The New Yorker - 23 03 2020

73 Pages·2020·33.27 MB·English

MAR. 23, 2020
PRICE $8.99

Trymaine Lee

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into swing states into the heartland
into the border towns into what’s
happening into why it matters into
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5 THE TALK OF THE TOWN

Steve Coll on the pandemic and Trump’s provocations;
a match made in quarantine; epidemic eavesdropping;
millennials get Lampooned; big into gilding.

AMERICAN CHRONICLES

Jill Lepore
10 But Who’s Counting?

This year’s census could be the last.

REFLECTIONS

Geoff Dyer
17 Existential Inconvenience

A writer’s life in the time of coronavirus.

ANNALS OF NATURE

James Somers
19 Cold War

Fighting avalanches with science.

PROFILES

Emily Nussbaum
26 Skin in the Game

The raw sounds of Fiona Apple.

LETTER FROM BOLIVIA

Jon Lee Anderson
38 The Burnt Palace

Evo Morales’s fall from power.

FICTION

Kate Folk
50 “Out There”

THE CRITICS

BOOKS

Atul Gawande
59 Why Americans are dying from despair.

61 Briefly Noted

THE THEATRE

Alexandra Schwartz
64 “Endlings.”

MUSICAL EVENTS

Alex Ross
66 “The Flying Dutchman,” “Agrippina.”

THE CURRENT CINEMA

Anthony Lane
68 “The Truth,” “The Booksellers.”

POEMS

Robert Pinsky
32 “Beach Glass”

Kimiko Hahn
54 “To be a daughter and to have a daughter”

COVER

Christoph Niemann
“Critical Mass”

MARCH 23, 2020

As a result of the coronavirus crisis and the closing of New York City venues,

Goings On About Town will not appear this week.

DRAWINGS Frank Cotham, Drew Dernavich, Pia Guerra and Ian Boothby,

Roz Chast, Liana Finck, Zachary Kanin, Emily Flake, Brendan Loper, Harry Bliss, Lars Kenseth,

Edward Koren, Matilda Borgström, Liza Donnelly SPOTS Marcellus Hall

2
THE NEW YORKER, MARCH 23, 2020

CONTRIBUTORS

Emily Nussbaum (“Skin in the Game,”
p. 26) won the Pulitzer Prize for crit-
icism in 2016. She is the author of “I
Like to Watch: Arguing My Way
Through the TV Revolution.”

James Somers (“Cold War,” p. 19) is a
writer and a programmer based in
New York.

Geoff Dyer (“Existential Inconvenience,”
p. 17) most recently published “Broad-
sword Calling Danny Boy,” which is
about the film “Where Eagles Dare.”

Kate Folk (Fiction, p. 50) is a Wallace
Stegner Fellow in fiction at Stanford
University.

Robert Pinsky (Poem, p. 32) edited the
recent anthology “The Mind Has Cliffs
of Fall.” His latest poetry collection is
“At the Foundling Hospital.”

Atul Gawande (Books, p. 59) is a surgeon,
a public-health researcher, and the
C.E.O. of the health-care venture
Haven. His books include “Being Mor-
tal” and “The Checklist Manifesto.”

Jon Lee Anderson (“The Burnt Palace,”
p. 38), a staff writer, is the author of
several books, including “Che Guevara:
A Revolutionary Life.”

Jill Lepore (“But Who’s Counting?,”
p. 10) is a professor of history at Har-
vard. Later this year, she will publish
“If Then: How the Simulmatics Cor-
poration Invented the Future.”

Christoph Niemann (Cover) is the au-
thor of several books, including “Sun-
day Sketching,” “Souvenir,” and
“Hopes and Dreams.”

Kimiko Hahn (Poem, p. 54) teaches at
Queens College, City University of
New York. Her latest poetry collection
is “Foreign Bodies.”

Peter Arkle (Sketchpad, p. 7) is an il-
lustrator based in New York. His most
recent book, with Amy Goldwasser,
is “All Black Cats Are Not Alike.”

Alexandra Schwartz (The Theatre,
p. 64), a theatre critic for the magazine,
has been a staff writer since 2016.

PHOTO BOOTH

Helen Rosner on Hannah La Follette
Ryan’s photos of New York City’s
“subway hands.”

NEWS DESK
Robert P. Baird on what it means to
contain and mitigate the speed and
scale of the coronavirus.

LEFT: HANNAH LA FOLLETTE RYAN; RIGHT: JON HAN

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THE NEW YORKER, MARCH 23, 2020
3

psychotherapist Tim Tate, who helped
found the North Face’s “wellness initia-
tive” and has counselled its sponsored
athletes (“The Altitude Sickness,” March
2nd). North Face’s president, Arne Arens,
says that his company tries to make
climbers’ endeavors “as safe as possible.”
Through my recent research into the
effects of corporate sponsorship on ex-
treme-sport athletes, I have found that
sponsor contracts often encourage ath-
letes to take dangerous risks in exchange
for financial rewards, because the grant-
ing of bonuses is tied to media popular-
ity. Young, inexperienced athletes are
particularly susceptible to the pressure
to engage in “adventure pornography”
on social media. Many sponsors—in-
cluding the North Face—also don’t pro-
vide athletes with health or life insur-
ance, leaving them especially vulnerable
when the worst occurs. Both Arens and
Tate are thus players in a cynical game,
in which sponsors contractually incen-
tivize athletes to court disaster.
Horst Eidenmueller
Professor of Commercial Law
University of Oxford
Oxford, England

Paumgarten’s insights into the allure of
mountaineering align with my own ex-
periences of hiking, climbing, and ski-
ing in the mountains of Washington
State. In the past thirty years, I’ve had
three close calls: during a rockfall, in
which I was nearly decapitated; while
skiing over an ice cliff with a forty-foot
drop onto bare rock; and while punch-
ing through a snow-and-ice cornice,
two thousand feet above the Stuart Gla-
cier. None of these experiences deterred
me, however, because everyone who en-
gages in risky sports makes peace with
the possibility of death.
Ira Shelton
Edmonds, Wash.

SEEKING JUSTICE

Reading Jennifer Gonnerman’s heart-
breaking account of Eric Smokes and
David Warren’s efforts to overturn their
murder convictions brings to mind two
concepts that I encounter often as an
attorney working on wrongful convic-
tions (“Burden of Proof,” March 2nd).
As agents of the justice system, we must
always “get proximate” to our cases—a
phrase coined by Bryan Stevenson, of
“Just Mercy” fame, to describe the con-
scious act of becoming close to people
and their experiences. To understand
why two men would relive the trauma
of their wrongful convictions and de-
cades in prison, one needs to under-
stand what they went through. Unfor-
tunately, prosecutors and judges rarely
spend time in prison speaking to peo-
ple who have been robbed of their free-
dom. Perhaps if they had with Smokes
and Warren, they would not have made
or considered disingenuous arguments
about the men’s supposed financial in-
centive to seek exoneration. Nor would
they have believed, based on the fact
that Smokes and Warren accepted re-
sponsibility before the parole board,
that the men’s guilt was indisputable;
maintaining innocence before the board
would have almost certainly resulted in
a denial of parole.

We must also be cognizant of how

institutional bias affects our justice sys-
tem. It will always be challenging for
conviction-review units in district at-
torneys’ offices to find, and speak pub-
licly about, wrongdoing, but that does
not mean that they lack the power or
the motivation to try. Sadly, for Smokes
and Warren, it seems that the review
process was as flawed as the convic-
tions themselves.
Elizabeth Sack Felber
Legal Aid Society
New York City
1
EXTREME RISK

Nick Paumgarten, in his piece about the
thrills and grief associated with moun-
tain climbing, features the work of the

•

Letters should be sent with the writer’s name,
address, and daytime phone number via e-mail to