Innholdsfortegnelse for October 12, 2020 i The New Yorker

The week of Labor Day, the founders of the Lincoln Project, a super pac of Republican operatives who have disavowed their own party in order to defeat President Donald Trump, set up a war room in a location far outside Washington, D.C. Since January, the group, whose founders include the consultants Steve Schmidt and Rick Wilson, had been targeting Trump with the kind of merciless ads that the strategists had aimed at Democratic candidates throughout their careers. A spot titled “Regret” features the comedian David Cross offering such a long list of Trump’s flaws—“the blatant racism, and the crass sexism, and the deranged narcissism, and pandering to Nazis”—that the recitation is still unspooling as the ad fades out. This type of message is aimed at convincing Republican voters that Trump’s…

On my second visit to the site of the former Huanan Seafood Wholesale Market, at the intersection of New China Road and Development Road, in central Wuhan, I wore a mask and a pair of sunglasses with a loose frame. It was late August, and three security guards in black uniforms sat at the entrance. They examined my passport, checked my temperature, and asked me to scan a QR code that connected to a registration system. The system, though, required a national I.D. number, and the guards seemed uncertain what to do with a foreigner. I handed over the sunglasses and explained that they needed to be repaired. The earliest documented clusters of coronavirus infections had occurred in the Huanan market. During my first visit, a week earlier, I had…

Amanda surprised me when she said we had to move. I’d barely got in the door, barely been in the hallway of our apartment a second, when she passed in and out of my peripheral vision, catching sight of me, I guess, and making her announcement. I’d been planning to take off my shoes and flop down on the couch with a cup of coffee to watch the news on TV—one blast of terrible news after another. I didn’t know what the terrible news would be today, but I knew it’d be terrible. Car crashes would be the least of it. Accidental ones, anyway. It had become common for people in cars to mow other people down. But that wasn’t the only thing. There were terrorists and gun battles in…

On October 27, 1962, a day that’s been described as the “most dangerous” in human history, a Soviet submarine designated B-59 was churning through the Sargasso Sea when suddenly it was rocked by a series of explosions. “It felt like you were sitting in a metal barrel, which somebody is constantly blasting with a sledgehammer,” Vadim Orlov, a communications specialist on board the sub, later recalled. “The situation was quite unusual, if not to say shocking, for the crew.” Four weeks earlier, B-59 had been dispatched from the U.S.S.R. with three other so-called F-class subs as part of Operation Anadyr, Nikita Khrushchev’s top-secret effort to install ballistic missiles in Cuba. (The Anadyr is a river that flows into the Bering Sea; the code name was intended to make even soldiers…

REFORMING DEMOCRACY Steve Coll, in his article about the Electoral College, seems to recognize that the constitutional-amendment process makes it unlikely that the United States will move to a direct national vote anytime soon (Comment, September 21st). But he makes only a glancing reference to a serious flaw in the Electoral College that could be changed by congressional action—the winner-take-all system of allocating electoral votes, used by forty-eight states and the District of Columbia. If, instead, either a proportional or a district system was employed to distribute electoral votes, the Electoral College would more consistently reflect the popular vote. Another democratic measure worth considering would be increasing the size of the House of Representatives, whose membership has remained capped at four hundred and thirty-five since the passage, in 1929, of…

It was like something out of a heist movie, only sadder. When Ruth Bader Ginsburg died, on Friday, September 18th, her far-flung crew of more than a hundred former clerks dropped everything and headed to the nation’s capital for a final mission: honoring their beloved boss. In Manhattan, Trevor Morrison, the dean of N.Y.U.’s law school (he clerked for R.B.G., in SCOTUS lingo, in October Term ’02), grabbed his computer so that he could teach a class from a hotel room and headed to the District. Nick Bravin (O.T. ’00), a four-time national fencing champion, got in his car and drove from his Covid refuge on the North Fork of Long Island. On the other coast, Goodwin Liu (O.T. ’00), a justice of the California Supreme Court, had his assistant…

I arrived in Santiago in early March to a city transformed. In my previous trips to the Chilean capital, Santiago had always seemed relatively orderly and safe, but now all that had changed. What had begun, the previous October, as civil disobedience against a metroticket price hike had escalated to encompass decades’ worth of political, economic, and social grievances, and the impact was everywhere. Plaza Italia, the city’s traditional meeting place for political rallies and championship celebrations, had become known colloquially as Plaza Dignidad, or Dignity Plaza. The scarred blocks surrounding it, which until recently had been a lively upper-middle-class neighborhood dotted with bars, restaurants, hotels, and theatres, were mostly shuttered now, or else burned and abandoned. The area was being referred to as Zona Cero—or Ground Zero—and had the…

Sometimes I arrive with my buds closed,and I am mistaken for scallions,but if you cut a half inch from my stemsand put me in water, I open up and releaseyellow dust from my petal cups,like talcum sprinkled on her shouldersafter she bathes and swallows herthird tranquillizer to erase herself,the sedative piercing right through herlike a small bunch of flowers graspedby a hand that connects the melancholyto something in nature urging Trust me,as the blackbirds at dawn trustthe aurora that conquers night.…

OVAH No. 5Not That Innocent PinkViolet ChachkiSee You Next TuesdayAmanda Lepore’s RevengeNude Descending a StaircaseThey’re All Gonna Laugh at YouI Will Always Love BlueThis Is My HairElectric TwiggyGrey GardensNene Is Very Rich GreenSpell on YouA Clair Huxtable HueThe Night the Lights Went Out in GeorgiaMutha! Has ArrivedLips Don’t LiePut a Little Yellow in My BowlMrs. BatesPriscilla: Green of the DesertBag Lady BlueMetallic Cyndi MayweatherLittle Latin Boy in DragTouch All This SkinOrange in the 212Burnt Sunset BoulevardIris Apfel BloomNaomi’s PoutC’est Si BonMeowFleetwood MatteDivine InterventionGood Witch, Bad WitchOnyx First LadyProud MaryThe Banana-52’sCleopatraRuPocalypse RedNo Wire HangersBeat for the GodsBarbarella BlueBette Davis EyesOpulenceTangerine…

Perilous Bounty, by Tom Philpott (Bloomsbury). Focussing on the agricultural crises of California’s Central Valley and the Midwest, this study illustrates how years of shortsighted policies and practices have brought the nation’s food systems to the point of collapse. California, which yields fruits, vegetables, and nuts, relies on precarious water supplies, threatened by droughts and floods, while the dominant crops of the Midwest, corn and soybeans, are depleting the region’s soil. Philpott characterizes industrial agriculture as an oligopoly, dominated by a few companies that squeeze farmers and by financial firms that bet on land and water shortages, and he discerningly identifies past mistakes and possible solutions. Sex and Lies, by Leïla Slimani, translated from the French by Sophie Lewis (Penguin). While on book tour in her native Morocco, Slimani, best…

OCTOBER 7 – 13, 2020 Leaf-peeping isn’t the only way to bring color into your life this fall. One of the special exhibitions at the American Museum of Natural History, which is now open Wednesday through Sunday, is “The Nature of Color” (pictured above). In a series of installations, some of which are interactive, visitors can learn about everything from the electromagnetic spectrum to the fact that purple dye can be derived from snails. Timed-entry tickets must be reserved on the museum’s Web site, at amnh.org. MUSIC Brentano String Quartet CLASSICAL The 92nd Street Y can’t open its doors to the public for concerts; instead, an appealing online series will bring the beloved venue into the homes of its admirers—and to new, virtual visitors as well. The institution’s fall season,…

Now that it’s gone viral, I just need to clarify a few things about that video. I’m not a doctor. I’m also not a statistician, a meteorologist, a lawyer, a politician, a generally informed individual, a scientist of any kind, a gymnast of any kind, a historian, or even an historian. I’m also not a squirrel. I’m not saying this to justify any of the content in the video (especially the slo-mo part), nor am I trying to avoid a lawsuit. I actually invite lawsuits! They’re cute. Send me all of them. Those quotes from Jesus and Gandhi and my local pediatrician were all real and in context, although they may have been paraphrased or misunderstood owing to translation/oral tradition/being out of context/being mildly to completely fabricated. Yes, that is…

I had dinner with James Beard sometime in the spring of 1984. I was a youngster editing a “feature” on mentors and their protégés for a men’s fashion magazine, with photographs by William Wegman, the avant-garde artist famous for his neo-Surrealist images of his dog—things like that happened in the eighties. Beard’s protégé was the chef Larry Forgione, whose recently opened restaurant on Lexington Avenue, An American Place, had a quote from Beard on the menu. Over dinner, I had the impression that, as happens often in life, the protégé had adopted the mentor more enthusiastically than the mentor the protégé; the epigraph from Beard was opaque, not to say a little fatuous: “The truth is, one must be inspired to cook. For, You Know, we always learn from others…

A lot of work goes into seeing a show at home. For one thing, it’s impossible to settle on a seat. I’ve watched plays while sitting at the desk where I write, or on the floor next to the desk, or on the couch across the room, or at the kitchen table, or, least proudly, lying in my bed, under the covers. I’m never even close to dressed up; I’m there to see but not be seen. One of the preoccupations of theatre-makers and critics during the past six months has been the construction and presentation of plays to be performed on laptop screens and smart TVs instead of on stages. “Virtual theatre”—a sprawling category, more experiential than formal, which ranges from high-quality performance recordings, such as the recently released…