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For this week’s Fault Lines column, Jon Allsop is filling in for Jay Caspian Kang.

If one lesson has emerged this travel season, it’s that you really, really don’t want to be on vacation in the vicinity of Vice-President J. D. Vance. Last month, with the Trump Administration continuing to conduct sweeping immigration raids in the Los Angeles area, Vance and his family went to Disneyland, where, apparently, parts of the park were shut down for them. “Sorry, to all the people who were at Disneyland, for the longer lines,” Vance said, on a new podcast hosted by Katie Miller, the wife of Stephen Miller, a White House deputy chief of staff. “But we had a very good time.” Earlier this month, the Army Corps of Engineers altered the outflow from a lake in Ohio to raise the water level of a river where Vance would be boating. A source told the Guardian that the change would create “ideal kayaking conditions,” though the Secret Service said that the intention was to facilitate Vance’s security detail; Vance’s office denied advance knowledge. Miller, on her podcast, asked Vance if there’s anywhere else he’s dying to go. “Hopefully we can find some excuse, as Vice-President of the United States, to go to Hawaii,” he replied.

Last week, Vance and his travelling circus touched down in the U.K. He visited David Lammy, the country’s Foreign Secretary, at the latter’s residence in Kent, before heading on to the Cotswolds, a scenic area west of London that looks like what an A.I.-image generator might spit out if you asked it to conjure the British countryside. (If you’ve seen the Disney+ adaptation of Jilly Cooper’s steamy book “Rivals,” you get the idea.) Vance and his family reportedly stayed in a lavish Georgian manor owned by a light-bulb magnate, obliging me to ask whose bright idea that was. Residents complained to the British press about the associated inconvenience, recounting road closures (leading to, gasp, wet crops), bad American driving, and an indiscreet Secret Service presence. (One local official likened the profusion of agents to a scene from “Men in Black,” adding, “It was a bit over the top really.”) Jeremy Clarkson—the cantankerous former host of the car program “Top Gear,” who recently called Vance “a bearded God-botherer”—suggested that a no-fly zone had obstructed drone filming for a show about a farm that he owns nearby. This led to headlines claiming that Clarkson had joined, or was even leading, a “backlash” against Vance—though he subsequently mocked the claims of chaos by posting a video of a peaceful pastoral vista.

Cotswoldians are used to celebrity visitors and residents: Clarkson, for starters, but also Piers Morgan, Ellen DeGeneres, and the former British Prime Minister David Cameron, who has a home in the hamlet where Vance posted up. (Kamala Harris also visited, shortly before Vance did.) Nor is Vance the first politician to vacation with an irritating retinue in tow. But his trip was unusually fraught. Protesters rallied in a local park, toting signs with slogans like “COTSWOLD CHILDLESS CAT LADIES SAY GO HOME” (brandished, reportedly, by a woman who does have children and does not have cats), “WAR CRIMINAL,” and (my personal favorite) “JD VANCE CLAPS WHEN THE PLANE LANDS.” A van drove around the area displaying a meme of Vance with a shiny bald head, which went viral after a tourist claimed that he was turned away from the U.S. for having it on his phone. (Homeland Security officials have denied that this happened.) According to reports in the Observer and the Wall Street Journal, police went door to door, asking residents to identify themselves and disclose details of their social-media accounts. In fairness, Vance did recently warn Britain’s government against advancing down a “very dark path” of online censorship. (His office denied any advance knowledge of the social-media questioning; a British police spokesperson said that it had not taken place.)

If the otherwise silly story of Vance’s vacation has a serious side, then his choice of destination has curious symbolic connotations, too. The Cotswolds have a rich association with a vein of upper-class establishment conservatism that is in retreat around the world. In many ways, Vance’s rise has been a compelling manifestation of that retreat. Whether Vance has left this sort of politics behind entirely, however, might be another matter.

For a man-of-the-people politician, Vance certainly seems to go on a lot of vacations. If he were a public official in the U.K., as Marina Hyde rightly noted in the Guardian last week, “he’d have been fitted with an unflattering holiday-related nickname months ago, and no one would take him remotely seriously.” (“Vance-cation” has a nice ring to it.) But, on this recent trip, he also attended to political business. There was the meeting with Lammy, the center-left Foreign Secretary, who has become friendly with Vance—somewhat improbably, given the gulf between their politics. It may have helped that, as Politico put it, Lammy “let Vance beat him at fishing” during their Kent sojourn; Vance’s kids caught carp, while Lammy caught nothing. (Lammy apparently lacked the requisite fishing license, and has since reported himself to an official watchdog.) Since arriving in the Cotswolds, Vance has mingled with various right-wing politicians, including Robert Jenrick, a plummy Conservative lawmaker with growing populist pretensions, and Nigel Farage, the Brexit architect, who has a very real chance of becoming Britain’s next Prime Minister. Because Vance is terminally online, he also met with Thomas Skinner, a former candidate on the British version of “The Apprentice,” who now seems to spend much of his time posting the word “Bosh” on X. Vance recently defended him after Skinner said that a parade of left-wingers had called him a racist when, in his telling, he was just a “normal man who loves his family and this country.” It’s been a big week for Skinner: yesterday, he was named a contestant on the British version of “Dancing with the Stars.”

In the British political imagination, the Cotswolds have been most closely linked not with the Farages of the world but with the likes of Cameron, who was part of what came to be known as “the Chipping Norton set”—an élite social circle named for a town that’s a ten-minute drive from Vance’s bolthole (albeit longer with motorcade traffic). The set became infamous in the early twenty-tens, shortly after Cameron took office, when another of its members, Rebekah Brooks, a lieutenant for Rupert Murdoch, was criminally charged in the phone-hacking scandal that engulfed Murdoch’s British newspaper empire. (Brooks was acquitted, and now works again for Murdoch.) Cameron styled himself as a modernizer keen to dispel the hard-edged image of the Conservative Party—in one famous stunt, he went to the Arctic and hugged a husky in order to prove his environmental credentials—and as a committed internationalist. Indeed, he resigned as Prime Minister, in 2016, after voters rejected the case he had made for Britain to stay in the European Union. Around the same time, he criticized Donald Trump’s proposed Muslim travel ban as “divisive, stupid, and wrong.” In a 2019 memoir, Cameron wrote that he had been depressed by Trump’s brand of protectionist, xenophobic politics; that he “couldn’t have agreed more” with a speech in which President Barack Obama warned that Trump’s rhetoric was a slippery slope toward demonizing “whole nations, races and religions”; and that Trump’s references to “Islamic terrorism” were crude and unhelpful.

Cameron’s school of conservatism now appears to be dead—at the hands of Vance, among others. (Last year, Vance described the U.K. as perhaps the world’s first nuclear-armed “Islamist country.”) His trip to the Cotswolds can be read, even if unintentionally, as dancing on the grave of this world view. Not so long ago, however, Vance appeared to be closer to Cameron politically. Shortly after the publication of his 2016 memoir, “Hillbilly Elegy,” Vance dismissed Trump as “cultural heroin.” In the book, he also made the case that post-industrial and rural poverty in largely white, Rust Belt communities was a result, in part, of a deficit of personal and collective responsibility. Such ideas echo rhetoric that Cameron used to indict what he saw as a “broken” British society. In 2016, George Osborne—who, as Cameron’s finance minister, oversaw a program of fiscal austerity that shredded Britain’s social safety net—described “Hillbilly Elegy” as one of his books of the year. After reading it, Osborne has said, he reached out to Vance, who, in turn, apparently complimented the Cameron government. The two men are still friends; according to the Financial Times, it was Osborne who sorted Vance’s accommodation ahead of his Cotswolds trip, and the pair dined together this week.

As has been endlessly chronicled, Vance has been on quite a political journey since 2016. Some aspects of his embrace of Trumpism—and, with it, an insistent economic populism and anti-corporate posture—strike me as sincere, and others less so. If there’s one clear through line of Vance’s politics, however, it is how he has, albeit with differing emphases, styled himself (or, at least, allowed himself to be styled) as a voice for the poor and downtrodden masses far from the madding crowds of big coastal cities. Whatever Vance’s real views, this image is hard to square with, say, serving in an Administration that has just passed a huge tax cut for the ultra-rich, or with getting special treatment on a kayaking trip, knowingly or not. It seems hard to square, too, with his Cotswolds visit.

This, at least, is true in the sense that the Cotswolds, which have become a playground for London’s élite, is not typically associated with hardscrabble imagery. But there is poverty there, of the rural kind that tends to be less visible—certainly if you stay in your country pile, with its tennis court, gardens, and orangery. “There is real hardship and deprivation behind the media stories of the area whose latest description, apparently, is the ‘Hamptons of England,’ ” one local told the Telegraph, a conservative British newspaper, this week. In 2013, in the wake of the phone-hacking scandal, a reporter from the New York Times visited the area and heard something similar. “This is still a working-class town, and this is a working-class pub,” one man said, over a pint, at least until “these tall people named Giles and Pippa show up.” And, now, J. D. ♦

It’s fascinating when filmmakers make drastic late-career shifts, as Martin Scorsese did with “The Wolf of Wall Street” and Francis Ford Coppola recently did with “Megalopolis.” Now it’s Spike Lee’s turn, and in his new drama, “Highest 2 Lowest,” he shifts in a surprising way. The film is a remake of the Japanese director Akira Kurosawa’s 1963 drama “High and Low,” among the greatest police procedurals. Lee turns the story into what is one of his most personal films, both emotionally and intellectually. Often, directors’ self-transformations involve changes in modes of production: Scorsese broke away from the studios and found independent financing; Coppola self-financed. Lee, who has had his own production company throughout his career, makes “Highest 2 Lowest”a film about his particular modes of production, one that focusses on the underlying notion of owning the means of production.

“Highest 2 Lowest” is a story of culture—of how it’s created and disseminated, flowing (in both directions) between the highest echelons of society and the lowest. The movie starts on high, with rapturous views of the Manhattan skyline and David King (Denzel Washington), one of the city’s highfliers, pacing on the balcony of his penthouse on the Brooklyn waterfront. A music executive, he’s discussing his plan to regain control of Stackin’ Hits, the label he founded. Five years ago, he sold a controlling interest, which is about to pass into the hands of a holding company that he fears will strip the label for parts, dispersing the archive of Black music that he enshrined there. David’s investment in the company is more than financial: renowned for having “the best ears in the business” (if you haven’t heard, he’ll tell you), he has been behind fifty Grammy winners and his music once dominated the charts. These days, the label barely breaks even, but he is looking to preserve his legacy and perhaps to recapture his glory days.

David and his wife, Pamela (Ilfenesh Hadera), are pillars of New York’s Black establishment, regular six-figure contributors to the Studio Museum in Harlem, but his planned buyout involves putting up the family’s entire fortune. Sitting in his Rolls-Royce en route to his office, in midtown, he turns to his chauffeur, Paul Christopher (Jeffrey Wright), for counsel. The men are lifelong friends, having grown up together in a rough Bronx housing project. Paul, who freely refers to his time “upstate”—that is, in prison—is grateful to David for putting him back on solid footing, and the pair’s bond is deepened by their having sons around the same age. David’s son, Trey (Aubrey Joseph), and Paul’s son, Kyle (Elijah Wright, the actor’s son), are best friends and are attending a summer basketball clinic together at Long Island University. (The coaches are L.I.U.’s actual coach, Rod Strickland, and the former N.B.A. player Rick Fox, both playing themselves.)

With the arrogance of privilege, the teens slip out onto the streets, and Kyle is kidnapped. As in Kurosawa’s film, the friends have swapped clothes, leading the kidnapper to snatch the chauffeur’s son rather than the mogul’s. When the kidnapper, thinking he’s holding Trey, first calls in, David prepares to cover the ransom with the money earmarked for buying back his label. When Trey shows up at home and it becomes clear that it’s Kyle who is missing, David initially refuses to pay, but friendship and worry about bad publicity impel him to go ahead.

David is exceptionally motivated to get his money back: not only are his wealth and his business on the line, but making personal use of funds contractually committed to the buyout may also expose him to criminal charges. This is where “Highest 2 Lowest” diverges most from Kurosawa’s film. In “High and Low,” once the ransom is paid and the boy is returned, catching the kidnapper is a police matter, an intricate mass mobilization; in Lee’s version, David himself dominates the hunt, and, crucially, the culprit turns out to be someone in his professional field. Filming largely from David’s perspective, and augmenting the action with cultural politics, Lee seems fully in sympathy with the protagonist’s viewpoint.

Lee, working with a script by Alan Fox, spins out the multiple threads of action with startling swiftness and characteristically rapid-fire, confrontational dialogue. The cinematography, by Matthew Libatique, has a sense of swing, and “Highest 2 Lowest” often plays like a sassy duet for camera and star. Washington’s invigorating performance goes far beyond charisma and technique to enrich the role with an imaginative repertory of seemingly spontaneous gestures: a chilling series of gun-pointing fingers when in doubt; the removal of a diamond earring at a point of financial need. Washington delivers the dialogue with a thrilling range from purrs to roars, all imbued with an authoritative swagger. In the few moments when his swagger falters, he nearly rends the screen with anguish.

The movie’s sense of swing isn’t merely ornamental, and it certainly isn’t neutral; the tonality of Lee’s visual and dramatic art, from writing and acting to framing and editing, has always been inseparable from his world view. With “Highest 2 Lowest,” starting from the opening credit sequence’s soaring glide through New York’s gleaming side, Lee conveys a city of boundless ambition in vital and vigorous motion—but set in motion, now, from the top down. The story and the images converge in a vision of economic Realpolitik, with a sense of jobs created, careers fostered, ideas conveyed, and institutions founded and sustained, through the inspired cultural capitalism of producers with a critic’s discernment, an artist’s passion, and a financier’s savvy, drive, and daring.

Even the intense bromantic warmth of David and Paul’s bond reinforces a distinctive view of power: David, for all his boardroom-honed elegance, has the same street-tough background as Paul, who provides the cunning and the muscle to back up David’s cultural politics. (He also has the movie’s funniest line: describing his gun as “insurance,” Paul calls it “Jake, from State Farm.”) The police—foremost three detectives, played by John Douglas Thompson, LaChanze, and Dean Winters—lend David additional muscle. Showing up at the King penthouse with startling rapidity, they set up shop there to monitor the situation and guide the family through the ransom negotiations. They are as fiercely protective of David as they are relentlessly hostile to Paul, whom they view as merely a criminal. “Highest 2 Lowest” is hardly copaganda, but it nonetheless offers a clear-eyed vision of the legal infrastructure, ranging from courts and prisons to street-level law enforcement, that sustains David’s business empire and the musical agenda that it advances.

For all David’s dependence on his nearest and dearest, and on social institutions at large, “Highest 2 Lowest” is the story of a self-made man who ends up taking the law into his own hands—and who does so aided by the talent that is at the core of his success, his ear for music. David is forced, by the kidnapper, to deliver the money himself, in an intricate, tensely dramatic sequence that (as in Kurosawa’s film) is centered on a moving train—here, the 4 train from Brooklyn to the Bronx, from which David must throw the loot. Police officers seeking to thwart the getaway are impeded by the festivities of the Puerto Rican Day parade, which features a sublime performance by the salsa great Eddie Palmieri (who died earlier this month, at the age of eighty-eight). In lieu of Kurosawa’s realistic vision of law enforcement, Lee offers a hallucination in realistic guise: David, seconded by Paul, descends to the kidnapper’s subterranean lair, near the friends’ childhood home.

It’s pointless to discuss “Highest 2 Lowest” without risking a spoiler and mentioning that the perpetrator is a rapper (played by the real-life musician A$AP Rocky, a.k.a. Rakim Mayers). The rapper, who’d hoped in vain that David would sign him and launch him, is the crucial hinge not only in the movie’s plot but in Lee’s philosophical approach to it. Early on, Pamela questions why David even wants to reacquire Stackin’ Hits, suggesting that his passion for the music he once released is gone; the kidnapper turns out to embody exactly the kind of music for which David is no longer passionate. And it is David’s view of culture, of authenticity and legitimacy, that wins out: his version of a happy ending involves Black music based in jazz and gospel, with no trace of hip-hop, and a vision of business as practically a mom-and-pop store (complete with nepo baby).

Lee’s aesthetic of production, and of the power that’s an essential and inescapable part of art, is fundamentally conservative—and no less stimulating for being so. Many great filmmakers, such as Whit Stillman, Éric Rohmer, and Clint Eastwood, have graced the cinema with original aesthetics for conservative viewpoints, but it’s an unexpected plot twist to see Lee join them. With “Highest 2 Lowest,” it’s as if Lee, facing Manhattan from high in Dumbo, with his back to the rest of Brooklyn, were crossing the East River Rubicon. Oddly, the move comes not as a renunciation but as a new adventure. The movie’s subject may be production, but the director is striking boldly out into a strange new artistic world. ♦

As you catch those last golden rays of summer, here’s something to look forward to: fall culture. Great art (and even not so great art) can soothe and buoy even the most beleaguered souls. Here’s hoping this season is no exception—our critics have gathered the most exciting cultural happenings in our fall preview. Several new TV shows take on the fight for truth in media—I’m especially excited about the “Office”-esque comedy “The Paper” and the new season of, I can’t help it, “The Morning Show”—and Vince Gilligan (“Breaking Bad”) is back with a new sci-fi project set in Albuquerque. In movies, I can’t wait to see Rose Byrne at the end of her rope in Mary Bronstein’s “If I Had Legs I’d Kick You,” and Richard Linklater’s take on Godard. In music, I’m eager to experience Park Avenue Armory’s sound storm of “11,000 Strings,” and indie rock is clearly having a moment (Mac DeMarco, Big Thief, Jeff Tweedy, the list goes on); Fall for Dance renews a love of all that the form can offer, and the city’s top ballet companies, New York City Ballet and American Theatre Ballet, both treat us to full seasons. The art world is having a feminist surge, if the shows of Ruth Asawa, June Leaf, and Vaginal Davis are any indication; Broadway gets Keanu Reeves waiting for Godot, Kristin Chenoweth reigning in “The Queen of Versailles,” and a transfer of Bess Wohl’s lovely, lived-in “Liberation.” Don’t miss it.

New Yorker subscribers enjoy access to our full seasonal cultural previews directly in their inbox. Thank you for your support.—Shauna Lyon

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Illustrations by Gosia Herba

It’s been a brutal year for journalism, with mass layoffs, corporate capitulation, and distrust of traditional media eroding the industry. One of the fall’s most anticipated shows, “The Paper” (Sept. 4), on Peacock, hopes to turn this decline into comedic fodder. The new sitcom, a spinoff of “The Office,” chronicles an editor-in-chief’s efforts to turn around an Ohio newspaper with volunteer reporters.

Elsewhere, the romance of the fourth estate is alive and kicking. FX’s “The Lowdown” (Sept. 23), Sterlin Harjo’s noir follow-up to his acclaimed “Reservation Dogs,” stars Ethan Hawke as a citizen journalist and a self-styled “truthstorian” in Tulsa whose exposé of a powerful local family leads to a suspicious death. (Hawke’s character is inspired in part by Lee Roy Chapman, an autodidact whose work sparked a major reconsideration of one of the city’s founding fathers.) Led by an equally determined protagonist is Netflix’s movie “The Woman in Cabin 10” (Oct. 10), in which a travel writer (Keira Knightley) on assignment aboard a luxury yacht sees a passenger being thrown off the ship and decides to investigate. Back on land, the TV anchors of Apple TV+’s “The Morning Show” (Sept. 17) return for a fourth season. Despite—or because of—the drama’s so-bad-it’s-good track record with ripped-from-the-headlines stories, it revisits that questionable well, with this year’s installments bringing up issues of the media’s credibility in an era of fake news and political polarization.

The pursuit of truth and justice continues outside of journalistic circles, too. In the adaptation of Mick Herron’s book “Down Cemetery Road” (Apple TV+; Oct. 29), the disappearance of a girl in a peaceful English suburb results in a woman’s obsession with the case. The streaming service also débuts “The Savant” (Sept. 26), a thriller in which a housewife (Jessica Chastain) infiltrates internet hate groups to deter mass shootings. The show is based on real life, as is the Netflix drama “Wayward” (Sept. 25), which is set at a facility for “troubled” teens, created by the comic Mae Martin, who was inspired by the stories of her childhood best friend. One suspects that much of the camp’s darkness will stem from the show’s creepy counsellor, played by Toni Collette.

If all this sleuthing motivates you to do some snooping of your own, there’s currently plenty to find out about “Pluribus” (Nov. 7), Vince Gilligan’s first major TV series since “Breaking Bad” and “Better Call Saul.” The Apple TV+ project, which features Rhea Seehorn, who earned two Emmy nominations for her exquisite performance in “Better Call Saul,” can be described as “mild science fiction,” according to Gilligan. Publicity materials thus far tease that the show will involve doughnuts, Albuquerque, and “the most miserable person on Earth” saving “the world from happiness.” Consider our curiosity whetted.—Inkoo Kang

Romance will be big in the coming season, as in Kogonada’s third feature, “A Big Bold Beautiful Journey” (opening Sept. 19), starring Margot Robbie and Colin Farrell as strangers who magically get to relive moments from their past. In “Splitsville” (Aug. 22), directed by Michael Angelo Covino, a divorcing couple (Kyle Marvin, who co-wrote the script with Covino, and Adria Arjona) is thrown into turmoil by friends with an open marriage (Dakota Johnson and Covino). The mumblecore pioneer Jay Duplass directed “The Baltimorons” (Sept. 5), about a thirtysomething man (Michael Strassner) who breaks a tooth on Christmas Eve and forges a sudden relationship with an older emergency dentist (Liz Larsen). “The History of Sound” (Sept. 12), set in the nineteen-tens and twenties, stars Paul Mescal and Josh O’Connor as ethnomusicologists whose relationship develops in their travels to discover and record folk music.

The season’s bio-pics involve an unusual range of subjects, starting with the M.M.A. fighter Mark Kerr, played by Dwayne Johnson, in “The Smashing Machine” (Oct. 3), the first feature directed solo by Benny Safdie. The prolific Richard Linklater has two artist-centered dramas: “Blue Moon” (Oct. 17), set amid the Broadway début of “Oklahoma!,” in 1943, about the lyricist Lorenz Hart (Ethan Hawke) and his professional breakup with the composer Richard Rodgers (Andrew Scott); and “Nouvelle Vague” (Oct. 31), the story of the 1959 shoot, in France, of “Breathless,” by Jean-Luc Godard (Guillaume Marbeck), with Zoey Deutch playing Jean Seberg. “Roofman” (Oct. 10) stars Channing Tatum as Jeffrey Manchester, a former Army Reserve officer whose nickname of the title refers to his method of breaking into McDonald’s restaurants; Derek Cianfrance directed. In Scott Cooper’s “Springsteen: Deliver Me from Nowhere” (Oct. 24), Jeremy Allen White portrays the singer-songwriter during the making of the 1982 album “Nebraska.” Ira Sachs directed “Peter Hujar’s Day” (Nov. 7), an adaptation of a book by Linda Rosenkrantz (played by Rebecca Hall), in which the author documents twenty-four hours, in 1974, in the life of the photographer (Ben Whishaw).

Crime pays cinematically in Darren Aronofsky’s new drama, “Caught Stealing” (Aug. 29), about a former baseball player (Austin Butler) who, in the nineties, gets drawn into a web of danger while cat-sitting; Bad Bunny and Zoë Kravitz co-star. Paul Thomas Anderson’s drama “One Battle After Another” (Sept. 26), about ex-revolutionaries who unite to rescue a kidnapped child, stars Leonardo DiCaprio, Benicio Del Toro, Teyana Taylor, and Sean Penn. “It Was Just an Accident” (Oct. 15), by the Iranian director Jafar Panahi, is a drama about a former political prisoner who kidnaps a man who he believes had tortured him. Emma Stone teams up again with the director Yorgos Lanthimos in “Bugonia” (Oct. 24), as an executive who is kidnapped by conspiracy theorists (Jesse Plemons and Aidan Delbis). And Kelly Reichardt returns with “The Mastermind” (Oct. 17), set in Massachusetts in the seventies, about an art-school dropout (Josh O’Connor) who becomes an art thief.

Family stories get a varied workout this fall, as in Mary Bronstein’s “If I Had Legs I’d Kick You” (Oct. 10), starring Rose Byrne as a therapist whose life is rendered chaotic by her young daughter’s chronic illness; Conan O’Brien and A$AP Rocky co-star. Nia DaCosta wrote and directed “Hedda” (Oct. 22), an adaptation of Ibsen’s “Hedda Gabler,” starring Tessa Thompson. Lynne Ramsay’s “Die My Love” (Nov. 7) stars Jennifer Lawrence as a woman who struggles with postpartum depression. In Joachim Trier’s “Sentimental Value” (Nov. 7), set in Oslo, Renate Reinsve plays a woman whose estranged father (Stellan Skarsgård), a director, offers her a role in his new film. Noah Baumbach’s drama “Jay Kelly” (Nov. 14) is about an actor (George Clooney) on an emotional road trip with his manager (Adam Sandler).—Richard Brody

What defines an opera if not the singing? While the composer Robert Ashley’s characters often do more speaking than singing, his pieces aim to tell “a long story based on musical forms.” Close enough. His electronic chamber opera “Celestial Excursions,” which traces the thoughts and speech patterns of old people, is at Roulette (Sept. 12-14). For bel-canto devotees, Donizetti’s “La Fille du Régiment” (opening Oct. 17) brings coloratura fireworks to the Metropolitan Opera, which kicks off its season with “The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay,” adapted by Mason Bates and Gene Scheer from Michael Chabon’s novel (opening Sept. 21). Jeanine Tesori’s “Blue,” about a Black family victimized by a police shooting, is presented at the Wu Tsai Theatre (Nov. 15).

Few have captured infatuation like Schubert, three of whose lovelorn song cycles—“Die Schöne Müllerin,” “Winterreise,” and “Schwanengesang”—are performed in a single day, by the Brooklyn Art Song Society (Roulette; Oct. 12). The baritone Matthias Goerne brings the first to Carnegie Hall, on Oct. 19, with Daniil Trifonov at the piano. If Schubert plumbs the depths of solipsism, the Estonian composer Arvo Pärt travels the voids between the stars. The Estonian Festival Orchestra (Oct. 23) and Estonian Philharmonic Chamber Choir (Oct. 23-24) bring two all-Pärt programs to Carnegie, including “Tabula Rasa,” a work of sumptuous austerity.

The New York Philharmonic, led for each program by a different conductor, presents a century-spanning trio of modern violin concerti: Leila Josefowicz plays Karol Szymanowski’s second violin concerto (Sept. 27, 30), Joshua Bell plays Thomas de Hartmann’s (Nov. 6-8), and Nicola Benedetti plays Wynton Marsalis’s swooning, high-kicking concerto, her recording of which won a Grammy (Nov. 13-16).

At the 92nd St. Y, it’s Bach season: Chris Thile performs sonatas and partitas on the mandolin (Oct. 19), and Angela Hewitt, a legendary Bach interpreter, plays the Goldberg Variations (Oct. 24). The alchemical guitarist Sean Shibe performs Bach’s Cello Suite No. 1 on classical guitar, before switching to electric for pieces by Steve Reich and Tyshawn Sorey (Nov. 7). Sorey’s work also features in three programs by the percussion group Yarn/Wire (Miller Theatre; Oct. 27-29). Wu Man, a Chinese-pipa virtuoso, performs, with the Knights, the concerto that was written for her by Lou Harrison (Metropolitan Museum; Sept. 9). And, at the Park Avenue Armory, fifty “microtonally attuned” pianos, plus a chamber orchestra, buzz and heave in Georg Friedrich Haas’s monumental “11,000 Strings” (Sept. 30-Oct. 7).—Fergus McIntosh

The fall slate of concerts is highlighted by defining figures of indie rock’s past half decade. At Radio City Music Hall, Mac DeMarco channels a stunning new LP, “Guitar” (Sept. 8), and a month later Alex G is joined by Nilüfer Yanya, scaling up his operation after a major-label début (Oct. 8). At Kings Theatre, MJ Lenderman performs one of the best albums of 2024, “Manning Fireworks” (Oct. 16). In the midst of a shakeup to its lineup, the now three-person folk-rock group Big Thief reaffirms its standing as one of the most dynamic and in-synch units in all of music (Forest Hills Stadium; Oct. 25).

As the season sets in, many of the best shows make their way to Brooklyn. At Brooklyn Steel: the avant-pop icons Stereolab (Oct. 1-2), the Wilco front man Jeff Tweedy (Oct. 22), the electronic duo Autechre (Oct. 25), and the alt-rock band Wednesday (Nov. 11-12). At Brooklyn Paramount: the funk bassist Thundercat (Oct. 25) and one of U.K. hip-hop’s generational lyricists, Little Simz (Oct. 30-31). Other acts run to fill the open space of Under the K Bridge Park. On Sept. 13, TV on the Radio hosts “There Goes the Neighborhood,” a homecoming celebration, featuring sets from Flying Lotus, Sudan Archives, Moor Mother, and SPELLLING; and on Sept. 27 the rock luminaries Iggy Pop, Jack White, and the Sex Pistols headline CBGB Festival. A week later, the Swedish experimentalist Bladee sets forth his mood board for a genreless music of the internet, alongside the rappers Nettspend and Black Kray and the indie-rock band Bôa (Oct. 3). On the groovier end of the spectrum, at Barclays Center, the electro-R. & B. producer and d.j. Kaytranada co-headlines two shows with the French house duo Justice, on Nov. 8-9.

For those tracking the ever-expanding definition of pop, upstarts arrive from all over with diverse visions. From TikTok, there’s Addison Rae, who traffics in trip-hop and iPod nostalgia (Brooklyn Paramount; Oct. 1, and Terminal 5; Oct. 3). From France, there’s Oklou, a different kind of Y2K fusionist, whose sound evokes bedroom pop instead of Britney Spears (Knockdown Center; Oct. 17). As K-pop revs up its global expansion, one of the sleepers is the bubbly girl group STAYC, whose songs possess a fun-house exuberance (The Theatre at M.S.G.; Oct. 21). The London singer Lola Young, fresh off the breakaway triumph of her sparingly scuzzy single, “Messy,” cheekily embraces newfound notoriety in support of her upcoming album, “I’m Only F**king Myself” (Terminal 5; Nov. 5-6).

But M.S.G. is home to stars across genres. On Sept. 8, the Haim sisters unlock the vivid songs of their June release, “I Quit,” and the Latin-soul iconoclast Kali Uchis follows suit, for May’s “Sincerely” (Sept. 11-12). The alt-pop savant Lorde débuts her new album, “Virgin” (Oct. 1), while Lainey Wilson, an irreverent country songwriter who rode a win for entertainer of the year at the 2023 C.M.A.s to breakout success, continues her hot streak (Oct. 10). If any artist feels quintessentially autumnal, it’s Laufey, the Icelandic jazz-pop sensation, who went from viral novelty to Grammy winner by honoring the sounds of the Great American Songbook, now on a new path for her “A Matter of Time” tour (Oct. 15-16).—Sheldon Pearce

Paris Opéra Ballet, “The Emperor Jones”

Every year, the dance scene awakens with a jolt in mid-September. The starting bell, as usual, is the Fall for Dance festival (Sept. 16-27), a smorgasbord of works from around the world organized by New York City Center. This year, audiences can catch a collaboration between Sara Mearns (a leading dancer at New York City Ballet for almost two decades) and Jamar Roberts (formerly of Alvin Ailey) alongside a tap solo by the winning Dario Natarelli, choreographed with Michelle Dorrance; or the Paris Opéra stars Hannah O’Neill and Hugo Marchand, in Jerome Robbins’s dreamy “Afternoon of a Faun.” City Center also hosts a rare visit by the Paris Opéra Ballet (Oct. 9-12), albeit in atypical repertory—an earthy dance by Hofesh Shechter, “Red Carpet.” This is followed by an equally rare visit from the Dutch National Ballet (Nov. 20-22), bringing works by the éminence grise of Dutch ballet, Hans van Manen, plus a new trio by Alexei Ratmansky, “Trio Kagel.”

The vibrant ensemble Indigenous Enterprise, a collective of Native American dancers and musicians based in Phoenix, floods the Joyce with jubilant dancing and dramatically colored regalia in “Still Here” (Sept. 16-21). The company’s deft choreography of solos and ensemble passages allows the performers, each representing a different tribal tradition (Navajo, Cree, Pueblo, Seneca, and Lakota), to stand as both distinct and part of a harmonious whole. A few weeks later (Oct. 14-19), the Limón Dance Company, founded in 1946 by José Limón, a father of American modern dance, offers a reconstruction of his eerily resonant “The Emperor Jones.” The dance, not seen in years, is loosely based on the play by Eugene O’Neill, about an arrogant despot undone by his demons.

Jamar Roberts, whose dances combine jaggedness with quicksilver complexity, débuts his third work for New York City Ballet (David H. Koch; Sept. 16-Oct. 12), set to music by the Venezuelan performance artist Arca. Justin Peck’s “Heatscape”—a dance driven by youthful energy and set against a backdrop by Shepard Fairey—also has its N.Y.C.B. première, and lovers of Balanchine will get the chance to see an extremely rare revival of the delicate and stylish “Ballade,” set to music by Fauré.

Misty Copeland bids farewell to American Ballet Theatre (David H. Koch; Oct. 15-Nov. 1), in an evening (Oct. 22) that includes some of her greatest hits. The company also rolls out a series of mixed programs, including one dedicated to the works of Twyla Tharp, whose first ballet for A.B.T., “Push Comes to Shove,” returns in full after an absence of nearly three decades. It’s vintage Tharp, combining the off-kilter with the virtuosic, and often poking fun at ballet’s self-serious tendencies.—Marina Harss

Ruth Asawa, the Met’s Egypt

Arguably, the biggest art-world happenings this fall are not exhibitions but museums themselves. Both the Studio Museum in Harlem and the New Museum began as small, scrappy projects roughly half a century ago and evolved to become collecting institutions with permanent homes. Both now reopen after high-profile—and high-price-tag—renovations that double their exhibition space. The Studio Museum returns, on Nov. 15, with installations devoted to its collection and history, plus a show of electric-light works by Tom Lloyd, who was the subject of the museum’s first-ever exhibition, in 1968. The New Museum, mysteriously, still hasn’t announced a reopening date, but will launch with “New Humans: Memories of the Future,” a building-wide show about the relationship between people and technology.

Elsewhere, heavy-hitting retrospectives abound. MOMA’s “Ruth Asawa: A Retrospective” (Oct. 19) features some three hundred works by the late Japanese American artist, who’s best known for hanging sculptures of rough wire transformed into bulbous, organic-looking forms, but who also made drawings, prints, and sculptures and was an educator and advocate. MOMA follows with “Wifredo Lam: When I Don’t Sleep, I Dream” (Nov. 10), a look at the twentieth-century Cuban artist, who travelled extensively between the Caribbean and Europe, and who filled his canvases with surreal, hybrid figures, calling his painting “an act of decolonization.”

At the Brooklyn Museum, “Seydou Keïta: A Tactile Lens” (Oct. 10) spotlights the photographer, whose portraits of everyday people in the Malian capital, Bamako, from the nineteen-forties through the sixties both captured and helped create a modern national identity. Keïta shot most of his subjects in black-and-white in his courtyard, posing them to bring out their confidence and style. Clocking in at almost two hundred and seventy-five objects, this show will be its own blockbuster, and when you’re done you can go see another: “Monet and Venice” (Oct. 11), which gathers and contextualizes the Impressionist master’s sparing depictions of the city.

The Metropolitan Museum of Art’s “Witnessing Humanity: The Art of John Wilson” (Sept. 20) includes the breadth of the artist’s emotionally charged, figurative work about Black American experience, from prints condemning racism to affirming portrait paintings; the show extends the legacy of the under-known Wilson beyond his home town of Boston. Also at the Met is a revelation of a different kind: “Divine Egypt” (Oct. 12), which examines and taxonomizes the images of twenty-five deities in ancient Egypt. This is the type of show the Met does best: scholarly and sumptuous.

Meanwhile, a list of this season’s smaller single-artist surveys reads like a feminist corrective: among them are June Leaf at Grey Art Museum (Sept. 9), Coco Fusco at El Museo del Barrio (Sept. 18), Vaginal Davis at MOMA PS1 (Oct. 9), Graciela Iturbide at the International Center of Photography (Oct. 16), and Gabriele Münter at the Guggenheim (Nov. 7). But perhaps the biggest effort on this front is “Designing Motherhood: Things That Make and Break Our Births” (Oct. 4), at the Museum of Arts and Design. The ambitious and sprawling exhibition, in the works for years, uses medical objects, educational films, and contemporary art to consider how design has shaped reproduction—something that seems evident but has heretofore been rarely explored.

The Whitney Museum is also attempting to rewrite history, in a way, with “Sixties Surreal” (Sept. 24). When chronicling the decade, art institutions have typically foregrounded Minimalism and Conceptualism, with their pared-down aesthetics and subtle politics. “Sixties Surreal” looks, instead, at weird, brash, psychological, and sexual works made in those years by more than a hundred artists, to offer what will undoubtedly be a germane alternative.—Jillian Steinhauer

This fall, seriousness strikes the giddy Broadway theatre like a cold snap. James Graham’s drama “Punch” deals with the aftermath of a killing blow (Friedman; beginning previews Sept. 9); Keanu Reeves and Alex Winters wax nihilistic in Samuel Beckett’s “Waiting for Godot” (Hudson; Sept. 13); Laurie Metcalf stars in Samuel Hunter’s melancholy “Little Bear Ridge Road” (Booth; Oct. 7); Bess Wohl’s “Liberation” examines seventies feminism (James Earl Jones; Oct. 8); and Mark Strong and Leslie Manville play doomed spouses in Robert Icke’s “Oedipus” (Studio 54; Oct. 30). Even the lightest fare—Yasmina Reza’s “Art,” with Neil Patrick Harris, Bobby Cannavale, and James Corden (Music Box; Aug. 28)—stages arguments about the ineffable.

The fall’s Broadway musicals are also a surprisingly unfrivolous lot, pondering the state of our union: “Ragtime,” Stephen Flaherty, Lynn Ahrens, and Terrence McNally’s nineteen-nineties barn burner, charts the U.S.’s troubled racial history (Vivian Beaumont; Sept. 26); Stephen Schwartz and Lindsey Ferrentino adapt the 2012 documentary “The Queen of Versailles,” about an avatar of American excess, with Kristin Chenoweth in the throne (St. James; Oct. 8); and even the bombastic eighties megamusical “Chess” (Imperial; Oct. 15), by Benny Andersson, Björn Ulvaeus, and Tim Rice, returns with new thoughts about the U.S.-Soviet relationship. As counterprogramming to all this political relevance, the goofball “Beetlejuice” (Palace; Oct. 8) boomerangs back to Broadway.

Speaking of musicals on a tight orbit: Andrew Lloyd Webber’s just-closed “The Phantom of the Opera” is reborn as the immersive “Masquerade” (218 W. 57th St.; through Oct. 19); William Finn and Rachel Sheinkin’s “The 25th Annual Putnam County Spelling Bee” takes another turn (New World Stages; Nov. 7); and Laurence O’Keefe’s 1997 “Bat Boy: The Musical” reëmerges from its cave at Encores! (City Center; Oct. 29-Nov. 9). Heather Christian’s superb, gospel-folk “Oratorio for Living Things,” happily, is also back, along with its peaceful, much needed cathedral atmosphere (Signature; Sept. 30).

Screen stars abound Off Broadway: the Shed hosts both André Holland in Tarell Alvin McCraney’s “The Brothers Size” (Aug. 30) and Tom Hanks in his time-travelling romance, “This World of Tomorrow” (Oct. 30); the “Los Espookys” genius Julio Torres rolls out his synesthetic standup in “Color Theories” (Performance Space New York; Sept. 3-21); Elizabeth Marvel headlines “And Then We Were No More,” by Tim Blake Nelson (La Mama; Sept. 19); Martyna Majok’s “Queens” (Manhattan Theatre Club at City Center; Oct. 14) features Anna Chlumsky; and Stephen Rea performs Beckett’s “Krapp’s Last Tape” (N.Y.U. Skirball; Oct. 8-19). (There are precious few classics this season: also Off Broadway is Ibsen’s “The Wild Duck,” at Theatre for a New Audience, beginning Sept. 2.)

Several of our finest playwrights have new work onstage: James Ijames, Damon Cardasis, and Sia adapt Cardasis’s queer coming-of-age film, “Saturday Church,” into a musical (N.Y.T.W.; Aug. 27); Jordan E. Cooper’s “Oh Happy Day!” sets a Biblical flood at a family barbecue (Public; Oct. 2); Anne Washburn’s “The Burning Cauldron of Fiery Fire” describes an insular California community (Vineyard; fall); and Talene Monahon’s satire about Armenian identity, “Meet the Cartozians” (Signature Center; Oct. 29), stars the recent Tony Award winner Will Brill. Apocalypse and the lure of despotic leaders are, for some reason, on many minds: Nazareth Hassan’s “Practice” (Playwrights Horizons; Oct. 30) satirizes a performance collective in thrall to its guru; at Roundabout, Rajiv Joseph’s “Archduke” (Laura Pels; fall) imagines the radicals who trigger a world war; Ethan Lipton’s comic musical “The Seat of Our Pants” envisions the end times (Public; Oct. 24); and Brian Watkins’s “Weather Girl” makes bleak jokes as the world burns (St. Ann’s Warehouse; Sept. 16).—Helen Shaw

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Photograph by Jack Mitchell / Getty

Garrett Hongo joins Kevin Young to read “T’ang Notebook,” by Charles Wright, and his own poem “On Emptiness.” Hongo is the author of several books of poetry and nonfiction, including “Ocean of Clouds” and “The Perfect Sound: A Memoir in Stereo.” He’s received fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation and the National Endowment for the Arts, and he’s a distinguished professor at the University of Oregon.

On the afternoon of August 15, 2024, Leonid Melekhin, a thirty-three-year-old small-business owner from Perm, a Russian city near the Ural Mountains, approached the U.S. border in Calexico, California. The previous winter, he had flown to Mexico, leaving behind his wife and their two small children. He spent the next eight months waiting for a notification in CBP One, an app that the Biden Administration launched in 2023 as an authorized portal to file asylum claims. Now, the app told Melekhin, he had an appointment to present himself to U.S. immigration officers. Wearing a backpack and a black baseball cap, he took a selfie in front of a sign that read “Entrada USA.”

Melekhin sent the photo to Yury Bobrov, an activist and political refugee who was also from Perm, on the messaging app Telegram. The two men had been in regular contact. Earlier, Melekhin had sent Bobrov another photo, of a small yellow poster hanging from a concrete bridge. Putin, the poster’s text reads, is a “killer, fascist, usurper.” Melekhin said that, on his last night in Russia, he had gone to Perm’s Kommunalny Bridge and attached the poster to the railing. “I couldn’t resist,” he told Bobrov. He had asked Bobrov to “post it somewhere,” because “it would be a shame if no one sees it.”

Bobrov shared it on Telegram alongside the photo of Melekhin crossing the border. “I felt that he might have wanted to strengthen his asylum case but also that he genuinely didn’t want to leave Russia in total silence,” Bobrov told me. “Was it a strategic move or an impulse of the soul? I don’t know, but I have no reason to doubt his motives.”

Less than a year later, a journalist in Perm published a story about a local court hearing: Melekhin had been arrested in Russia and charged with justifying terrorism, a crime that carries a potential five-year prison sentence. It was a rare instance of such a case being publicized, in which a Russian was deported from the U.S. to face a prison sentence back home. But little else was known of how he’d ended up there.

From the border, Melekhin was brought to the Imperial Regional Detention Facility, a holding center in Calexico run by a private company called the Management and Training Corporation. He was placed in a housing unit with dozens of other asylum seekers, including a number of Russians, and waited for his hearing with a judge. Melekhin thought he had a fairly strong case: for years, he had attended protests and volunteered with the Perm field office of Alexei Navalny’s political organization, which is now banned in Russia. “Everyone knows Russia’s problems,” a relative of Melekhin’s, who is still in Russia, told me. “Corruption is rampant. Fair elections are nonexistent.” The relative said, of Melekhin, “If he wasn’t happy about something, he always stood his ground.”

Even in a midsize city such as Perm, Melekhin wasn’t a recognizable activist. Bobrov called him an “ordinary, average, homespun guy who took an interest in the fate of his country.” When I reached Sergei Ukhov, the former head of the Navalny field office in Perm, who now lives abroad, he didn’t remember Melekhin. But, when he searched his photo archive, he found a picture of Melekhin at a protest in Perm, in 2017. Natalia Vavilova, another former coördinator for the field office, said, of Melekhin, “I can’t say he was a particularly active volunteer or regular presence in our headquarters.” But she, too, had found traces of him: a text exchange from 2018, in which he discussed his plans to volunteer as an independent election monitor during that year’s Presidential race. “That’s definitely civic activism,” Vavilova said. “No doubt about it.”

In 2021, Melekhin was arrested at a pro-Navalny protest in Perm. Investigators attempted to pressure him to give testimony against others in Navalny’s political organization, but he refused. In 2023, the year after Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, when nearly all protest activity was banned, he went to the center of Perm holding a sign that read “Freedom to Navalny.” He was almost immediately detained. At the station, one officer held his hands behind his back while another punched him in the stomach. Later, the police threatened him with forced conscription into the Russian Army. “He became seized by the idea of moving to the U.S.,” Melekhin’s relative said.

Melekhin started to study English and to follow the stories of other Russians who had made the journey, including Bobrov. He decided to travel alone. His youngest child was only a year old at the time. “No one knew how long it would take or what conditions he’d be living in along the way,” the relative said. The plan was that Melekhin would secure legal status for himself and then find a way to reunite with his family in the U.S.

I spoke with a number of Russians who had met Melekhin in the Imperial detention center, none of whom are named out of concerns for their safety. “He was in a positive mood,” one of them, a citizen journalist from central Russia, said. He had launched self-funded investigations into malfeasance by local police and municipal officials, and was detained and questioned multiple times before he decided to seek asylum in the U.S. He and Melekhin met in the exercise yard. They were both optimistic about their cases. “We finally made it, at least this far,” the other asylum seeker recalled them saying. “Surely, they will listen to us, and at the end we will be offered help. All we have to do is wait.”

Melekhin’s hearing was in December, 2024, four months into his detention at Imperial, and a year after he left his family in Russia. His case was assigned to a judge named Anne Kristina Perry, who was appointed as an immigration judge in 2018. “She is very kind, calm, professional, diligent,” Raisa Stepanova, an immigration attorney in California who has represented several Russian asylum seekers, but not Melekhin, told me. “But her judicial reasoning doesn’t always display a knowledge of how Russian police and law enforcement actually function.” The citizen journalist from central Russia, whose case was also adjudicated by Perry, said, “She acts like a prosecutor more than a judge. She questioned me for three hours; it was a real interrogation.” (I wrote to Perry to ask about Melekhin’s case but received only a general reply from the Executive Office for Immigration Review at the Department of Justice.)

Melekhin presented his case pro se—that is, without a lawyer. He spoke of his past participation in protests and how, after Bobrov posted the image of his Putin poster, police in Perm had searched his family’s apartment. I obtained a transcript of Perry’s oral decision. She considered Melekhin a “credible witness” and called the evidence that he had managed to gather “plausible, consistent, and detailed.” But she decided that his case did not meet a long-established legal standard, that there was at least a ten-per-cent chance he would face persecution in his country of origin—a benchmark for determining “objectively reasonable well-founded fear.” Melekhin’s previous activism, Perry said, was “quite limited,” and the “description of his participation is vague and lacks specifics.” Melekhin was “not entitled to relief,” Perry ruled. “The Respondent is ordered removed to Russia.”

“Leonid was angry and frustrated,” another Russian asylum seeker at Imperial said. “In detention, you constantly see people with far less serious cases being granted asylum.” But Melekhin planned to appeal and was confident in his chances. “I tried to offer moral support,” Bobrov told me. He suggested that Melekhin hire a lawyer and launched a fund-raising drive on his Telegram channel to help Melekhin pay for one.

Early this year, Melekhin learned that criminal charges had been filed against him back in Russia. Word had travelled from Perm to Imperial about the case, and, though there were few specifics, it seemed likely linked to the poster on the bridge. “He was worried, but you’d never guess from how he carried himself,” Bobrov told me. Melekhin was, he went on, “a rather dry biscuit, emotionally speaking—impassive, reserved, extremely calm.”

While Melekhin waited for his appeal decision, he was transferred to another privately run immigrant-detention center in San Luis, Arizona, which was known to have comparatively harsher conditions. “His life became significantly worse,” Melekhin’s relative told me. He grew thinner and quieter. Because appeal decisions in asylum cases are often made by an outside board without an additional hearing, Melekhin’s appeal was considered without him ever appearing in court. The decision came in mid-June: “We affirm the Immigration Judge’s decision denying the respondent’s applications for asylum.” The appeals court agreed with Perry that Melekhin lacked a “well-founded fear or clear probability of future persecution.” The evidence he provided was “insufficient to show that the authorities or anyone else would seek out the respondent for political persecution in Russia.” The judgment made no mention of the criminal charges in Russia, which Melekhin had learned of after his initial hearing. It’s unclear whether the judge was aware of them at all.

Melekhin was transferred back to Imperial to await deportation. “He was in shock,” the Russian journalist said. Another detainee said he seemed “depressed.” As the days passed, Melekhin told him, “ ‘I see no point to continue, and no chance of a just outcome.’ ” The other detainee added, “He thought he would find refuge for himself and his family here, but things turned out otherwise.” Now he needed to find a way to avoid being sent to Russia. “ ‘God forbid I end up back there,’ ” Melekhin told his fellow-inmates, “ ‘because there’s no way I can avoid prison if I do.’ ”

Russian deportees are not sent directly back to Russia from the U.S. They are flown on commercial airlines, with stops in any number of transit countries, such as Egypt and Morocco. Melekhin seemed to believe that his only hope was to buy a ticket elsewhere once he landed at a stopover; inmates at Imperial had heard that at least one Russian deportee had accomplished this while in transit in Morocco. (Bobrov suspects, however, that deportees to Russia do not have access to their passports when they board these flights.)

His friends at Imperial implored him to keep trying to pursue his case in the U.S. He could file a final appeal, to the U.S. Court of Appeals. That would require finding a new lawyer and, in the best-case scenario, enduring more months in detention. “You have to try,” one of his friends told him. But Melekhin was resigned. “I’ve waited enough,” he said. The lawyer whom Bobrov hired had said that she urgently needed to speak with Melekhin, but she was unable to reach him; she asked Bobrov to tell Melekhin to call her. When Bobrov relayed the message, Melekhin said, “I already know I lost the appeal. What’s the point?”

After that, around July 23rd, Melekhin disappeared from detention. According to his relative, police came to the family’s apartment around that time for another search. But the family didn’t know what it was about, or that Melekhin was even back in Russia, until they saw the news of his arrest. “Then things clicked into place,” the relative told me. A judge has ordered Melekhin held in jail while he awaits sentencing.

Not long ago, I reached Valery Kuznetsov, Melekhin’s state-appointed lawyer in Perm. (In Russia, such lawyers are generally considered close to the police and prosecutors.) He insisted that Melekhin returned to Russia voluntarily. “He decided it’s better at home,” Kuznetsov said. “He knew that a criminal case had been opened against him, and that he might be arrested upon arrival, which is indeed what happened.” His client, he said, has pleaded guilty; he is aware that he “did something stupid and is now paying the price.” Kuznetsov confirmed the basis for the indictment is the poster from the bridge that Melekhin asked Bobrov to post to his channel.

In the end, Melekhin’s deportation was less a reflection of Trump’s warming stance toward Russia or of the Administration’s ongoing immigration crackdown. Instead, he appears to have been swept up in an overwhelmed immigration system making snap judgments without time or capacity to fully consider the dangers that asylum seekers may face back at home. One of Melekhin’s friends in Imperial told me that, in the days before his deportation, “he was questioning himself, feeling anxious, not sleeping.” Melekhin had told the friend, “ ‘If I have to sit in prison, I might as well do it at home, where my wife and family can visit me.’ ” Another, whose legal saga has dragged on for over a year, said, “When you break the law, you are given a certain sentence, and that makes things easier, in a way.” But in immigration detention, the friend added, “You didn’t break any laws, yet end up in prison seemingly indefinitely. That’s what breaks a person.” ♦