Innholdsfortegnelse for October 19, 2020 i The New Yorker

When Facebook was founded, in 2004, the company had few codified rules about what was allowed on the platform and what was not. Charlotte Willner joined three years later, as one of the company’s first employees to moderate content on the site. At the time, she said, the written guidelines were about a page long; around the office, they were often summarized as, “If something makes you feel bad in your gut, take it down.” Her husband, Dave, was hired the following year, becoming one of twelve full-time content moderators. He later became the company’s head of content policy. The guidelines, he told me, “were just a bunch of examples, with no one articulating the reasoning behind them. ‘We delete nudity.’ ‘People aren’t allowed to say nice things about Hitler.’…

First extinction in the Galápagos Islands, the least vermillion flycatcher— Hopis drill a foot deep and plant blue corn along a wash— Danger, a woman brushed on the side of a napalm bomb— in an oblong box emptied of firewood, a black-widow web— shaving, he nicked himself and stared in the mirror in a moment of blood— out of a saddlebag, a teen pulls a severed goat’s head— before signing his name, he recalls hotel rooms were once used as torture chambers— in Thessaloniki, the beach attendant made a gun of his hand and fired at him— prisoners cackled when the inmate onstage said, “Is it not time for my painkiller?”— weighing mushrooms, the Tibetan cashier grins, “You suffer from suspicion; I suffer from kindness”— a mercenary turned car mechanic…

Once, years ago, when the children were children, someone had asked Alan if he had any—children. And he’d said no. He hadn’t expected to say it; it hadn’t been part of a plan. It wasn’t a woman he was talking to. It wasn’t the possibility of sex that had pushed him to say it. He remembered it as a choice, a junction, yes or no. And—just the once—he’d gone for no, and for the rest of the evening he’d been a man with no children. It had been dreadful, really, having to constantly remind himself that he had no kids. Because that was what he had been, for more than two decades—the man with kids. From the second he woke to the point in the night when he stopped knowing…

The Spymasters, by Chris Whipple (Scribner). This follow-up to “The Gatekeepers,” the author’s study of White House chiefs of staff, examines how C.I.A. directors have shaped the course of the past fifty years, from Richard Helms’s refusal to help Nixon cover up Watergate to John Brennan’s discovery of a Russian threat to the 2016 election. Whipple candidly assesses how the men (and one woman) in the job have negotiated its daunting challenges, including the ethical dilemmas surrounding assassinations, coups, enhanced interrogation, drone warfare, and Presidents who want them to break the law. Underlying Whipple’s analysis is a provocative question: “Is the world’s most powerful intelligence agency a force for good or evil in the world?” Having and Being Had, by Eula Biss (Riverhead). The trade-off of time and money is…

PLAYING JOHN BROWN In John Lahr’s Profile of Ethan Hawke, who plays the abolitionist John Brown in “The Good Lord Bird,” a new Showtime series, Lahr says that Hawke will be “the first person to put John Brown’s full story on film” (“The Shape-Shifter,” September 21st). I am a descendant of John Brown, and appreciate the work both of Hawke and of James McBride, who wrote the novel on which the show is based. I welcome their effort to bring John Brown’s story to a wider audience. But “The Good Lord Bird” is not a bio-pic; it does not remotely tell the full story of John Brown. Since the film “Santa Fe Trail,” released in 1940, which portrayed Brown, played by Raymond Massey, as a maniacal murderer, historians and biographers…

New Dorp Lane, on Staten Island, is nothing like a lane. Half of the borough, it seems, promenade along the thoroughfare by car or on foot, and of those passersby half (it seems) stopped by a storefront gallery one day recently to greet Staten Island’s most famous artist, Scott LoBaido. The gallery occupies a space similar to the ones rented by small businesses—Italian, Chinese, and Mexican restaurants, a cell-phone-repair store, insurance brokers, bakeries, hair salons—up and down the street. Sometimes the artist takes a break at a table on the sidewalk. From a distance, a vertical view would include the table, covered with a white cloth; a Martini in a Martini glass (yellow dab of lemon peel); a pack of Marlboros; a brushed-chrome Zippo lighter; the seated artist, deliberately unshaved,…

On the morning of Monday, June 15th, Chase Strangio, the deputy director for transgender justice at the American Civil Liberties Union’s L.G.B.T. & H.I.V. Project, woke up in his childhood bedroom, in Newton, Massachusetts. After three months of isolating in his small apartment, in Queens, Strangio had driven with his seven-year-old child to Newton, an affluent, liberal suburb of Boston, to see his mother, Joan. Strangio had just buzzed the sides and the back of his head—his quarantine substitute for what used to be a weekly barbershop visit, and a grooming ritual for whenever the Supreme Court might be expected to hand down a decision. The thatch of dark, glossy hair on the top of his head had gone untouched since mid-March. He’d also brought a blazer to his mother’s…

Dolly Parton is loved for many reasons—the songwriting, the singing, the industry smarts, the cheeky cracks, the homey manner, the beauty, the verve, the hits. She is also loved for being loved, and loved transcendentally. During a red-hot summer marked in part by toppled monuments to slavery and genocide, a petition arose, directed at Tennessee lawmakers, calling for Parton to be pedestalled instead. “Let’s replace the statues of men who sought to tear this country apart with a monument to the woman who has worked her entire life to bring us closer together,” the petition proposed, soon gaining some twenty-three thousand signatories. The country-music establishment can be about as partisan as they come, a rope line of old-school apple-pie values and unquestioning patriotism. But Parton is a true diplomat. A…

Philosophy often flourishes in the aftermath of wars, especially lost wars. Socrates served in the losing Athenian army in the Peloponnesian War; Thomas Hobbes wrote “Leviathan” while in exile in Paris after the defeat of the royalists in the English Civil War. At moments of humiliation and confusion, when people need to rebuild their understanding of the world, they are willing to rethink assumptions that go unchallenged in normal times. The defeat of the Central Powers in the First World War gave rise to one of these historic bursts of creative thinking. Ludwig Wittgenstein, perhaps the most influential philosopher of the twentieth century, served in the war as an artillery officer in the Austro-Hungarian Army. Captured just days before the Armistice, in November, 1918, he spent nine months as a…

Art people have been shocked by the postponement, possibly until 2024, of a major exhibition, “Philip Guston Now,” by the institutions that were scheduled to mount it: the National Gallery of Art, in Washington; the Tate Modern, in London; the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston; and the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. I shared the reaction until I thought about it. At issue are some darkly comic paintings by the great American artist which feature cartoonish Ku Klux Klan figures smoking cigars, tootling around in open cars, and generally making fools of themselves. The dark part consists of abject self-portraiture, the focus of works, including the Klan pictures, that dumbfounded the art world when first shown, in 1970. At fifty-seven, Guston had trashed his status as the most sensitive stylist…

OCTOBER 14 – 20, 2020 At the start of David Byrne’s peculiar, exuberant “American Utopia,” which played on Broadway last season, the former Talking Heads front man contemplates a model of a human brain. Part concert, part vision quest, the show is also a chance to contemplate Byrne’s own brain—a unique specimen—as he expounds on philosophy, belts out many of his hits, and marches through the aisles with a roving twelve-piece band, all in matching silver suits and bare feet. A filmed version, directed by Spike Lee, comes to HBO on Oct. 17. MUSIC Cut Worms: “Nobody Lives Here Anymore” ROCK On Cut Worms’s second album, “Nobody Lives Here Anymore,” Max Clarke, the project’s creator, flits through an avalanche of pop sources, drawing most vigorously from the less frenetic side…

“I used to not really respond to babies,” Chloë Sevigny, the actress and downtown style icon, said one recent afternoon. “I’d never see a baby and go, ‘Oh, I want a kid.’ But I’d see teen-agers and be, like, ‘Damn, I want a teen-ager!’” She laughed, long and loud. Sevigny, who is forty-five, and who for more than half her life has embodied the platonic ideal of what the coolest girl in any room might look and act like, was wearing square-toed cerulean-blue ballerina flats (“Comme des Garçons from the nineties”), paired with short, lacy white socks, and a black slip dress repurposed as a skirt. (“Maison Margiela, also from the nineties. I was watching that documentary series about Michael Jordan—so good!—and this fabric reminded me of basketball shorts.”) She…

The difference between doing the job and just appearing to do the job is rarely absolute. In the more than eight months since Covid-19 manifested in the United States, our public officials have demonstrated pretty much every gradation. Recently, President Donald Trump was ailing at Walter Reed hospital, both a victim and a symbol of his Administration’s lassitude and arrogance in the face of the pandemic. He’d failed to protect the country, and now he’d failed to protect himself—not to mention his staff, his supporters, and perhaps his opponent. Even after he returned to the White House, persistent obfuscations about how long he’d had symptoms and how serious they were called only more attention to the Administration’s negligence and bad faith. He continued to do nothing, and to urge the…

Leo Cruz makes the most beautiful white bowls;I think I must get some to youbut how is the questionin these times He is teaching methe names of the desert grasses;I have a booksince to see the grasses is impossible Leo thinks the things man makesare more beautifulthan what exists in nature and I say no.And Leo sayswait and see. We make plansto walk the trails together.When, I ask him,when? Never again:that is what we do not say. He is teaching meto live in imagination: a cold windblows as I cross the desert;I can see his house in the distance;smoke is coming from the chimney That is the kiln, I think;only Leo makes porcelain in the desert Ah, he says, you are dreaming again And I say then I’m glad I…

I first started listening to the podcast “You’re Wrong About,” a cultural-history show hosted by the journalists Michael Hobbes and Sarah Marshall, because of a T-shirt. Late last year, while lazily strolling along the social-media promenade, I came across a woman wearing a boxy T with a cheeky, provocative illustration on the front. The design, which was drawn by the artist Aude White, featured an X-Y axis, along with the faces of eight notable women who had made headlines over the last six decades. The caption read “The Maligned Women of ‘You’re Wrong About,’” and it sorted the women into four categories: Mistreated by Politics (Anita Hill, Monica Lewinsky), Mistreated by Media (Kitty Genovese, Anna Nicole Smith), Mistreated by Capitalism (Tonya Harding, Janet Jackson), and Mistreated by Religion (Tammy Faye…