What Happens When Elvis Goes Missing

In today’s newsletter, what the case of Mahmoud Khalil tells us about the Administration’s attitude toward free speech. But, first, inside the mystery of a stolen Elvis bust.

The Case of the Missing Elvis

The bust of Elvis—in his Vegas garb, paint cracking, adorned with old Mardi Gras beads—had been sitting at the Great Jones Café, in the East Village, since a server, known as the Rudest Waitress in New York City, brought it to work with her in the mid-eighties. The café was a neighborhood staple, where dollar Martinis were served in a shot glass and the bar was filled by beloved, punky regulars and by the likes of Bill Murray, Bruce Springsteen, Nan Goldin, and Jean-Michel Basquiat (who lived across the street).

For nearly four decades, Elvis sat in the window, becoming an icon of the scene. And then—shortly after the café came under new ownership, got a paint job, and was turned into a restaurant called Jolene—the bust was brazenly stolen. In a place where “everyone knew everyone, or knew someone who did,” Zach Helfand writes, “it came as a shock when the Elvis bandits turned out to be two of their own.” What followed was a very New York City showdown, involving a fedora, an Instagram threat, a cop with a Queens accent, “This American Life” ’s Ira Glass, the forever question of gentrification, a big dog named Easy, and a grand-larceny charge.

For a piece in this week’s issue, Helfand speaks with all parties involved, and even visits Elvis in his current resting place, amid dusty knickknacks and towering piles of junk in an office behind a mechanic’s garage. Belonging to no one exactly, of debatable worth, and kept company by a neighborhood lifer and his detritus: perhaps a fitting end for the bust that ignited a fight over the soul of downtown.

Read the story »

Jay Caspian Kang

The Detention of Mahmoud Khalil Is a Flagrant Assault on Free Speech

“For decades, the bedrock of First Amendment discourse in this country was the belief that we should especially protect speech that we do not like,” Jay Caspian Kang writes in his latest column. That belief is being tested under Donald Trump. Mahmoud Khalil, who was involved in the pro-Palestinian demonstrations on Columbia’s campus, is a permanent resident of the U.S. and has not been charged with a crime—and yet he is being detained. To keep Khalil in custody, the Administration is invoking a rarely used provision of the Immigration and Nationality Act, which empowers the Secretary of State to deport any immigrant—legal or not—whose presence in the U.S. is deemed a threat to foreign policy. “Anyone who was hoping that the Trump Administration would loosen the strictures of ‘wokeness’ and bring us into a relatively freer speech era,” Kang argues, “can officially chalk themselves up as a fool.” Read the column »

For more: Isaac Chotiner recently spoke with Lindsay Nash, a legal scholar, about what Khalil’s arrest could mean for immigration enforcement in Trump’s second term, and whether the courts will uphold his detention.

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Daily Cartoon

Cartoon by Brendan Loper

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P.S. Albert Einstein, the father of relativity, was born on this day in 1879. “He should have an iron will, instead of being pliant, docile, compromising,” Alva Johnston wrote in a Profile of the physicist, from 1933. “The explanation seems to be that Einstein, unlike most men of achievement, has never had to coerce or harden himself.”

Erin Neil contributed to this edition.