Innholdsfortegnelse for November 23, 2020 i The New Yorker

Donald Trump is not much of a note-taker, and he does not like his staff to take notes. He has a habit of tearing up documents at the close of meetings. (Records analysts, armed with Scotch Tape, have tried to put the pieces back together.) No real record exists for five meetings Trump had with Vladimir Putin during the first two years of his Presidency. Members of his staff have routinely used apps that automatically erase text messages, and Trump often deletes his own tweets, notwithstanding a warning from the National Archives and Records Administration that doing so contravenes the Presidential Records Act. Trump cannot abide documentation for fear of disclosure, and cannot abide disclosure for fear of disparagement. For decades, in private life, he required people who worked with…

About a week before Election Day, Erica Chenoweth, the Berthold Beitz Professor in Human Rights and International Affairs at the Harvard Kennedy School, hosted an impromptu Zoom meeting for students, alumni, and colleagues—a free-form conversation in which people could ask questions, express anxieties, and try to gauge, from a comparative-politics perspective, whether the United States was totally screwed or just moderately screwed. As rectangles on the Zoom grid flickered to life, Chenoweth played “Freedom,” by Beyoncé (“I break chains all by myself/Won’t let my freedom rot in Hell”). Chenoweth is an expert in civil resistance, a term that Chenoweth uses interchangeably with “nonviolent mass action,” or “strategic nonviolent conflict,” or “unarmed insurrection.” Most political scientists study how political institutions work; Chenoweth and other scholars of civil resistance study what happens…

Every day, at about four o’clock in the afternoon, when the sun’s heat has begun to diminish, the old man comes into the piazza. He walks slowly, shuffling his feet, which are encased in dusty brown loafers. He is wearing, most days, a dark-blue jacket buttoned all the way up to the neck, and navy pants that fasten with a drawstring at the waist. His hair is white, and there is a beret on his head. He goes to the only café in the piazza, the Café of the Fountain, and sits on a wooden chair at a wooden table and orders a small, strong coffee. At 6 p.m., he orders a beer and a sandwich. At 8 p.m., he rises, wipes his lips, and shuffles away, presumably to his…

Recasting the Vote, by Cathleen D. Cahill (North Carolina). This spirited history situates the campaign for female suffrage within the broader narrative of civil rights. In 1920, the Nineteenth Amendment gave the vote to white women but not to millions of Black, Native American, Hispanic, and Chinese women, many of whom were active in the cause. White suffragists were often quick to exclude their Black colleagues from rallies, yet racism failed to stop women of color from using the movement to amplify their voices, enriching it in the process. Cahill’s widened focus links the battle for enfranchisement to currents of exclusion and empowerment that continue to shape the vote today. What Becomes a Legend Most, by Philip Gefter (Harper). “I trust performances,” Richard Avedon wrote. “Stripping them away doesn’t necessarily…

WHAT’S IN A VOTE? Hua Hsu’s piece on Asian American voters raises many interesting points, but it mentions only briefly an important element of history that may have had a bearing on the lack of voter turnout that Hsu discusses (“Bloc by Bloc,” November 2nd). From the late eighteenth century until the middle of the twentieth century, the naturalization of Asian immigrants was against the law in the U.S. The bar against citizenship began with the Naturalization Act of 1870, which initially applied only to Chinese immigrants. In 1910, however, the Supreme Court held that the act prohibited the naturalization of any Asian. Chinese immigrants were only permitted to apply for citizenship with the passage of the Magnuson Act, in 1943. Other Asian immigrants had to wait for the McCarran-Walter…

Modern Love is a weekly column, a book, a podcast—and now, in its 16th year, a television show—about relationships, feelings, betrayals and revelations.—The Times. My husband and I don’t text, we don’t talk, we don’t live together, I don’t know where he lives (I have my guesses), and we’ve never been more in modern love. The vows wrote themselves, pouring from my ballpoint pen like milk being poured from a gallon of milk. At the top of Machu Picchu, as the woman I would one day call my wife vomited up the engagement ring I’d hidden in her Nalgene, I caught a glimpse of God’s plan. I asked Sally to watch “When Harry Met Sally” with me on our third date. My name isn’t Harry—it’s Henry—but it would have been…

Being called all manner of thingsfrom the Dictionary of Shame—not English, not words, not heard,but worn, borne, carried, never spent—we feel now a largeness coming on,something passing into us. We knownot in what source it was begun, butrapt, we watch it rise through our fallen,our slain, our millions dragged, chained.Like daylight setting leaves alight—green to gold to blinding white.Like a spirit caught. Flame-in-flesh.I watched a woman try to shake it, once,from her shoulders and hips. A wildannihilating fright. Other womenformed a wall around her, holding backwhat clamored to rise. God. Devil.Ancestor. What Black bodies carrythrough your schools, your cities.Do you see how mighty you’ve made us,all these generations running?Every day steeling ourselves against it.Every day coaxing it back into coils.And all the while feeding it.And all the while loving it.…

Our grandmother worked at the cannery.And our mother and aunts.They were workers, not housewives. Or were that, too.I liked that smell they brought homewhen they came in from work. That smell of fish, perspiration, and brine.Though they all hated it.The smell that’s so hard to wash off and forget. The women at our house worked in the canneryand, afterward, at home.They cleaned anchovies at the kitchen table. While I played around underneath it.If I was lucky they’d give me a taste.Even sandwiches were anchovy ones or tuna fish. I preferred that to sausage or chocolate.Even though my friends laughed at me.Those were some different times. Back then the women sang in the canneries,and their bosses gave them leaveif they had to breastfeed the baby. The women took their breaks together.In…

NOVEMBER 18 – 24, 2020 Though Sonny Rollins, at the age of ninety, is no longer playing the saxophone, his legacy is still growing. On Record Store Day (Nov. 27), an annual celebration of independently owned music shops, Resonance Records, a prime label for rediscovered jazz classics, issues the three-LP set “Rollins in Holland.” It features expansive concert and radio performances with the bassist Ruud Jacobs and the drummer Han Bennink from 1967, and showcases—in cuts up to twenty-two minutes—Rollins’s freely associative artistry liberated from studio norms. ART Sam Gilliam Gilliam, who is still productive at the age of eighty-six, is a leading light of what is termed the Washington Color School of abstract painting. He broke ranks with the movement in the mid-sixties, draping vast unstretched paintstained and -spattered…

Three police officers in an unmarked pickup truck pulled into the parking lot of a Walgreens in Vallejo, California, responding to a call of looting in progress. It was just after midnight on June 2nd, and a group of people who had gathered around a smashed drive-through window quickly fled in two cars. Sean Monterrosa, a twenty-two-year-old from San Francisco, was left behind. As the police truck closed in on Monterrosa, Jarrett Tonn, a detective who had been with the Vallejo police force for six years, was in the back seat, aiming a rifle. No one told Monterrosa to freeze or to put his hands up, but he fell to his knees anyway. As the truck came to a stop, Tonn fired five rounds at Monterrosa through the windshield. A…

On the afternoon of February 22, 2019, a tall Asian man rang the doorbell of the North Korean Embassy in Madrid. His business card identified him as Matthew Chao, an investor from Baron Stone Capital, with offices in Toronto and Dubai. Once he was allowed in, nine men in their twenties and thirties, carrying pellet guns, knives, and metal bars, entered. They covered their faces with black balaclavas, tied up four staffers with zip ties and handcuffs, and herded them into a meeting room, before taking a senior Embassy official to the basement. His wife and his eight-year-old son were put in a room on the first floor. About thirty minutes later, an employee of a nearby gym was driving past the Embassy and came across a woman, her face…

You don’t have to be a royal watcher—I’m not—to find the fourth season of “The Crown” (on Netflix) compelling. It’s not that it isn’t fun to watch royal infidelity, sibling rivalry, emotional breakdowns, political friction, misbegotten romances, and dog mania play out against backgrounds that include Buckingham Palace and various grand country estates. But the point here is that, just as you begin to luxuriate in the lurid gossip behind the façade of tradition, wealth, and fading glory, Peter Morgan, the show’s creator and writer, pulls back the brocade curtain and introduces a reality that feels more like yours than not. These wrinkles of truth—a mouse trotting unnoticed across the Queen Mother’s floor while she waits for a call, guards fucking around and ignoring the security cameras during shift changes,…

Once, while reading the poetry of Paul Celan, I had an experience I can describe only as mystical. It was about twenty years ago, and I was working at a job that required me to stay very late one or two nights a week. On one of those nights, trying to keep myself awake, I started browsing in John Felstiner’s “Selected Poems and Prose of Paul Celan.” My eye came to rest on an almost impossibly brief poem: Once,I heard him,he was washing the world,unseen, nightlong,real. One and infinite,annihilated,they I’d. Light was. Salvation. In a dream state or trance, I read the lines over and over, instilling them permanently in my memory. It was as if the poem opened up and I entered into it. I felt “him,” that presence,…