THENEWYORKER,M AY4, 2020 15
“We’re transient people in California.”
While the players warmed up on the
court, Malkmus cracked open a tallboy
of Brooklyn Lager. “I would like to be
one of those guys more than any other
athlete,” he said, as they stretched and
shot baskets. “I know it takes an in-
credible amount of work, and travel,
and boring nights, and airplane flights.
But I would like to be hanging with
James Harden and LeBron at some
cool after-party in L.A. with secret bot-
tle service.”
Barclays Center contains a window-
less cinder-block room with the words
“Love” and “JOY” posted on the wall. It
is known as the Meditation Room.
Though the door is often locked, it is
intended as a place for hysterical fans
to pause and gather themselves. Malk-
mus said that sports have never made
him cry. At his most worked up, he might
curse at the TV, but even that’s unusual.
He keeps his cool. That evening, the
Nets won, 119–97. “Another great night
for the city of Brooklyn,” he said dryly.
—Amanda Petrusich
1
POSTSCRIPT
THEHANDSHAKET
he handshake, a widespread social
custom that has forged political al-
liances, sealed multibillion-dollar busi-
ness deals, and taught fathers “a thing or
two” about prospective sons-in-law, diedalone last month, in quarantine. It was
at least two thousand eight hundred years
old. (An early appearance: a limestone
dais, carved in the mid-ninth century
B.C.E., depicting the Assyrian king Shal-
maneser III hand in hand with a Baby-
lonian ally.)
The cause of death? Sudden aware-
ness by the general population that every
surface on earth—and, especially, the
appendages we use to touch said sur-
faces—are misted with an invisible, po-
tentially lethal cocktail of viral droplets.
The shake had been on life support since
early March. After declaring a national
emergency at a Rose Garden press con-
ference, President Trump shook hands
with assorted executives. Then Bruce
Greenstein, the chief strategy-and-in-
novation officer of LHC Group, ex-
tended an elbow. The dominoes were
falling. Mercado Libre, a Latin-American
e-commerce platform, moved to replace
the handshake in its logo with an elbow
bump. The director general of the World
Health Organization tweeted that he
would now be greeting people with a
“hand-on-heart” gesture. Others found
the habit hard to shake. On March 9th,
the Dutch Prime Minister announced
a national no-shake policy, then turned
and shook hands with a health official.
“Oh, sorry!” he said. “We can’t do that
anymore. Sorry, sorry.”
Dorothea Johnson, the founder of
the Protocol School of Washington and
a co-author of “The Power of Hand-
shaking,” couldn’t bear the news. Reached
by telephone, in Maine, she said, “It’s
how we connect to someone when we
first meet them. Touching someone, it
helps you create a friendship, a relation-
ship. It’s so important.”
In “Primary Colors,” the author, Joe
Klein, calls the handshake “the thresh-
old act, the beginning of politics.” Rabin
and Arafat, Reagan and Gorbachev,
Nixon and the King of Rock and Roll,
all went palm-to-palm. The U.S. Pres-
ident, according to one estimate, shakes
hands with sixty-five thousand people
per year. In 1907, President Teddy Roo-
sevelt, known for his “pump handling,”
shook more than eight thousand hands
in a single afternoon. Afterward, his bi-
ographer wrote, he went upstairs to “scrub
himself clean.”
A solid shake relies on a combination
of grip and intuition. Pamela Holland,a co-author of “Help! Was That a Ca-
reer Limiting Move?,” has advised, “Go
in, thumb up, at a right angle. Make sure
you make the full contact, web to web.
Two to three pumps, then drop. It’s a lit-
tle like a kiss: You’ll know when it’s over.”
A lot can go wrong. There are arm-twist-
ers, bone-crushers, yankers, dead fish.
“Some people are totally unsophisti-
cated,” Johnson said. Like who? She de-
murred. She once shook hands with
Trump, a known handshake hater, but
decorum held. “Not soft, not hard,” she
recalled. “It was brief. He is very adept
at moving on.”
It is often said that handshakes evolved
as a way to show that you weren’t hold-
ing a weapon. (The up-and-down mo-
tion would dislodge a dagger that had
been hidden up a sleeve.) The Greeks
put an image of the shake on gravestones,
using it to link the living and the dead.
Romans, who put it on coins, used it to
link the living and the stuff they wanted
to buy. The Quakers popularized it; they
considered it to be more egalitarian than
bowing. And yet the history of hand-
shaking is riddled with conscientious ob-
jectors, ahead of their time. In 2015, a
U.C.L.A. hospital established a “hand-
shake-free zone” in its neonatal inten-
sive-care unit. (Research suggests that
substituting fist bumps cuts germ trans-
mission by ninety per cent.) But the
U.C.L.A. policy lasted just six months.
In France, an Algerian woman was re-
cently denied citizenship for refusing to
shake an official’s hand at her natural-
ization ceremony. She appealed on reli-
gious grounds; her petition was denied.
Sanda and Florin Dolcos, psychol-
ogy researchers at the University of Il-
linois, have conducted a series of stud-
ies on the ritual’s longevity. Their con-
clusion: it’s a little like sex. “Handshake
activity activates a part of the brain that
also processes other types of reward
stimulus: good food, or drinks, or some-
thing related to, um, closer physical in-
teractions,” Florin said.
The handshake is survived by the
elbow bump, the foot shake, the peace
sign, and the wave. “These customs do
evolve,” Sanda Dolcos said. “The replace-
ments might seem awkward at first, be-
cause the handshake is so natural, so auto-
matic, so ingrained. But people will find
a new way.” In lieu of flowers, send Purell.
—Micah HauserStephen Malkmus