12 THENEWYORKER, APRIL 18, 2022exercised that some of the briefs she filed
on the men’s behalf contained allegations
that they had been subjected to “Amer-
ican war crimes.” The crimes alleged were
torture, something that the Senate itself
has documented with regard to a num-
ber of Guantánamo detainees—raising
the question of whether Cotton thinks
that torture isn’t a crime, or if he believes
that a lawyer who wants to be on the
Supreme Court should pretend that
such things never happen. Either posi-
tion is perilous. Cotton continued, “The
last Judge Jackson”—Robert H. Jack-
son—“left the Supreme Court to go to
Nuremberg and prosecute the case against
the Nazis. This Judge Jackson might have
gone there to defend them.”
Gary Bass, a professor at Princeton
who has written extensively on war
crimes, observed that Cotton invoked
Robert Jackson “understanding noth-
ing about what he did at Nuremberg.
Justice Jackson negotiated the ruleswhich gave the Nazi defendants the
right to defense counsel, and in his open-
ing address emphasized that they would
get ‘a fair opportunity to defend them-
selves.’” One of his most enduring opin-
ions was his passionate dissent in the
Korematsu case, from 1944, in which
the Supreme Court, to its shame, ef-
fectively sanctioned the internment of
Americans of Japanese descent. (The
Court finally renounced the decision
in 2018, when Donald Trump’s efforts
to institute a “Muslim ban” made it
newly relevant.) Robert Jackson called
the internment “racial discrimination,”
and warned of the danger of putting
aside constitutional rights in the name
of wartime exigency. It’s Ketanji Brown
Jackson who is carrying on his legacy—
not Cotton.
Some senators used the hearings to
practice other electoral gambits, includ-
ing those related to gender identity, a
topic currently providing campaign fod-der for Republicans such as Florida’s
governor, Ron DeSantis. Senator Mar-
sha Blackburn asked Jackson to define
“woman.” After the judge demurred—a
reasonable move, given the biological
and legal complexities—Blackburn and
her colleagues practically exulted. Cruz
asked Jackson how she could possibly
rule on cases involving gender if she
couldn’t “determine what a woman was.”
“Senator, I know that I am a woman,”
Jackson told him. “I know that Senator
Blackburn is a woman. And the woman
I admire most in the world is in the
room today—my mother.” It was an an-
swer that reached not only back to her
childhood but to Sojourner Truth’s dec-
laration “Ain’t I a woman?” and forward
to what, with any luck, will be decades
on the Court. Amid all the partisan
noise, Jackson had her own message.
She knows who she is, and doesn’t need
any senator to tell her.
—Amy Davidson SorkinDEPT.OFCULTIVATION
FRUITFAC TSS
am Van Aken cultivates fruit, binges
on fruit, and searches for long-lost
fruit, so naturally he has opinions on fruit.
His favorite is a lumpy brown apple called
the Ashmead’s Kernel. “It looks like some-
body taped a potato to the tree,” he said
recently, while tending to his nursery, on
Governors Island. “But you bite into it
and it has this floral bouquet. It’s not like
a Gala or a Fuji—industrialized apples.”
The Ashmead’s, which used to grow in
New York, has three distinct flavors, like
a Bordeaux. “I always thought wine tast-
ing was pretentious,” he said. “Now I’m
talking about fruit this way.”
Van Aken was putting the finishing
touches on an art installation called the
Open Orchard, which is all about fruit—a
hundred trees in two groves that will re-
side permanently on the island. Peaches,
plums, apricots, nectarines, cherries, ap-
ples, pears, persimmons, almonds. Each
fruit had to have an agreeable flavor and
a colorful lineage. All proliferated within
the five boroughs, then disappeared. “Yousee how the city was shaped by orchards!”
Van Aken said. He can cite fruit facts to
back his claim: Lenape peach-trading
routes that extended to Florida; cotton-
ball-tufted beach-plum bushes that lined
the shores when Verrazzano sailed into
town. The Dutch settlers were so cherry
crazy that the street grid was altered to
accommodate a farmer’s favorite cherry
tree—it’s why Broadway bends at Tenth
Street. Apples abounded but were gone
before the nickname the Big Apple was
coined. “Apparently, that was from a horse
race,” Van Aken said—the term was Jazz
Age slang for a sure bet. “I was really
disappointed by that.”
In the nursery, Van Aken, in a trucker
hat and muddy boots, was breeding new
trees. Many fruits don’t grow true to
seed—a McIntosh seed will sprout
something else entirely—so Van Aken
propagates via graft. “Johnny Appleseed
became Johnny Appleseed because he
was from this Protestant denomination
that didn’t believe in grafting,” he said.
A rooster crowed. Van Aken took some
rootstock and used electrical tape to at-
tach the branch of a Bloodgood—“the
most famous pear that came out of New
York!” Voilà. “That’s the only one I have,”
he said. “So I’m hoping that worked.”
Van Aken is an artist, not a pomol-
ogist. He grew up on a dairy farm inPennsylvania Dutch country. Next to
the farmhouse stood a sixty-foot-tall
black-cherry tree planted by Van Aken’s
great-grandfather. In the summer, it be-
came so heavy with fruit that the fam-
ily had to gird it with chains. Eventu-
ally, the farm was sold. The tree was
chopped down. Van Aken began an id-
iosyncratic art career; one early work
featured Willem Dafoe movies played
on a loop. “Just all the death scenes,” he
said. “I got an e-mail from him: ‘Sam,
thank you. I’ve always been prideful ofSam Van Aken