between Israel and Saudi Arabia are on hold. Russia and China sense an opportunity to assert their influence in the region. The European Union is struggling with its future role in the conflict. And the United States government faces both headwinds and isolation stemming from its pro-Israeli stance.
And as brutal and repulsive as the attack was, the Palestinians, says Israeli pollster Dahlia Scheindlin, now view Hamas as "number one” in the fight against Israel. The secular Fatah, which controls the Palestinian Authority in the West Bank, has faded into insignificance, she says.
It can be assumed that this is exactly what the Hamas fighters wanted to acheive, in addition to the very specific goal of taking as many hostages as possible in order to leverage the release of prisoners held by the Israelis.
But Sinwar likely had another goal in mind: That of shaking the Israelis’ sense of security and their trust in the state and the army. And of hitting them at their weakest point – the deep-seated fear of annihilation held by a people who have been persecuted for thousands of years.
The Israeli army began calling up reservists on October 7. And since then, the military has been waging a war against Hamas that has also had a far-reaching impact on the Gaza Strip’s civilian population. Thus far, Israel’s army has killed around 18,000 Palestinians, a figure that comes from Hamas sources, but is nevertheless considered realistic by international organizations. More than 100 Israeli soldiers have also been killed in the Gaza Strip. The north of the region, in particularly, has largely been destroyed. The Israeli army reports that 7,000 terrorists have been killed so far, including half of all Hamas commanders.
How was it possible for the terrorists to launch such an attack? Were the atrocities part of the plan from the start? Why did Hamas risk its control over the Gaza Strip, indeed its very existence? And can this war destroy the organization as the Israeli government is hoping, or will Hamas perhaps emerge even stronger than before?
In the search for answers to these questions, it’s impossible to ignore Yahya Sinwar. His story is deeply interwoven with the rise of Hamas, with its many transformations – and with the horrific October 7 massacre, the planning of which he was deeply involved in.
### The Founding in Gaza
The history of Hamas began in December 1987, as a Gaza City offshoot of the Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood. The first intifada, the Palestinian uprising against the Israeli occupation, had just broken out. Ahmed Yassin, who was partially blind and confined to a wheelchair, founded Hamas, an acronym for Islamic Resistance Movement. His most eager student was Sinwar, a young man in his mid-20s who had grown up in the Khan Yunis refugee camp. Despite his young age, Sinwar had already spent several months in Israeli custody – and had embarked on a career of murdering alleged Palestinian collaborators.
Hamas founder Ahmed Yassin surrounded by supporters in the Gaza Strip
Foto: REUTERS
Previously, Yassin and his comrades-in-arms had not taken part in the armed resistance, which was dominated by secular nationalists at the time. Instead, the group’s main goal was to Islamicize society. Yassin received a license from the Israeli military administration in the 1970s for an Islamic association, and his people ran schools, hospitals and religious centers.
Israel’s primary concern at the time was militant nationalists, and the Muslim zealots were seen as a counterweight – so Israel backed them. "It was a vast, stupid mistake,” an Israeli government official who spent years working in Gaza would later state. It was just the first of many mistakes made in dealing with the Islamists, culminating in disaster 36 years later.
Whereas Yasser Arafat, the head of the secular Palestinian Liberation Organization (PLO), contemplated negotiations with Israel and a two-state solution while in exile in Tunisia at the beginning of the first intifada and recognized Israel’s right to exist shortly afterward, Hamas took a different path. They believed the moment for armed conflict had arrived.
Its founding charter from 1988 is steeped in anti-Semitic conspiracy theories in which Hamas preaches jihad for Palestine and rules out any negotiations with Israel.
### Hamas Is Not Islamic State
Unlike the terrorists of the Islamic State (IS) or al-Qaida, Hamas is focused on the establishment of a Palestinian state – not global jihad or the creation of a caliphate inhabited by Muslims from all over the world. The organization was founded by refugees who were driven by the idea of returning to the places from which they or their parents had fled or been expelled during the founding of Israel. They wanted a country, and for them, this country would be "Islamic.” Even if some of the acts they commit are similar, the origins, goals and ideology of IS and Hamas are quite different.
It didn’t take long after its founding for Hamas to begin attacking the Israelis. In 1989, Hamas members kidnapped and killed two soldiers in the Gaza Strip.
Michael Koubi, now 78 years old, was in charge of investigations for the Israeli domestic intelligence service Shin Bet in the Gaza Strip at the end of the 1980s. He decided to take a radical step: On May 9, 1989, he had all members of Hamas arrested, including Yassin – and Yahya Sinwar. Koubi met Sinwar, who was 27 years old at the time, in person.
“It was clear to me even then that Hamas was our biggest enemy,” he says. “What we are doing now in Gaza was long overdue.”
Michael Koubi, Israeli secret service agent
"At first, Sinwar didn’t speak a word,” Koubi recalls. He says Yassin then explained that Sinwar was his most important helper, that he was the founder and commander of the Majd, Hamas’ internal secret service. It was only under pressure from Yassin that Sinwar said anything at all to Koubi. The Palestinian, says Koubi, admitted to having committed 12 murders. He said he strangled one of his victims with a kufiyah, the Palestinian scarf. He had another one buried alive by his brother, who was a member of Hamas. "That’s what Yahya Sinwar was like,” Koubi said.
Koubi says he spent between 150 and 180 hours interrogating Sinwar – and that during that entire time, Sinwar never once smiled, that he seemed like a man without emotions. When he asked Sinwar why, in his late 20s, he still didn’t have a family, he responded: "Hamas is my wife, my son, my daughter, my parents. Hamas is everything to me.” He stressed that the day would come when Hamas men would get out of prison to destroy Israel. "It was clear to me even then that Hamas was our biggest enemy,” says Koubi. "What we’re doing now in Gaza was long overdue,” he adds.
### Four Life Sentences
In 1989, an Israeli court convicted Sinwar to four life sentences. According to Koubi, he accepted the verdict impassively. Sinwar spent a total of more than two decades in prison.
"When we met in Shikma prison in Ashkelon in 1996, there were only a few hundred Hamas members there,” recalls Esmat Mansour, 48, who spent time in prison with Sinwar. Mansour served 20 years for the murder of a settler. He now works as a journalist and translator in Ramallah. During the second intifada after the turn of the millennium, the number of prisoners grew. "Hamas became the strongest force in the prisons. That caused Sinwar’s power to grow.” Both inside and outside the prison walls.
Esmat Mansour, who spent time with Sinwar in prison, in Ramallah
Foto: Lucas Barioulet/ DER SPIEGEL
Israeli security services thought they could keep Hamas under control in prison, says Tel Aviv University analyst Michael Milshtein, the former head of the Palestinian division of Israeli military intelligence. But that was a mistake. "With Hamas, there is no difference between inside and outside.” Sinwar’s role model, Sheikh Yassin, also spent 10 years in prison and emerged stronger than ever, Milshtein says. Sinwar, the analyst adds, was constantly communicating with Hamas people in Gaza during his imprisonment – through his lawyers and other prisoners, including by phone, which is actually forbidden in prison. But it was tolerated because it provided a means to eavesdrop on the prisoners.
Koubi, his former interrogator, says that Sinwar is extremely charismatic and intelligent – that he learned Hebrew within just a few months and was interested in Israeli history and politics. "He read books about Ben-Gurion, Begin and Rabin, and even learned a little about the Jewish Torah.” Sinwar went on hunger strikes three times and campaigned for better treatment for his fellow prisoners. He was later elected the leader of all Hamas inmates in Israel’s prisons.
He often spoke about his childhood and youth in Khan Yunis, fellow inmate Mansour recalls: about his suffering, about the canned fish they had to eat, about the lack of a sewage system. He continually insisted, says Mansour, that Israel had to be defeated so that his family could return to their village near Ashkelon. The Nakba, Mansour emphasizes, is a central element of his worldview.
### The Years of the Suicide Bombers
The world changed during Sinwar’s years in prison: Then-Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin and PLO leader Arafat shook hands in the Rose Garden of the White House in Washington in 1993 and agreed on a process that boiled down to the formula “land for peace.” The process was to provide the Palestinians with their own state in the West Bank and Gaza Strip in return for recognizing Israel and stopping the terror.
Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin shaking hands with Palestinian President Yasser Arafat shaking hands after signing a peace deal mediated by U.S. President Bill Clinton
Foto: UPI Photo/ IMAGO
The Gaza International Airport in 1998
Foto: Ahmed Jadallah/ REUTERS
But Hamas tried to sabotage that two-state solution by murdering Israeli soldiers and civilians and carrying out the first bombing attacks. Nonetheless, a better future still seemed possible. The Oslo Accords of 1993 ended the occupation and brought an independent state within reach. Thanks to money from Europe, the U.S. and the Gulf States, the Gaza Strip was thriving. An airport was built, separate Palestinian stamps were issued and Palestine received its own international telephone code.
In 1995, though, Rabin was shot dead by a right-wing extremist Israeli – after months of agitation and death threats. Benjamin Netanyahu and Itamar Ben-Gvir, who is now national security minister, were central figures at the time. Two months after Rabin’s assassination, the most important Hamas bombmaker was killed with an explosive device planted in a mobile phone. Hamas took revenge by killing dozens of Israelis in attacks within a few days – and hardliner Benjamin Netanyahu won the election against Rabin’s successor Shimon Peres.
Mohammed Daib Ibrahim al-Masri, known as Mohammed Deif, succeeded the slain bombmaker. Like Sinwar, he was born in Khan Yunis as the son of refugees. The two are said to be friends from childhood. In the coming years, Deif would rise to become the leader of the Qassam Brigades, the military wing of Hamas, escaping at least seven Israeli assassination attempts, losing an arm, a leg and an eye in the process – and planning the gruesome October 7 massacre together with Sinwar. There are only a few decades-old photos of him. He hasn’t appeared in public for 30 years and reportedly sleeps in a different place each day to prevent getting killed by Israel. Hence his name: "Deif” means guest.
Netanyahu was followed by a two-year term in office for Ehud Barak and, in 2001, hardliner Ariel Sharon. In retrospect, it was the beginning of the end of the idea of land for peace. These were the years of the second intifada, the suicide attacks by Hamas and other terrorist groups and targeted killings by Israel. According to Israeli figures, Hamas carried out 425 terrorist attacks and murdered 377 Israelis at bus stops, restaurants and shopping centers between 2000 and 2004. Sharon responded with brutality: More than 3,000 Palestinians were killed through Israeli military operations, including many civilians, during this period.
### Hamas Driving Policy
Even as Israeli domestic intelligence agents went about killing Hamas leaders in the Gaza Strip, including Ahmed Yassin, doctors in Israel were busy saving Sinwar’s life in prison. He developed a dangerous abscess in his brain and was operated on in 2004.
The journalist Yoram Binur visited him two years later in Be’er Sheva prison and conducted an interview for Israel’s Channel 2. “When Sinwar spoke, the others fell silent. When he sat down, a fellow prisoner placed a prayer mat on his chair. And his Hebrew was perfect,” says Binur, now 69.
Journalist Yoram Binur showing the interview that he conducted with Yahya Sinwar
Foto: Jonas Opperskalski/ DER SPIEGEL
“Sinwar didn’t come across as someone who wants to please but as someone who has something to offer.”
Yoram Binur, Israeli journalist
Sinwar during his television interview from prison with Yoram Binur, aired on Israeli broadcaster Channel 2
Foto: Channel 2
The interview was also remarkable because it seemed as if Sinwar were holding court from prison. He looks directly into the face of the reporter sitting just a few inches away from him and says that the Israelis must understand that Hamas can never recognize the state of Israel, but that a long "hudna,” a ceasefire, is possible. He argues that such a suspension of hostilities could lead to peace and prosperity in the region "for at least a generation.” "Sinwar didn’t come across as someone who wants to please but as someone who has something to offer,” Binur says of the interview 17 years later.
Things were going well in those years for Hamas. Arafat died in 2004, leaving a void that his less charismatic successor Mahmoud Abbas was unable to fill. And in 2005, Sharon also unilaterally evacuated the settlements in the Gaza Strip, and Hamas celebrated. The following year, parliamentary elections were held in the West Bank and Gaza Strip, with Hamas participating for the first time. It put up candidates and hit the campaign trail.
In the overall result, Hamas received 56 percent of the votes and thus an absolute majority of seats in the de facto parliament in Ramallah. More than anything, it was a vote against the inefficiency and corruption of the Palestinian Authority – and also an expression of disappointment with the stalled peace process. Even some Christians voted for the Islamists.
But a Palestinian government led by the terrorists of Hamas was unpalatable to Israel, the U.S. and the Europeans – and they threatened a boycott. The U.S. government pushed for an armed coup by Fatah, which was arming militias in Gaza Strip in order to force Hamas to back down. But Hamas preempted the attempted coup and drove the Fatah militias out of Gaza in bloody battles in 2007. The Palestinian Authority called on its employees in Gaza to go on strike, but then Hamas simply deployed its own people, thus consolidating its power. Since then, Hamas has held power in the Gaza Strip, and the increasingly autocratic and unpopular Mahmoud Abbas has ruled in the West Bank. Elections are a thing of the past.
### 1,027 Palestinians for a Single Israeli Hostage
In the turmoil after Hamas came to power, an event took place that would have a major impact on future developments. In June 2006, terrorists abducted the Israeli soldier Gilad Shalit, a kidnapping that may have been planned inside the Be’er Seva prison. Sinwar’s younger brother Mohammed was also part of the kidnapping squad, and he then spent years guarding Shalit.
It is thought to have been Sinwar who, from prison, had the idea of digging tunnels to kidnap Israeli soldiers. According to the Israeli newspaper *Yedioth Ahronoth*, he reportedly ordered Hamas to dig a tunnel in 1998 and use it to abduct an Israeli soldier, who could then be used to leverage the release of Palestinian prisoners. The tunnel was discovered a few months later, but the idea remained. By the time of the second intifada, tunnels had become part of the standard arsenal for attacking soldiers.
The Israelis spent five years negotiating Gilad Shalit’s release. A deal was close on several occasions, but time and again, Sinwar prevented it from going through from prison because he didn’t agree to the conditions, recalls Yuval Bitton, his former dentist. Bitton treated Sinwar regularly over the course of several years before joining an intelligence agency in 2008.
Yuval Bitton - a former intelligence official and one-time dentist to Sinwar - in the Shoval kibbutz.
Foto: Jonas Opperskalski/ DER SPIEGEL
Bitton says he warned against Sinwar’s release, but his concerns were ignored. Yet he knew Sinwar better than almost anyone else. "Sinwar didn’t trust any Israeli the way he trusted me. No one negotiated with him as much about the conditions of detention and about the Shalit deal.”
In October 2011, Sinwar, the most prominent of 1,027 Palestinian prisoners – of whom 280 had been serving life sentences – was exchanged for Shalit’s freedom. Thousands of people greeted him with shouts of "Allahu akbar,” shots of joy and a rally in Gaza City.
In the years that followed, Sinwar recruited thousands of new fighters for the Qassam Brigades, the military arm of Hamas. While still in prison, he encouraged cooperation with Iran and later brought Iranian trainers to Gaza. The Iranians also set up a rocket factory, says Sinwar’s former interrogator Koubi. "I still don’t understand why my government allowed this to happen.”
The Shalit deal was approved by Benjamin Netanyahu, who had been back in office since 2009 – and who, with a brief interruption, is still there today.
It was this deal that allowed Sinwar to be released, and it paved the way for him to become the political leader of Hamas in the Gaza Strip. It may also have served as the model for the attack on October 7. If Israel was prepared to release 1,027 prisoners for a single soldier, what would happen if Hamas kidnapped dozens of Israelis?
### A Mini-State on the Mediterranean
Hamas has had its own mini-state since 2008, with around 2.3 million citizens today, but it is sealed off from Israel by land, air and sea and, as such, remains occupied territory according to the United Nations.
But the Hamas barely have any funds of their own – and the Autonomous Authority in Ramallah stopped some of its payments. Hamas is also largely cut off from the international banking system. Over the years, much of the money for the fight against Israel has come from Iran. According to Western estimates, the regime in Tehran has been providing Hamas and other Palestinian terrorist groups with around $100 million a year since the 1990s.
More important for Hamas’ military clout, however, are the direct deliveries of weapons, rocket technology and ammunition. Iran and Hezbollah also share military expertise in the production of drones and missiles.
Hamas fighters at a military parade in the Gaza Strip in July 2023
Foto: Ibraheem Abu Mustafa/ REUTERS
In the years since Israel’s unilateral withdrawal from Gaza, Hamas has built up a de facto army. Before October 7, it is thought to have included 30,000 fighters, including cyber warfare units and combat divers. They have increased the range of their rockets from 40 to 230 kilometers. If not for the Israeli Iron Dome defense system, Hamas would be able to strike any place in Israel with them.
Even AK-47 assault rifles and the ammunition that goes along with them are produced in Gaza. Meanwhile, anti-tank missiles, kamikaze drones and heavy machine guns likely reach Gaza aboard fishing boats or via tunnels from Egypt. Despite four major military clashes with Israel since 2008, Hamas’ arsenal just kept on growing.
### An Odd Alliance
In 2012, the U.S. government asked the Emir of Qatar to take in the leadership of Hamas, which had previously been based in Damascus. Since then, the political leadership of Hamas has been living in Doha – in addition to a representative in Gaza. The Americans’ goal was to establish a direct line to the terrorist group and to lessen Iranian influence. Qatar also became the most important donor to the Gaza Strip.
People familiar with the transfers in Qatar say that much of the money was wired directly. The rest was ferried from Israel to Gaza in suitcases once a month by Qatari emissary Mohammed Emadi. Upon arrival in Tel Aviv, Emadi would reportedly be met by Israeli secret service agents, and they would then travel together to the Kerem Shalom border crossing, where Emadi would meet up with people from Hamas.
But why? The Hamas fighters were continuing to fire rockets at Israel and Israel continued to bomb Hamas in retaliation. Why would Israel’s prime minister ensure that Hamas had access to money?
It appears as though Netanyahu and Hamas kept each other alive in those years. Netanyahu, elected on the promise of establishing security, regularly cracked down on the terrorist group. At the same time, though, he allowed Qatar to finance construction projects and, later, to even pay the salaries of public servants. According to diplomatic sources, Qatar supplied around $30 million a month to Gaza in 2019.
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu visiting the troops in December
Foto: Amos Ben Gershom/ GPO/ Polaris/ ddp
“Anyone who wants to prevent the creation of a Palestinian state must support the strengthening of Hamas.”
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu
"One effective way of preventing a two-state solution is to keep Gaza and the West Bank separate,” says former Israeli General Shlomo Brom, who has criticized this policy in the past, as have many other former military and intelligence officials. "Then Netanyahu can reject all peace talks using the excuse that he has no negotiating partner.”
According to media reports, Netanyahu in fact admitted as much at an internal meeting of Likud parliamentarians in 2019: "Anyone who wants to prevent the creation of a Palestinian state needs to support the strengthening Hamas.” But he has never said anything quite that clear in public. But in 2015, his far-right finance minister, Bezalel Smotrich, said in an interview: "The Palestinian Authority is a burden, and Hamas is an asset.”
The weakening of the Palestinian Authority was the common goal that united the right-wing in Israel with the terrorists in Gaza. And both sides initially benefited. Hamas continued to build up its mini-state, while Netanyahu bought himself peace and continued to expand the settlements in the West Bank, making a two-state solution increasingly unrealistic.
### A Model for Coexistence
In a number of different skirmishes and wars against Israel, Hamas was able to emerge as the defenders of all Palestinians. As a consequence, the Gaza Strip over the years became the central theater of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and a symbol of Palestinian resistance.
Without anybody to negotiate with on the Palestinian side, Netanyahu meanwhile increasingly pursued a policy that foresaw the normalization of relations with Arab countries without ending the occupation of the Palestinian Territories.
It was almost as though Hamas and Israel had found a model for coexistence.
### Sinwar’s Rise
In February 2017, Sinwar was elected leader of Hamas in the Gaza Strip, marking the radical wing’s takeover of Hamas leadership. But outwardly, Sinwar’s election was followed by a phase of relative moderation.
Just a few months later, Khaled Meshaal, the outgoing leader of Hamas in Qatari exile, presented a new political program that added a few elements to the group’s 1988 charter. While the new version also did not recognize the right of Israel to exist, it marked the first mention of a Palestinian state within the 1967 borders.
To the surprise of many, Sinwar also used the occasion to speak with foreign journalists, adopting an unusually flowery and personable tone. "We Palestinians are coming out in droves, looking for compromise,” he said in May 2018. "We believe that if we have a way to potentially resolve the conflict without destruction, we’re OK with that. We want to invest in peace and love.” He said he had spent almost half his life in Israeli prisons, and that such a life was easier than living in the conditions in Gaza. "The first words my son spoke were 'father,’ 'mother’ and 'drone.’”
But that was just part of Sinwar’s message. The other was far darker and more threatening. The people of Gaza, he said in the same interview, are like a "very hungry tiger, kept in a cage, starved.” An animal, he said, "who the Israelis have been trying to humiliate. Now, it’s on the loose, it’s left its cage, and no one knows where it’s heading or what it’s going to do.” Hamas, he said, could not continue on as before. "Conditions here are unbearable. An explosion is inevitable.”
A few months later, the Israeli paper *Yedioth Ahronoth* also published an interview with Sinwar. "The truth is that a new war is in no one’s interest,” he said. "For sure it is not in ours. Who would like to face a nuclear power with slingshots?”
It seemed as though Sinwar was following a two-pronged strategy during this phase. On the one hand, he was expanding Hamas’ military capabilities. Following the last military clash with Israel in 2021, Sinwar spoke of "more than 500 kilometers of tunnels.” And Hamas poured vast quantities of money into building the tunnel system before then reinforcing them with concrete. Before long, they had an underground network that included bases of operations, weapon factories and sleeping quarters. Homes, city quarters and even towns located several kilometers from each other were linked up belowground.
An Israeli soldier in a tunnel below the Al-Shifa Hospital
Foto: Victor R. Caivano/ AP
On the other hand, Sinwar was also thinking about participating in elections to be held in the Palestinian Territories – elections that never did actually come to pass. In the spirit of coexistence, he also negotiated with the Israeli government over a deal that would have secured Hamas rule in Gaza for the long term and also granted residents the ability to conduct far more trade than before. But that, also, never became reality.
### Sinwar No Longer Wants to Talk
In October 2022, Nasser Al Qudwa, now 70, met with the Hamas leader in Gaza. Qudwa, who, like Sinwar, was born in the Gaza Strip, belongs to the Palestinian political elite. A nephew of Yasser Arafat, he served for a time as foreign minister under President Abbas before the two had a falling out. He has lived in France since then but still travels frequently to the Middle East to mediate between different Palestinian factions.
The meeting between Sinwar and Qudwa lasted for around two hours and focused primarily on the latter’s attempts to achieve reunification between the Gaza Strip and the West Bank. "We wanted Hamas to give up its claim to sole leadership in Gaza.” Qudwa says that his impression at the time was that Sinwar had been open to the idea. Indeed, Qudwa believed in fall 2022 that the Hamas leadership in Gaza was still looking for a possible return to the PLO and the Palestinian National Authority.
Just over two months later, Qudwa made yet another trip to Gaza and explored the possibility of holding another meeting with Sinwar. "But he was no longer receiving anyone.” To this day, Qudwa continues to wonder about Sinwar’s sudden withdrawal. Had the insular leadership circle of Hamas already decided by then to abandon the political route? Or was everything that had come before merely a charade, and the terror attack was already being planned? "It is possible,” says Qudwa, "that the previous talks merely served as camouflage.”
But Israel’s government apparently continued to believe that Sinwar was interested in a deal. Which led them to ignore the warning signs.
### A Vicious Plan
More than a year before October 7, the Israeli secret service obtained a detailed Hamas attack plan, codenamed Jericho Wall, as reported by Israeli media and the *New York Times* following the attack. The plan called for a barrage of rockets combined with drone attacks on the security cameras and remote-controlled machine guns affixed to the Israeli border fence surrounding the Gaza Strip. In the next stage of the onslaught, fighters on motorcycles and paragliders, along with others on foot, were to break through the border fortifications at 60 different sites.
But senior Israeli military leaders and secret service agents felt the plan was unrealistic, a Hamas pipedream. And that assessment didn’t change, despite the fact that soldiers from a surveillance unit responsible for keeping an eye on the border fence later realized that Hamas was flying drones near the barricade on a daily basis. Hamas had even built a replica of an army observation post and attacked it with drones, and fighters were practicing attacks on models of Israeli Merkava tanks. Warnings from the surveillance unit, though, weren’t taken seriously.
When around 3,000 terrorists did, in fact, break through the border fence on the morning of October 7 and attack army posts, towns and kibbutzim, several hours passed before the army was able to relocate units to the south. And it was several days before the army killed the last terrorists on Israeli soil. By then, of course, Hamas had produced a bloodbath – and abducted more than 240 people.
Was the size of the attack part of the plan? Or was Hamas surprised by how little military resistance they encountered? The answer depends on who you talk to.
"Sinwar likely just wanted to take enough hostages to force the release of the 7,000 prisoners,” says Yuval Diskin, who was head of Shin Bet from 2005 to 2011. Leveraging the freedom of all the Palestinian prisoners held in Israeli prisons would have been a huge boost to Hamas’ popularity. "The fact that he would ultimately end up with far more than 200 hostages and kill so many civilians on Israeli territory – he can’t have anticipated that.”
Other experts believe the plan was so sophisticated that Sinwar may indeed have been envisioning a massacre of this size – together with the harsh Israeli reaction.
### Kill as Many as Possible
If you look at Sinwar’s background and examine the detailed Hamas plans for murdering Israeli civilians on October 7, it seems likely that the extreme violence was pre-programmed. Israelis found notes on the bodies of dead terrorists with orders to "kill and take hostage as many people as possible.” Some of the terrorists were equipped with zip ties, rocket-propelled grenades and incendiaries. And the attackers were also carrying provisions and ammunition for several days, along with plans for assaulting targets far deeper into Israel.
It could be, however, that the attack was not coordinated with the Hamas leadership in Doha – or at least not in its entirety. Ismail Haniyeh, the leader of Hamas in exile, has lived in the capital of Qatar since 2019 – a pleasant existence far away from the suffering of the Gaza Strip. Even before the attack on Israel on October 7, relations between Haniyeh and Sinwar were said to be strained. The Qatari faction was apparently dissatisfied with the political process, and Haniyeh’s influence over decisions made in Gaza seemed to be shrinking. At the time of the terrorist attack, Haniyeh was apparently in Istanbul, where he also has a home. The Hamas offensive likely took him by surprise. High-ranking Qatari officials are certain that he hadn’t been informed prior to the attack, as are the Americans.
Iranian Foreign Minister Hossein Amirabdollahian together with Hamas political leader Haniyeh in Doha
Foto: Iranian Foreign Ministry/ AP
But since October 7, Haniyeh has been the direct point of contact between Israel, the U.S. and the Hamas leaders in Gaza, who are thought to be hiding out in tunnels beneath the city of Khan Yunis. "Haniyeh can pick of the phone and reach Deif or Sinwar,” says a Western diplomat in Qatar. This connection proved instrumental in the deal for the release of the 110 hostages and for the seven-day cease-fire.
Currently, discussions are underway for a larger hostage deal and a lasting cease-fire. Majed al-Ansari, the Qatari prime minister’s foreign affairs adviser, believes that the terrorist organization is hoping for a cease-fire. Even if the political leadership of Hamas says they will fight to the death, al-Ansari says, it’s just rhetoric. "Hamas isn’t suicidal. They want to survive.”
### Rising Support
Many Palestinians celebrated in late November when prisoners were released in exchange for some of the Israeli hostages, just as they had cheered the images of Palestinian fighters breaking through the border fence around the Gaza Strip on October 7 – even those who are not Hamas supporters. They have also sought to play down the massacre, with many believing that the dead civilians were merely collateral damage resulting from the fighting. There is also a widespread unwillingness to believe that rapes occurred.
In a public opinion poll carried out by the Palestinian Center for Policy and Survey Research (PSR), which is considered to be largely reliable, 90 percent of Palestinians surveyed said that Hamas did not commit atrocities in Israel. The survey also found that 44 percent of people in the West Bank support Hamas – against just 12 percent in September. Backing for Hamas also rose in the Gaza Strip, if only slightly – from 38 percent to 42 percent. An overwhelming majority of those surveyed are in favor of Abbas’ resignation.
On the question as to whether the Hamas attack on Israel was the right move, opinions diverge between Palestinians in the West Bank, of whom 82 percent endorse the attack, and residents of the Gaza Strip, only 57 percent of whom express support. Almost two-thirds of those surveyed believe that Hamas will remain in control of the Gaza Strip in the future.
"It's more than just Hamas becoming more popular – it is armed resistance that gained popularity,” says the Israeli Middle East expert Ofer Zalzbeg of the Herbert C. Kelman Institute in Vienna. Surveys have shown, he says, that people do not want to be governed by Hamas. "They want to inflict pain on Israel so that it changes its policies, but most don’t want to live in a Shariah state. They want neither the repressive rule of Hamas nor do they want the Palestinian Authority. They want a new kind of governance.”
Despite the growing support for Hamas, there has yet to be a coordinated uprising against the Israeli occupation in the West Bank.
And there is also plenty of anger with Hamas. "No resistance movement sacrifices its people for party interests. You can’t kill thousands of people and then call it liberation,” complains a refugee in the southern Gaza Strip who requested that his name not be published. He says he first fled from the northern part of Gaza to the city of Khan Yunis, and now, with the new Israeli offensive, he says he had to spend the night in the desert. Food is difficult to come by, he says, as is water. "We don’t have anything to do with these maniacs who behave like Islamic State!” he rages. "Yahya Sinwar is a psychopath. He should go into therapy instead of acting like a representative of his people.”
### Can Hamas Be Defeated?
In the last two months, the Israeli military has transformed Gaza into a sea of rubble and driven the majority of the Gaza Strip’s 2.3 million residents from their homes. The humanitarian situation is a disaster. Allied nations like the U.S. are also pushing for a rapid end to the war. But the big question is whether Israel can achieve its primary aim – destroying Hamas.
"What exactly does destroying Hamas actually mean?” wonders a source in Doha who is familiar with the negotiations. When Sinwar and Deif are dead? What happens if they are liquidated, but a new leader takes over control? Does the entire command structure need to be annihilated? Do all Hamas fighters have to be killed? The Israeli government, the source says, has thus far been avoiding all of these questions. Along with that of who should rule the Gaza Strip in the future. Netanyahu recently said that he will not allow Gaza to become a "Hamastan or a Fatahstan” once the war has ended.
Israel says that its military has killed 7,000 terrorists since the start of the fighting and smashed Hamas' command structure. But does that translate to a military defeat of Hamas? And is a military defeat sufficient?
### Eight-Hundred Tunnel Shafts Discovered and 500 Destroyed
Israel says that it has so far discovered 800 tunnel shafts during its offensive and destroyed 500 of them. But the vast tunnel network where the Hamas leadership is hiding and where the hostages are likely being held – where weapons, food, drinking water, generators and fuel are being stored – has thus far barely been touched.
During a press briefing in early December at a military base in southern Israel, a lieutenant colonel described operations targeting tunnels in the city of Beit Hanun, in the northeastern corner of the Gaza Strip. On October 7, said the officer, who may not be named, the terrorists fired 350 rockets within just a few hours from the city. The Israelis found weapons in almost every house, he added.
He said he doesn’t know what kind of underground infrastructure Hamas may still have. There are orders to refrain from entering the tunnels, because there are explosives everywhere. And the army doesn’t have any effective technological means to find the tunnels, the officer said, adding that numerous underground connections remain useable despite the fact that their entrance shafts have been destroyed.
Partly for that reason, the Israeli army has begun pumping seawater into the tunnels, according to reports that emerged last week. The procedure is apparently still just a test, and there are doubts as to whether it would be sufficient to destroy the wide-ranging tunnel network, not to mention the unpredictable consequences for the environment and Gazan infrastructure.
"The idea that Israel can defeat Hamas or that it can militarily decimate Hamas is unachievable,” said Hamas expert Tareq Baconi in a recent interview with the *New York Times*. "The movement is also a political body. It’s also a social infrastructure. And so, even if Hamas were to be removed, that ideology of commitment to armed resistance for liberation would manifest in a different movement.”
It could be that after the war, Hamas might not be able to carry out military operations for an extended period, Baconi believes. "But what we’ve learned from the past 16 years (…) is that Hamas is playing the long game.”
Even Israeli hardliners like the military analyst Kobi Michael recognize that Hamas isn’t just a terror network, but also a deeply rooted force in society. More than anything, he says, Israel’s war aim is that of destroying Hamas’ military capabilities. That doesn’t mean "that we will dismantle the entire Hamas ideology. Ideology is rooted in people’s heads and hearts, so that would be a completely different process, comparable to the denazification of Germany after World War II. That would take decades.”
### Hamas Has Built Up a Network of Companies
It also isn’t easy to weaken Hamas economically. The group’s primary sources of income are overseas, and the millions of dollars the group receives from Tehran are likely to keep flowing, or even increase. The same can be said for the income the group earns from the 30 to 40 companies it controls, most of them thought to be active in the construction and real estate sectors in Turkey, Qatar, Algeria, the United Arab Emirates and Sudan. According to estimates, the terror organization’s business activities bring in some $500 million each year.
The Israeli Hamas expert Milshtein also believes that even if Israel were to succeed in defeating Hamas militarily, the group would continue to exist underground and overseas. "Hamas cannot be destroyed,” he says.
Prior to October 7, he warned in vain that Hamas was continuing to pursue the destruction of the Jewish state. After the terror attack, he wrote an op-ed for the *Financial Times* in which he argued against bombarding and occupying the Gaza Strip. The economic costs of doing so, he wrote, would be enormous and the system installed by Hamas could hardly be quickly replaced because the Palestinian Authority is too weak. A large-scale attack, he wrote, "risks turning the Gaza Strip into a Somalia or Afghanistan.”
### A Future with Hamas?
Moderate Palestinians like former Prime Minister Salam Fayyad and Arafat’s nephew, Nasser Al Qudwa, have begun thinking intensively about what the postwar order should look like. For Fayyad, such an order would be impossible without Hamas involvement. "The first step must be the immediate and unconditional expansion of the PLO to include all major factions and political forces, including Hamas,” he wrote in a widely cited essay for *Foreign Affairs* in late October.
Al Qudwa also believes that cooperation with Hamas is fundamentally a possibility, but he has no illusions about how challenging and complicated that would be. The current war, though, "could lead to a different, military and politically weakened Hamas,” he says, especially if "Palestinian public opinion turns against the organization.”
Members of the Qassam Brigades in the Gaza Strip in 2018
Foto: Mohammed Saber/ EPA-EFE
Islamist movements play a central role in almost every country in the Middle East: either as part of the government, like in Turkey and Iran; as an extremist organization held in check by an authoritarian government, like in Egypt and Tunisia; or as a powerful militia, as in Lebanon and Iraq. The idea that in a future Palestinian state, the Islamist element could simply be kept out of politics is unrealistic. But the question is whether it could be involved without an armed group like Hamas, which is focused on the destruction of Israel.
According to recent reports, Sinwar is "furious” that the Hamas leadership in Doha and representatives from Palestinian President Abbas have begun discussing possible future cooperation. He had apparently demanded that such contacts come to an end.
“Hamas has to be destroyed!”
Yuval Bitton, secret service agent and Sinwar's former dentist
Future developments now depend primarily on what happens in the coming weeks – whether a hostage deal and a lasting cease-fire take shape, or whether significantly more civilians in the Gaza Strip are killed. Should the latter come to pass, support for Hamas may increase and the images of dead children from the Gaza Strip could produce a new generation of terrorists.
Indeed, Hamas could ultimately emerge from this war strategically more powerful despite being militarily weakened.
For Yuval Bitton, the Israeli secret service official and former dentist to Sinwar, the answer remains clear. "Hamas has to be destroyed!” Every time he spoke to Sinwar, he says, he could sense "that he hates Israelis and wants to kill them.” He was just waiting for the right opportunity, the dentist says.
Bitton also has personal reasons for his severity. He swivels around on his kitchen stool in his house in the Shoval kibbutz and points to the sofa, where there is a cardboard sign bearing a photo of his nephew. On October 7, he was kidnapped together with his grandmother Yaffa Adar and taken to Gaza, says Bitton. The elderly woman has since been released. But Bitton’s nephew has not.
## It’s become emphatic, exhausting, scheduled, hyped, forced and performative
(Illustrations by Michael Parkin for The Washington Post)
Sometime in recent history, possibly around 2004, Americans forgot to have fun, true fun, as though they’d misplaced it like a sock.
Instead, fun evolved into work, sometimes more than true work, which is where we find ourselves now.
Fun is often emphatic, exhausting, scheduled, pigeonholed, hyped, forced and performative. Adults assiduously record themselves appearing to have something masquerading as “fun,” a fusillade of Coachellic micro social aggressions unleashed on multiple social media platforms. *Look at me having so much FUN!*
Which means it is nothing of the sort. This is the drag equivalent of fun and suggests that fun is done.
When there are podcasts on happiness ([“The Happiness Lab,”](https://www.pushkin.fm/podcasts/the-happiness-lab-with-dr-laurie-santos) [“Happier”](https://gretchenrubin.com/podcasts/)); a global study on joy ([The Big Joy Project](https://ggia.berkeley.edu/bigjoy?)); David Byrne offering [reasons to be cheerful](https://reasonstobecheerful.world/); workshops on staging a “funtervention”; fun coaches; and various [apps to track happiness](https://www.makeuseof.com/apps-track-your-happiness-learn-feelings/), two things are abundantly clear: Fun is in serious trouble, and we are desperately in need of joy.
Consider what we’ve done to fun. Things that were long big fun now overwhelm, exhaust and annoy. The holiday season is an extended exercise in excess and loud, [often sleazy sweaters](https://www.washingtonpost.com/lifestyle/style/santas-a-sleazebag-the-elves-are-drunk-how-did-christmas-sweaters-get-so-raunchy/2019/12/15/7ebf3562-1c40-11ea-87f7-f2e91143c60d_story.html?itid=lk_inline_manual_7). Instead of this being the most wonderful time of the year, we battle [holiday fatigue](https://www.wellandgood.com/holiday-fatigue/), relentless beseeching for our money and, if Fox News is to be believed, a [war on Christmas that is nearing its third decade.](https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2023/11/14/fox-news-war-christmas/?itid=lk_inline_manual_7)
Weddings have morphed into multistage stress extravaganzas while doubling as express paths to insolvency: destination proposals for the whole family, destination bachelorette and bachelor blowouts, destination weddings in remote barns with limited lodging, something called a “buddymoon” (bring the gang!) and planners to help facilitate the same custom cocktailsness of it all. When weddings involve this much travel, pedicabs, custom T-shirts and port-a-potties, they’ve become many things, but fun is not one of them.
What could be a greater cause for joy or more natural than having a baby? Apparently, not much these days. Impending parenthood is overthought and [over-apped](https://www.babylist.com/hello-baby/best-pregnancy-apps?g_acctid=878-527-6823&g_adgroupid=146360520865&g_adid=651135395923&g_adtype=search&g_campaign=Content-HighPerformance&g_campaignid=19816329536&g_keyword=pregnancy%20apps&g_keywordid=kwd-15474578695&g_network=g&utm_campaign=Content-HighPerformance&utm_content=651135395923&utm_medium=paid-search&utm_source=g&utm_term=146360520865&gad_source=1&gclid=CjwKCAiApuCrBhAuEiwA8VJ6JvPgUa_8Bn2XGvhqINY3D_9kdcmchPxXCKpnIiwYTBNH7Q2DBDE0hRoC3O4QAvD_BwE), incorporating more savings-draining events that didn’t exist a few decades ago: [babymoons](https://www.travelandleisure.com/trip-ideas/romantic-getaways/best-babymoon-destinations-ideas) and [lethal, fire-inducing, gender-reveal gatherings](https://www.travelandleisure.com/trip-ideas/romantic-getaways/best-babymoon-destinations-ideas) and baby showers so over-the-top as to shame weddings.
Retirements must be purposeful. Also, occasions for an acute identity crisis. You need to have a plan, a mission, [a coach](https://retirementcoachesassociation.org/), a packed color-coded grid of daily activities in a culture where our jobs are our identities, our worth tied to employment.
Vacations are overscheduled with too many activities, FOMO on steroids, [a paradox of choice-inducing decision fatigue](https://www.washingtonpost.com/lifestyle/wellness/too-many-choices-decision-fatigue/2021/09/21/2dffce74-1b22-11ec-bcb8-0cb135811007_story.html?itid=lk_inline_manual_13), so much so that people return home exhausted and in need of another one.
The beach is no longer a day at one, an oasis of rest and relaxation. Vacationers feel the need to plant a chair — make that eight — at sunrise before transporting 220 pounds of stuff in a Buick-sized [beach wagon](https://www.travelandleisure.com/best-beach-wagons-6385768?&globeTest_visualSummaryList=0&utm_source=googlepaid&utm_medium=con&utm_content=CjwKCAiAg9urBhB_EiwAgw88mfP9e9FXv79myACwf-eZWncMqY3f_a3vRrprPZq1WUZpc-CCpRFO4hoCM1sQAvD_BwE&utm_campaign=commerce-dd-BeachWagons_TravelAndLeisure_Desktop_CommSEM_OrganicLP-385768&utm_term=best%20beach%20wagon&utm_test=&gclid=CjwKCAiAg9urBhB_EiwAgw88mfP9e9FXv79myACwf-eZWncMqY3f_a3vRrprPZq1WUZpc-CCpRFO4hoCM1sQAvD_BwE), which is also a thing that used not to exist when a bucket, a book and a towel were enough. And still most people stare at their phones instead of the water.
“I feel like I should be having more fun than I’m actually having,” says Alyssa Alvarez, a social media marketing manager and DJ in Detroit, expressing a sentiment that many share. “There are expectations of what I want people to believe that my life is like rather than what my life is actually like.”
Newly single after an eight-year relationship, Alvarez feels she lacks a true friend group. “I’m addicted to my phone. You live in this social realm, using it as a social crutch instead of making true connections,” she says.
Mind you, Alvarez is 27. For eons, early adulthood was considered an age of peak fun. Now, according to [several studies](https://www.washingtonpost.com/wellness/2023/10/24/anxiety-depression-young-adults/?itid=lk_inline_manual_19), it’s a protracted state of anxiety and depression.
> “I feel like I should be having more fun than I’m actually having”
>
> — Alyssa Alvarez, 27
Because there is now a coach for everything, Alvarez hired the “[party coach](https://partycoach.me/)” Evan Cudworth, taking his $497 course this fall on how to pursue “intentional fun.” (It now costs $555.) Cudworth meets with students biweekly, assigns podcasts, asks them to journal, and teaches them how to regulate their impulses and explore new outlets for fun.
How did this happen? How did fun come to take a back seat to almost everything? There is plenty of blame to go around, sort of like — *spoiler alert* — “Murder on the Orient Express” or our current Congress.
Blame it on an American culture that values work, productivity, power, wealth, status and more work over leisure. Italians celebrate *dolce far niente*, the sweetness of doing nothing. Americans reward the sweat of doing everything ASAP.
Blame it on technological advances that tether us to work without cessation. Blame it on the pandemic, which exacerbated so much while delivering Zoomageddon. Blame it on 2004, with the advent of Facebook, which led to ~Twitter~ (okay, X), Instagram, Threads, TikTok and who-knows-what lurking in the ether.
Blame it again on 2004 and the introduction of FOMO, our dread of missing out, broadcast through multiple social media spigots, allowing us to follow/stalk prettier, richer people having oodles of fun in fabulous places while doing irreparable damage to our free time, self-esteem and ability to experience joy.
“So many people are retreating into their phones, into anxiety,” says Cudworth, 37, from Chicago. “I’m helping people rediscover what fun means to them.” He hosts a virtual KnowFun social health club, helping clients experience joy while sober. Cudworth is a former college-prep coach, customer engagement officer, marketing director, college admissions staffer, host of a full-moon gathering and serious fan of raves and underground music.
His mandate is redefining fun: cutting back on bingeing screen time, eradicating envy scrolling, getting outside, moving, dancing. “With technology, we don’t allow ourselves to be present. You’re always thinking ‘something is better around the corner,’” Cudworth says, the now squandered in pursuit of the future.
“The world is so much less about human connection,” says Amanda Richards, 34, who works in casting in Los Angeles and is a graduate of Cudworth’s course. “We do more things virtually. People are more isolated. And there’s all this toxic positivity to convince people of how happy you are.”
How do Americans spend their leisure hours when they might be having fun with others, making those vital in-person connections? Watching television, our favorite [free time and “sports activity”](https://www.bls.gov/news.release/pdf/atus.pdf) (yes, that’s how it’s classified), according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, an average of 2.8 hours daily.
“That’s way more television than you really need. We put play on the back burner,” says Pat Rumbaugh, 65, of Takoma Park, Md. She’s [“The Play Lady,”](https://www.letsplayamerica.org/founders) who organizes unorganized play for adults. Rumbaugh is also a fan of getting dirty (literally, with dirt), dress-up boxes and sidewalk chalk for grown-ups.
Catherine Price, the author of [“The Power of Fun: How to Feel Alive Again,”](https://www.amazon.com/Power-Fun-Feel-Alive-Again/dp/0593241401/ref=sr_1_1?crid=2QW85O9H5WJ9N&keywords=the+power+of+fun&qid=1702312147&sprefix=the+power+of+fun%2Caps%2C94&sr=8-1) believes “we’re totally misdoing leisure” and “not leaving any room for spontaneity.”
Price plans to launch a “funtervention” in January on her “[How to Feel Alive” Substack](https://catherineprice.substack.com/), with exercises and tips on having more fun to help start the year with a resolution that, unlike diets and exercise, people may keep. These include prioritizing “fun magnets” (people, activities and settings that make us happy rather than things we think we should do for fun), identifying a new experience for the new year, and taking a digital Sabbath from screens.
Price takes fun seriously, designing a fun framework called SPARK, which stands for space, pursue passions, attract fun, rebel, and keep at it. She distinguishes between Fake Fun, which she defines as often passive and done too frequently (television, phone, “activities and products that are marketed to us as fun”) and True Fun, actually [Venn diagraming](https://www.eltandhappiness.com/new---the-power-of-fun.html) the latter.
To Price, True Fun is the confluence of connection (other people, nature), playfulness (lightheartedness, freedom) and flow (being fully engaged, present), which is not as challenging as it sounds. “You can have fun in any context. Playfulness is about an attitude,” she says.
Similarly, Todd Davis, 66, of Scottsdale, Ariz., says, “I don’t think having fun is a matter of finding time. I think it’s an emotion.”
Davis is a corporate fun coach and author of [“Fun at Work,”](https://funcoachusa.com/fun-at-work-%22book%22) which sound like oxymorons. But, once upon a time, workplaces could be fun, as opposed to offices that are designed to appear fun (look, wood accents, free Kind bars) so that people will spend every waking hour there. Back in the day, co-workers were friends. (Sometimes, more.) After hours, they gathered for drinks, played softball. Today, because of email, Slack and remote work, offices are half empty and far quieter than [libraries](https://www.washingtonpost.com/books/2023/05/12/noisy-library-defense-essay/?itid=lk_inline_manual_40).
“We go to work and there’s no sense of connection and camaraderie,” says Davis, who was long employed by his city’s department of parks and recreation. “People feel emotionally disconnected. Healthy conversations are the precursor of fun. We’ve lost the art of communication. Our spirit comes home with us. If you don’t communicate at work, what are you coming home with?”
Cathy Wasner, 54, is a consultant in North Jersey who took Davis’s multiday program. For years, work took precedence in her life, a situation she’s trying to correct. “Spontaneity has totally gone out the window,” she says. “For me, fun is kind of putting myself first, being intentional about getting together with friends, self-care. You have to make sure to do the things that feed your soul.”
Meanwhile, Alvarez, the Detroit social media marketing manager and DJ, says: “I’ve changed the need to put so much pressure on myself to socialize, to feel the need to create content.” As a millennial hyphenate, she is training with Cudworth to become a party coach herself.
“There’s this feeling that we’re not doing much, yet we’re burned out at the same time,” says Cudworth. “There’s a lot of shame involved in this, people telling themselves, ‘I don’t know how to have fun. It’s not working for me.’”
When Scott Frank was a child, his father, Barry, bought a small Cessna airplane, and on weekends the two of them would fly. This was the mid-nineteen-seventies, in Los Gatos, California. Barry was a Pan Am pilot, and he believed that in some lines of work, as Scott later put it, “fear is your friend.” Upon reaching an altitude of two miles, Barry would say, “Scott, if I had a heart attack right now and you had to land the plane, where would you land?” Scott would scan the horizon for a break in the trees, his heart pounding to the rhythm of the ticking clock Barry had imposed: *The plane is going down*. Scott was a sensitive child with a vigorous imagination, and these impromptu exercises in flight instruction were slightly traumatic. He never learned how to fly a plane himself. Instead, he became one of Hollywood’s most prolific and successful screenwriters.
Frank tends to obsess about the beginning of any story: how can he introduce a character with a few deft strokes so that the audience is immediately invested in what happens to her? He has devoted entire months just to cracking an opening scene. But he also excels at endings. In the mid-nineties, he was adapting “Out of Sight,” a novel by Elmore Leonard. The book culminates in a mansion outside Detroit; the federal marshal Karen Sisco (Jennifer Lopez, in the film) shoots the escaped bank robber she loves, Jack Foley (George Clooney), in the leg, then arrests him. But the movie version couldn’t end with Clooney returning to prison and Lopez just going home. Frank needed a tiny dose of hope: nothing cheesy, but something in keeping with Leonard’s playfully sardonic tone. So he invented a coda. Clooney is shackled in the back of a prison van, with Lopez sitting up front. She can at least escort him back to the penitentiary in Florida. Then a new piece is suddenly added to the chessboard. Another inmate, played by SamuelL. Jackson, joins them for the ride. His name is Hejira.
> F*oley*: *Hejira*? What kinda name is that?
> H*ejira*: The Hejira was the flight of Mohammed from Mecca in 622.
> F*oley:* The flight?
> H*ejira*: The brothers in Leavenworth gave me the name.
> F*oley*: You were at Leavenworth, huh?
> H*ejira*: For a time.
> F*oley*: Meaning?
> H*ejira*: Meaning time came, I left.
> F*oley*: You busted out?
> H*ejira*: I prefer to call it an exodus from an undesirable place.
> F*oley* (*interested now*): And how long was it before they caught up with you?
> H*ejira*: That time?
> F*oley*: There were others.
> H*ejira*: Yeah. That was the ninth.
> F*oley* (*really interested*): The *ninth*?
Hejira mentions that he was supposed to leave for Florida the previous night, but for some reason “the lady marshal” wanted him to ride with Foley. A shot of Lopez, her face giving nothing away. “Maybe she thought we’d have a lot to talk about,” Clooney murmurs. “Long ride to Florida.” And the credits roll. The scene lasts just two minutes. Frank can stick a landing.
Screenwriting looks as if it should be easy, but it isn’t. In 1925, Herman Mankiewicz (“Citizen Kane”) sent a telegram to his friend Ben Hecht, the playwright, trying to lure him from New York to Los Angeles. “*millions are to be grabbed out here and your only competition is idiots*,” he wrote, adding, “*don’t let this get around*.” Countless books and seminars and podcasts offer advice to aspiring screenwriters, as if any idiot *could* do it. Yet the form is notoriously confounding. It’s one thing to write a movie; it’s another to get it made, and another altogether for it to be any good. And, as Frank points out, the bad ones are “just as hard to write as the good ones.” A formatted screenplay page equates to about a minute of screen time, so each scene needs the abbreviated clarity of a haiku. Screenplays “are this unique, weird thing,” Frank says—more disciplined than playwriting, and with a much faster tempo. The tools of the novelist are mostly off-limits: no extensive character description, no metaphors. Frank has written fiction, and finds it easier. Scripts, he says, are “more of an exact science.”
You can’t make a Hollywood movie without a script, yet a screenwriter, unlike a novelist or a poet, must eventually hand off his precious creation to a whole team of people, and the first thing they want to do is change it. Even at the highest levels, the job can make you feel stunted and contingent. The novelist and screenwriter John Gregory Dunne once observed that just wanting to be a screenwriter is like just wanting to be a co-pilot; Frank is partial to that analogy, and not merely because of the aviation angle. Though he fiercely believes that screenwriting is an art form, he acknowledges that, in the world of streamers and big studios in which he operates, screenplays aren’t so much written as built. Why would writers subject themselves to such a humbling vocation? There’s the money, certainly, but the movies also possess a magnetic allure. An untold number of great novels have gone unwritten while their authors foundered in Hollywood. At the height of his literary powers, F. Scott Fitzgerald took time out to ride a desk at M-G-M, writing lacklustre scripts that never made it into production. Billy Wilder joked that Fitzgerald was like “a great sculptor who is hired to do a plumbing job.”
When the Writers Guild of America went on strike earlier this year, the awkward truth was that most of the union’s eleven thousand five hundred members were employed only intermittently as screenwriters. To be a so-called “working writer”—someone making a steady living off screenplays—is already to be a member of an exclusive club. When success comes, it tends to be fleeting. Frank is one of only a handful of American screenwriters who have managed to write good films and enjoy consistent success for four decades. His first movie, a cop-goes-undercover-in-high-school stinker called “Plain Clothes,” came out in 1988, and he has since had fifteen films released, across disparate genres, from “Get Shorty” to “Minority Report” to “Marley & Me” to “Logan,” along with several streaming series, most notably the 2020 Netflix megahit “The Queen’s Gambit,” which he wrote, produced, and directed.
Frank is a commercial writer. He has never worked in independent film. Craig Mazin, who wrote the HBO series “The Last of Us” and “Chernobyl,” told me, “In a good old-fashioned vaudevillian sense, Scott worries about the audience,” adding that he regards Frank as “one of the best screenwriters of all time.” The writer-director Paul Thomas Anderson told me that Frank’s work reminds him of Hollywood’s golden age. “He’s a formalist, and I mean that as the highest compliment,” Anderson said. “It’s what I always admired and wanted to emulate. He understood classic structure in a way most people can’t ever grasp, so they end up having to be ‘inventive.’ His scripts have always felt like they had one foot in the nineteen-thirties or forties.”
[](https://www.newyorker.com/cartoon/a22241)
“Can you buy me a six-pack?”
Cartoon by Jon Adams
Frank’s IMDb page obscures the true extent of his contributions to cinema, because he has also enjoyed a quiet, and extremely lucrative, sideline as perhaps the most in-demand script doctor in Hollywood. Studios summon him to punch up dialogue or deepen a character or untangle a contorted third act. For such assignments, which are generally uncredited, he commands a fee that he acknowledges is “insane”: three hundred thousand dollars a week. Most jobs last a few weeks. He has done rewrites on nearly sixty films—possibly more than any other contemporary screenwriter—including “Saving Private Ryan,” “Night at the Museum,” “Unfaithful,” “The Ring,” and “Gravity.” (He also did “a lot of the X-Men movies,” he told me, adding, “I don’t remember their titles.”)
It’s hard to turn down this kind of assignment, and Frank is keenly aware that the opportunities afforded to him are something most screenwriters could only dream of. Nevertheless, it can be demoralizing to expend so much of one’s creative energy servicing someone else’s vision. Steven Soderbergh, who directed “Out of Sight” and is a close friend, described Frank to me as “a ventriloquist.” Just as Frank can inhabit movie characters so completely that he can compose fluid dialogue in their precise manner of speaking, he is adept at channelling the voice of a director or a previous screenwriter. The producer Nina Jacobson, who has worked as a senior executive at three studios, told me, “Scott folds himself into the process. He’s sort of foolproof, in terms of being able to diagnose what you need, team up with the director, and deliver it.” Frank’s ability to offer solutions within an existing stylistic idiom makes him a “chameleon,” she said, adding, “You’d be hard-pressed to find an executive or producer who doesn’t think of him first virtually anytime they have a problem on a script.” The one trouble with having this talent, Jacobson pointed out, is that it can lead you to “spend your whole career rewriting other people’s movies.”
The two qualities that Frank finds most appealing in a character are competence—at robbing banks, playing chess, being an astronaut—and a sense of humor. He possesses both. In our first e-mail exchange, he warned, “My work doesn’t so much change the aesthetic as it does provoke adjectives like ‘solid’ and ‘dependable.’ ” He pointed out that, unlike such peers as Aaron Sorkin or Nicole Holofcener, he lacks the kind of idiosyncratic writing style that becomes a signature. When the British Academy of Film and Television Arts invited him to deliver a screenwriting lecture, in 2012, he told the audience, “I’m a bit of a hack.” Frank said to me that he questioned the entertainment value of a Profile of him: having reached his sixties, he reflected, “I find myself very content, not particularly tormented. Even my demons have gotten bored.” But one reason he’s taken so many rewrite jobs is that he is compulsively obliging. So we met for a series of lunches, often at Café Cluny, a West Village restaurant that serves as a canteen for Hollywood types in exile.
Frank has soft features and dresses in soft, dark clothes. His dark hair and neatly trimmed beard are going gray. But the actress and director Jodie Foster, a longtime friend, noted, “Even though he’s sixty-three, he still *feels* like a fourteen-year-old boy. He giggles a lot.” Several people who know Frank well mentioned the contrast between his writing, which can be dark and extremely violent, and his twinkle-eyed irrepressibility. He and his wife, Jennifer, a conceptual artist, have been married for thirty-five years, and they raised three children in Pasadena—adjacent to the social-professional vortex of Hollywood but far enough away to avoid its more virulent aspects. A decade ago, the Franks moved to New York, settling in an apartment around the corner from Café Cluny. “Like so many assholes who’ve come before me, I spend the summer in Martha’s Vineyard,” Frank told me, adding, “I’m also that asshole who goes to Connecticut on weekends.” With a hint of self-laceration, he admitted that he’d taken many jobs chiefly so that he could buy nicer homes. “I even rewrote a movie called ‘Paycheck,’ ” he told me.
One thing that sets Frank apart even among talented screenwriters is the sheer fecundity of his imagination. As Soderbergh put it, Frank has “ideas just pouring off him.” In elementary school, he would make up stories and occasionally present them to others as though they were true. After one such composition, involving domestic violence, prompted an alarmed teacher to call his home, Barry Frank held up a flight manual in one hand and a novel in the other and said, “Scott, one of these is true, and one of these is fiction. Do you know the difference?” From then on, anytime Scott wrote a story, he would pencil “*fiction*” at the top of the page.
He was about eleven when, at the grocery store with his mother, he was browsing through a carrousel of paperbacks by the register and discovered the screenplay for “Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid.” This was fortuitous, not least because screenplays were rarely published then—even scripts for successful movies weren’t perceived to be of literary interest. “Butch,” however, had been written by one of the great practitioners of the form, William Goldman, who also wrote “Marathon Man” and “All the President’s Men.” Goldman’s style on the page was visceral and conversational, as if he’d just walked out of the movie himself and was now breathlessly recounting it to you. Never had the words “*cut to*” been deployed with greater brio.
At fifteen, Frank saw “Dog Day Afternoon” at the Century cinema in San Jose, and, at the point in the movie when the bank robber played by Al Pacino starts chanting, “Attica! Attica!,” the audience rose to its feet and chanted along with him. Even today, Frank recalls the experience as a kind of religious awakening.
His parents were dubious about his interest in the cinema. “*Pilots* can write,” Barry said, suggesting that Scott pursue a real career and save screenwriting for weekends. But in 1980, when Scott was a nineteen-year-old student at the University of California, Santa Barbara, he wrote his first script: “Little Man Tate,” a comedy about a seven-year-old prodigy being raised by a single mother. In an early scene, one-year-old Fred Tate is at a diner, repeating what sounds like a fragment of baby talk, “Koffer.” His mother has no idea what he’s saying until she notices the manufacturer’s name on the plate he has been eating from—and realizes that he can read. Like many Hollywood scripts, it spent years in development. Jodie Foster eventually directed and starred in the movie, which came out in 1991. Foster was raised by a single mother and had been a prodigy herself, delivering, at the age of twelve, a discomfitingly assured performance as a child prostitute in “Taxi Driver.” She told me that when she read Frank’s script she responded to “the autobiography of it.” She felt a kinship with Frank, she added, because he, too, had been something of a prodigy.
Lindsay Doran was a young studio executive in L.A. when, in 1984, she picked up the script for “Little Man Tate.” She experienced a jolt reading the scene with the plate. “I remember my hand snaking to the phone almost involuntarily,” she said. “I thought, Who *is* this guy?” When Doran was appointed vice-president of production at Paramount, she offered Frank a contract and an office on the lot. Like other Hollywood success stories, Frank has been known to reminisce about his humble early days as a bartender. But, as Tony Gilroy, another prolific screenwriter, who wrote and directed “Michael Clayton,” points out, Frank broke into the business almost immediately. “I think he tended bar for, like, twelve minutes,” Gilroy said.
The writers’ floor at Paramount was not so different from the one where F.Scott Fitzgerald had toiled at M-G-M. But Frank loved it. He and Doran developed a campy Hitchcockian thriller called “Dead Again,” which Kenneth Branagh directed and starred in, alongside Emma Thompson. One character butchers another with a pair of scissors. (After Jordan Peele released his 2019 horror film, “Us,” he acknowledged his debt to “Dead Again” for the scissors-as-murder-weapon motif.) Branagh’s movie, which was released in 1991, was a hit. Friends of Frank’s wife asked if she felt safe sharing a room with the twisted fellow who had written it. In one memorable scene, Andy Garcia, playing an ailing chain-smoker who has had a cancer operation, inserts a cigarette directly into the breathing tube in his trachea. To Doran, “Dead Again” captured “the essence of Scott Frank—funny, mysterious, cynical, but also somehow hopeful.” She coined a term for it: film blanc.
When Frank goes to movies, he can sometimes predict when people will get up to use the bathroom. A lapse in the action, half an hour in—one character says to another, “So, what made you want to become a cop?” Frank believes that moviegoers, in an almost Pavlovian way, have learned to recognize “baldly expositional” writing as a sign that they might safely sneak out for a bit. One conundrum of screenwriting is how to smuggle into the mouths of your characters the necessary information that a novel can just *tell* the reader. Frank tries to avoid disquisitions, and if he can’t avoid them he injects an element of surprise. The exposition in his scripts is often imparted by an eccentric minor character, in an unusual milieu: in “Dead Again,” Robin Williams, in a bloody butcher’s apron, talks to Branagh and Thompson about reincarnation, upon which the plot hinges; in “Minority Report,” Tom Cruise sneaks into a greenhouse, where a comically brusque botanist divulges secrets about the police state they live in. To hold the interest of a jaded audience, nothing is more important than unpredictability—a promise that if you look away you might miss something.
“Most people can do story *or* character,” Stacey Sher, who produced “Get Shorty” and “Out of Sight,” told me. “Scott can do both, and that’s really rare.” Character always comes first for Frank, however. He avoids outlines, preferring to navigate his scripts without G.P.S. Ideally, his characters will become so fully realized that they’ll grab the wheel and steer the narrative in unexpected directions. By forging story to fit character, rather than the other way around, Frank often ends up surprised himself. One of his daughters, Stella, told me that as a child she would fall asleep “to the sound of him typing.” When she walks in on him at work, she finds him mouthing dialogue. If it’s going really well, he sometimes laughs in delight.
Because Frank has such intuitive mastery of narrative structure, he finds rewriting other people’s screenplays easy. “Scripts become transparent if they’re not my own,” he told me. He subscribes to a Billy Wilder adage: “If you have a problem in the third act, the real problem is in the first act.” Often, studio executives will have mandated cuts to the script’s first sections, because they want the movie to get to the point, but the abbreviated opening means that the audience never becomes attached to the characters enough to be concerned about their fates. At the end of such a movie, Frank observed, viewers “understand how they’re *supposed* to feel—but they don’t feel it.” This is one reason that he is not overly alarmed about a future in which artificial intelligence replaces screenwriters. A.I. can certainly assemble a recombinant screenplay by drawing on the collected works of people like Scott Frank, and the result may even be schematically sound—but getting an audience to really care about what happens to fictional characters requires a different sort of magic. The Tom Cruise character in “Minority Report” is, essentially, a fascist: a cop who works for a futuristic “pre-crime” unit that apprehends people who intend to break the law before they can pull it off. But in Frank’s rendering, he is also a man who has lost his own child—a son who was abducted—and is coping with that loss by trying, in extreme ways, to stamp out crime forever. On paper, we should not find a protagonist with this job description sympathetic. Yet we do.
On rewrites, Frank tends to work quickly—and often under enormous time pressure. Nina Jacobson told me that Frank was brought in to rewrite “The Hunger Games: Catching Fire” when the film was just weeks from production. She likened the process to “laying down new train track while conducting the moving train at the same time.” On his own projects, it takes a year or more to write a script. He always starts with the first scene. William Horberg, who produced “The Queen’s Gambit,” recalls Frank pitching what became the opening of the series: “He said, ‘You’re in this hotel room. This girl throws open the curtains. There’s somebody in the bed, we don’t know who it is. She’s hungover. She goes down in the elevator and through the hotel and into this big room, and it’s a *chess tournament!*’ ” This was not the beginning of the 1983 Walter Tevis novel upon which the series is based, but a scene from later in the book. Frank plucked out that moment, Horberg said, and “it just established the whole show.”
[](https://www.newyorker.com/cartoon/a25461)
“Were we expecting a baby?”
Cartoon by Mick Stevens
Book adaptations are Frank’s specialty. Translating a novel for the movies, especially a popular one, is often fraught. After the success of “Dead Again,” Frank signed on to adapt the Elmore Leonard novel “Get Shorty.” Before he started writing, he had lunch with Leonard at the M-G-M commissary. Leonard once published a list of ten “rules of writing,” which included “Avoid detailed descriptions of characters” and “Don’t go into great detail describing places and things.” His novels are lean and well paced, like good screenplays, so you might suppose that they’d transfer easily to the screen. But at lunch Leonard regaled Frank with horror stories about how much he hated all the adaptations of his books. The young screenwriter wanted very much to impress the older novelist. By the time Leonard said, in parting, “Have fun,” Frank was nauseous.
Faithful adaptations usually make terrible films. There are exceptions: Frank especially admires Ted Tally’s script for “The Silence of the Lambs,” which, apart from some judicious pruning, seems to have been lifted directly from the Thomas Harris novel. The screenwriter Steven Knight has remarked that, if a book is a mountain, then a good adaptation is a painting of the mountain—a vivid impression that can never be as multidimensional as its subject but that retains its essence. The first time Frank read “Get Shorty,” he went through it with a green highlighter, coloring the parts he thought he might use. When he finished, practically the whole book was green. With any adaptation, he reaches a point where he must decide what the novel means to him, then build the script around that core idea, discarding everything else.
One theme Frank frequently returns to is reinvention. He often invokes a famous chapter in Dashiell Hammett’s “Maltese Falcon” which was left out of the 1941 film. During a respite from the action, the hardboiled detective Sam Spade relates a seemingly extraneous story about a Tacoma man named Flitcraft, who has a near-death experience when a falling beam at a building site almost kills him. Shaken, Flitcraft radically changes his life, abandoning his family and leaving town. The punch line is that when he reëmerges, in Spokane, after several years of drifting, he ends up more or less re-creating his old life, only with a new woman and a new kid. Hammett fans have long puzzled over this enigmatic digression. To Frank, the Flitcraft parable illustrates how “a single moment” can cause a person to reassess who they are and who they want to be. The name of his production company is Flitcraft, Ltd.
Chili Palmer, the hero of “Get Shorty,” is a loan shark who doesn’t want to be a loan shark anymore. He wants to be a movie producer. Adapting Leonard books is tricky, Frank told me, because they’re “all talk.” You can get halfway through one before the plot kicks in. But Chili was a Flitcraft type, and Frank knew how to write such a character. Departing from Leonard’s book, he imagined Chili as more of a movie fan, allowing the character’s wiseguy savvy to be comically offset by flashes of childlike enthusiasm. In one scene, Chili (played by John Travolta) is accosted in a parking garage by a burly leg-breaker named Bear (a pre-“Sopranos” James Gandolfini). Bear, a former Hollywood stuntman, has repeatedly tried to beat Chili up, but Chili keeps getting the better of him—this time kneeing him in the face. As Bear wheezes on the floor, Chili suddenly changes the subject:
> C*hili*: So... how many movies you been in?
> B*ear*: About sixty.
> C*hili*: No shit? What’re some of ’em?
“Get Shorty,” which was directed by Barry Sonnenfeld, came out in 1995, and was a commercial and critical hit. Even Leonard liked it. He later said to Sher, “I never know the themes of my books until Scott Frank tells me.” The film’s success led Frank’s agent at the time to say that he would be guaranteed ten years of steady work as a screenwriter. This was meant to be encouraging, but it filled Frank with dread. He was thirty-five. He and Jennifer had two young children, and another on the way. At night, he would walk the family dog around Pasadena, and upon reaching home he’d look at his family through the brightly lit windows and wonder, “What if I run out of ideas?” There was no reason to believe that creativity was a renewable resource. Writers burn out, fall out of fashion, become blocked. Frank was seized by a fear that he would “fail three or four times in a row,” and be finished. Looking in at Jennifer and the children, he would think, “These people are in trouble!”
Most screenwriters grapple with the tension between art and commerce. Joan Didion, who wrote films such as “The Panic in Needle Park” and “A Star Is Born” with her husband, John Gregory Dunne, once suggested that “to understand whose picture it is one needs to look not particularly at the script but at the deal memo.”
Frank is philosophical about the mercantile aspect of his profession. Early in his career, he got to know his hero, William Goldman, who became a mentor to Frank and other young screenwriters. Even Goldman lamented that half the scripts he’d written went unproduced. If you set out to make great art in Hollywood, Frank found, you frequently ended up in a purgatory of development. On a few occasions, he told me, he has declined to rewrite someone else’s script, because he saw nothing he could improve—it was perfect. When I inquired about the titles of these films, he said, “Oh, they never got made.” By contrast, some of his most creatively fulfilling experiences have come from money jobs. When Sher asked him to adapt “Out of Sight,” he was wary: he’d managed to write one Elmore Leonard movie without pissing off Elmore Leonard, and he wasn’t eager to try his luck again. But his third child had been born, leading him to buy a bigger home, and he was still haunted by his agent’s “ten years” prophecy. So he took the job. Soderbergh turned out to be an ideal match for Frank’s sensibilities, preserving the wry, sexy vernacular of the script. As Chili muses in “Get Shorty,” “Sometimes you do your best work when you got a gun to your head.” The screenplay that Frank wrote to pay for his new house was nominated for an Academy Award.
After “Out of Sight,” he was inundated by rewrite offers. Frank adheres to an informal code of discretion when it comes to this sort of work, but when I pressed him he said, “Ninety per cent of what I get called in on is character work.” In “Saving Private Ryan,” he helped round out such soldiers as the Scripture-quoting sniper, giving them active connections with people back home. In “The Ring,” he developed the relationship between the protagonist, played by Naomi Watts, and her son. In “Gravity,” his assignment was to give Sandra Bullock’s character, an astronaut, “a life outside of space.” In “Rise of the Planet of the Apes,” he created the father character, played by John Lithgow, who forms a bond with a chimpanzee named Caesar and is cured of his Alzheimer’s disease before regressing to an impaired mental state.
All the while, Frank deferred his own projects. This was a high-class problem, by any definition, but Craig Mazin, who has also done rewrites, explained the psychological effect: “There is something so vulnerable and frightening about doing your own thing, because it’s your fault if it doesn’t work. And then there’s this other kind of work, where you’re paid an extraordinary amount of money, you’re the hero before you walk in the door, you’re not even held that accountable, because you have a limited amount of time, and all you can do is make it better.” Sometimes, an executive would tell Frank, “We have a script coming in a month from now, and we need you to rewrite it.”
Frank stresses that these gigs allowed him to work with many directors he admired. He did a rewrite several years ago on a “Scarface” remake for Luca Guadagnino, which has since been abandoned. And his work on some films, such as “Minority Report,” which was directed by Steven Spielberg, was so extensive that he received an official screenwriting credit. Nevertheless, it could sometimes seem as though Frank’s many friends in the industry were taking advantage of his biddable nature. “Why are you saying yes to this?” Jennifer would ask after he’d accepted yet another assignment.
A prominent film producer told me, “For a long time, Scott Frank was the name people would bring up as a cautionary tale about the dangers of the rewrite system. This was someone who could be the next William Goldman, but he kept doing these weekly rewrites instead of his own original work.” When I asked Frank about that critique, he readily accepted it. “My career is probably best defined more as a failure of nerve than anything else,” he told me. “I used to book myself up three years in advance, out of fear.” Such anxiety can be a great motivator, but it can also amount to a life of safe choices.
By the time Frank reached his fifties, he was feeling a rising unease. There was no one eureka moment when he decided, like Flitcraft, to change his life. But, as Frank surveyed his career, he thought back to those childhood excursions in the Cessna with his father. For a good part of the past thirty years, he realized, he had just been “picking places to land.”
One day last year, I visited the South of France, where Frank was directing a new limited series, “Monsieur Spade.” It was early October, but it still felt like summer. At a remote farmhouse an hour north of Montpellier, I found Frank, in a baseball hat and sunglasses, preparing to shoot a scene with Clive Owen. The series is not an adaptation, but something like it: several years ago, Frank was informed that the rights to the Sam Spade character were available. Apart from “The Maltese Falcon,” Spade appears in only a few Hammett stories, but Frank saw an opportunity to build a new tale around the famous detective. As it happened, he had been trying to obtain the rights to a different Dashiell Hammett property, “Red Harvest,” which is one of Frank’s favorite novels. (He likes to tell young writers that “Red Harvest” can teach them more about the velocity and economy of screenwriting than any manual.) So initially he demurred on the character rights. But then he had a thought: “I went, Wait, I know what this is about. It’s about middle age.” What if Spade was no longer a detective but an expat—in France? “He’s living a quiet life. Tranquil,” Frank told himself, warming to the idea. “And it’s about to get very untranquil.” He approached Tom Fontana, a veteran TV writer who created the HBO drama “Oz,” about collaborating. Fontana told me, “Scott said, ‘Sam Spade, twenty years after “The Maltese Falcon,” living in the South of France.’ I said, ‘I’m in.’ ”
[](https://www.newyorker.com/cartoon/a26342)
“Interesting. I don’t remember that part of the book I listened to at 2x speed while doing other things.”
Cartoon by Asher Perlman
As French crew members adjusted lights around a storage shed where the scene would be shot, Frank conferred with Owen, who was dressed in suspenders and a high-waisted suit; the look was reminiscent of Humphrey Bogart, the quintessential Sam Spade (though Owen is about twice Bogart’s height). Owen, a lifelong Hammett fan himself, expressed amusement to me that when the opportunity arose to play Spade it was in a series that would deconstruct the very macho iconography that made the character famous, and portray him as a man out of his element. The first scene Frank wrote finds Spade with his pants around his ankles, prone on an examination table, being given a prostate exam by a droll French physician who says that it’s time to quit smoking. Chuckling over the humiliations Frank had visited upon his hero, Owen drawled, in his malty baritone, “I don’t get the hat, I don’t carry a gun, I don’t smoke. I’ve got one word for this job—I’ve been duped!” He picked up a folding chair marked “*clive owen*,” relocated it to a spot in the shade, and sat down to study his script.
In the course of the past several years, Frank had experienced the kind of reinvention that his characters often undergo. Several changes transpired in close succession. After he and Jennifer moved to New York, he did “a ton” of therapy. He began taking Zoloft for anxiety, a move that he had resisted for a long time, because he felt that fear might be integral to his creative process. He wrote a novel, “Shaker,” about a dissolute hit man whose plan to execute someone in L.A. is upended by an earthquake. The book, which Knopf published in 2015, didn’t find a big audience, but writing it was cathartic. “Part of the exercise was getting all these other voices out of my head—all these people I liked collaborating with,” Frank said. “I wanted to just write for myself.” Perhaps most consequentially, he decided to stop doing rewrite jobs. “My identity for so long was defined by a lack of self-confidence in my own ideas,” he told me. “Pleasing others seemed like a perfectly reasonable thing to organize my art around. Until it wasn’t.”
It may have helped that Frank, like Spade, had woken up one day in a world that had changed. The movie business had become unrecognizable, with the studios essentially giving up on freestanding R-rated thrillers and dramas. Frank was forced to admit that most of the films he had built his reputation on would probably not get made today. Many talented screenwriters have opted to hold their noses and squander their gifts writing for superhero franchises. Frank wrote the X-Men movies “The Wolverine” and “Logan.” But he was angry at himself for taking those jobs, and if you read the script for “Logan” you can tell. On page 2, he prefaces an action sequence with a warning to the reader: “If you’re on the make for a hyper choreographed, gravity defying, city-block destroying, CG fuckathon, this ain’t your movie. In this flick, people will get hurt or killed when shit falls on them.... Should anyone in our story have the misfortune to fall off a roof or out a window, they won’t bounce. They will die.”
The script, which Frank wrote with the film’s director, James Mangold, rejected so many tenets of the genre that it turned out to be quite interesting; part noir, part Western, it was “Shane” with retractable claws. Frank received his second Oscar nomination for the screenplay. “If Scott wanted to write those movies, he could write them all day long,” Stacey Sher remarked. “He made ‘Logan’ singular. He got nominated for a fucking Oscar for it. What’s distinctive about Scott is that he never did it again.” By the time “Logan” came out, in 2017, Frank had discovered a new medium in which the stories he actually wanted to tell could still get made: streaming.
For the past two decades, Frank has worked with a researcher named Mimi Munson, who lives in Maine. Inspired by Francis Ford Coppola and Elmore Leonard, both of whom employed full-time researchers, Frank hired Munson to help him explore broad areas that he might want to write about, or to answer highly specific queries on deadline. Munson told me, “He’ll say, ‘I have a soldier and he needs to be very sick. But it can’t be an illness that’ll definitely kill him—it has to be something that *might* kill him. And it has to have a psychological component, so people might doubt he is compos mentis. And it has to go away. And I need it in forty-five minutes.’ ”
Frank, who loves Westerns, had long wanted to write one, and when Munson was visiting New York she discovered, at the Strand bookstore, numerous published diaries of women from the Wild West. An idea took root, and Frank wrote a movie script, called “Godless,” about a town in New Mexico where a mining accident has killed most of the men. People loved the screenplay. It was violent but soulful, and filled with those moments of narrative subversion that Frank enjoys: the inhabitants of a remote ranch brace for an attack when they see a figure approaching, only to discover that it is a mother seeking help for her sick baby; a callow deputy sheriff twirls his pistols and talks a suspiciously big game, then turns out to be an excellent shot. But it was a sprawling, ambitious story that tracked a dozen intersecting characters, with no connection to a comic book or a line of toys—precisely the sort of movie that Hollywood now avoided. The idea was rejected all over town. Frank finally ended up at Netflix, which offered him the broader canvas of six episodes. (During production, he was allowed to add a seventh.) The show appeared in 2017 to strong reviews, and helped establish the “limited series” as a streaming staple.
One curious feature of Hollywood sociology is that people who write movies may be wretched, powerless, and replaceable, but in television the writer is king. Frank wrote all the episodes of “Godless,” and as the showrunner he enjoyed a level of creative authority that a writer seldom does on a film set. He also directed every episode.
For about a decade, Frank had been developing into something like an auteur. As a young screenwriter, he had talked about directing but had insisted that it was not the right time. He took comfort in the predictable domesticity of a writer’s life, and worried that becoming a director, which can mean long stretches away from home, might put a strain on his family. Like the characters he writes, Frank occasionally says one thing when he means another. Jennifer decided that he was using his family as a pretext. “He kept saying, ‘I can’t direct because of the kids,’ ” she told me. “And I said, ‘Don’t hide behind the kids.’ ”
When Frank was in his thirties, he had written a thriller, “The Lookout,” about a former high-school hockey star who suffers a traumatic brain injury and is coöpted by a gang of local crooks into assisting in a heist. Some prominent directors considered making the movie—Sam Mendes, David Fincher, Michael Mann—but none did. Finally, in 2005, Frank decided to make it himself. He shot it in Manitoba, with Joseph Gordon-Levitt and Jeff Daniels. The finished film is moody and effective, but Frank was forced to admit that his level of mastery as a director lagged considerably behind his abilities as a writer. After Soderbergh saw the film, they had what Soderbergh described to me as a “very blunt” conversation: “I said, ‘Look, you are a writer who has directed now, but you are not yet a director. You documented what you wrote. But that’s not the same as being a director.’ ”
When I asked Frank about this, he confirmed that Soderbergh had said those things—and also that, for some time after that conversation, they didn’t speak. Frank, still sounding a bit wounded, pointed out to me that the movie won an Independent Spirit Award for Best First Feature. But Soderbergh said that he loved Frank too much to offer disingenuous enthusiasm, and that he wouldn’t have said what he did if he hadn’t thought that Frank could ultimately “get there,” and find a distinctive directorial voice.
After such an appraisal, it must have been tempting for Frank to retreat to what he knew he was good at. Instead, he directed a second film: a grisly detective story, based on a book by Lawrence Block, called “A Walk Among the Tombstones.” While he was working on the film, in 2012, he experienced a crisis of confidence: the movie didn’t cohere. Panicked and stuck, Frank stifled his pride and went to Soderbergh for advice.
They had not been entirely out of touch. When Soderbergh was editing his 2011 film “Contagion,” he had asked for feedback, and Frank had offered his own blunt assessment. “He watched the movie and said, ‘You’ve got huge problems. I don’t even know where to start,’ ” Soderbergh recalled. Frank’s bruising suggestion was that they reassess the narrative and make a ninety-minute version, effectively shaving forty-five minutes from the film—which Soderbergh proceeded to do. “The fact that he was right, coupled with the fact that he got to be tough on me, was probably a necessary and helpful step in our reconnecting,” he said.
Soderbergh, who has made nearly forty films, possesses the sort of diagnostic acumen when it comes to directing and editing that Frank does with a screenplay. After watching Frank’s cut of “A Walk Among the Tombstones,” he said, “You’ve edited it very insecurely.” Frank had aspired to make a seventies-style thriller, in the fashion of Alan J. Pakula. But he’d hedged his bets by compiling multiple alternative versions for every sequence. The result looked “as if every scene was a different movie,” Frank says now. Soderbergh offered to clear his schedule and recut the movie with him. Scene by scene, they excavated the film that Frank had originally intended to make. It took three weeks, and it was during that time, Frank told me, that he “really learned how to be a director.”
On set in France, Frank seemed amiably frazzled. Whereas he tends to prefer neurotic overpreparation, his French crew favored a more spontaneous approach. “They don’t *prep*,” he whispered. “It’s terrifying. They’re super casual.” Clive Owen told me that, because Frank had written all the episodes with Fontana and knew precisely what he wanted from each scene, “he doesn’t do many takes.” He likes to move quickly, so as not to dissipate the actors’ energy or fall behind schedule. For the actors, Owen said, it means that “you have to come ready to work.”
[](https://www.newyorker.com/cartoon/a27406)
“Can you remember the general shape of our car?”
Cartoon by Amy Hwang
While the crew adjusted the lighting for a new shot, Frank mused on his role as writer-director. “The hardest part about the job is learning to live with disappointment,” he explained. There’s never the budget to shoot the scene exactly as you’d imagined it, or the weather isn’t coöperating, or you couldn’t book the perfect location, or an actor can’t nail the tone. “You have this thing in your head, and *you* can’t do it,” he went on. “You see your vision leaking away.” And yet you can’t blame the result on anyone else. Directing, he concluded, is “the loneliest job in the world.”
Yet he told me all this with a smile, as if he were deriving some madcap joy from the process. The trick, he went on, was to find a way to embrace the uncertainty and to recognize that the thing you shoot will be different from the thing you wrote—and often better, in unexpected ways.
The cinematographer Steven Meizler, who shot both “Godless” and “The Queen’s Gambit” and has also worked with Spielberg, Soderbergh, and Fincher, told me, “A lot of great directors, they’re out of reach. There’s a persona when they get on set.” But Frank directs without the armor of such a mystique. It takes a certain confidence to be open to the ideas, and even to the criticism, of the people around you, Meizler said, and to be candid about your own uncertainty. “Scott’s shield is that he doesn’t have one,” he remarked.
It was after the editing master class with Soderbergh that Frank came into his own as a director, with “Godless.” The series was a success, so Netflix agreed to make “The Queen’s Gambit.” As one of the show’s producers, William Horberg, pointed out to me, the story did not seem particularly commercial: “Girl? Chess? Fifties? Orphan? Drugs? Pass.” Several notable filmmakers had tried and failed to turn the novel into a feature film, including Bernardo Bertolucci and the actor Heath Ledger, who, before his death, in 2008, had planned to make “The Queen’s Gambit” his directorial début. The problem with doing it as a feature, Frank decided, was that at that length it would inevitably turn into a “Karate Kid”-style sports movie. He was less interested in whether the protagonist, Beth Harmon, would win the big tournament than he was in a theme that he had first explored in “Little Man Tate,” and had grappled with in his own life: the hazards of mastery, the costs of brilliance. As he had with “Godless,” Frank secured a green light from Netflix before he wrote all the scripts—a risky move for the company, generally speaking, though the suits presumably took comfort in knowing that if they ran into trouble they could always call Scott Frank.
The series was shot in Berlin, because Frank was determined to work with the German production designer Uli Hanisch, having admired his work on the series “Babylon Berlin.” Beth Harmon was played, with eerie poise, by Anya Taylor-Joy. Whereas “Godless” features wide shots of people in vast landscapes, much of “The Queen’s Gambit” plays out in closeups of Taylor-Joy, because so much of the drama takes place inside her head. When Soderbergh saw Frank’s first rough assembly, he said, “This is going to be huge.” Released in October, 2020, at the height of the pandemic, “The Queen’s Gambit” was watched by sixty-two million Netflix subscribers in its first month of streaming, becoming the service’s No. 1 show in sixty-three countries. The series triggered an international boom in the sale of chess sets. Netflix even introduced its own “Queen’s Gambit” board game. (“It’s... not chess, which I wasn’t expecting,” Rebecca Root, who plays a choir teacher in the series, told me dryly.) The show was nominated for eighteen Emmys and won eleven; Frank got one for directing, and was nominated for writing.
This triumph was marred, slightly, on Emmy night, when Frank went up to accept his directing award—in a tux, his curly hair carefully combed—and brought with him a two-page speech, with a long list of people to thank. He was nervous, and running long, when the band struck up to play him off. “Really?” he said, with a dismissive wave of his hand, plowing on. “Um, I’m also grateful to this incredible array of actors, none of whom really need much help from me and all of whom—seriously, stop the music.” To people who know Frank, this moment, though clumsily expressed, illustrated his humility—his desire to showcase collaborators. Nevertheless, for a man who is so adept at writing concise, elegant speeches for fictional characters, it was a puzzling lapse, on a very big stage. Twitter went berserk. “The 2021 Emmys Featured the Worst Acceptance Speech in History,” the *Independent* declared. Months later, Sterlin Harjo, the co-creator of the show “Reservation Dogs,” delivered an acceptance speech at the Gotham Awards in which he took a jab at “the chess-player show, or whatever that was,” exclaiming, “Don’t fucking talk so long!”
Over lunch one day in New York, I spoke with Tony Gilroy about how difficult it can be to remain relevant as a screenwriter as you age. When he and Frank were young, Gilroy pointed out, they were “surrogate sons” to older, accomplished figures such as Goldman and the director Sydney Pollack, and they absorbed a great deal of wisdom from those relationships. (They no doubt benefitted as well from the fact that Hollywood was then such a boys’ club.) But Frank and Gilroy also watched their mentors lose their touch. Goldman “hated to revise,” Gilroy said, and it is all too easy to let your prowess and your ego seduce you into believing that your first instinct is always right. Both Frank and Gilroy offered counsel on Pollack’s troubled final film, “The Interpreter.” After decades of success making such movies as “Three Days of the Condor” and “Out of Africa,” Pollack had “a way of working,” Frank said. “And it stopped working.” Suddenly, Pollack was out of step. Frank urged him to do “something different, something small, something that’s not a love story where they end up together.” He even tried to get Pollack to direct his thriller “The Lookout.” But Pollack couldn’t change. To Frank, the lesson was clear: you can’t “just double down on what you used to do.” The only way to remain vital is to take chances.
On a bright Saturday morning this past spring, I met Frank at a theatre in Hell’s Kitchen, where he was rehearsing a new project, an opera set to the music of the Killers. The concept was for Frank to stitch songs by the band into a fictional Cain-and-Abel story about the founding of a Las Vegas-like city, called “Dustland”: a film with musical numbers. “I’m trying to do something based on Brecht’s ‘City of Mahagonny,’ ” he told me excitedly. “I’m listening to the Killers’ songs over and over. But the bastards just released a new album, so now I’ll have to reconfigure it.” He had spent the past week workshopping with the band’s front man, Brandon Flowers, and Thomas Kail, the director of “Hamilton,” along with a pickup team of accomplished Broadway vocalists whom Kail had assembled. As a small audience of friends and family sat down to watch, Kail said, “This is really about just experiencing this music in sequence. We’re not going to tell you the story right now.” He sat next to Frank and Flowers at a folding table in a corner of the stage while a pianist played the pretty descending riff from the song “Enterlude,” and the performers, assembled in a semicircle, sang, “We hope you enjoy your stay/It’s good to have you with us, even if it’s just for the day.”
While I was working on this article, Frank periodically sent me an updated version of a document titled “My Stuff”—an ever-evolving list of twenty or so active projects. Some are films that he is producing, as a way of mentoring younger writers. Since the nineties, he has been an adviser to the Sundance Screenwriters Lab, and in that capacity he has worked with many filmmakers who have gone on to substantial careers. Among them are Marielle Heller, who directed “Diary of a Teenage Girl” and “Can You Ever Forgive Me?”—and whom Frank cast as Beth Harmon’s mother in “The Queen’s Gambit”—and Charlotte Wells, who directed the recent film “Aftersun.” In 1993, when Paul Thomas Anderson was writing his first feature, “Hard Eight,” he attended the lab. “Stop watching movies and start reading,” Frank told him, recommending a list of books, including “Red Harvest.” It was “the best advice I could have gotten,” Anderson told me.
Even after the global success of “The Queen’s Gambit,” Netflix passed on Frank’s next three projects. One was an adaptation of “Laughter in the Dark,” the 1938 novel by Vladimir Nabokov. Frank is co-writing the script with the novelist and screenwriter Megan Abbott. The material is tricky; the novel, often described as a precursor to “Lolita,” tells the story of a middle-aged art critic who becomes infatuated with a seventeen-year-old girl. Frank wanted to do it as a film noir, and Abbott, who was an academic before she turned to popular writing, is an authority on women in noir. “We talked about the femme fatale as this character who gets short shrift,” Abbott told me. “But really great noir is always toying with that. Scott wanted the female point of view to be foregrounded.” If they can get the movie made, Anya Taylor-Joy is slated to play the femme fatale.
“Monsieur Spade” will begin airing on AMC in January. By the time that happens, Frank will be in Scotland, directing a project that Netflix *did* go for: “Department Q,” a series based on crime novels by the Danish author Jussi Adler-Olsen. Frank is also working on a follow-up to his novel, “Shaker,” this one called “Faker.” The story is centered on a crooked Hollywood money manager. “A sequel to the novel nobody read,” he said. “That’s how I roll. Giving the people what they don’t want.” He has also, after decades of trying, finally secured the rights to “Red Harvest”; he and Abbott will write a script for A24.
When the band had run through eight or nine Killers songs, the audience applauded. Frank climbed down from the stage. “It’s fun, right?” he said, grinning. “It’s so different.” He seemed exhilarated. He has never written an opera, or anything like it, he acknowledged, and that was a little scary. “I literally Googled ‘How do you write a libretto?’ ” he said. “It feels good to not know what I’m doing.” ♦
# Was Frank Gore the Last NFL Running Back? - ESPN
**DUDE'S STILL AT IT.**
It's late in the game, late in the season, late in his career, but he's still hungry for the ball, so he gets it one more time. He's a Jet now, his uniform the color of algae, but his jersey number, 21, is what he started with five teams ago, and it still means something. The play calls for him to go off-tackle, such a signature play it might as well be designed for him. There is no hole, but that's nothing new -- he has played for at least as many bad teams as good ones. There is no hole, but Frank Gore knows exactly what to do.
It's 2020, and Gore signed his one-year deal with the Jets to back up Le'Veon Bell and to mentor the Jets' young backs. But Gore has never backed up anybody. So he did what he always did, show up sharp at training camp and go to work. Bell is long gone. Now Gore leads what might be the worst team in the NFL in rushing. The Jets won their first game 14 games into the season, against the Rams. His coach, Adam Gase, is facing criticism for giving an old man like Gore all the carries. Shouldn't he be developing his younger backs? Why Frank Gore? Gase has a simple answer: "I hate to say this, but Frank was 37 years old and the best player on the team."
He's hurt when he gets the ball. Like, really hurt. Like, he has suffered a lung contusion and should be going to the hospital. But he has already carried the ball 13 times for a hard-won 44 yards and there's no way he's coming out now, not with the Jets ahead by four points. He has practically gained his yards by inches -- 1, zero, 6, 5, 7, 2, 7, 2, 3, 5. He has lost 2. He has gained 3, 4, 3, 7. Now, on second-and-9, with eight minutes and 51 seconds to go in the game, he gains 4. He doesn't so much run as burrow -- 3 of those yards seem to be on his belly. But it's 4, all right, and he takes himself out, a few players on the sideline greeting him and patting him on the pads.
No, it hasn't been much of a season; but then again, it's his 16th season. It hasn't been much of a game; but then again, it's his 241st game. And it isn't even much of a run; but then again, it's his 3,735th run, and by God it's in the books. He wants to go back in, but the doctors won't let him. Nor will Gase, no matter how much Gore pleads and cajoles. "I'm like, 'Bro, you have the greatest career stat line ever,'" Gase says. "I'm like, Bro, you're not going back in -- this is the football gods saying you did it right.'"
The season before -- with the Bills, his 15th -- he had become the third-leading rusher in the history of the NFL, behind only Emmitt Smith and Walter Payton. He began the game against the Browns with 15,952 yards. The 4-yard run with 8:51 on the clock gave him 16,000 yards "on the nuts," as Gase says -- the greatest final stat line ever. And it stays that way. Indeed, it will stay that way forever, for almost certainly the third man to amass at least 16,000 yards on the ground will also be the last.
The realities of the modern NFL have conspired to discount the value of running backs across the league and across the entire culture of American sports. It's not just that there are no active running backs who can keep running for 16 seasons; there are no teams that will pay them to do such a thing. Gore is the last of his kind -- the Last Running Back because running backs, once gods, are now considered mere foot soldiers. But that proposition raises a host of questions. Is he the last of his kind because he was actually *one* of a kind? Was he one of the gods or just the ultimate foot soldier, a grinder who never transcended the trenches? And if he is, in fact, singular, what's that like for his successors? And what's that like for his namesake -- Frank Gore Jr.?
**IF YOU WATCHED FOOTBALL** over the past 20 years, you probably had the Frank Gore Experience. It probably came when football was just what's on, when you were watching an off-market game on a Sunday afternoon without knowing why. Someone caught your eye, a hammer of a man, a relentless runner who pumped his knees high yet stayed low, making his living running the ball between the tackles and catching it in the flat, not so much gaining yards as accumulating them -- 3, 2, 3, 5, 16, 8, 8, first down, touchdown. When the play-by-play announcer mentioned his name -- often calling him "ageless" or just "well-traveled" -- you sat up. *"Frank Gore? Frank Gore is still playing? I didn't know he was still* alive*."*
Last December, I was in a hotel room, away from home, working, just watching what's on, and what's on was the LendingTree Bowl in Mobile, Alabama. The game pitted Southern Mississippi against Rice, and Southern Mississippi had a back Rice couldn't stop. He was short and squat, but his hips had swivel and his legs had spring and he found wayward angles, and he ran low and when all else failed he ran into the tacklers who were trying to run into him. He was in the process of gaining 329 yards on 21 carries, and his name was Frank Gore Jr. I sat up. "Wait -- Frank Gore ... *Jr.*?"
He could only be Frank Gore's son. But that seemed impossible, for there is no such thing as generational overlap in the lives of running backs. This was 2022. Gore finally retired in 2022. He was 39 years old. He began his career in 2005, his counterparts lifers such asLarry Johnson, Clinton Portis, Willis McGahee, Jamal Lewis and Corey Dillon, or else Hall of Famers such asCurtis Martin, LaDainian Tomlinson and Edgerrin James. He ended his career as the emblem of an unlikely and nearly outdated ideal -- the running back who sacrificed his body for a body of work and whose fame rests in the fact that he never rested.
We hear again and again that the average career of an NFL running back lasts less than five years, the bleak actuarial reality becoming such an article of faith that we lose faith in the backs themselves -- witness the annual outcry of fans whose team chooses a running back in the first round of the NFL draft. We are told that the job is short-lived as a result of the punishment each running back must absorb as well as the game's relentless movement from the ground to the air. But the position-wide devaluation is also a matter of money, an economic model that deems running backs not just injury-prone but expendable. There are no old running backs in the NFL anymore, and precious few in midcareer. There are mostly young backs -- fresh legs -- who are increasingly unlikely to receive contract extensions, increasingly unlikely to get paid. Last summer even some of the greatest backs of our time, Josh Jacobs and Saquon Barkley, received franchise tags instead of long-term contracts, leading their peers to take to Twitter in aggrieved solidarity: "At this point, just take the RB position out the game then," wrote the Titans' Derrick Henry. "The ones that want to be great & work as hard as they can to give their all to an organization, just seems like it don't even matter. I'm with every RB that's fighting to get what they deserve."
Gore fought against economic obsolescence just as tirelessly as he fought against opposing defenses and the inevitable injuries. "When you turn 28, you're going to hear as a running back, you're declining," he says. "You can have a f---ing 1,300-yard season, you declining." As a young back, Gore had a 1,695-yard season with the 49ers. As a midcareer back, he gave the 49ers four straight seasons of more than 1,100 yards and excelled in the playoffs and the Super Bowl. And as an old back ... well, a lot of backs get better as games go on. Gore got better as his career went on. If he was one of the best backs ever to play the game over the age of 30, he has that distinction all to himself over the age of 35, averaging 4.6 yards a carry with the Dolphins in 2018. If Derrick Henry, the John Henry of today's NFL running backs, wanted to match Gore's yardage totals, he'd have to gain almost 7,000 more yards. When Christian McCaffrey, now the highest-paid back in football, recently became the first 49er to gain 1,000 yards since 2014, the back whose milestone he matched was Gore, who gained 1,106 yards in his 10th freaking season.
How did he do it? In a world where billions of people wonder how to get out of bed in the morning, how did he keep hurling himself into the breach, not quite an immortal but simply a man intent on facing down his own mortality? When asked that question, even people who know Gore best struggle to answer, settling again and again on the same word: "Frank is unique." But even as a casual fan I could see *that*, which is why it was so startling to turn on the LendingTree Bowl and see Frank Gore Jr. tearing up the Rice Owls.
*Wait* \-- there's *another* Frank Gore? To say that Frank Gore is unique -- a singular figure who had a singular career -- is to say that following in his footsteps is futile; to realize that he's, well, a *dad*, tells a completely different story, because footsteps, by nature, demand to be followed. His son not only saw his father from the stands and on television. He sees him every time he looks in the mirror, and so his tutelage gains a special force. "I understand where he's coming from, and I also see it in my face," says Frank Gore Jr. "So, it's like I know it's just not something he's making up because it's in my face as well." The question of how Gore did it now sits alongside the question of how he teaches it, and what can and can't be learned, and what can and can't be passed on from father to son. Gore had to know something to have had the career he had in the most perilous position in sports -- he had to have trade secrets, a body of knowledge, a Tao. But, like all predecessors -- like all fathers -- he had to have ...*secrets*, unspoken mysteries that informed the mystery at hand. And watching Frank Gore Jr. run roughshod over Rice, I wanted to know what they were.
**THAT'S FRANK GORE**, all right, at a restaurant near his home west of Fort Lauderdale. He's wearing a gray hoodie, and he has both forearms planted on the bar. His elbows flank him, as if he's clearing space for himself, and his hunched shoulders are low, about the same level as the bar rail. His thumbs might be working the iPhone propped in front of him and the light from the screen might be shining on his face, but you couldn't get a clean shot at him if you tried.
I take a seat at the corner of the bar, between him and his agent. I have been told he's quiet; I have been told he's very serious; I have been told he can even be sullen. He is an imposing man, although not physically -- he was listed, when he played, as 5-foot-9; his body is described by his high school coach as "roly-poly"; and the way he compresses himself, keeps himself coiled, makes him appear almost shy, self-effacing. What's imposing about him is his watchfulness, his wariness and his patience. He holds his phone as close as a guy playing high-stakes poker holds his cards, and I get the feeling he'd be comfortable sitting for the next two hours without saying a word.
But that's not what happens. Although he's been retired an entire year, in the mornings he is still training hard, as though holding out for the prospect of more -- one more run, somewhere. He's going back to the University of Miami to get his degree and fulfill his late mother's dream for him. There, he's taking a course on autobiography. He has already started telling his story to a friend for the purpose of writing a book, and his coursework has sharpened his interest and his determination. I ask him if he has a title. He doesn't know yet. "Nine Miles," I say. "What?" he asks. "You ran for 16,000 yards in the NFL," I say. "That's 9.09 miles."
This is news to him, but he doesn't move a muscle and his smile is barely visible. He still holds his phone close, with his elbows out. Yet something passes through him, and suddenly it's as if he has gone from playing poker to rolling dice. "Those 9 miles -- I had the will, man," he says. "I wasn't going to let no one break me. If I set out to do something, I'm going to do it." Now he wants to share the video clips he has on his phone, and he uses his elbows to signal when I should take a look. He has a lot of video clips, not just of him and his son but also of other backs, whose work he examines with a jeweler's eye. Derrick Henry? "He so big, he just *lean* on people. He's a baller, though." Bijan Robinson?"A little stiff in the hips, but he got good feet. He gonna be a good back." Najee Harris? "He never got 4 yards a carry. How do you not get 4 with that team?" The man who is supposed to be so quiet has an opinion about everything and everyone, and when I ask him how he did it -- how he ran for 9 brutally contested miles -- he talks for two hours straight.
First of all, he had what he regards as the two indispensable ingredients for success as a running back, neither of which is speed or power. "Vision and feet," he says. "They're everything."
Second, he lowered his shoulder. Anyone who was trying to hit him, he hit first. Asked to name the defender who hit him hardest, he answers thusly: "S---, I don't know, man. Because I don't really *get* hit."
Third, he studied with a kind of mania. When he was a freshman at the University of Miami, he asked his running backs coach, Don Soldinger, what he needed to do to compete with the likes of the players The U had in the backfield in those days -- with Clinton Portis and Willis McGahee. Soldinger gave Frank the playbook, and 3:30 that morning his phone rang. "Coach, this is Frank." "Frank? Are you OK? Is anything wrong?" "No, Coach. I learned all the pass protections, and I want you to quiz me."
Fourth, he learned about himself. "I feel like every great player study themself," he says. "If they love the game, they study themself, and every year, when you get older, you're going to know what you're losing. I knew what I was losing. I knew I couldn't get in and out of everything, so I had to put myself in position. I had to be more patient. I used to make sure I knew my aiming points. If the coach said, 'You have to be outside the tight end,' I have to make sure I'm there, so if anything break down, I can get out of it. When you're young, it don't matter. Your quick twist, it's there. When you're young and don't know the blocking schemes, you run on instinct. Then you get older, it slow you down. You want to know the defenses so you can predetermine stuff. Sometimes it f---s with you. But most of the time, that s---'s going to hit."
Fifth, he worked. He didn't just stay in shape, eat right, show up early and leave late. He did "game-specific" workouts, forcing himself to move his feet faster and faster through smaller and smaller spaces; as he got older, he did them with younger backs, surrounding himself with the freshest legs. But he was also teaching himself how to compete with them, while at the same time putting them on notice. It didn't matter how old he was, or how young they were. They still had to beat him.
And sixth, he conceded no carries. He claimed them and he was greedy for them and he didn't care whose feelings he hurt. "Yeah, bro, I ain't want nobody taking none of my reps," Gore says. "Nah, f--- that, that's my s---, bro. That's why I wasn't scared of nobody, like competition. I ain't scared of s---. As long as I can compete every day, I'm going to win. I'm going to win."
**EVERY DRAFT DAY**, there is a lot of excruciating analysis about the "length" of certain prospects, their times in the 40-yard dash. There is also an almost diagnostic measurement of their motivation -- of the size of "the chips on their shoulders." Well, Gore didn't have a lot of length. But his chip was about 5-9 and 212, and when he arrived in San Francisco in 2005 as a third-round draft pick, he met Kevan Barlow, the 49ers' starting back. "Hey, my backup," Barlow said. Gore could do a lot of things as a football player, but showing deference to an established teammate wasn't one of them. "I said, 'Backup, bro?' I said, 'Bro, I've never sat the bench playing football. And I hope you not thinking I'm coming to sit the bench. I'm dead serious.'"
He was dead serious. Gore led the woebegone 2005 49ers in rushing as Barlow's backup. "Second year come, I'm like, Man, f--- that. I'm already thinking in my mind, 'This my s---.' But you know I'm playing backup. So we in preseason, we play Chicago, right? And Kevan, he don't play because you know he saying he hurt, so I get to start. So first time we go down, I f---ing score, boom. So that next week come, and we go to practice. They call the starting lineup and it's 12 people in the huddle. I went in the huddle, I'm like, f--- that. I don't got time. I'm like, This motherf---er faking, man. This my s---, and I'm 12 people in the huddle, bro.
"It took awhile for me to get out the huddle," he says. "The coach is all like, 'All right, just get out.' But Norv Turner was the coordinator at the time, and he liked that s--. So that f---ing next week, Barlow f---ing traded, bro.
Fifteen years later, he arrived in Buffalo as an NFL warhorse. He was 36. The Bills were his fourth team, and the starting back was LeSean "Shady" McCoy, his best friend. It didn't matter. "Bro, I remember I took it so serious because of how people praised him and downplayed my career," he says. "I wanted to show I'm a bad motherf---er." He thought Shady had life too easy in Buffalo; he did his best to make it harder. "When you're a superstar, a lot of coaches don't really say nothing to you," Gore says. "So once I get to Buffalo and the coaches see me and Shady competing, and saw that I can play, then they start questioning stuff he do. I remember one time we was in a meeting in training camp, and he didn't hit a hole or something, and one of the coaches was like, 'Shady, you should've took this.' And Shady started going back and forth with him. And I was like, 'F--- that, coach. Give that b---- to me.'"
The Bills wound up giving it to him 166 times, and Nov. 24, 2019, in a game against the Denver Broncos in Orchard Park, New York, he gained 6 yards and passed Barry Sanders as the third-leading rusher in the history of the NFL. After the game he received a congratulatory phone call from his old rival in San Francisco, Barlow. "He hated me, bro," Gore says. "We used to about fight and everything. But I don't want to knock him because he called me and said, 'I'm going to be real with you, man. I treated you like that because I knew you was better than me.'"
The Barlow and Shady stories are separated by 15 years and over 15,000 yards. They are separated by time and toil, as well as a broken hip and a couple of broken hands and two rounds of ankle surgery. They are separated by the blood and, well, by the gore. But they are the same story because they are both about Frank Gore. "How did you do it?" I ask him at the bar, thinking it a complicated question since what he'd done was just about impossible. But he has a one-word answer that was the underlying truth of all the others.
He touches his finger to his temple.
"Mindset."
**FRANK GORE DID NOT RECEIVE** his surname from his father because his father wasn't around. He received it from the woman who bore and raised him, the woman who made the name and the mindset inseparable. Lizzie Gore was the most powerful presence in her son Franklin's life because she pushed him to the front and made sure people saw him. She was as fierce and protective as she was poor and, for most of Frank's life, sick. She brought up Frank in a one-room apartment in Coconut Grove. There were 12 of them in one place -- some her own and some part of her extended family and some simply in need of a home. "Beds pushed up against all the walls," Frank says. When he was 5, she took him to the local park and altered his birth certificate so he could play Pop Warner. He knew right away what he was running for and running from, and wherever he played, he could hear her voice in the crowd. It didn't matter if he was playing in the park or playing at the Orange Bowl for the University of Miami, it didn't matter how loud everyone else was. He was a mama's boy, and her voice told him where to look.
Lizzie's kidneys failed when Frank was a junior at Coral Gables Senior High School and already a star. She went to the hospital for dialysis, and he went to visit her. He hated hospitals, but he needed her blessing. "We was about to play the playoff game, and my coaches didn't know how I was going to be and how I'd react," he says. "So I just went to the hospital, and my mom was in ICU, got tubes and all. And she told me, 'Son, I want you to go play.'"
She lived for seven more years. She was able to attend one of his games in his first year as a 49er, against the Jaguars in Jacksonville. But in the summer of 2007, he went through training camp without hearing from her. "So I call my sister to see how Mama was doing," he says. "But they was lying to me -- 'Oh, Mama good.' She was at the hospital. I didn't know how bad off she was because they wanted me to focus. And I didn't feel right, you know? It had to be God or something, bro. And I'm like, 'Man something got to be up. I haven't talked to my mama.' And I felt it, and I'm driving, and I just broke down crying in my car."
He flew home to Miami so he could see her before she died. "I walked in the hospital and couldn't believe that was my mom. Bro, I just couldn't believe it." He was at her bedside the last time she opened her eyes, and he spoke to her when she closed them and fell into a coma. He returned to San Francisco, and one day after learning that his mother had died in Miami, he traveled with his team when the 49ers played the Rams.
"The week she passed, everybody was like, 'You need to go home.' And I'm like, 'Why am I going to go home?' I knew she would have said the same thing if she was in the hospital and fighting. She would have told me to play, and that's when I made the decision. All right, I'm going to stay up here this week and I'm going to just fight it with you.
"At that game I had to dig deep. It was like I was in a dream, bro. Especially because my mom would call at a certain time to talk to me before the game. Tell me, 'Go play your heart out.' And now I didn't get that call. I went in the bathroom by myself and just broke down. I had to keep talking to myself. I said, 'Come on, man. You decided to play. You know Mama wants you to play.'"
The video is on his phone. The 49ers are playing the Rams on Sept. 16, 2007. It's the third quarter, and they're behind 13-7. They're on the Rams' 43, fourth-and-1. Gore, No. 21, takes the handoff, then takes the hole. Boom. He runs into a bunch of players milling around at the line, players who seem nonchalant by comparison and unprepared for the encounter. He is stopped, and then he is not. Boom. He hits a linebacker before the linebacker can hit him. He is stopped again, but then he is free, a plugger turned into a gazelle, his shortish legs stretched by the incredible amplitude of his stride, his chunky 212-pound body angular with swivel as 20 or 30 yards downfield he splits one last clump of human convergence and runs like a dancer into the end zone.
It is the run to watch if you think Gore's yardage totals came simply as a result of his ability to hang around. It's also the run to watch if you want to understand the other 3,474 runs, in that it is beyond understanding, his zigs as illogical as his zags are inexplicable, his way lit not just by willpower but by the jagged lightning of inspiration. Even he doesn't understand, and so he rewinds the video to the point of initial contact, that first shredded scrum. "Look at that," he says. "Boom. How did I get out of that? Yeah, that was my mama, bro."
**HE COULD START** his autobiography anywhere. He could start with the first or last of his 16,000 yards, with the first or last of his 100 touchdowns, or with the brute fact that he played more games than any other back in the history of the NFL. He could start with Lizzie sneaking him into Pop Warner or telling him from her hospital bed to go play or guiding his feet through the circuitous 43-yard run he dedicated to her memory. He has won the right to start with one of the milestones. But the more he has thought about it, the more inclined he has become to start at a moment when he thought it was all going to go away -- at the beginning he thought was an ending.
He always knew where he was running, even when he was a kid. He was running downhill, he was running north-south, and he was running straight out of the hard parts of Miami. Lizzie agreed, and so after a senior year at Coral Gables Senior High when he ran for 2,953 yards and set records for Miami-Dade County, she gave her quiet assent when he committed to the University of Mississippi. But The U was not done and still had an advantage in Curtis Johnson, a coach who had watched Gore playing at the park. "I got in my car and drove to his house," Johnson says. "I said, 'You're not going to Ole Miss.' He said, 'Yeah, Coach, I'm going.' I said, 'Reason you going is you don't want to compete with the backs we got. You don't want to compete with Clinton Portis and Willis McGahee. You scared.' He said, 'That's not it, Coach. I said, 'Well, look' -- and there was his mother. She was a great lady. Oh, she was strong. But she was sick and she wanted him near her. So I was like, 'How you going to leave your mother? How you going to leave all this?'"
Gore stayed in Miami and not only competed with one of the greatest collections of running backs college football has ever seen but also developed a system with Portis, the starter, that gave him playing time. "He came in and right away we had that bond, that friendship -- we got really close," Portis says. "So every time I came off the field, I'd tell Frank to make sure he was standing with me on the sideline. And as I'd walk off the field, I'd step on the back of my shoe and make it come off, and I'd take my time putting it back on so Coach would put him in."
Gore ran for 562 yards on 62 carries as a freshman in 2001, and when he remembers that edition of himself, he thinks he ran like Marshall Faulk, "long speed, breaking tackles," 9.1 yards a carry. In spring practice, Portis had gone on to the NFL draft, and Gore ran with the first team until he made one of his impossible cuts in a routine drill. He had been untouchable that spring, but after colliding in practice with safety Sean Taylor, he immediately grabbed his knee. It came apart so comprehensively that the surgeon, John Uribe, had to address what he saw as a structural susceptibility to injury, "the small notches" tying his ligaments to the bone. Gore never ran like Faulk again. He was too poor at the time to find transportation to the therapy he needed and never regained full extension of his right knee. "Frankie lost that step," Don Soldinger said. "But he never lost his vision and could pick his way through things." His style changed, and at the same time so did his life. He was just 18 years old, and on March 13, 2002, six days before he wrecked his knee, Frank Gore Jr. was born.
It is another part of the Frank Gore Experience:*Wait -- he did all that ... hurt?*Turns out, he might have been durable, but he was never invulnerable. Turns out, he was sort of injury-prone. Turns out, he blew out his left knee in 2003 -- those small notches again, costing him a second step -- and went to Soldinger in tears, telling him he was done, until Soldinger responded that his talent was God-given, and it was Soldinger's mission to get him to the NFL. Turns out, he was not only the best old back in NFL history but also the best injured one. Turns out, his story is not about an invulnerable man at all but rather a man who as a child, as a boy, as a high school student, as a football player and as a father knows that he is vulnerable and has spent his life figuring out what to do about it.
**HE WAS JUST IN MIDDLE SCHOOL**. A woman pulled up to the apartment in Coconut Grove to pick up one of his cousins. Her name was Sharon Krantz, and she was his cousin's guidance counselor. She was not Frank's, but he walked up to the car and tried to get in. She had heard about him -- "I really didn't like Frank because he was always in trouble and a little bit of a crybaby." She locked the door. Then Lizzie came outside and began yelling at Frank to get in the car and go to school. "She won't open the door," he answered. A stalemate ensued: "He's turning around to go back to the house and she's yelling at him to get in the car," Krantz says. "So I opened the door, and I let him in."
He started showing up at her office to talk to her. He began *getting in trouble* to talk to her, although that was not the only reason for his misbehavior. He couldn't read. "I was getting into trouble because I didn't want to get picked on," Gore says. "I didn't want to read in front of people so, OK, I'll go make problems."
He began calling her what he calls her to this day: "Miss." She in turn recognized him as the kind of young man the public education system routinely discards, a casualty in the making. When one of his teachers told him he would amount to nothing, he would have taken the damning judgement entirely to heart if not for football. It was all he talked about with Miss Krantz, and so one day she gave in and went to the park to watch him play. She was shocked by what she saw. "Football was like his Superman cape," she says. She also heard Lizzie talking about her: "There's that white lady Frankie loves."
In high school he called her from class on his cellphone, saying "I'm so bored, Miss." She had a stock response -- "If you're so bored, why aren't you getting all A's?" -- but she took it upon herself to check what kind of classes he was taking. No wonder he was bored: He was on track for a "special diploma" that would preclude him from going to college no matter how prized he was as a recruit.
"I waited until the end of sophomore season to tell him," she says. "The day after it was over, I called him into my office and said, 'Frank, we have to do something. You can't go to college the way your classes are set up right now.' It was a terrible moment. He actually ran out of my office. I had to go down the street and bring him back and say, 'I'm not going to leave it like that. We're going to figure something out.' So that's really where it started for us."
**ON FEB. 5, 1999**, Frank and Lizzie Gore joined Krantz and school administrators in the principal's office at Coral Gables Senior High School for the purpose of changing Frank's academic track. "They kept asking Frank, 'What are your goals, what are your goals?'" Krantz says. "And he kept answering, 'I want to play Division I college football and then go on to play in the NFL.' They kept saying, 'Yes, but people get hurt.' It finally got to the point where he banged his head on the table and said, 'Why isn't anyone listening to me?' and stormed out of the room."
That Superman cape -- sure, it allowed him to run past everyone. But it also enabled him to see everything in three dimensions. He told Miss Krantz what he still tells people today: "I was born to play football," by which he meant he was at home on the football field in a way he wasn't anywhere else. The school gave him an academic adviser, and he began attending a commercial learning center, but football was already his tutor, already his Kumon. He was finally diagnosed with severe dyslexia, and when that came with a condition -- "We had to prove he could improve his reading," Krantz says -- she began buying him books. They were short books, simple books, sports books, football books, books about Emmitt Smith and Terrell Davis and other running backs Frank idolized. She bought them as fast as he could read them, and he read them as fast as she could buy them. "I picked him up after school and drove him home," she says. "We read them together."
When Gore went to San Francisco for his first year as a 49er, he lived in a hotel, alone and at a loss. He called Miss Krantz and asked her to fly out west and help find him a place to live. So she called Lizzie, and Lizzie gave her blessing. It was the moment she felt the full force of Lizzie entrusting him to her. It was the moment she felt the full and final force of her own obligation.
"I tell Frank that Lizzie led me into his life," Krantz says. "I tell him she led people into his life, to help him and to help her. So we have a special bond, we really do. I don't have any kids, so to me he's like my kid, he's my child, and when people ask me, I'm like, 'I guess God put him in my path. He changed my life, he has me believing in things I don't think I ever believed before I met him -- the power to achieve whatever you put your mind to.'"
"She like my mom, bro," Gore says.
**HE RESPONDED TO THE CIRCUMSTANCES** of his life by developing two great talents. One was running the football. The other was making people love him. They are not independent of each other; they coexist, like vision and feet. There is perhaps no more individual act in the game of football than piling up yards and touchdowns as a running back. But the Last Running Back ran as part of a collective. Because the people who love him also do things for him. Sharon Krantz made sure he went to college. Clinton Portis made sure he received playing time. John Uribe, the surgeon who operated on both of Gore's knees, was so frustrated by Gore's difficulty accessing therapy after the first surgery that he had him stay in his house with his family after the second. And Scot McCloughan, who was a scout for the Packers, then the VP of personnel and later the GM for the 49ers, fell in love with him the first time he saw him play for the Miami Hurricanes.
"He flat dominated," McCloughan says. "He made Clinton Portis and Edgerrin James look *normal*. He was the best back on the field as a true freshman. And I'm like, this motherf---er, he's mine."
McCloughan never lost faith in that judgment because, even after the knee injuries and the lost steps, he never lost faith in Gore. When he got the job with the 49ers, McCloughan met Gore at his combine workouts and made him a promise. "Listen, buddy, I can't take you as our first, I can't take you as our second," he said the night before the draft. "But if you are there for our first pick in the third round, we are taking you."
Gore didn't make it easy. His score on the Wonderlic test was legendarily low -- "We get the test and I'm like, 'What the f--- is this, man? I just got *out* of school.'" And there were linemen with better times in the 40. But McCloughan didn't care about the Wonderlic because of Gore's prodigious football intelligence. "Smartest player on the field, hands down," McCloughan says. "He has a photographic memory. Any play, he could tell me time on the clock, where the defense was lined up, where the middle linebacker was offset, what happened when the ball was snapped and where the linebacker's first step went, all right? I'm like, 'Holy s---, dude. I'm a f---ing GM, and I can't even do that.'" He didn't care about the 40 times because "Frank was always slow. I got him down at 4.78 on a track. I wrote down 4.68. I'm the one who's drafting him, I'm lying to myself." And then, McCloughan says, "He flat failed our physical at the combine. The first thing I said to the doctors when we had our medical meeting was, 'I want to know one grade: Frank Gore.' They both look at each other, like, 'Not good.' I'm like, 'Well, it's going to be good.' I had them change the grades in my first year at the job. I'm telling these doctors that have been there for 20 years, 'You're changing the grade from a 2 to a 3.' They're like, 'We've never done that.' I said, 'Well, you're doing it this time.' They changed it. Otherwise, he's off the board."
Gore can still recite the names and career yardage totals for all the backs selected before him in the 2005 draft: "I started crying when Eric Shelton got picked," he says. But McCloughan kept his promise. He selected Gore with the first pick of the third round, 65th overall, and when Gore flew to San Francisco to meet his new head coach, Mike Nolan, he headed straight for McCloughan's office instead. "Everyone's saying, 'Frank, Frank, you gotta meet the coach,'" McCloughan says. "I hear him say, 'Wait a second,' and he walks into my office crying and gives me a hug. He says, 'You have my trust for life. I'll run through walls for you no matter what. I'll outplay and blast everyone and all the backs taken in front of me. You're the only motherf---er that was honest, and I'm going to prove to you that you're the baddest motherf---ing GM in the league.'"
Why do people love Frank Gore? He has an answer: "I'm respectful, man," he says. "A lot of people act a certain way just because what they done and what they doing. That's not me. Because I know you can be up and you can be down, so you got to respect everybody. So, that's why I think a lot of people really care for me, really respect me. I respect."
But there's another reason. He cries. He could be dressing down his teammates after losing a game, he could be bemoaning his plummeting stock in the draft, he could be pledging his lifelong love and loyalty to the man who drafted him, he could be signing his contract extension with the 49ers, he could be preparing to play in his first game without a call from Lizzie, he could be inducted into the University of Miami Sports Hall of Fame, he could just be dropping Frank Jr. off at college for the first time. He might be the hardest of hard cases. But he's also an unabashed crybaby, and the combination of the two extremes is what makes so many hearts go out to him.
No one is tougher; no one is more emotional. No one is more ruthlessly competitive; no one is more openly wounded. He forgets nothing -- not favors, not slights. He has learned to run not only through pain but *on* it. Sure, he's all football player, and it's easy enough to tell his story through touchdowns. It is easy enough to tell his story as a running back to tell the story of all running backs in the 21st century, to make him somehow representative of how vulnerable they have become, that earthbound elite. But you can also tell his story in a way that's specific to him. How did he do it?
Through tears.
**THIS, FROM MCCLOUGHAN,**is the best short scouting report on Gore:
"He had the kind of vision where he can make the first guy miss without the guy knowing he's missed. He's already setting up the down lineman, he's got him beat. He knows he's setting up the linebacker and the safety after that. He sees three levels when he's running. And he was a four-quarter football player. They got tired of tackling him. The big boys got tired of hitting him. He's just so strong. He's like a bowling ball, going forward, with both shoulders down. He would drop his shoulder. That's how he survived, and he'd just run through them. I mean, there's bad motherf---ers out there saying, 'Holy Christ, I'm tough as s---. Frank's tougher than me.'"
Then one day his mindset changed. Then one day, the Last Running Back got tired. He had finished his season with the Jets and gained his 16,000th yard. But he was entertaining the possibility of staying in the league another year to attain an impossible ideal: father and son running backs in the NFL. Baltimore was rumored to be interested. Then he had to start training. "If my mindset was the same, I probably would have," he says. "When the Ravens wanted to sign me in 2021, if I was to train in that offseason the way I always trained... But that's when I knew. 'You know what? I'm done, bro.'"
But mindset has a way of playing tricks on you. He uses the word sometimes as a synonym for determination, grit, all the qualities that stood him in such good stead as an NFL running back. He uses it other times to describe something bigger, darker and deeper -- the knowledge he grew up with. Ask how he did it: That's one kind of mindset. Ask what he knew: That's entirely another, because it's what he learned growing up in Coconut Grove. It's what he learned when his fifth-grade teacher told him he'd be nothing, when no one bothered to tell him he was heading for a special diploma and couldn't go to college, when he ripped up his knee and couldn't go to therapy because he didn't have a car, when Lizzie was dying in the hospital and only when his agent informed the doctors that her son played in the NFL did she get the attention she deserved. When he was playing, he was well known for his reluctance to take himself out of a game. But that was because he feared that if he came off the field, he would give someone the excuse not to let him back on. That was because he grew up knowing that anywhere else but the football field he had been deemed something he adamantly refused to be as a running back:
Expendable.
When the 2021 season began, he was a running back no more. He was surprised that he didn't miss the game as much as he missed the discipline and the identity. But he was also surprised by how *much* he missed the discipline and the identity, because they turned out to be linked -- because the unceasing discipline of being a running back counted for a large part of who he was. "I think when you're done, not being on a routine like you always been, you got to find yourself because you lost," Gore says. "You get lost." And so, one day he called McCloughan. "He said, 'This is awful,'" McCloughan remembers. "I'm like, 'What's the matter?' He says, 'People don't talk about me anymore. I don't have football.'"
He began casting about for a new discipline and a new identity, or maybe just a new discipline that would preserve the old Frank Gore. He wasn't looking to play another sport, exactly; he was looking to be forged in another furnace. He turned to boxing. "It's more physical even than football," he says. "It's way more physical." He was a short heavyweight with a long jab and a hard overhand right. But he went into his first fight, an exhibition against former NBA player Deron Williams, with just a few rounds of sparring behind him and took a sloppy drubbing. He won his next two fights by knockout. But he was getting hit, and he was aware that he was seeking out what he had spent his NFL career avoiding. "I done played for 16 years; that's already too much contact to the head," he says. And besides, there was something else about boxing: The people who loved him hated it. "No bueno," McCloughan says. "That's probably the only time ever in my life I was just mad at the world," Frank Gore Jr. says. "I couldn't help him. There was nothing I could do because he signed up for this."
But there is no one who hated the boxing more than Sharon Krantz. She "hated, hated" it, because it made her worry about him. "I was always fearful for him when his career ended, because he poured every ounce of his being since he was like 3 years old into football," Krantz says. "I called his agent, and I called his financial adviser and asked, 'What's he doing?' I was afraid something was going to happen." It wasn't just the boxing, the unwelcome sight of him getting punched in the face. It was what the boxing represented. The world it put him in. Long ago, she had promised him that she would always be there for him "as long as you don't end up on the street." But, like so many who love and support him, she had developed a deep moral faith in him, in his "good heart" and his instinctive grasp of right and wrong. "He had made such an effort to never put himself in a bad situation," she says. "He was always so disciplined. Now I just felt like he was drinking and partying and doing things he had never done."
Krantz was at a workshop preparing for the new school year when she received the news. On Aug. 10, 2022, TMZ reported that Gore had been charged with simple assault and false imprisonment in Atlantic City, New Jersey. The story cited "bombshell court documents" without detailing their provenance. But it was lurid and it was chilling. "Frank Gore grabbed a naked woman by her hair and dragged her across a hotel room's hallway during an altercation in Atlantic City, N.J. last month ..."
"I got sick," Krantz says. "I literally had to go to the bathroom. I thought it was all over."
**IT WAS A TERRIBLE PARODY**of the Frank Gore Experience: *Wait* -- he did ... *what*?
Was the woman hurt? Did Frank Gore hurt her?
He had a son who was following in his footsteps, a son who believed he had lived a life without doing harm. As Frank Gore Jr. says, "He could never slip up, and he never did." Gore had no record of previous domestic violence incidents. Would Sr. tell Jr. about Atlantic City?
Any story about a legacy must include its entirety. But the Atlantic City police claimed a domestic violence exemption to New Jersey's open public records laws and refused requests for information and documents. The detective who investigated the case and the prosecutor from the municipal court did not answer calls. The defense attorney declined to discuss evidence in the case. The woman in the hotel room was not for available for comment. A press release the Atlantic City police issued in the summer of 2022 detailed the "domestic violence dispute" that took place on the 59th floor of the Havana Tower at the Tropicana Atlantic City on the morning of July 31: "Officers arrived to find the victim, a 28-year-old woman from Miami, Florida, speaking with hotel security." She "did not exhibit signs of injury" or file a complaint. Six days later, after finding a discrepancy between the story told at the scene and the security video, the police filed charges of their own. Seven months later, on March 3, 2023, Gore pleaded guilty to violating Atlantic City's "public health nuisance code" and was ordered by the municipal court to pay a $2,033 fine. A false imprisonment charge was dismissed.
I went to Florida to ask Gore about it. I went to his house in a gated and guarded community reclaimed from the palmetto scrub and rumored to be popular with professional athletes. His family was home. His sons were buzzing with the start of football season -- one a lineman and two of them running backs. The youngest Messiah was celebrating his first touchdown by scootering around the marble floors in a whirlwind of ebullience. They did not follow Gore into his TV room, and when they knocked on the door, they did not step beyond the threshold. Dark, with an enormous leather sectional marooned in the center and images drawn from Gore's NFL career paneling the ceiling, the room belonged to their father.
Out of consideration for the victim and for members of his family, he asked that some intimate details be kept off the record. I agreed. But, with his agent on hand, Gore talked. He said he put himself in a tough place, a bad situation. He and the woman in the hotel room were drinking. They were naked. They argued, and the woman left the room. Gore said he followed her into the hall and saw the eye of a security camera staring at them. He also saw the woman heading for the elevator. He panicked, he said. He grabbed her, lifting her off her feet and pulling her back into the room. Hotel security was already on its way.
"It wasn't how they try to make it because I would have went to jail," he said. "I was really bringing the girl back in the room because she was out how she was out, and when I brung her back in the room, if I was trying to hurt her, she would've been hurt. And I would've went to jail that same day. Like they say, she didn't have no bruises, she didn't have nothing. Only thing they saw was me grabbing her to put her back in the room. But at the time, I was scared. I was doing it to protect myself, but it went against me. It wasn't that I was doing it to hurt her. I was like, F---. Like f---, I'm going to get in trouble. But how they saw it on tape, how it looked -- they say I was dragging. No, bro, it wasn't like that. By the time I got her back in the room, the police came up like five minutes later. I'm sitting down, and we talking."
Gore learned about the charges and the TMZ story on Instagram. "I was scared as f---," he said. "But I forgot about it, because I thought I didn't do nothing, really. I was like, 'What the f---? What the f--- is this?' Everybody started calling."
His children heard about Atlantic City at school and read about it on the internet. And they asked their father questions. "They was like, 'Daddy, you told us never to hit girls,'" he said. "I'm like, 'Damn.' I'm not saying s--- for the media and the fans, but that s--- hit hard when you got to deal with your loved ones. They scared to go to school. Because I'm they everything. I'm they hero. Man, I was in a f---ed-up place. I had to dig deep to get out, bro. I was in the dark. I was in a dark place. I was embarrassed. I didn't want to go outside. I was even scared to look at my kids."
He hadn't felt such pain since Lizzie died, and he hadn't felt how close he was to the end of everything he worked for since he tore up his knees. He had made himself expendable again.
**KRANTZ CALLED HIM** as soon as she heard. He didn't call her back. Months passed and he didn't call her back. He didn't even text. "He cut me off," she says. "He literally didn't answer my calls. I was crushed, devastated. Not for me -- for him. I understood he was embarrassed. But for me, this is my child. That's how I see him. And I'm like, 'I want to make sure he is OK.' And I'm seeing pictures of him and I'm hearing that he's here and there, and I'm like, 'I know he's not OK.' So I would text him every single day, I don't know how many months it was. Sending him quotes, telling him I loved him, telling him I'm never going to ever give up on him. Finally, one day I was at Ross store on a Sunday morning, and he wrote back. He wrote back something like, 'Love you too, Miss,' or something like that. And I was just boohooing in the middle of the store."
He had waited until his case was adjudicated to talk to Krantz. He told her he hadn't been able to face her. He told her he knew he had disappointed her. "He didn't want to be his father," Krantz says. He told her his version of what had happened on the 59th floor of the Havana Tower at the Tropicana Atlantic City, and she believed him. "Whatever Frank told me, I know it's the truth," she says. "I know him. I know he had no intention of putting his hands on anyone. I know it was a situation that unfolded in a way that he couldn't get out of. So then it started making me rethink other things that I thought about other people that you see. How do you know them, and how do you know what the truth is? And so we make judgments."
Frank Sr. called Frank Jr. soon after the charges went public. "Well, he told me it didn't happen," Frank Jr. says. "So that was the main thing. Once it came out, I probably was one of the first people he talked to, and he told me it's not true. So, that's my dad and that's what I stuck to. But it also showed me people are waiting on you to mess up. Even if it's not true, they just want to say, 'Oh, look, he's this person and he did that wrong.' Even if you never showed them no wrong, you could not be perfect. I'm not saying he's a perfect person, but I'm saying you could be a clean slate, nothing wrong. Once you mess up, everyone's going to point at that, and everyone wants to harp on that. It just shows me how the world really is. Get me ready for the real world, because this is a guy who have no record, nothing. Just because a misunderstanding happened or someone thought this happened, that's what you all are going to say and you're going to tarnish his image because of this. It just showed me. It made me more aware and more awake."
Krantz and Frank Jr. came to similar conclusions based on what Gore had told them and how they felt about him: *It is easy to lose everything in this world because this world wants you to lose it.* But that was not Gore's conclusion. Something had indeed happened in that hotel room in Atlantic City. Charges had indeed been filled. Those were facts. And he began emerging from the darkness only when he began accepting that, just as the darkness once made him a better player, it might now make him a better man.
"When he started coming out of it," Krantz says, "he was kind of like, 'I know who I am, and I know what I'm going to do, and I know what happened.' He always believes he wouldn't have been the same player without his injuries. Now he feels that for the rest of his life and career he's going to be a different person because he understands how fragile all of this is."
These were the lessons he learned, and these were lessons he could share in his autobiography and with his children: "I'm for real," he says. "If I f--- with you, I f--- with you. I don't care what you do in life. I don't care who you is. And that's why I respect everybody, because you going to be here in life and you going to be *here*. You know what I'm saying? When you here, when you passing people and you get *here*, you can't look down on them because you never know when you got to come down who you going to see again."
**LIZZIE LOVED FRANK JR.** She loved him so much she wanted him all to herself. He lived with his mom, who was not married to his dad. But he was with his grandma "probably 85% of the time," he says. "She didn't want anyone touching her baby. There were times she didn't even want my mom coming to pick me up If I was with her." She was always sick and often in pain, but he gave her comfort. "She used to lay down and make me walk on her back."
His dad played football. That's all he knew -- he was born when his father's knees died. But there was never a time he didn't want to walk in those footsteps. He was one of those kids, 3 or 4 and always with a football in his hands. His dad saw that and took it upon himself to prepare him. "I had a lot of older cousins," he says. "My dad made me be with them to toughen me up."
He watched his dad play for the NFC championship when he was 10. His dad promised that if the 49ers won, his son could come down on the field with him. His dad ran for 90 yards on 21 carries and scored two touchdowns, and the 49ers beat the Falcons in Atlanta. There were so many people heading for the exits and his dad was nowhere in sight, but he refused to leave, he kept pushing against the human tide and telling Krantz, "My dad said I could come if they won." She had to chase after him, and when he saw his father summoned back to the field for an interview, he cried, "Daddy, Daddy!" He made it to the field. His dad did the interview with his arm around his son's shoulder.
Frank Jr. played football for a private school in Miami. One day, his dad came down from Indianapolis to surprise him at practice. His son wasn't there. "I asked the coach, I was like, 'He telling y'all he doing good and this and that, but he ain't even at practice.' That's when I was like, 'F--- that, he's going to public school.'"
He didn't want to go to Gables, where his dad went. He enrolled at Miami Killian. But he was smaller than his dad and had his own mindset -- "He never thought he was good enough," Krantz says. But his new coach saw something, vision and feet. "He told his father, 'He's got your footwork. He's like a mini you.' And his father was thinking, 'Oh, Coach is just saying that,' until he actually came to see him play. And then he was like, 'Man, this kid does have it.'"
His dad came home to the Dolphins in 2018, when his son was a junior at Killian. He began not only watching his games but training with him, indoctrinating his son to his unyielding routine. He still likes to show videos of his namesake's workouts. "When I train him, game specific," Gore says. "Watch this. I'm going to show you, and you going to be like, 'Goddamn.' Watch this. I train him with all game-specific stuff. Boom boom boom. That s--- work, man."
He played Wildcat quarterback at Killian and was listed as a three-star prospect as running back. But his dad believed he had been given a gift: motivation. "I told him, 'When I tore my ACL, people doubted me; when you was coming out of high school, they thought you were talented enough, but they looked at your size.'*He little* -- you know? Or, "*He good; he not his dad*."
Frank Jr. went to Southern Mississippi in 2020 and played quarterback for one season when the roster was so depleted the new coach, Will Hall, pressed him into service. The coach was the son of one of the winningest coaches in Mississippi high school history, so they often spoke, coach and player, about the pressures of legacy. "He's basically a coach's kid," Hall says. "Because though his dad wasn't a coach, his dad was a great player at the position he plays. So I think there's a tremendous drive to prove people wrong because of his size and then there's always that cloud over him that his dad made it and played for so long and rushed for 16,000 yards and him wanting to live up to that last name."
His dad used to call him when he entered the tunnel on game day. They talked twice a day even when his dad was absent, living in some NFL city far away. Now his dad comes to Hattiesburg to see him play and watch film with him Sunday mornings. "He'll tell me everything I did wrong, probably skip the plays where I did good," Frank Jr. says. "He's a tough critic, the toughest critic I probably met. But I understand that he want the best for me. He's great in his game, so I don't want to try to act like he don't know what he's talking about, because he clearly do. The things I want to be in life, he's already been, so I just try to pick his brain as much as possible."
In 2023, Frank Jr. gained 1,131 yards in a dismal three-win season for Southern Mississippi. He averaged 4.9 yards a carry. He got better, stronger, as the season wore on.
He says he wants to be an NFL running back if God allows him to. He declared for the 2024 draft in early December. But more than that he wants to be a high school football coach, teaching kids the game.
Frank Jr.'s game against Rice in the LendingTree Bowl felt like grace, like a release. It had been such a hard year, with his father's name -- *his* name -- tarnished by Atlantic City. "That was like God giving me my blessing in my hand because he watched me work hard, extremely hard, all offseason and even throughout the season," he says. "He also watched me go through the tough times. So I just feel like that was the blessing that God had for me all through this time. It felt like nothing could go wrong that night. That's probably the best I ever felt, ever, ever, beside my son being born."
Frank Gore Jr. had the ultimate Frank Gore Experience, a running back following in the Last Running Back's tens of thousands of footsteps. He is grateful for it. But he has a son of his own now, born right before the 2023 season began at Southern Mississippi.
*He* is Frank Gore's namesake. His *son* is named Mason.
**WHEN GORE FIRST JOINED** the 49ers they were a bad team. They were so bad, in fact, that head coach Mike Nolan asked his running back to evaluate each of his teammates. "So he went through the names of about 50-plus guys and it was incredible," Nolan says. "It was just one sentence on each guy, but I'll be damned if he wasn't right on the money."
It is how his mind has always worked. He is quick and confident and unsentimental when judging talent, and in the summer of 2023, six months after he concluded the case in Atlantic City, he returned to the 49ers for a job in the player personnel office. The team's general manager, John Lynch, cited Gore's "smart football mind" in announcing the hire, but to Frank the job was about the loyalty of CEO Jed York and the rest of the family that owns the team. "I always knew Jed and the family really cared about me, but when that s--- came out \[in Atlantic City\], they could have turned it back on me," he says. "But no, he called me, like he was one of the gods, man."
Gore earned his degree from the University of Miami on Dec. 14, six days after Frank Jr. graduated from Southern Miss. He believes he can do anything he sets his mind to, and now he has set his mind to succeeding Lynch as the GM of the 49ers. And so, when I meet him in the inner sanctum of his home in Florida, I ask Gore to act in his professional capacity and evaluate Frank Gore Jr. Does Little Frank, as he is known back home, have the ability to run in three dimensions, to run with leverage, to find angles, to survive with his feet in the smallest of spaces? "Everything, yep," Gore says, and begins flicking through the video clips on his phone with the intensity of some ancient scholar making calculations on an abacus. "Show you this play right here," he says. "Watch this s---, bro. This is crazy. Look at this run right here, man. This s--- crazy."
"Can you give me a scouting report on your son?" I ask the father.
He responds without a flicker of hesitation. "He got to get better -- the blocking," he says. "He got to finish his long runs. But the will to play, to love the game? He love the game. Great feet, great eyes, stronger than what people think. He got put on tape that he can't catch. I know he can catch, but he got to show other people. But when he break out, he got to finish. He got to finish going. That's my short report on him."
He wanted to be the last running back to leave the field, and that's exactly what he turned out to be. But how can he be the Last Running Back when his son is the next running back? And how can the Last Running Back even countenance his son becoming the next running back while knowing what he'll have to endure?
Big Frank has given Little Frank so much: vision, feet, some sort of advanced spatial awareness, game-specific training, and hours of film study, along with the motivation common to all sons from the first generation likely to the last -- the conflicting desire to please and surpass the man who came before. But Gore was able to run 9.09 miles in the NFL because he was formed in the most unforgiving of crucibles. How can he pass on the apartment with beds pushed to the edges of all the walls, the dyslexia, the casual disregard by the school system, the teacher who in Gore's memory told him, "You ain't s--- and you ain't never going to be s---," the prospect of the special diploma, and the sickness and death of the woman who loved him enough to lead him to the love and care of another? How can he tell Frank Jr. not just how he did it but what he knew? He can't. He has staked his whole life -- all that toil, all those hits, all that agony and exhaustion, all the darkness -- on making Frank Jr. and his other children feel essential rather than expendable. He loves Little Frank. How can he not want the world to love him too?
He suffered the knee injury that changed his life six days after Frank Jr. was born. It was the injury that broke forever his sense of physical invulnerability, and so became the paradoxical basis of a career that pushed any conventional idea of durability to its limit. Frank Jr. has yet to suffer a major injury. He's been spared. But if he goes into the NFL, he will play in a league that assumes he is expendable and banks on the expectation that he can and will be replaced. It is not a matter of if but when: One day he will not just get hurt but leave the field on a cart, in tears, and find himself facing the prospect of starting all over again, from nothing.
"Will your son be able to do that?" I ask Frank Gore Sr.
The dark room fills with silence, and the question lingers like a curse. He knows what his injuries cost him and the obsessive work required to come back from them. He knows how much innocence he had to lose, not to mention how much time -- time with his family, time with his son. He might not believe in luck, but he's not about to start daring the gods now, football or otherwise.
"I don't want to talk about that," he finally says.
It is the first question the Last Running Back won't answer.
# Why Parents Struggle So Much in the World's Richest Country
Illustration by Aleia Murawski and Sam Copeland
Raising kids shouldn’t be this hard.
One morning a couple of years ago, during the awkward hour between my eldest daughter’s school drop-off and her sister’s swim lesson, I stopped at a coffee shop. There, I ran into the father of a boy in my daughter’s class. He was also schlepping a younger child around, and as we got to talking, I learned that we had a lot in common.
Like me, he had followed his spouse to the United Kingdom for work; she was a physician, learning some new procedure to take back to Australia. He couldn’t wait to move home to his big house down the road from the beach. “Do you think you’ll ever move back to the U.S.?” he asked. Sure, eventually, I said. Or at least that was the plan.
What he said next threw me: His wife had recently been offered a job in America. “It would have been great for her career,” he said, “but we figured it would be too dangerous for the kids.”
I can’t remember what I said in response—probably something about things not being quite as bad as they seem on the news. But his comment, and the matter-of-fact way he said it, stuck with me.
For most of my life, I have never felt anything but extreme, what-are-the-odds gratitude to have been born and raised in America. We have so much: a [high median income](https://www.oecd-ilibrary.org/sites/45ae3dae-en/index.html?itemId=/content/component/45ae3dae-en) and [larger-than-average houses](https://www.oecdbetterlifeindex.org/topics/housing/) and some of the world’s most prestigious colleges and universities. When I tell people in the U.K. that I’ve moved there from the U.S., many respond with something to the effect of “Why on Earth would you do that?”
But their tone changes a little when I mention having kids. American parents have something of a reputation in Europe. We’re known for being intense, neurotic, overprotective, obsessed with academic achievement—“the opposite of relaxed,” [Matthias Doepke](https://www.lse.ac.uk/economics/people/faculty/matthias-doepke), a professor of economics at the London School of Economics, told me. Some Europeans worry that American child-rearing [norms](https://www.bbc.com/worklife/article/20200225-the-parenting-style-sweeping-europe) will take [hold](https://www.theguardian.com/education/2014/oct/09/have-helicopter-parents-landed-in-the-uk) there. Yet many of the parents I’ve spoken with also express some sympathy, or even pity, for American parents. They seem bewildered by how little support new parents receive in the U.S., and horrified by the prevalence of gun violence in American life.
Of course, people in many other parts of the world experience levels of poverty, violence, and instability that are far worse. By that measure, many Americans are indeed very lucky. But the United States is a rich country, and it could afford to alleviate some of the challenges its parents face. Instead, the U.S. mostly regards children, and the vital task of raising them, as a personal matter.
[Read: Parental leave is American exceptionalism at its bleakest](https://www.theatlantic.com/family/archive/2021/11/us-paid-family-parental-leave-congress-bill/620660/)
If you have children in America, it is up to you to keep them safe, healthy, and well cared for. This philosophy shapes government policy in some obvious ways: The U.S. is one of the only countries in the world [without guaranteed paid maternity leave](https://www.nytimes.com/2021/10/25/upshot/paid-leave-democrats.html). Compared with the rest of the OECD, an international coalition of 38 nations—most of them wealthy—it spends far less on direct cash benefits for families (which the U.S. briefly experimented with more broadly during the early pandemic but then abandoned), as well as on early education and child care. Statutory paid vacation, sick leave, caregiving leave, and [pension credits for caregivers](https://www.ssa.gov/policy/docs/ssb/v71n4/v71n4p61.html) are [all](https://www.oecd.org/els/soc/PF2_3_Additional_leave_entitlements_of_working_parents.pdf) [common](https://www.oecd.org/coronavirus/policy-responses/paid-sick-leave-to-protect-income-health-and-jobs-through-the-covid-19-crisis-a9e1a154/) in OECD countries but absent in America.
I’ve come to understand that Australian dad’s logic: America is a land of incredible opportunity, but it’s not a great place to raise kids.
The job of raising children is simply different in the U.S. It comes with fewer assurances and requires navigating a level of precarity that is unique in the developed world.
It is, in a word, harder.
To me, the American ideal of “having it all”—that is, working a full-time job while raising children—always seemed like way too much. So when I finished graduate school with a baby in tow, I sought out part-time work that I hoped to scale up when my kids got older.
But the sort of work you can do part-time in America is generally not the sort that offers any leave or that can cover the cost of child care for two kids. When I gave birth to my second daughter, in 2018, I left my job entirely. This was by no means a disaster—my husband has a great job with excellent health insurance—but it was daunting to entirely lose my foothold in the labor market. I spent my first year at home trying to start a freelance writing career but didn’t get very far. Then, at the end of 2019, we moved to the United Kingdom.
Among the wealthy, postindustrial nations that make up America’s peers, England is hardly the most supportive for parents. Brits sometimes describe their country as a kind of halfway point between Europe and America, and that’s certainly true for family policy. But with a full year of job-protected leave, up to 39 weeks of which is paid; cash stipends for parents; tax-free child-care funds; paid vacation and sick leave; universal health care; and a right to [request flexible working arrangements](https://www.gov.uk/government/news/millions-to-benefit-from-new-flexible-working-measures#:~:text=Workers%20will%20have%20the%20right,for%20parents%20and%20unpaid%20carers.), there is far more support for parents in the U.K. than in the U.S. I don’t qualify for some of these benefits due to my visa status, but all kids, including mine, are entitled to at least 570 hours of early-childhood education or child care per year from age 3 to 4, and most children start full-time school a year earlier than American kindergarten.
With this help, I was able to give freelancing another go. I’m now living my dream of having a career that allows me to pick my daughters up from school every day, and I owe it in no small part to the subsidized child care in England. I would not be writing this article without it.
I still find parenting overwhelming and difficult at times, even though I know I’ve got it better than most people. But there’s a different feel to parenting over here—more sure-footed and secure—and it took me a while to figure out why. It’s the sense that my children’s welfare is not all on me and my husband. That is, after all, what a policy like paid parental leave represents: the conviction that parents deserve support, that the work of raising a country’s next generation of citizens should be a collective enterprise. When the government instead leaves parents to look for employers willing to tolerate their care responsibilities, it sends a clear message: your kids, your problem.
(Kuni Takahashi / Getty)
Take the example of Dina, who was born in Africa and works in higher education. When she found out she was pregnant, everyone in her and her husband’s extended families abroad assumed that she would have paid maternity leave. (Dina asked to be identified by her first name only so that she could speak openly about her leave experience.) But her academic job at the time offered no paid leave, and because she hadn’t been there for a full year when she gave birth, she didn’t even qualify for unpaid leave through the Family and Medical Leave Act (FMLA). This is something I encountered repeatedly in speaking with women for this article—the fact that they had switched jobs during their pregnancy or worked part-time rendered them ineligible for *any* job-protected leave, which isn’t how it works in many other countries.
[Read: The U.S. leaves parents on their own for a reason](https://www.theatlantic.com/family/archive/2022/06/us-paid-parental-leave-child-welfare-tax-credit/661276/)
By the time Dina gave birth, she had accumulated just three days of paid time off. She scheduled her C-section for the Friday before the last week of the 2020 fall term so that she would have the weekend to recover before diving back into grading and research for the rest of her school’s winter break.
When the spring term started, she went back to teaching—virtually, due to the pandemic—at five weeks postpartum, still in pain from her C-section, pumping and nursing through six hours of class. Even so, Dina told me, in some ways she felt “lucky.” That her due date came so close to winter break was a stroke of good fortune; COVID-19 “saved” her, she said, because it allowed her to teach from home.
Another mother I spoke with, Patricia Green, was working as a home-health aide for a company serving people with disabilities when she found out she was pregnant. One of her clients would sometimes get violent and hit her belly, so Green sought out a new job at another agency. Like Dina, the fact that she started working there midpregnancy meant that she didn’t qualify for the FMLA. And even if she had been eligible, she needed the money, which meant that she had to go back to work two weeks postpartum, even though she didn’t have anyone she trusted to watch her child. “I feel like I was just kind of forced to go back to work, and I was not ready,” Green told me. “I would constantly be thinking about the safety of my child.”
Work-family conflicts continue throughout a child’s life—and, unsurprisingly, put the most strain on financially vulnerable mothers. [Amanda Freeman](https://www.hartford.edu/directory/arts-science/freeman-amanda.aspx), a sociologist at the University of Hartford who conducted a [yearslong study](https://tertulia.com/book/getting-me-cheap-how-low-wage-work-traps-women-and-girls-in-poverty-amanda-freeman/9781620977422?affiliate_id=atl-347) of low-income mothers in America, told me that all of the women she surveyed were working, often multiple part-time jobs that not only paid poorly but also offered few benefits and none of the flexibility necessary to coordinate employment and parenting. Just-in-time scheduling, in which employers post employees’ schedules with very little notice and can change it at the last minute, made it difficult to arrange child care or, for that matter, any other aspect of their child’s life. “Sometimes they’ll pay for child care, which they can’t afford anyway, and then not have a shift,” Freeman said. The mothers Freeman interviewed worried about their kids getting sick—or about falling ill themselves—because few of them had any sick leave, which meant that if they called out of work, they lost money and potentially their job.
One mother I spoke with, Mendy Hughes, has worked at Walmart for more than 13 years. For many years, her employer only allowed her to work night shifts, sometimes until midnight, so she would bring her 10-year-old son to work when she couldn’t find someone to watch him. “I can’t call in,” she told me. “He had to get up and go to school the next day.”
On top of all this, many of the women Freeman interviewed depended on various forms of means-tested social assistance that are issued for brief and varied intervals and subject to stringent income limits and work requirements. Hanging on to them requires, among other things, regularly reporting detailed information about their earnings or work-related activities, creating an additional axis of work-family conflict. This [triple load](https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/0192513X20949599) of work, parenting, and navigating public benefits is a direct by-product of America’s view of public support for parents as something you are not supposed to need, Freeman told me. It’s not something that happens when programs are universal.
To lose work in America is to lose not only your income and the child care it pays for but also practically everything else: your health insurance, your company’s retirement-savings plan, and, potentially, Social Security benefits. Even much of the social safety net—the earned-income tax credit, the refundable portion of the child tax credit, and often Temporary Assistance for Needy Families, what we usually think of as “welfare”—is tied to work. What help is left for those with little or no income is sparse, patchy, and difficult to access (and retain). If American families can’t find a way to juggle work and parenting in spite of all the obstacles, they have a lot to lose and very far to fall.
And people do fall. At least one in 10 Americans has medical debt; one study found that [postpartum women](https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC10192781/), more than one [in 10 of whom are uninsured](https://www.urban.org/sites/default/files/publication/102296/uninsured-new-mothers-health-and-health-care-challenges-highlight-the-benefits-of-increasing-postpartum-medicaid-coverage_0.pdf), are significantly overrepresented among them. Nearly 5 percent of children in America have no health insurance, and, by one estimate, a third of children [are underinsured](https://publications.aap.org/pediatrics/article/149/1/e2021050353/183780/Underinsurance-Among-Children-in-the-United-States?autologincheck=redirected). Even though the health system in the U.K. has problems, parents there and in other countries with universal health care don’t have to hesitate to seek care for their kids for fear they won’t be able to afford it.
American families are also more likely to live in poverty [than those](https://www.oecd.org/els/CO_2_2_Child_Poverty.pdf) in most other OECD countries. And as [Jane Waldfogel](https://socialwork.columbia.edu/faculty-research/faculty/full-time/jane-waldfogel/), a professor of social work at Columbia University, told me, “It’s not just that we have more poor kids, but that the penalty to being poor is stronger.” For one thing, kids who grow up in poverty in the U.S. are [four times more likely](https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=4467955) to be poor as adults than those in Denmark or Germany, and twice as likely as those in the U.K. or Australia.
A memorial display for the victims of the Sandy Hook school shooting in Newtown, Connecticut, in 2012 (Zhang Chuanshi / Xinhua / Redux)
And then there’s the threat American parents have to worry about that pretty much doesn’t exist in many of the United States’s peer countries: guns. According to one analysis, from birth to 18, kids in the U.S. are nearly twice as likely to die as kids in a set of other wealthy countries—and the [No. 1 cause of death](https://www.kff.org/global-health-policy/issue-brief/child-and-teen-firearm-mortality-in-the-u-s-and-peer-countries/) is gun violence. Firearms are responsible for 20 percent of all U.S. child and teen deaths; the average among other comparably large and wealthy countries is less than 2 percent. Yet even that shocking statistic understates the degree to which guns distort childhood and complicate parenthood.
[Read: No parent should have to live like this](https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2022/05/school-gun-violence-robb-elementary-uvalde/638422/)
The prevalence of gun violence is the reason Kayla Perry, who moved from the U.S. to Singapore in 2019, plans never to move back home. Born and raised in Silver Spring, Maryland, Perry’s first brush with gun violence occurred when snipers spent [three weeks](https://www.washingtonpost.com/history/2022/10/01/timeline-dc-sniper-attacks/) in 2002 shooting people across the greater Washington, D.C., area. Their first victim was the father of one of her classmates. Perry heard the news when a fellow student passed her a note in French class, minutes before the school went into lockdown. Everything about school life was strange that month, she remembers—they weren’t allowed to go out for recess, and no one stood outside at the bus stop. Perry was never a direct victim or survivor of firearm violence, yet it shaped her worldview. She recalled a time when, while walking home from school, she and her friends heard what they thought was a gunshot. “We all ran in zigzags all the way home, because it’s the best way to avoid a shooter,” she told me. “Looking back, like, how sad is it that a kid that age has that fear?”
American childhood today is indelibly shaped by that fear. School shootings have been rising in the past few decades; according to [one count](https://www.edweek.org/leadership/school-shootings-over-time-incidents-injuries-and-deaths), in 2022, 40 people were killed and 100 more injured in 51 shootings. And even though most students will never encounter a school shooter, the pervasive threat and all of the countermeasures—the drills and metal detectors and bulletproof backpacks—produce a sense of unsafety at school. For parents, the unrelenting fear that your child could fall victim to a shooter is a source of anxiety, always there in the back of your mind.
But school shootings, and the defensive apparatus that has built up around them, are only the most visible way that firearm violence has warped American childhood. They represent a tiny fraction of gun deaths. Once, while Perry was home for winter break during her freshman year of college, her neighbor was shot in his driveway during an armed robbery. No one died, and Perry mostly accepted the swirling threat of gun violence as an ordinary part of life. “You could get in a car crash; you could get in a plane crash; you could be shot … That’s just normal life,” she said.
Only when she moved away did she fully appreciate how unusual widespread gun violence is in other parts of the world, or start to wonder what it would be like to grow up without it. Perry doesn’t have children yet, but she wants them—and that’s why she’s decided she will not move back to the United States. She wants her future kids to live in a country where they don’t need to worry about firearms.
For a year during the pandemic, I found myself in the somewhat strange position of writing a weekly roundup of parenting advice for an American audience from my perch overseas. I remember reading [an article](https://melindawmoyer.substack.com/p/how-to-protect-kids-from-gun-violence) published after the Uvalde massacre, meant to give American parents data-driven advice on how to protect their kids. The author accurately noted that the overwhelming majority of children who die by gun violence aren’t killed at school. Nearly [a third](https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2023/04/06/gun-deaths-among-us-kids-rose-50-percent-in-two-years/) of deaths from firearms among minors are suicides. Among kids under 13, [nearly half](https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/31470333/) of gun deaths and injuries are accidental.
Nothing epitomizes U.S. individualism quite like widespread gun ownership—and nothing more clearly illustrates the impossible burdens that individualism inevitably places on parents. No amount of tragedy has yet convinced Americans to set aside their guns, so instead we saddle parents with the absurd task of protecting their children from other gun owners while also ensuring that the child never stumbles across a gun.
All of this might help explain why American parents act the way they do.
In many parts of the world, parenting has gotten more intense, and childhood has become less free. But the all-consuming nature of American child-rearing is extreme compared with many other countries, Doepke, the economics professor, told me. In the U.S., for example, preschool is much more academic. (While searching for summer camps last year, I stumbled on a “USA-style” camp where kids can learn to code.) In the Nordic region and elsewhere, early care settings are more focused on playing in nature. “If you live in Stockholm and do the American thing of teaching numbers and letters to your kids and signing them up for violin at age 4, then your Swedish friends will tell you that is almost child abuse,” Doepke said.
This meddling style of parenting may have started out as an idiosyncrasy of the upper classes, but it has become the norm—or at least the aspiration—for many American parents. We see it not only in that early academic pressure but also in the way moms and dads devour [parenting advice](https://www.theatlantic.com/family/archive/2019/05/american-parents-obsession-expert-advice/589132/), and the [high degree of surveillance](https://www.theatlantic.com/family/archive/2023/07/helicopter-parenting-child-autonomy-standards/674618/) kids are subjected to. But, of course, not everyone has the time and resources to meet these standards. Amanda Freeman told me that every parent in her survey of low-income mothers was aware of intensive-parenting norms; most were desperate to replicate them and ashamed when they couldn’t.
[Read: The gravitational pull of supervising kids all the time](https://www.theatlantic.com/family/archive/2023/07/helicopter-parenting-child-autonomy-standards/674618/)
Hannes Schwandt, an economist at Northwestern University, told me that in many communities in Switzerland, where he used to teach, accompanying children on their walk to school was generally frowned upon. By comparison, American children seem to be raised as if they were in a “combat zone,” Schwandt said. Perry noted something similar in Singapore—kids there are extremely focused on academics (many go to after-school school), but they also have a tremendous amount of freedom from a young age, riding the metro or going to the mall on their own.
It’s ironic that in a country so committed to freedom, children have so little of it; that in a society so committed to personal responsibility and self-reliance, children can do so little for themselves. But perhaps that’s not a coincidence. In their book, *Love, Money, and Parenting*, Doepke and his co-author, Fabrizio Zilibotti, argue that much of the variation among wealthy nations in [parenting styles has economic roots](https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/posteverything/wp/2019/02/22/feature/how-economic-inequality-gives-rise-to-hyper-parenting/). The emphasis that parents across the world put on hard work (relative to values such as independence and imagination) lines up remarkably well with their country’s economic inequality. About 9 in 10 Chinese parents and two-thirds of American parents place hard work among the most important values to pass along to children. In Sweden, it’s 11 percent. This makes a lot of sense: Parents everywhere want to set their kids up for success, but “the economic environment really shapes what that means,” Doepke said.
Pushing your kids to do well in school and filling out their free time with extracurriculars that will help their college applications might be tough on children, but if you live in the U.S., it is still likely the rational thing to do. The risks, both physical and financial, of taking a hands-off approach to parenting are simply higher in America than in pretty much any other comparably wealthy country.
This, I think, is the quandary I find myself in when weighing whether to return to the United States: I don’t know that I can move back to America without becoming an *American* parent. The task of raising a child is always uncertain and daunting, even under the best of circumstances. But when you sign up to be a parent in the U.S., you are signing up to navigate threats to your kids’ safety and your family’s financial stability that you would not have to consider if you lived in any comparable country. There’s no opting out of these stressors; they’re part of the job.
My husband and I still plan to move back to the U.S. at some point. We want to be near our families—and will need to be, eventually, in order to help care for our parents as they age. We always assumed that moving closer to family members who can help out with our kids would make parenting easier. But I don’t know if my relatives’ support would be enough to offset the feeling that my country doesn’t have my family’s back. It’s a tragic thought: that moving home is not what’s best for my family. But it’s one I cannot shake.
Très chronophage et particulièrement difficile, la confection de la pâte feuilletée n’est pas indispensable. Pour faciliter le travail, il est possible d’acheter une pâte feuilletée en grande surface ou de se procurer chez le pâtissier des pâtons ou une pâte déjà étalée.
 
Pour les plus courageux, voici la marche à suivre. Travailler le beurre tempéré avec la première partie de la farine. Stocker au frais une nuit. Sabler le beurre et la farine puis ajouter l’eau, le vinaigre et le sel. Ne pas corser. Stocker une nuit.
 
Etaler la pâte sans mélanger complètement le beurre manié à la détrempe, le but étant d’avoir des couches de beurre au milieu de la pâte. Donner un tour simple (pliage de la pâte en trois) et laisser reposer deux heures au frais. Refaire l’opération sept fois, en laissant reposer quinze minutes au réfrigérateur à chaque fois.
 
#### Etape 2 : la frangipane
Dans un cul-de-poule, verser le sucre glace agrémenté d’un soupçon de farine, et verser le beurre mou. Mélanger à la cuillère en bois, puis verser les œufs entiers. Continuer de mélanger pour obtenir une petite masse bien homogénéisée. Ajouter la poudre d’amande et la crème pâtissière.
 
Parallèlement, faire monter les blancs d’œuf en neige à l’aide d’un batteur, pour alléger la frangipane et pour qu’elle soit moins tassée.
 
Pendant ce temps, ajouter un peu de zestes d’orange bio (ou autre agrume) à la crème d’amande, ainsi que le rhum (ou du Grand Marnier) pour détendre et alléger la frangipane. Incorporer les blancs en neige et bien mélanger la préparation jusqu’à une parfaite homogénéité.
 
#### Etape 3 : le montage de la galette
Préparer deux cercles de pâte. Placer un cercle en métal de 22 cm de diamètre au centre du premier cercle de pâte et y poser la frangipane. C’est le moment de déposer la fève sur le rebord extérieur de la frangipane. Placer le deuxième cercle de pâte par-dessus la frangipane, puis placer le cercle en métal dessus ou souder à la main les deux couches de pâte. Bien appuyer sur les bords pour souder parfaitement.
 
Laisser reposer deux à trois heures au réfrigérateur. Avec le cercle en métal, détourer le trop-plein de pâte pour obtenir un cercle parfait. Entailler réguliérement au couteau les extrémités du cercle pour « fermer » la pâte. La retourner sur une assiette.
 
Au pinceau, recouvrir de jaune d’œuf légèrement sucré pour la dorure. Dessiner sur le dessus de la galette à votre convenance, avec le côté non tranchant d’une lame de couteau.
 
Percer à quelques endroits de la galette avec un couteau pour laisser la pâte respirer.
plot: "A tale of outsized ambition and outrageous excess, it traces the rise and fall of multiple characters during an era of unbridled decadence and depravity in early Hollywood."
plot: "A timid dog groomer living in a poor suburb sells cocaine on the side and stays out of trouble, while trying to deal with his unstable, violent acquaintance who is a menace to the whole neighborhood."
plot: "It follows two teenagers doing time in Naples. Filippo dreams of becoming a musician, and Carmine of becoming a hairdresser. Will they be strong enough to oppose the attacks from fellow detainee Ciro, the crime boss?"
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1 year ago