The New Yorker - 29 06 2020

72 Pages·2020·29.13 MB·English

JUNE 29, 2020
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THE NEW YORKER, JUNE 29, 2020
1

4 GOINGS ON ABOUT TOWN

13 THE TALK OF THE TOWN

Jelani Cobb on the significance of Juneteenth;
birding while black; any questions?;
the real Shirley Jackson; the Mooch shouts out.

PERSONAL HISTORY
Hilton Als
18 Homecoming
A son’s reckoning with his mother’s hope.

ANNALS OF MEDICINE
John Seabrook
24 Hands Off
Virtual health care during the COVID crisis.

THE POLITICAL SCENE
Adam Entous
30 A Devil’s Bargain
Fiona Hill’s time in the Trump Administration.

LETTER FROM ISRAEL
Ruth Margalit
42 Built on Sand
The contentious search for King David’s palace.

FICTION

Franz Kafka
52 “The Rescue Will Begin in Its Own Time”

THE CRITICS

BOOKS
Caleb Crain
55 A new biography of a gay-rights pioneer.

59 Briefly Noted

A CRITIC AT LARGE
David Denby
61 “Crime and Punishment” in a pandemic.

THE CURRENT CINEMA
Anthony Lane
66 “Mr. Jones,” “Wasp Network.”

POEMS

Afaa Michael Weaver
23 “In a Border Town”
Yi Lei
36 “Flame in the Cloud at Midnight”

COVER

Diana Ejaita
“A Family Blooms”

JUNE 29, 2020

DRAWINGS Barbara Smaller, Akeem Roberts, Joe Dator, Pia Guerra and
Ian Boothby, Roz Chast, Victoria Roberts, Bruce Eric Kaplan,
Frank Cotham, Tom Toro, P. C. Vey, Amy Hwang, Charlie Hankin,
Emily Bernstein, Evan Lian, Julia Suits SPOTS Hanna Barczyk

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CONTRIBUTORS

Ruth Margalit (“Built on Sand,” p. 42)
is a writer based in Tel Aviv.

Hilton Als (“Homecoming,” p. 18), an
associate professor of writing at Co­
lumbia University, won the 2017 Pulit­
zer Prize for criticism. He will be a
Presidential Visiting Scholar at Prince­
ton University starting in the fall.

Diana Ejaita (Cover) is an illustrator
and a textile designer. She lives in Ber­
lin and Lagos.

Jelani Cobb (Comment, p. 13) teaches
in the journalism program at Colum­
bia University.

Yi Lei (Poem, p. 36), a recipient of the
Zhuang Zhongwen Literature Prize,
died in 2018. “My Name Will Grow
Wide Like a Tree: Selected Poems,”
translated from the Chinese by Tracy K.
Smith and Changtai Bi, will be out in
November.

John Seabrook (“Hands Off,” p. 24) has
published four books. His latest is “The
Song Machine.”

Adam Entous (“A Devil’s Bargain,”
p. 30) became a staff writer in 2018. He
was a member of a team at the Wash­
ington Post that won the Pulitzer Prize
for national reporting.

Carolyn Kormann (The Talk of the Town,
p. 14), a staff writer, has contributed to
The New Yorker since 2012.

Afaa Michael Weaver (Poem, p. 23), a
Cave Canem Foundation elder, is the
author of, most recently, the poetry col­
lection “Spirit Boxing.”

Hannah Goldfield (Tables for Two,
p. 11), the magazine’s food critic, began
writing for The New Yorker in 2010.

David Denby (A Critic at Large, p. 61),
a contributor to the magazine since
1993, is the author of “Great Books”
and “Lit Up.”

Franz Kafka (Fiction, p. 52), who died
in 1924, wrote “The Metamorphosis”
and “The Trial.” “The Lost Writings,”
a collection of his short fiction, will
come out in September.

ANNALS OF ACTIVISM
Jia Tolentino on what’s next for bail
funds, which have received an influx
of donations amid recent protests.

DEPT. OF DESIGN
Kyle Chayka examines how the
COVID­19 pandemic will reshape our
homes, offices, and public spaces.

Download the New Yorker app for the latest news, commentary, criticism,
and humor, plus this week’s magazine and all issues back to 2008.

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PHOTO BY PAUL RAESIDE

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who are healed is an outdated para-
digm. Therapists fall ill, lose relation-
ships, and struggle with their own mor-
tality. These days, with the ongoing
threat of the coronavirus and the racial
and political crises in our country, we
can’t deny the collective experience of
vulnerability. What we therapists can
do, using our training in cultivating re-
silience over time, is model how to nav-
igate uncertainty and complexity. Those
in the helping professions should not
try to keep their humanity off their
computer screens; patients need to see
it now more than ever.
Eva Tuschman
Menlo Park, Calif.
1
A CASE FOR JEEVES

I thoroughly enjoyed Rivka Galchen’s
portrait of P. G. Wodehouse, one of
my favorite authors (Books, June 1st).
Galchen describes Wodehouse’s as-
tonishing naïveté as a prisoner in Ger-
man internment camps. Wodehouse
was savvy, though, when it came to his
livelihood as a writer. In 1938 and 1941,
the author negotiated significant up-
front, lump-sum payments from Amer-
ican publishers. The Bureau of Inter-
nal Revenue decided that Wodehouse’s
advance earnings amounted to royal-
ties, and were therefore subject to U.S.
taxes. Wodehouse litigated the issue
all the way to the Supreme Court, los-
ing, 5–3, in 1949. But Wodehouse even-
tually won, in a way: in 1954, Congress
overturned the decision, allowing for-
eign authors to sell their work with-
out being taxed for earnings other than
sales. At least as far as his money was
concerned, Wodehouse was far from
oblivious; indeed, he was more Jeeves
than Wooster.
Reuven Avi-Yonah
Lincoln, Mass.

THE TRUE IMPEDIMENTS
TO RACIAL JUSTICE

Nicholas Lemann’s thesis, which ends
his review of Walter Johnson’s book
“The Broken Heart of America,” is a
warning: we should expect only “par-
tial victories” when it comes to racial
justice in America, and we ought to
beware the likes of Johnson, who in-
sists on “deflating and deriding” past
progress (Books, May 25th). To Le-
mann, Johnson errs insofar as he “dis-
courages us from drawing much hope”
from the election of an African-Amer-
ican President, the passage of civil-
rights legislation, or the ratification of
the Thirteenth Amendment. But John-
son’s contribution—like much of the
recent scholarship on racial capital-
ism—reveals the poison at the heart
of these and other celebrated steps for-
ward. The Thirteenth Amendment, for
example, contains, in its liberating lan-
guage, the legal justification for con-
vict labor and chain gangs, and amounts
to an impetus for mass incarceration.
White supremacy is indeed an adapt-
able and slippery monster, but the real
hazards to forward motion are naïveté,
white privilege, and a deficit of imag-
ination and courage.
Bill Ayers
Chicago, Ill.
1
ZOOM THERAPY

As a marriage and family psychother-
apist, I read Adam Gopnik’s piece on
remote therapy sessions with great in-
terest (“The Empty Couch,” June 1st).
When a chronic illness forced me, as
a younger therapist, to work remotely,
I dreaded exposing my vulnerabilities
to my patients. I had been trained to
make my office a neutral setting, and
to erase my personal life from it. But
bringing humanity to the work enriches
it in ways we can’t predict. As Gopnik’s
article implies, there is potential for the
therapeutic relationship to grow when
the power dynamic softens, as it has
during the pandemic. The strict dichot-
omy between those who heal and those

•

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