Former Trump White House aide Cassidy Hutchinson, who offered dramatic testimony at a January 6 Committee hearing in June, detailed her own lawyer’s efforts to keep her quiet in an explosive deposition made public Thursday. Now he’s taken a leave of absence from his law firm, in a swirl of controversy over ethics violations.

According to her deposition, attorney Stefan Passantino, who had previously worked as a White House attorney for Trump, told Hutchinson, who had been subpoenaed by the panel, to “downplay” her knowledge of the events leading to January 6 in her testimony and to also claim she could not recall other important details. Passantino offered to help her find work in what he referred to as “Trump world,” while making it clear he was considering the interests of the former president ahead of her own, she testified. The timing of the offers to “take care” of her financial needs, Hutchinson said, suggested they were linked to her offering testimony that did not hurt Trump or his allies. Passantino even warned her that Trump often read transcripts and bore grudges against witnesses who talked too much.

“We just want to focus on protecting the President,” Hutchinson said Passantino told her before her first interview with the panel. “We all know that you’re loyal.”

Passantino, who was, strikingly, formerly a top ethics attorney in the Trump White House, was paid by a Trump PAC called Save America, to represent Hutchinson. She didn’t know that at the time, because he refused to tell her who was paying him for the work, she said. She also said he shared details about her testimony with other lawyers working for Trump clients against her wishes.

Those actions represent gross violations of basic legal ethics and DC Bar rules governing conflicts of interest, ethics experts said. Those rules require lawyers from taking third-party payments that interfere with their “independent professional judgment,” and mandate that the attorneys obtain “informed consent from the client” for such arrangements. If Hutchinson is telling the truth that Passantino didn’t tell her who was paying him, she could not consent, noted Kathleen Clark, a law professor at Washington University in St. Louis who studies legal ethics. And Clark said that’s not the half of it.

The following is drawn from Franz Kafka’s 1911 notebooks, to be published by Schocken Books in a new translation by Ross Benjamin in January 2023. Benjamin’s translation preserves the diaries’ distinctive writing, inconsistencies and all.

      My visit to Dr. Steiner.
A woman is already waiting (upstairs on the 3rd floor of the Viktoria Hotel on Jungmannsstrasse) but implores me to go in before her. We wait. The secretary comes and holds out hope to us. Glancing down a corridor, I see him. A moment later he comes toward us with arms half spread. The woman declares that I was here first. Now I walk behind him as he leads me into his room. His black frock coat, which on lecture evenings appears polished, (not polished, but only shiny due to its pure black) is now in the light of day (3 o’clock in the afternoon) dusty and even stained especially on the back and shoulders. In his room I try to show my humility, which I cannot feel, by looking for a ridiculous place for my hat; I put it on a small wooden stand for lacing boots. Table in the middle, I sit facing the window, he on the left side of the table. On the table some papers with a few drawings, which recall those from the lectures on occult physiology. A magazine Annalen für Naturphilosophie covers a small pile of books, which seem to be lying around elsewhere too. Only you can’t look around, because he keeps trying to hold you with his gaze. But whenever he doesn’t do so, you have to watch out for the return of the gaze. He begins with a few loose sentences: So you’re Dr. Kafka? Have you been interested in theosophy long? But I press forward with my prepared speech: I feel a large part of my being striving toward theosophy, but at the same time I have the utmost fear of it. I’m afraid, namely, that it will bring about a new confusion, which would be very bad for me since my present unhappiness itself consists of nothing but confusion. This confusion lies in the following: My happiness, my abilities and any possibility of being in some way useful have always resided in the literary realm. And here I have, to be sure, experienced states (not many) that are in my opinion very close to the clairvoyant states described by you Herr Doktor, in which I dwelled completely in every idea, but also filled every idea and in which I felt myself not only at my own limits, but at the limits of the human in general. Only the calm of enthusiasm, which is probably peculiar to the clairvoyant, was still missing from those states, even if not entirely. I conclude this from the fact that I have not written the best of my works in those states.—I cannot now devote myself fully to this literary realm, as would be necessary, and indeed for various reasons. Leaving aside my family circumstances, I couldn’t live off literature if for no other reason than the slow emergence of my works and their special character; moreover, my health and my character also hinder me from devoting myself to what is in the most favorable case an uncertain life. I have therefore become an official in a social insurance institute. Now these two professions could never tolerate each other and permit a shared happiness. The least happiness in one becomes a great unhappiness in the other. If I have written something good one evening, I am aflame the next day in the office and can accomplish nothing. This back-and-forth keeps getting worse. In the office I outwardly live up to my duties, but not my inner duties and every unfulfilled inner duty turns into an unhappiness that never leaves me. And to these two never-to-be-balanced endeavors am I now to add theosophy as a third? Won’t it disturb both sides and itself be disturbed by both? Will I, already at present such an unhappy person be able to bring the 3 to a conclusion? I have come Herr Doktor to ask you this, for I sense that, if you consider me capable of it, I could actually take it on.

Below is our list of heroes and monsters from 2022. For the last few years, we’ve taken inventory in this fashion—personal, idiosyncratic, and somehow when assembled a snapshot of yet another unsettled, strange, glorious 12 months. (You can read the full archive here.) At this point, it’s become something of a holiday tradition.

As always, our list is by no means exhaustive. Each entry reflects less the perfect distillation of the year than our personal obsessions. But if you take all of this together, we hope you have a pretty representative time capsule of 2022. If we missed one of your nightmares or loves, maybe we can pick that up next year.

We will be adding to this list over the holidays. And so if you do not immediately see some of the items it will feature—a German coup, a bot, Mike Davis, Eric Adams, cars, strikers, a flamingo—please, keep coming back. You may even discover a few more.

Top image credits: Plan B Entertainment/ZUMA; Tom Dorsey/Salina Journal/AP; Scott Garfitt/AP; Francois Nel/Getty

This year was filled with reactionary dorks. In Arizona, Blake Masters tried and failed to larp his way into the Senate by posting creepy videos of himself shooting his many guns. In Manhattan, a dozen-or-so people maybe turned a bit fascist and maybe a bit Catholic and writers tried to figure out why rich kids would do something like that. In cyberspace, the absolute monarchist blogger once known as Mencius Moldbug emerged on Substack under his own name, Curtis Yarvin, and got written up in Tablet and Vox.

All of these people had moments. But none of them really went it for like Heinrich XIII Prince Reuss, the descendant of princes arrested earlier this month by German authorities, who stands accused of being the ringleader of a coup plot inspired by the ludicrous theory that Germany is not a sovereign state but a company set up by western powers following World War II.

It sounds like a Nathan Fielder episode of overthrow. The plan? To storm the Reichstag, execute Chancellor Olaf Schulz, and put Reuss in power.

From one angle, it was more than a bit unsettling. After fanning out across Germany, Austria, and Italy, three thousand law enforcement officials arrested 25 people and found weapons at more than 50 of the roughly 150 locations they raided. From another angle, it was a chance to laugh at perhaps the year’s most pompous man.

This is that version of the story. 

Nearly one year after Eric Adams was sworn in as New York’s 110th mayor, many of the same questions remain. How does Adams, against a plummeted approval rating and barely alleviated housing affordability crisis, still fit in all that partying? Is he sure about crypto? What’s the deal with those twin dudes?

The only general consensus that’s emerged seems to be bipartisan: Mayor Adams is a blabber. He’s all talk, few plans. But in the last quarter of 2022, Adams offered a proposal aimed at fixing one of the city’s most complex and enduring issues. And it has given us the first real window into what kind of mayor Adams aspires to be—and that’s a monstrous one.

That’s the only way to describe Adam’s headline-making plan to task police officers and emergency medical workers with removing people who appear mentally ill off the streets—even when a recent dangerous act has not been documented—against their will in order to enter a deeply broken, understaffed hospital pipeline, where doctors are overloaded and psychiatric beds are notoriously scant.

In his announcement last month, Adams appeared to be under the impression that the state’s commitment of 50 new beds for city hospitals would be enough to provide one for “everyone” who needed it. That, of course, is nothing short of a delusion; at least 60,000 people are homeless in New York, with thousands living unsheltered. A large majority of the unhoused suffer from mental illness. The number of respite care centers in the city—which offer alternatives to hospitalization by providing temporary shelters for the mentally ill—has been slashed in half in recent years. It’s unclear how a plan to make it easier for the homeless to be forcibly hospitalized—when the critical coordination between police officers and hospitals has yet to be determined—won’t lead to more bottlenecks for a system already at a breaking point.

What’s more certain is that the explosive directive will arm police officers with a dangerous expansion in latitude to detain people, leaving the city’s mentally ill population already in fear of police brutality and officers themselves blindsided by the chaotic order. 

Imagine you are the seventh of eight children born to poor, illiterate farmers in the countryside of northeast Brazil. You spend your early life in a house made of mud and sticks. When you’re seven years old your family sets off for the big city, and you find work as a shoe shiner. As a teenager, you become a metalworker. It’s a tough trade. You lose a finger in an accident when you’re 17. Your 18th birthday coincides with a United States-backed military coup, and a repressive dictatorship takes power. In response, you get involved in your union. As a labor leader, you lead the first mass strikes since the dictatorship took power. In fact, you lead general strikes that at their peak involve over twenty million workers. Your leadership helps bring democracy back to the country. Along the way, you are imprisoned. You lose your first wife and newborn baby to pregnancy complications.

You help found a political party hoping to bring dignity to the poor and working class. You spend the next twenty years leading this worker’s party. After many fits, starts—and perhaps one too many compromises—you finally win the presidency. During your administration, you implement some of the most successful social democratic reforms of the 21st century. You bring 40 million people out of poverty. The president of the United States calls you “the most popular politician on earth.” After two terms, you leave office with a staggering 87 percent approval rating. 

Then it all comes crashing down.

Your hand-picked successor is impeached. A nasty former Army captain and once-fringe politician nostalgic for the military dictatorship ascends. You announce a third attempt at the presidency, but you’re targeted by a massive corruption investigation that has enveloped the party you founded. You watch the neo-fascist win the presidency from a prison cell, where you’ve been sentenced to twelve years. The new president appoints the judge that convicted you as the country’s new justice minister. 

You learn, through leaked messages that the corruption investigation was a potential political hit-job to prevent you from running in 2018. The U.S Department of Justice was involved. Near the end of your second year behind bars, your conviction is reversed. You’re released to a country that’s been ravaged by an incompetent response to the pandemic. The far-right has grown stronger. Deforestation of the Amazon rainforest has accelerated.

In March 2020 the writer, scholar, and activist Mike Davis—who passed away earlier this year from complications from Esophageal cancer—addressed the origins of the Covid-19 pandemic, and what must be done to survive it, in an essay for Jacobin. It was titled “In a Plague Year.” As usual, he was prescient.

He predicted nursing homes as hot spots (they would be); he predicted workers would not want to endure such conditions and “stay home” (they did). Davis said that the coronavirus would enter as a “familiar monster,” even though the world felt radically new at the time. Within months, there would be analysis that followed Davis’s thoughts closely—of COVID as exposing cracks in our systems, like medical dye spreading in the body to find disease. But it was not “familiar” to most of us to think about a pandemic. It was to him because in 2006 Davis published The Monster at Our Door, a book-length warning about the threat of a global contagion stemming from zoonotic spillover, and how the lack of global public health infrastructure made the planet increasingly vulnerable to such a disaster. 

It has been typical of how many have mourned Davis this year to begin this way. After his passing, and during his time in hospice care—as pilgrimages were made to write profiles, conduct long interviews, and say goodbye—writers had to note that he was always ahead. Davis hated the “prophet” label that he was tagged with ever since his book City of Quartz was credited with predicting the 1992 Rodney King rebellion in Los Angeles. But it followed him for a reason.

One example has stuck with me this year. Nested within that 2020 essay was another prediction. Though it was tucked in parentheses, and easy to miss. After writing about the need for progressives to unite to push Biden left at the 2020 DNC in Milwaukee, Davis addressed the role of ordinary people. (Emphasis mine.)

The rest of us have an equally important role in the streets, starting now with the fights against eviction, layoffs, and employers who refuse compensation to workers on leave. (Afraid of contagion? Stand six feet from the next protester, and it will only make a more powerful image on TV. But we need to reclaim the streets.)

Abortion is healthcare, and no law prohibiting it can eradicate its necessity. That hasn’t stopped Republican legislators from trying. Fifty-five abortion restrictions were enacted in 2022. Many of these laws target doctors and healthcare workers, threatening them with fines and jail time for providing necessary and wanted care. But while this year may have been unprecedented, for many abortion providers, it was, at least, anticipated.

“We’re not shocked by any of it,” Dr. Christina Bourne, the medical director at Trust Women, which has clinics in Oklahoma and Kansas, told me earlier this year. “[We’re] just trying to figure out strategies and next steps.”

To continue providing this care in a climate so hostile to abortion it actually becomes personally dangerous is, frankly, too much to ask of anyone. But over the last year, Mother Jones has heard from providers all over the country continuing on anyway. For Trust Women, this has meant fighting to stay open no matter what. “Our day-to-day existence is about keeping our doors open and our day-to-day conversations involve that,” said Bourne. “It truncates our ability to grow and blossom and refine and be slow and intentional in the work we do when it’s just like, you wake up every day to your fresh new hell.”

Like Bourne at Trust Women, Dr. Ghazaleh Moayedi, a physician who has spent the past 18 years providing abortion care in Texas, was dealing with the frustration of trying to practice under abortion restrictions even before the Supreme Court’s Dobbs decision overturned Roe v. Wade. Moayedi told my former colleague Becca Andrews about having to operate under the state’s Senate Bill 8, which banned abortions after six weeks, but made broad exceptions for extreme medical emergencies: 

We are in a state that has a high maternal mortality rate, a high maternal morbidity rate, a high infant death rate [among vulnerable populations]. Being pregnant in a state like Texas is a dangerous baseline. Being forced to be pregnant in a state like Texas can be catastrophic. My colleagues and I are having to deal with this extremely broad law that is being individually interpreted at each hospital, at each clinic, at every practice. And it’s really just about personal and system risk mitigation. How much risk is a hospital system or clinic willing to take? How can we really prove that circumstances were, in fact, life-threatening?

A month ago, Gianni Infantino, the president of FIFA, made his now infamous “I am Spartacus” speech at the World Cup’s opening press conference. “Today I have very strong feelings, today I feel Qatari, today I feel Arab, today I feel African, today I feel gay, today I feel disabled, today I feel a migrant worker,” he said, before adding, “Of course, I am not Qatari, I am not an Arab, I am not African, I am not gay, I am not disabled. But I feel like it, because I know what it means to be discriminated, to be bullied.” Two days before Sunday’s final, he returned to the microphone to announce, a bit prematurely, that this had been the “best World Cup ever.” It pains me to say it, n terms of pure football, and especially given the galactically great final—a game that will remain, as everyone pretty much agrees, unsurpassed in the annals of football history—he was right on the money.

At the beginning of England’s penalty shoot-out against France in the quarterfinals, English fans were back at the Battle of Agincourt, the whole country ready to channel Laurence Olivier or Kenneth Branagh and “cry ‘God for Harry, England, and Saint George,’” when the local penalty pathology kicked in. In the 1996 Euro, Gareth Southgate, currently England’s manager, had famously missed a vital penalty against Germany, weakly side-footing the ball toward the goal. The next day one of the tabloids ran the unforgiving headline “‘HE SHOULD HAVE BELTED IT’ SAYS SOUTHGATE’S MUM.” This time, Harry Kane did belt it. The result was the same. Kane’s ball went way over the bar, effectively ending his country’s chances of beating France in the quarterfinals. England had probably otherwise deserved the win, on the merit of its second-half performance and in the wake of some egregious decisions from the referee Wilton Sampaio, along with the mystery that is VAR (video assistant referee). All the bells say: too late. This is not for tears. Harry lifted the top of his shirt above his chin and bit down on it.

Harry Kane is in good company. All the greats have missed completely or have had penalties saved, including Messi in this World Cup and the last one, and Ronaldo in 2018. But at least they were the obvious choices for the job. Harder to figure is why Virgil van Dijk, one of the world’s truly dominant center backs but not particularly well-known for his goal-scoring abilities, insisted on taking the first penalty for the Netherlands in their shoot-out against Argentina this year. No doubt he wanted to play the captain’s role, steady his team’s nerves, and lay down a marker for the rest of them. The heart has reasons of which reason knows nothing. But I retract my criticism. The miasma of despair that hangs over missed penalties is the cruelest epilogue a game can have.

Only the fourth-ever African and first-ever Arab team to make the quarterfinals, and the first of both to make the semis, Morocco was the darling of this tournament. Playing with guts, flair, and imagination, and led by an unflappable manager in Walid Regragui, Morocco dispensed with those colonizers Belgium, Spain, and Portugal (was there ever a more towering header than Youssef En-Nesyri’s against Portugal?) before coming up against France in the semifinals. The Moroccan team played their hearts out: Jawad El Yamiq’s splendid first-half overhead kick hit the post; Azzedine Ounahi, who was superb all tournament, had a shot cleared off the line; several times Kylian Mbappé took off on one of his electric runs down the wing, he was upended by a hard, effective, borderline-yellow-card tackle. In the end, however, as with Messi in Argentina’s semifinal against Croatia, the superstar had the last word: Mbappé dinked past defenders in the box before laying off a pass for Randal Kolo Muani to finish for a 2–0 France lead. The great sea of red and green in Al Bayt Stadium, borne up on the tidal wave of global support for the underdog, worked itself up with whistles for France and chants of siir! (go!) for Morocco, as if to prove conclusively that a state of wild frenzy can be achieved without the consumption of alcohol. But France held on.

The Paris Review‘s Winter issue cover, Snowfall: winter in Roseboom #4, by the artist Uman, looks from different angles like a field of floating Christmas lights, a confetti drop on New Year’s Eve, and a winter storm touched with a kind of bright magic. Uman worked on it over a period of four years, dabbing bright color on the canvas until, as they told me in our conversation, it felt a bit like “the mothership.” Born in Somalia in 1980, they grew up in Kenya and moved to Denmark in their teens. In 2004, they came to New York, where they continued to work in collage, painting, and sculpture before moving upstate. They are largely self-taught, and their signature style is bright, geometric, and vivid. We talked about their economical attitude toward paint, the process of making Snowfall, and their sheep.

INTERVIEWER

Have you always thought of yourself as an artist?

UMAN