Innholdsfortegnelse for March 30, 2020 i The New Yorker

Last week, as cities across the country shut down in an effort to slow the spread of COVID-19, President Trump said, “We have a problem that, a month ago, nobody thought about.” Well, somebody did. On December 29th, as Trump vacationed with his family at Mar-a-Lago, Avi Schiffmann, a seventeen-year-old from Washington State, launched a homemade Web site to track the movement of the coronavirus. Since then, the site, ncov2019.live, has had more than a hundred million visitors. “I wanted to just make the data easily accessible, but I never thought it would end up being this big,” the high-school junior said last week over FaceTime. Schiffmann, gap-toothed and bespectacled, was sitting on his bed wearing a blue T-shirt and baggy pajama bottoms. It was late morning. He was at…

For four years, Sarah Longwell has been hoping for Donald Trump’s downfall. But nothing has triggered it. Not the Mueller investigation into his dealings with Russia. Not his coverup of hush-money payments to a porn star, or the profiting from his office to benefit his personal businesses. Not even a Ukraine extortion scheme that resulted in just the third impeachment and trial of a President in history. He has proved immune to every scandal. Will the coronavirus pandemic be any different? I spoke to Longwell on March 13th, barely an hour after Trump declared a “national emergency” to combat a once-in-a-century outbreak that he had spent the previous few weeks claiming to have completely under control. Pundits were already calling Trump’s botched initial handling of the crisis “the end of…

Did you check his phone? I told you, I’m not gonna do that! But it’s so easy. They are not talking about Martin. Toby pronounces it Mahr-teen. Because that’s how Martin himself pronounced it, being from Chile. It was only last year that Martin stayed with them, and Toby’s father was crazy about the young tennis player. Since then, disillusionment has spoiled his father’s gaze, and every tennis player after Martin can only be a reminder of him, and an object of suspicion. I don’t think I could live through that again, Toby’s father says, and switches back to the subject of the new guy: How difficult could it be? Just ask to borrow his phone. Say you want to play a game. Say I don’t allow you to on…

In 1908, Harry Houdini—“The World’s Handcuff King and Prison Breaker”—needed a new act. He was thirty-four and had worked in show business for fifteen years. He had toured all over the United States, playing circus sideshows, vaudeville houses, and packed theatres of the Orpheum Circuit. As a beginner, he had performed with trained monkeys and fat ladies; a few years later, he did his tricks in a tuxedo with a boutonnière. In Europe, he had pulled off such stunts as escaping (in 1903) from the “Siberian Transport Cell,” a metal safe on wheels that was used to haul political renegades off to prison. It was a time of intense anti-Semitism in Russia, and Houdini, who was Jewish, wanted to flummox the tsarist politsiya. Indeed, he was an affront to authorities…

Not long after being discharged from a Swiss sanitarium, in 1938, the English writer Helen Edmonds, who was born Helen Woods and had published six novels as Helen Ferguson, replaced her long brown locks with a neat blond bob and started calling herself Anna Kavan. The name was borrowed from the protagonist of her most autobiographical novels, “Let Me Alone” (1930) and “A Stranger Still” (1935), and chosen, at least in part, because it echoed the name of the writer who inspired the shifts in literary approach that accompanied her change of identity: Franz Kafka. It was in this new guise—born-again avant-gardist—and under this new name that she became known to the Home Office (as a registered heroin addict); to her most important publisher, Peter Owen; and to a small…

WEIMAR IN L.A. Alex Ross’s piece about German writers and composers who fled to Los Angeles during the Second World War is fascinating (“Exodus,” March 9th). He brings to life the émigrés’ sense of dislocation, dissatisfaction, residual despair—and their infighting. As Ross mentions, many were rescued by Varian Fry, who helped artists and intellectuals escape France in 1940 and 1941. Not mentioned in Ross’s account is Hiram Bingham IV, the U.S. vice-consul in Marseille, who, to the State Department’s great displeasure, worked alongside Fry. Bingham issued thousands of U.S. visas to refugees, including Marc Chagall, Hannah Arendt, and ordinary people such as my mother and grandparents. He engineered the liberation of the German novelist Lion Feuchtwanger from Les Milles, the French concentration camp, by disguising him as a woman and…

enough to see any of the newdreams the hundreds of new kinds of suffering and weeds birds animals shouldering theirdemise without possibility of re-generation the heart in your tiny chest opening its new unimaginable ways ofopening and to what might it stillopen. Will there still besuch opening. Will you dare. I will not be thereto surround you w/the past w/my ways ofknowing—to saveyou—shall you be saved—from what—home from fighting are you, remembering how he or she or they looked at youwhile you both fed the machine or built the trough in dirtwhere it will be necessary toplant again—will it open—will the earth open—will the seeds that remain—will you know tofind them intime—will those who have their lock on youlet the openings which arechance unknowing loneliness the unrelenting arms ofform, which…

Good morning to what’s left and what has gone.No more of my dense cries and heavy songsabout time’s hardships, my mood, gunfights in schools,our murderous American sunshine.I want a looser grip, a sweeter lightnessand grace and mercy around us, plainer talk while my neighborhood’s wild parrots squawkand flash their smart immigrant fineryand acute green wings over treetops and roofs,and Jimmy starts his Tuesday picking throughtrash bins, fifteen years now, set your watch.Buongiorno, too, you kestrel in the blue, ignorant of tech genius and real estate.It’s a happy day to begin happy daysto come. My friends won’t have to remind meto say thank you, excuse me, please, how nice.The glory of the casual and destined,last month’s blue moon, the orbed orange shade of last week’s eclipse. Good morning inthe afternoon to…

It was an unlikely candidacy: a thirty-eight-year old mayor from the heart-land who pitched himself as the solution to partisan gridlock, played up his military experience, talked often about his faith, and promised to end the country’s moral decline. He was fond of quoting the Founding Fathers, had an army of grassroots supporters, and came from a swing state. But the year was 1844, the state was Illinois, the parties were the Whigs and the Democrats, and the candidate was Joseph Smith, the founder of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. Whether or not the country would have been with Joe, we’ll never know: on June 27th, a few months after announcing his candidacy, the first Mormon to run for President became the first Presidential candidate to be…

On late afternoons, after his work was done, the modernist poet, novelist, religious omnivore, and occasional playwright Jean Toomer observed a ritual that he called “deserving time.” Much of the latter half of his life was spent in Bucks County, Pennsylvania, north of Philadelphia, on his property, Mill House. On the grounds, alongside his family, Toomer housed a revolving retinue of devotees who came to learn his home-brewed adaptation of the spiritualist George Gurdjieff’s mystical practices; the students also performed manual labor, a classic—and, for Toomer, quite convenient—aspect of Gurdjieff’s “Work.” At four o’clock, when the teacher had finished his writing and his charges had finished with their chores, they’d gather in the main house, where adults made drinks and children had cookies and ginger ale. The placid hour wasn’t…

Though the opening of Catherine Deneuve’s latest film, “The Truth,” has been postponed, many of her most celebrated movies are available to stream on the Criterion Channel. In one of the best of them, François Truffaut’s macabre thriller “Mississippi Mermaid” (above), from 1969, she plays a mail-order bride who shows up at the Réunion Island estate of a wealthy planter (Jean-Paul Belmondo) with designs on his money. Truffaut transforms the crime drama into a desperate romance and a portrait of French social dysfunction. MOVIES A Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood Tom Hanks, starring in Marielle Heller’s new film as the singular Mr. Rogers, complete with cozy knitwear and matching homilies, not only re-creates every quirk of the character’s gestures and speech but prevents what could have been the mushiest of…

When the plague came to London in 1665, Londoners lost their wits. They consulted astrologers, quacks, the Bible. They searched their bodies for signs, tokens of the disease: lumps, blisters, black spots. They begged for prophecies; they paid for predictions; they prayed; they yowled. They closed their eyes; they covered their ears. They wept in the street. They read alarming almanacs: “Certain it is, books frighted them terribly.” The government, keen to contain the panic, attempted “to suppress the Printing of such Books as terrify’d the People,” according to Daniel Defoe, in “A Journal of the Plague Year,” a history that he wrote in tandem with an advice manual called “Due Preparations for the Plague,” in 1722, a year when people feared that the disease might leap across the English…

Plagues happen only to people. Animals can suffer from mass infections, of course, but they experience them as one more bad blow from an unpredictable and predatory natural environment. Only people put mental brackets around a phenomenon like the coronavirus pandemic and attempt to give it a name and some historical perspective, some sense of precedence and possibility. The coronavirus, indifferent to individuals, has no creed or moral purpose, but it becomes human when it hits us—neither microscopic nor historic, just the size we are as we experience its effects. As Albert Camus wrote in “The Plague,” the 1947 novel that’s becoming to this disruption what W. H. Auden’s “September 1, 1939” was to the aftermath of 9/11, the microbe has no meaning; we seek to create one in the…

Rebel Cinderella, by Adam Hochschild (Houghton Mifflin Harourt). This vibrant biography portrays the riveting charisma of the socialist activist Rose Pastor Stokes. A Russian-Jewish immigrant and a cigar-factory worker, Pastor Stokes became an overnight celebrity when, in 1905, she married into one of the nation’s wealthiest families. For the next fifteen years, she was a tireless crusader for workers’ and women’s rights, fighting to decriminalize birth control. She also hosted a stream of socialist luminaries, including W. E. B. Du Bois and Maxim Gorky, on her private island. Moving between glittering estates and squalid tenements, Hochschild captures the improbability and idealism of both Pastor Stokes and her era, a time when it seemed that stark divisions of class, race, and gender might be erased, in an instant, by love. Yellow…