The New Yorker - 16 03 2020

99 Pages·2020·48.81 MB·English

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9 GOINGS ON ABOUT TOWN

27 THE TALK OF THE TOWN

Amy Davidson Sorkin on Super Tuesday;
the jump-scare Experience; channelling Princess Diana;
Alabama in the promised land; the Band looks back.

LETTER FROM FULING
Peter Hessler
34 Broken Bonds
How the Peace Corps left China.

PERSONAL HISTORY
Colin Jost
42 Commuting
Adventures on the way uptown.

ANNALS OF TECHNOLOGY
John Seabrook
44 Adversarial Man
Could what you wear elude surveillance?

PROFILES
Dana Goodyear
52 Hot and Toxic
Jordan Wolfson’s animatronic provocations.

THE WORLD OF FASHION
Emily Witt
64 Get the Look
The global ambition of Telfar Clemens.

FICTION

Matthew Klam
72 “The Liver”

THE CRITICS

BOOKS
Daniel Mendelsohn
80 The end of Hilary Mantel’s Tudor trilogy.

85 Briefly Noted
Sarah Resnick
87 Anne Enright’s “Actress.”

MUSICAL EVENTS
Alex Ross 90 A Weimar revival at the L.A. Philharmonic.

THE THEATRE
Vinson Cunningham
92 “All the Natalie Portmans.”

THE ART WORLD
Peter Schjeldahl 94 The metamorphoses of Gerhard Richter.

POEMS

Jeffrey McDaniel
58 “Wooden Bench”
Patricia Spears Jones
77 “Nia”

COVER

Tomer Hanuka
“Blown Away”

DRAWINGS Barbara Smaller, P. C. Vey, Will McPhail, Emily Bernstein, Edward Steed,
William Haefeli, Dan Roe, Carolita Johnson, Roz Chast, Liana Finck, Drew Panckeri, Frank Cotham,
Julia Suits, Tom Toro, Liz Montague, Ali Solomon SPOTS Benoît van Innis

MARCH 16, 2020

THE STYLE & DESIGN ISSUE

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4
THE NEW YORKER, MARCH 16, 2020

CONTRIBUTORS

Dana Goodyear (“Hot and Toxic,” p. 52)
is a staff writer based in California.

Peter Hessler (“Broken Bonds,” p. 34),
a staff writer, most recently published
“The Buried: An Archaeology of the
Egyptian Revolution.”

Emily Witt (“Get the Look,” p. 64) is
the author of “Future Sex: A New Kind
of Free Love” and “Nollywood: The
Making of a Film Empire.”

Daniel Mendelsohn (Books, p. 80), the
editor-at-large of the New York Review
of Books, most recently published “Ec-
stasy and Terror.” His tenth book, “Three
Rings: A Tale of Exile, Narrative, and
Fate,” will be out in September.

Patricia Spears Jones (Poem, p. 77), the
recipient of the 2017 Jackson Poetry
Prize, is a poet, a playwright, and an ac-
tivist. Her latest book is “A Lucent Fire.”

Colin Jost (“Commuting,” p. 42) has been
a head writer at “Saturday Night Live”
for six years. In April, he will publish
the memoir “A Very Punchable Face.”

John Seabrook (“Adversarial Man,”
p. 44; The Talk of the Town, p. 33) has
published four books, including, most
recently, “The Song Machine: Inside
the Hit Factory.”

Sarah Resnick (Books, p. 87) is the act-
ing deputy editor of n+1. She is at work
on her first novel.

Jeffrey McDaniel (Poem, p. 58) is the
author of six books of poetry, including
the collection “Holiday in the Islands
of Grief.” He teaches in the writing
program at Sarah Lawrence College.

Tomer Hanuka (Cover) is an illustrator
who works in film and television. This
is his fourth cover for the magazine.

Amy Davidson Sorkin (Comment,
p. 27), a staff writer, is a regular con-
tributor to Comment. She also writes
a column for newyorker.com.

Matthew Klam (Fiction, p. 72) is the
author of “Sam the Cat and Other Sto-
ries” and, most recently, “Who Is Rich?”
He teaches at Stony Brook University.

DISPATCH
Dan Kaufman on the push to remove
Alaska’s governor, who gutted public
services in the name of populism.

UNDER REVIEW
Jia Tolentino considers Cathy
Park Hong’s collection of essays
about Asian-American identity.

LEFT: BRIAN ADAMS FOR THE NEW YORKER; RIGHT: KA YOUNG LEE

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“I COULDN’T
PUT IT DOWN.”

—Ann Patchett

“MARVELOUS.”

—Stephen King

—The New York Times
Book Review

AmericanDirt.com

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THE NEW YORKER, MARCH 16, 2020
5

home gardeners can increase the bio-
diversity and ecological function of their
yards, just as Fiennes has at Holkham.
These include keeping the ground cov-
ered, minimizing any disturbance of the
soil, and avoiding pesticides, chemical
fertilizers, and herbicides. Pioneering
work by Fiennes, as well as by Charlie
Burrell and Isabella Tree, reminds us
that nature can recover quickly under
favorable conditions. Building up healthy
soils can help farmers and gardeners se-
quester atmospheric carbon safely un-
derground while creating a hospitable
habitat for pollinators like bees, birds,
and butterflies.
Diana Donlon
Executive Director, Soil Centric
San Anselmo, Calif.
1
SIMULATING SLAVERY

Julian Lucas explores whether slavery
reënactments are powerful teaching
tools or serve more to trivialize history
and, perhaps, to traumatize students
(“The Fugitive Cure,” February 17th &
24th). About twenty years ago, I taught
a course at Marymount College, in
Tarrytown, New York, in which my
students, a diverse group of young
women, read sections of Harriet Ja-
cobs’s “Incidents in the Life of a Slave
Girl.” I brought into the classroom
large pieces of cardboard that I had
cut to create an enclosure the size of
the attic crawl space in which Jacobs
hid for seven years. Lucas describes
spending several minutes in a crawl
space created for the same purpose by
a reënactor. In my class, only two or
three students were willing to enter
the enclosure, even for a minute. I am
still puzzling over an explanation for
their reluctance.
Jordy Bell
Croton-on-Hudson, N.Y.

EXPERIMENTAL METHODS

Hannah Fry asks whether tech com-
panies’ large-scale social experiments,
such as measuring the emotional im-
pact that negative posts have on Face-
book users, are sufficiently regulated
(Books, March 2nd). She is right to
point out that such tests are not sub-
ject to federal regulations protecting
human subjects in biomedical research.
But she doesn’t mention that the ex-
periments fall outside the federal defi-
nition of “research.” The protections for
human subjects set out by the Depart-
ment of Health and Human Services
apply only to studies that are “designed
to develop or contribute to generaliz-
able knowledge”—i.e., undertaken with
the intent of public dissemination. Be-
cause market research is not meant to
be seen by the public, the rules protect-
ing human subjects are not generally
applicable—and there are no equiva-
lent federal protections for consumers
whose behavior is studied by private
organizations seeking monetary gain.
Most of the corporate practices that
Fry cites are questionable not due to a
lack of consumer consent but because
they may run afoul of other protections
that our regulatory system is supposed
to provide: truth in advertising, safety
of roads and consumer products, and
access to competitive markets.
Jennifer Steele
Associate Professor, School of Education
American University
Washington, D.C.
1
FARM FRESH

Sam Knight’s profile of Jake Fiennes,
the conservation manager of the
Holkham Estate, in England, show-
cases an approach to environmentally
responsible farming (“Betting the Farm,”
February 17th & 24th). Readers may
wonder whether the nature-friendly
ethos Fiennes espouses, as well as the
inspiring results he is getting, can be
applied to more modest plots. By fol-
lowing a set of principles universally
recognized for optimizing soil health,

•

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