The New Yorker - February 17-24 2020

86 Pages·2020·34.27 MB·English

7 GOINGS ON ABOUT TOWN

27 THE TALK OF THE TOWN

Steve Coll on Trump’s war with Democrats;
the only true Bernie Bro; honeymoons for all;
yarnbombs away; love, and germs, in the air.

ANNALS OF NATURE

Sam Knight
32 Betting the Farm

A new vision for Britain’s land.

SHOUTS & MURMURS

Jack Handey
39 To My Relatives

AMERICAN CHRONICLES

Julian Lucas
40 The Fugitive Cure

Learning history by reënacting it.

PROFILES

Ian Parker
48 The Really Big Picture

Yuval Noah Harari explains the world.

LETTER FROM ARLES

Lauren Collins
60 Living Proof

A supercentenarian or an audacious fraud?

FICTION

Haruki Murakami
72 “With the Beatles”

PUZZLES & GAMES DEPT.

Elizabeth C. Gorski
83 Anniversary Crossword

THE CRITICS

ON TELEVISION

Doreen St. Félix
84 “High Fidelity,” “Party of Five.”

BOOKS

Joan Acocella
87 Life under Vesuvius.

89 Briefly Noted

James Wood
91 Daniel Kehlmann’s mythical trickster.

THE ART WORLD

Peter Schjeldahl
94 The effrontery of Peter Saul.

THE CURRENT CINEMA

Anthony Lane
96 “Birds of Prey,” “Corpus Christi.”

POEMS

Caki Wilkinson
54 “Elvis Week”

Cecily Parks
76 “December”

COVER

Barry Blitt
“Origin Story”

DRAWINGS Madeline Horwath, George Booth, Zoe Si, Will McPhail, Paul Noth, Liana Finck, P. C. Vey, Karl Stevens,

Edward Koren, Roz Chast, Carolita Johnson, Joe Dator, Bruce Eric Kaplan, Kim Warp SPOTS Barry Blitt

FEBRUARY 17 & 24, 2020

THE NEW YORKER

95TH ANNIVERSARY ISSUE

CONTRIBUTORS

Ian Parker (“The Really Big Picture,”
p. 48) contributed his first piece to the
magazine in 1992 and became a staff
writer in 2000.

Cecily Parks (Poem, p. 76) teaches at
Texas State University. She is the author
of the poetry collections “Field Folly
Snow” and “O’Nights.”

Julian Lucas (“The Fugitive Cure,” p. 40)
is a writer and critic based in Brooklyn.

Elizabeth C. Gorski (Puzzles & Games
Dept., p. 83) is the founder of Crossword
Nation and creates a daily puzzle for
King Features Syndicate. Her crosswords
have also appeared in the Times and the
Wall Street Journal.

Eren Orbey (The Talk of the Town,
p. 28), a graduate student at Oxford,
has contributed to The New Yorker
since 2016.

Caki Wilkinson (Poem, p. 54) will pub-
lish her third poetry collection, “The
Survival Expo,” in 2021. Her latest book
is “The Wynona Stone Poems.”

Lauren Collins (“Living Proof,” p. 60)
has been a staff writer since 2008. She
is the author of “When in French: Love
in a Second Language.”

Sam Knight (“Betting the Farm,” p. 32)
is a staff writer who lives in London.

Emily Flake (Sketchpad, p. 31), a New
Yorker cartoonist, is the author of
“Mama Tried” and, most recently, “That
Was Awkward: The Art and Etiquette
of the Awkward Hug.”

Haruki Murakami (Fiction, p. 72) is the
author of fourteen novels in English,
including “The Wind-Up Bird Chron-
icle,” “Kafka on the Shore,” “1Q84,”
and “Killing Commendatore.”

Joan Acocella (Books, p. 87) has been a
staff writer since 1995. She is at work
on a biography of Mikhail Baryshnikov.

Barry Blitt (Cover) is a cartoonist and
an illustrator. His latest book, “Blitt,”
is a collection of his illustrations for
The New Yorker, the Times, Vanity Fair,
and other publications.

THE NEW YORKER INTERVIEW
Masha Gessen talks with the
academic Judith Butler about the
possibilities of nonviolence.

PHOTO BOOTH

Eren Orbey on how the queer,
disabled artist Joey Solomon is
reimagining the diagnostic gaze.

LEFT: CAYCE CLIFFORD FOR THE NEW YORKER; RIGHT: JOEY SOLOMON

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obstacles to democracy today, includ-
ing the anti-democratic skew of the
Senate and the Electoral College; the
rollback of voting rights by Republi-
can politicians and courts; the pluto-
cratic bent of the Supreme Court,
which enables corporate money to
overwhelm public interests; and Sili-
con Valley’s treatment of political
speech as a commodity. We need a
full-on, democratic with a small “d”
reconstruction.
Todd Gitlin
Professor of Journalism and Sociology
Columbia University
New York City

I was happy that Lepore wrote about
the schoolteachers and other citizens
who took an active role in pro-democ-
racy activities in the nineteen-thirties,
when many people in the U.S. were
turning to authoritarian systems for
comfort and security. It is worth not-
ing that a large percentage of these
teachers were women, who knew first-
hand what it meant to live without
agency in a developing democracy. They
had learned through their struggle for
suffrage how to organize, mobilize, and,
most important, educate. It is no sur-
prise that these teacher-led forums had
a pedagogical function; that is, they
subtly taught a diverse citizenship that
democracies survive only when people
are compelled to listen, learn, challenge,
argue, and find common ground. And,
as Lepore points out, they ultimately
helped move the U.S. against author-
itarianism. It is unclear whether we can
again educate an anxious citizenship
about the benefits of democracy, but
we must try.
Eric J. Weiner
Educational Foundations Department
Montclair State University
Montclair, N.J.

DEMOCRACY, THEN AND NOW

Jill Lepore’s report on the grassroots
democracy debates that took place in
the nineteen-thirties is a useful anti-
dote to today’s widespread pessimism
(“In Every Dark Hour,” February 3rd).
But the question we must ask now is
not what people might do to preserve
democracy’s future but what democ-
racy might do to preserve theirs. The
surge of citizen engagement inspired
by the bicentennial of the American
Revolution, in the nineteen-seventies,
offers a model. Communities from
Maine to California gathered to dis-
cuss how they wanted their states or
localities to look in the year 2000. They
considered issues such as environmen-
tal sustainability, land use, race, and
poverty. These conversations could
have been the first steps toward a po-
litical culture of truly democratic ex-
change. But after Ronald Reagan was
elected, in 1980, there seemed little
point to crafting a common future in
a world driven by radical individual-
ism. Nevertheless, any strategy for re-
storing faith in democracy after the
Trump Presidency should involve or-
dinary citizens working together to
envision and create a better tomorrow.
Jeff Faux
Economic Policy Institute
Washington, D.C.

Lepore offers an astute accounting of
the last time the future of American
democracy was in doubt. As always,
she shines light into dark corners of
U.S. history. But the piece disappoints
insofar as Lepore, like many intellec-
tuals, overrates the power of media to
“bring people together.” She is correct,
of course, that grownup discussion has
deteriorated since the time when radio
gave Americans “a sense of their shared
suffering, and shared ideals.” Indeed,
disinformation is now a major imped-
iment to democratic life. But let’s not
kid ourselves that tinkering with the
programming on NPR or PBS is going
to drag us back from the brink. There
are many equally grave institutional

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