Innholdsfortegnelse for March 23, 2020 i The New Yorker

“Count all people, including babies,” the U.S. Census Bureau instructs Americans on the questionnaire that will be mailed to every household by April 1, 2020, April Fool’s Day, which also happens to be National Census Day (and has been since 1930). You can answer the door; you can answer by mail; for the first time, you can answer online. People have been counting people for thousands of years. Count everyone, beginning with babies who have teeth, decreed census-takers in China in the first millennium B.C.E., under the Zhou dynasty. “Take ye the sum of all the congregation of the children of Israel, after their families, by the house of their fathers, with the number of their names, every male by their polls,” God commands Moses in the Book of Numbers,…

I was putting myself out there. On my return to San Francisco from a bleak Thanksgiving with my surviving relatives in Illinois, I downloaded Tinder, Bumble, and a few other apps I’d seen Instagram ads for. I resolved to pass judgment on several hundred men per day, and to make an effort to message the few I matched with. I’d never liked the idea of finding a romantic partner on an app, the way you’d order pizza or an Uber. To further complicate matters, it was estimated that fifty per cent of men on dating apps in the city were now blots. But what choice did I have? Apps seemed to be the way everyone found each other these days. After my last breakup, I spent a while “letting something…

Golden Gates, by Conor Dougherty (Penguin Press). Time and again, in this sweeping account of San Francisco’s housing crisis, warring constituencies—tenants, techies, homeowners, builders, and activists—talk past one another, often with loudspeakers. One woman suggests that the groups instead attend their opponents’ meetings: “Just show up, shut up, and sit there for half a year, listening.” To Dougherty, such calls for empathy seem to offer hope both for Bay Area residents being priced out and for city officials facing resistance to building more housing. Although his book focusses on the zoning laws and economic distortions that created the shortage in the first place, at its core lies a subtle appeal against tribalism. These Fevered Days, by Martha Ackmann (Norton). The Emily Dickinson who emerges in this vivid, affectionate chronicle is…

SEEKING JUSTICE Reading Jennifer Gonnerman’s heartbreaking account of Eric Smokes and David Warren’s efforts to overturn their murder convictions brings to mind two concepts that I encounter often as an attorney working on wrongful convictions (“Burden of Proof,” March 2nd). As agents of the justice system, we must always “get proximate” to our cases—a phrase coined by Bryan Stevenson, of “Just Mercy” fame, to describe the conscious act of becoming close to people and their experiences. To understand why two men would relive the trauma of their wrongful convictions and decades in prison, one needs to understand what they went through. Unfortunately, prosecutors and judges rarely spend time in prison speaking to people who have been robbed of their freedom. Perhaps if they had with Smokes and Warren, they would…

This might be the first installment of a rewrite of “A Journal of the Plague Year,” but it will be written in real time rather than with the benefit of the fifty-odd years of hindsight that Daniel Defoe was able to draw on. If all goes well—or very badly—it might also be the last installment, because although we’re only at the beginning of the coronavirus outbreak, I’m close to the end of my tether. Physical effects lie in the future, but the psychic toll is already huge—and wide-ranging. At the top end: Am I going to catch it? This can be answered with a slight rephrasing of Philip Larkin’s famous line from “Aubade”: most things may never happen; this one probably will. Strangely, that comes far down on the list…

Who knew this too could become endangered or extinct?They gave me a little pail so I collected beach glass and shells.Who knew the sound in a seashell wasn’t your own blood—No more than the ocean? It was the shell’s chambers breathing, A voice of air: Not churning breakers, nor a pulse in your ear.In the sun’s furnace glare, the cloudy smooth gemstonesCouched an interior fire. Like shells, progeny of the beach.Back then, who knew talcum powder could ignite cancer? Cobalt from Phillips’ Milk of Magnesia. Emerald from Coke.Wildroot Cream-Oil, Desert Flower, Serutan—the yearsEroded their pale glitter. I had a friend once who lovedBuying the water that came in plastic bottles: Nature Mastered by invention. Who knew those very bottles couldStrangle the ocean? Did their chemicals make him sick?Prone on the…

can forecast at-odds relationshipsespecially when the mother hazards to writewhile keeping the baby safefrom herself as she and the baby wail,one in the crib, the other on the floor, to wailwith the vacuum cleaner so the daughtercan’t hear mama-drowning, so the new relationshipisn’t all arithmetic and geometry, all rightangles barely connecting. What is leftat dusk, still tender and safe,you couldn’t pluck and lock in a safe—not unlike a girl calf and her mama whale,two generations of breaching daughtersapplauded by tourists on a shipbut more likely, if they are rightwhales, or what species are leftof those docile equatorial pods, never leftby men hunting their fat. They are not safe.Larger than grays, smaller than blue whales,mother and son or daughterin their yearlong relationshipare so buoyant that whalers called them “the rightwhale to…

The theatre is full of interruption these days. The lights go down, the play begins, and then, suddenly, stops. Some other action takes over, which, more often than not, critiques what we’ve just watched and—rubes that we are—maybe even enjoyed. The effect, sometimes profoundly, productively destabilizing, can also be glibly “gotcha,” as the audience finds itself mocked for its willingness to suspend disbelief. But lately I’ve heard a note of anxiety sounding beneath all the restless form-shifting, one that suggests playwrights’ ambivalence about the idea of “storytelling”—that poor, overworked word, corporately co-opted to within an inch of its life. Is it all right to make things up? the playwrights seem to be asking. Is it ethical? Is it interesting? And who am I to be doing it? “Endlings,” Celine Song’s…

When, at the beginning of March, the powerfully political Russian conductor Valery Gergiev led the première of a new production of Wagner’s “The Flying Dutchman” at the Metropolitan Opera, a mild-mannered group of protesters gathered outside to object to his presence. “gergiev signed letter backing the annexation of crimea and war in ukraine” read one sign. It was something of an understatement. Gergiev, the longtime chief of the Mariinsky Theatre, in St. Petersburg, has close ties to Vladimir Putin, and has repeatedly participated in high-profile propaganda efforts on behalf of the current Russian regime, including making appearances in Crimea and in Syria. In light of the regime’s well-documented involvement in domestic repression, assassination plots, efforts to sabotage Western democracies, and, not least, interference in American elections, Gergiev’s relationships with institutions…

One night earlier this winter, the only road out of Alta, Utah, was closed down. At ski lodges, signs warned guests to stay inside or face fines. Already that season, twenty-two feet of snow had fallen, and, the day before, a storm had dropped thirty-three inches; another foot was predicted by morning. The most dangerous time for avalanches is after a rapid snowfall, and three-quarters of the buildings in Alta are threatened by a known avalanche path. A standard measure for danger on roads, the Avalanche Hazard Index, computes risk according to the size and frequency of avalanches and the number of vehicles that are exposed to them. An A.H.I. of 10 is considered moderate; at 40, the road requires the attention of a full-time avalanche forecaster. State Highway 210,…