newyorker--2020-10-29--The Very French Fight Over Reuniting Rimbaud and Verlaine in the Pantheon

The place to which their remains might be moved is the Pantheon , in the Fifth Arrondissement of Paris .
Built in the late eighteenth century as a domed church modelled on , though much larger and significantly less shapely than , the ancient Pantheon in Rome , it was transformed during the Revolution into a kind of mausoleum for the great figures of France , an Académie Française for the glorious deceased .
Voltaire , Zola , and Marie Curie are all interred there .
Its purpose is a bit like that of the Poet ’ s Corner , @ @ @ @ @ @ @ .
( America has no real equivalent . )
Well worth a visit for its interior ’ s gloomy grandeur , the Pantheon is a beautiful climb up the steep streets of the Fifth , its entrance directly opposite a hotel with the best name of any in the world , the Hôtel des Grands Hommes—presumably , you have to establish your cultural significance before they give you your room key .
Rimbaud ’ s remains are currently interred in the provinces , and Verlaine ’ s elsewhere in Paris ; the controversy @ @ @ @ @ @ @ scandal attached to their lives .
Bob Dylan , in “ You ’ re Gon na Make Me Lonesome When You Go , ” from his 1975 album , “ Blood on the Tracks , ” compared his love life to Verlaine and Rimbaud ’ s , and he didn ’ t mean it as a cheerful domestic reference .
Their story , memorialized in countless retellings ( including a not-entirely-terrible movie from 1995 , starring Leonardo DiCaprio and David Thewlis ) is familiar to every student of modern Western literature .
In @ @ @ @ @ @ @ , while the Impressionists remade art , Rimbaud , then a precocious sixteen-year-old provincial kid , sent his verse to Verlaine , a decade older and a rising , if avant-garde , poet .
Verlaine was taken with the poems and even more so with the youth , when he arrived in Paris , where Verlaine lived in semi-bourgeois comfort with his wife and children .
The two men plunged into an illicit love affair , fuelled by absinthe and opium , which became the very model of French amour fou—the crazy love @ @ @ @ @ @ @ fascination , dominated the avant-garde poetic imagination from Symbolism to Surrealism and beyond .
It eventually led them to the two standard sites of French exile : London , first , and then Brussels .
In Brussels , Verlaine , in the midst of an inebriated lover ’ s quarrel , fired a revolver at Rimbaud , wounding him in the wrist .
Verlaine was sentenced to two years in prison for criminal assault , assumed to be aggravated by homosexuality .
While there , he converted to Catholicism .
Rimbaud , still @ @ @ @ @ @ @ a career as , among other things , an arms dealer in , among other places , Abyssinia , from where rumors of his continued existence occasionally made their way to France .
He died at the age of thirty-seven .
A decade ago , a photograph thought to be of Rimbaud was discovered in a flea market ; it was apparently taken in Aden when he was twenty-five , and it is seemingly the only adult photograph of the man who changed French poetry .
( There ’ s an unforgettable image @ @ @ @ @ @ @ , alongside Verlaine , in Henri Fantin-Latour ’ s great group portrait “ By the Table , ” from 1872 . )
He and Verlaine both changed poetry , in ways that continue to affect it in our own time .
Dylan ’ s mention of them was not mere name-dropping .
By the testimony of Dylan ’ s mentor Dave Van Ronk , it was a paperback copy of modern French verse , heavy with underlining—which a fresh-from-Minnesota Dylan took down from Van Ronk ’ s bookshelf , on Macdougal Street , @ @ @ @ @ @ @ poet ’ s own stream of imagery .
Rimbaud ’ s “ A Season In Hell ” gave the idea that poetry should be , first of all , a journey into extreme experience , evidenced not by a coherent evocation of a story but by subversive images and sensual evocations that subvert logic and language itself .
( Dylan ’ s great songs from “ Blonde on Blonde ” — “ Sad-Eyed Lady of the Lowlands ” and “ Visions of Johanna ” —are straight applications of Rimbaud ’ s symbolist methods @ @ @ @ @ @ @ , no poetic practice , or poets ’ lives , have been more influential .
Rimbaud is the exemplar of the mad youth , the poete maudit , that runs right to Kurt Cobain , and also the model of the mysterious disappearance , which touches legends as different as those of Ambrose Bierce and Jack Black .
( Not the actor Jack Black , but the California vagabond whose memoir has the best title in American literature , “ You Can ’ t Win , ” and who disappeared , in New @ @ @ @ @ @ @ Verlaine , in turn , is the modern model of the sublime-if-not-quite-comprehensible poet , his verse forms streaming into those of everyone from Mallarmé to Wallace Stevens .
The move to bring Rimbaud and Verlaine together in the Pantheon began last year , when several writers—some gay , some French , and at least one of them American—launched a petition .
Soon reinforced by nine French former ministers of culture—and , eventually , President Emmanuel Macron ’ s current culture minister , Roselyne Bachelot—the appeal of the petition was that the inclusion of @ @ @ @ @ @ @ “ diversity ” of those honored in the Pantheon and put an end to its implicit homophobia .
It began , “ Arthur Rimbaud and Paul Verlaine are two major poets of our language .
They enriched our heritage with their genius .
They are two symbols of diversity .
They had to endure the implacable homophobia of their time .
They are the French Oscar Wildes.
” These conceptions turned out to be poisoned chalices , placing the appeal outside the main currents of French culture .
The call for diversity rang @ @ @ @ @ @ @ comparison to Oscar Wilde , a great wit but hardly a great poet , seemed to reduce the originality of the true French poetic kind .
French snobbery met the ethic of French subversive art .
The reaction was instant , voluble , and negative—on several fronts .
The right-wing newspaper Le Figaro , reported that Rimbaud ’ s great-grand-niece , with the vestiges of bourgeois stuffiness still astonishingly strong , disapproved of the idea , ironically , because it made too much of his brief connection to Verlaine .
“ Rimbaud did @ @ @ @ @ @ @ did not end it with him , these are just a few years of his youth , ” she sniffed , rather overlooking the point that those few years are the only reason we remember him now .
The left-wing Libération published an attack on the proposed move under the headline “ Verlaine Et Rimbaud : trop sauvages pour le Panthéon ” —too wild for the Pantheon .
A counter-petition against the interment was launched in the center-left Le Monde , on the same ground : that it would honor two damned poets @ @ @ @ @ @ @ French rhetorical inversion , the original petitioners then returned to say that “ it is not that we act , in our eyes , to institutionalize Rimbaud and Verlaine ; it is to deinstitutionalize the Pantheon .
.
.
.
The secular and republican temple should be a ‘ multiplier ’ of progress.
” Meanwhile , writing in La Règle du jeu , a literary magazine founded by Bernard-Henri Lévy , the writer Pascal Basqué objected that placing the poets in the Pantheon would reduce them to another happy couple : it is @ @ @ @ @ @ @ crazy love in a sane space .
The final dispensation of the mens ’ remains is still in dispute , and other events and tragedies , above all the unspeakable decapitation of the teacher Samuel Paty , have taken its place at the center of French cultural argument .
But we might still ask what we , across the sea and mostly cut off from Parisian culture , make of it .
Surely , the first irony is most self-evident : while we are tearing down statues and dismantling old memorials , in @ @ @ @ @ @ @ French impulse is to reject the act of memorializing itself as inadequate to our memories .
To honor Rimbaud or Verlaine as though they were safely conventional figures , as ornaments of official culture , is to deny the relevance of their example .
At a deeper level , the argument reminds us that the battle between the bourgeois and the bohemian has an edge in France that we can scarcely understand in America .
The “ bourgeois ” in France is , if not an actual social class , an actual cultural @ @ @ @ @ @ @ : a force of order , property , and regularity governing even the manners of love affairs .
To be bohemian is not merely to turn that order on its head but to reject it altogether , to turn one ’ s back on any structure of property or approval or order , and to accept love and art in their inherently unmanageable forms .
In America , we admire an audacious voyage that is at last steered safely into port—the voyage of Dylan himself , beribboned and academicized , is of this @ @ @ @ @ @ @ is still of the voyage out , sails unfurled , on a roiling wave amid a permanent tempest .
We are not at all surprised to see yesterday ’ s avant-garde artist turned into today ’ s acknowledged master .
In France , even a century later , to see those who had the audacity to dare turned into an image of those who had the shrewdness to submit feels like a defeat .
( The honored avant-garde may live very bourgeois lives in France , but they would prefer not to be @ @ @ @ @ @ @ the pragmatic American imagination demands , would Verlaine and Rimbaud have wanted the honor ?
Here one can answer only with a pragmatic American “ Uh , yes and no.
” No , because Rimbaud himself once called the Pantheon an “ official acropolis which takes modern barbarity to new extremes.
” But , yes , because writers always fear the annihilation of time , so anything that secures their words from the corrosive salt of the passing ages is positive .
People of action may have to endure memorials ; men and @ @ @ @ @ @ @ the traces that they have left on the page .
We place them in the Pantheon—indeed , we kick them right up into a mansion on Parnassus—when we take down from the shelf our own ( heavily underlined ) paperback copy of their verse , and read .

Obsessing as so many are on the small niceties of American politics—i.e., the final confrontation between the forces of light and darkness on which all of humanity’s future depends—let us spare a moment’s thought for a couple of obscure French poets and their fate. (The poets themselves are not obscure, but their work often is, and deliberately so.) The poets are Arthur Rimbaud and Paul Verlaine, and the fate that they, or their remains—or if you are a romantic, as they were, their ghosts—face is whether they should be moved into the position of the highest imaginable honor in their country, or whether they would be better honored by being deprived of the honor.
The place to which their remains might be moved is the Pantheon, in the Fifth Arrondissement of Paris. Built in the late eighteenth century as a domed church modelled on, though much larger and significantly less shapely than, the ancient Pantheon in Rome, it was transformed during the Revolution into a kind of mausoleum for the great figures of France, an Académie Française for the glorious deceased. Voltaire, Zola, and Marie Curie are all interred there. Its purpose is a bit like that of the Poet’s Corner, in Westminster Abbey—to honor the culturally magnificent. (America has no real equivalent.) Well worth a visit for its interior’s gloomy grandeur, the Pantheon is a beautiful climb up the steep streets of the Fifth, its entrance directly opposite a hotel with the best name of any in the world, the Hôtel des Grands Hommes—presumably, you have to establish your cultural significance before they give you your room key.
Rimbaud’s remains are currently interred in the provinces, and Verlaine’s elsewhere in Paris; the controversy over moving them derives from the still-resonant scandal attached to their lives. Bob Dylan, in “You’re Gonna Make Me Lonesome When You Go,” from his 1975 album, “Blood on the Tracks,” compared his love life to Verlaine and Rimbaud’s, and he didn’t mean it as a cheerful domestic reference. Their story, memorialized in countless retellings (including a not-entirely-terrible movie from 1995, starring Leonardo DiCaprio and David Thewlis) is familiar to every student of modern Western literature. In the golden artistic decade of the eighteen-seventies, while the Impressionists remade art, Rimbaud, then a precocious sixteen-year-old provincial kid, sent his verse to Verlaine, a decade older and a rising, if avant-garde, poet. Verlaine was taken with the poems and even more so with the youth, when he arrived in Paris, where Verlaine lived in semi-bourgeois comfort with his wife and children.
The two men plunged into an illicit love affair, fuelled by absinthe and opium, which became the very model of French amour fou—the crazy love that, as a practice and a fascination, dominated the avant-garde poetic imagination from Symbolism to Surrealism and beyond. It eventually led them to the two standard sites of French exile: London, first, and then Brussels. In Brussels, Verlaine, in the midst of an inebriated lover’s quarrel, fired a revolver at Rimbaud, wounding him in the wrist. Verlaine was sentenced to two years in prison for criminal assault, assumed to be aggravated by homosexuality. While there, he converted to Catholicism.
Rimbaud, still only twenty, gave up literature for a career as, among other things, an arms dealer in, among other places, Abyssinia, from where rumors of his continued existence occasionally made their way to France. He died at the age of thirty-seven. A decade ago, a photograph thought to be of Rimbaud was discovered in a flea market; it was apparently taken in Aden when he was twenty-five, and it is seemingly the only adult photograph of the man who changed French poetry. (There’s an unforgettable image of him as a devastatingly beautiful youth, alongside Verlaine, in Henri Fantin-Latour’s great group portrait “By the Table,” from 1872.)
He and Verlaine both changed poetry, in ways that continue to affect it in our own time. Dylan’s mention of them was not mere name-dropping. By the testimony of Dylan’s mentor Dave Van Ronk, it was a paperback copy of modern French verse, heavy with underlining—which a fresh-from-Minnesota Dylan took down from Van Ronk’s bookshelf, on Macdougal Street, in 1960—that provided the impetus for that poet’s own stream of imagery. Rimbaud’s “A Season in Hell” gave the idea that poetry should be, first of all, a journey into extreme experience, evidenced not by a coherent evocation of a story but by subversive images and sensual evocations that subvert logic and language itself. (Dylan’s great songs from “Blonde on Blonde”—“Sad-Eyed Lady of the Lowlands” and “Visions of Johanna”—are straight applications of Rimbaud’s symbolist methods to popular music.)
Dylan aside, no poetic practice, or poets’ lives, have been more influential. Rimbaud is the exemplar of the mad youth, the poete maudit, that runs right to Kurt Cobain, and also the model of the mysterious disappearance, which touches legends as different as those of Ambrose Bierce and Jack Black. (Not the actor Jack Black, but the California vagabond whose memoir has the best title in American literature, “You Can’t Win,” and who disappeared, in New York, in the nineteen-thirties.) Verlaine, in turn, is the modern model of the sublime-if-not-quite-comprehensible poet, his verse forms streaming into those of everyone from Mallarmé to Wallace Stevens.
The move to bring Rimbaud and Verlaine together in the Pantheon began last year, when several writers—some gay, some French, and at least one of them American—launched a petition. Soon reinforced by nine French former ministers of culture—and, eventually, President Emmanuel Macron’s current culture minister, Roselyne Bachelot—the appeal of the petition was that the inclusion of Verlaine and Rimbaud would both increase the “diversity” of those honored in the Pantheon and put an end to its implicit homophobia. It began, “Arthur Rimbaud and Paul Verlaine are two major poets of our language. They enriched our heritage with their genius. They are two symbols of diversity. They had to endure the implacable homophobia of their time. They are the French Oscar Wildes.”
These conceptions turned out to be poisoned chalices, placing the appeal outside the main currents of French culture. The call for diversity rang in suspiciously American tones, while the comparison to Oscar Wilde, a great wit but hardly a great poet, seemed to reduce the originality of the true French poetic kind. French snobbery met the ethic of French subversive art. The reaction was instant, voluble, and negative—on several fronts. The right-wing newspaper Le Figaro reported that Rimbaud’s great-grand-niece, with the vestiges of bourgeois stuffiness still astonishingly strong, disapproved of the idea, ironically, because it made too much of his brief connection to Verlaine. “Rimbaud did not start his life with Verlaine and did not end it with him, these are just a few years of his youth,” she sniffed, rather overlooking the point that those few years are the only reason we remember him now.
The left-wing Libération published an attack on the proposed move under the headline “Verlaine Et Rimbaud: trop sauvages pour le Panthéon”—too wild for the Pantheon. A counter-petition against the interment was launched in the center-left Le Monde, on the same ground: that it would honor two damned poets with too much bliss. With maximum French rhetorical inversion, the original petitioners then returned to say that “it is not that we act, in our eyes, to institutionalize Rimbaud and Verlaine; it is to deinstitutionalize the Pantheon . . . . The secular and republican temple should be a ‘multiplier’ of progress.” Meanwhile, writing in La Règle du jeu, a literary magazine founded by Bernard-Henri Lévy, the writer Pascal Basqué objected that placing the poets in the Pantheon would reduce them to another happy couple: it is hard, and wrong, to honor crazy love in a sane space.


newyorker--2020-10-30--Poems Edgar Allan Poe Wrote While Lost in a Corn Maze

It fills my heart with endless dread .
My world is now just endless corn .
Lonesome is the journey @ @ @ @ @ his mouth deploy .
His eyes across my face , they graze— He disappears into @ @ @ @ @ not aid my quest , it seems .
I really wish I had a map @ @ @ @ @ remain in sight .
This wanderer is less than proud .
Lo !
What grace @ @ @ @ @ ?
Beyond the tree there stands a farm , It welcomes me with open arms @

Weary traveller, small and meek,
O’er the fields, a path I seek.
The labyrinth does stretch ahead,
It fills my heart with endless dread.
My freedom I begin to mourn—
My world is now just endless corn.
Lonesome is the journey still,
A child appears, his voice so shrill.
“Who watches thee?” I ask the boy,
No answers does his mouth deploy.
His eyes across my face, they graze—
He disappears into the maze.
A leaf, some hay, an apple core,
A crow descends onto the floor—
Unwelcome guest, wingèd fiend,
He cannot aid my quest, it seems.
Lifting winds, the stalks they rap—
I really wish I had a map.
Resignedly, I take a right,
And rows of stalks remain in sight.
“Curse this maze!” I cry aloud,
This wanderer is less than proud.
Melancholy is the man
Who enters corn without a plan.
Lo! What grace before me do I see?
Beyond the stalks I spot a tree,
Beyond the tree there stands a farm,
It welcomes me with open arms.
To celebrate this glorious feat,
A caramel apple I shall eat.


newyorker--2020-10-30--“I Burn Paris” and the Temptation of Newly Topical Fiction

“ I Burn Paris ” was a sensation when it was first published , serially , in L ’ Humanité , a Communist newspaper , in 1928 .
Its author , Bruno Jasieński , had come to Paris from Poland , and he began the novel as a refutation of “ Je brûle Moscou ” ( “ I Burn Moscow ” ) , a short anti-Soviet and anti-Semitic satire written by Paul Morand , an upper-class French writer who would later collaborate with the Nazis .
Jasieński ’ s father , Jakub Zysman , was Jewish , though he converted @ @ @ @ @ @ @ Catholic mother ; when their son , Wiktor Bruno , was born , in 1901 , they quickly changed the boy ’ s last name to Jasieński , possibly as an effort to conceal his Jewish lineage .
The family spent Bruno ’ s adolescence in Moscow , years that coincided with the Russian Revolution .
When they returned to Poland , Bruno began wearing a monocle , and developed a reputation as a radical literary gadfly of Krakow ’ s burgeoning avant-garde scene .
He co-founded a futurist group that sought to @ @ @ @ @ @ @ mummies and relics ” —through avant-garde literature .
The state harassed him for his efforts , and eventually barred him from reading his poetry in public .
After publishing multiple manifestos and a novella , he disbanded the futurist group and fled , in 1925 , for Paris , where he began writing for Polish-language newspapers and joined the Communist Party .
“ It started with a minor , seemingly insignificant incident that was decidedly private in nature , ” Jasieński ’ s first novel begins .
Structurally , “ I Burn Paris @ @ @ @ @ @ @ confounding work , but it opens conventionally enough .
We meet a man named Pierre , who proceeds to lose his factory job , his home , and his girlfriend , and who then , on Bastille Day , takes revenge on the miserable world by dumping two stolen vials of bubonic plague into Paris ’ s water supply .
Here ends the first section .
In the second , as an outbreak of the plague consumes Paris , the narration turns communal—Pierre is referred to simply as a “ red-haired man ” @ @ @ @ @ @ @ city from the individuality of capitalism into the collectivity of communism .
In Soren Gauger and Marcin Piekoszewski ’ s translation , Jasieński ’ s description of a contagion infecting , paralyzing , and eviscerating a large metropolis is vivid , and now feels darkly prophetic .
The first infections , which arrive amid Bastille Day celebrations , inspire denial .
The “ first time someone dropped the word ‘ epidemic , ’ ” Jasieński writes , it “ clattered like a coin and rolled through the crowd .
Nobody believed it , @ @ @ @ @ @ @ following two days , newspapers report an exponential rise in cases and fatalities , and the city enters lockdown .
The prefecture urges “ residents to stay calm and rational , and not to leave their apartments.
” After five days of containment , “ Parisians who had been impatiently crammed in their apartments ” wander “ irresolute into the streets , ” and there is a desperate assertion of personal agency over communal responsibility .
“ In the face of the leveling trickle of death , the people dissolving in the giant @ @ @ @ @ @ @ in a blind centrifugal urge , to every shred of their individuality , crowding together around the temples of their own rituals , like iron filings around the poles of a magnet.
” Breaking quarantine doesn ’ t go well : deaths mount , and the city fractures into segregated territories of Russian , Jewish , Chinese , French , and Anglo-American residents .
One self-contained chapter of the book , “ The Tale of the Navy-Blue Republic , ” details the plight of “ the disoriented and superfluous police , ” who @ @ @ @ @ @ @ , in the middle of the Seine .
“ The unemployed blue folk swiftly came to realize that they were less real creatures with every passing day , becoming metaphysical fiction , purse nonsense , insubstantial , like the very concept of ‘ police for police ’ s sake.
’ ” Meanwhile , “ a dozen Chinese bacteriology assistants and students ” work around the clock “ to find the grail of the vaccine to immunize against the murderous disease , ” and protesters swarm the mansion of an American tycoon , who @ @ @ @ @ @ @ “ The crowd panicked to escape , ” Jasieński writes .
“ In the space of five minutes the square was evacuated , with a dozen people left lying motionless on the asphalt.
” The plague in “ I Burn Paris ” represents a cleansing by fire of the social order : what rises out of the ashes of capitalism is a communist reinvention of the state .
The proletariat visionaries here are literal prisoners , whose incarceration saves them from the rampaging sickness outside .
In the novel ’ s final section @ @ @ @ @ @ @ abandoned city , which they reclaim as a worker ’ s utopia .
The novel ’ s politics are not subtle , and its critique of capitalism and its advocacy of social upheaval appear to have played a role in Jasieński ’ s subsequent deportation from France .
After the novel was published in book form in Polish , he was banned from entering his native country , too , and he attempted to settle in Belgium , Luxembourg , and Germany , before heading to Leningrad , in 1929 .
The first @ @ @ @ @ @ @ ” reportedly sold a hundred and thirty thousand copies .
Upon his arrival in Moscow , Jasieński was received by Stalin as a hero and awarded Soviet citizenship .
He began writing in Russian , producing state-sanctioned work such as the social-realist novel “ Man Sheds His Skin , ” which extolled the engineering feats of Soviet irrigation systems in Tajikistan .
He became an official in the Union of Soviet Writers , and supported purges of seditious literary figures that were conducted by the N.K.V.D .
and overseen by Genrikh Grigoryevich Yagoda @ @ @ @ @ @ @ then , in 1937 , Yagoda fell out of favor with Stalin and was arrested ; soon afterward , Jasieński was accused of “ ideological alienation ” and sentenced to fifteen years in the gulag .
On September 17 , 1938 , he was executed in Moscow ’ s Butyrka prison and buried in a mass grave outside the city .
I had not been prepared for how topical “ I Burn Paris ” was going to seem in 2020 , and I was initially beguiled by its correlations with our current news @ @ @ @ @ @ @ reading , the echoes came to seem inevitable , and , to some degree , superficial .
Plagues of various kinds have been with us always ; the political hopes we know today are plenty more than a century old .
Jasieński ’ s fictional Paris , contorted by capitalist excess , includes a brothel of child prostitutes that cater to a pedophilic Parisian élite .
Encountering this passage in 2020 , my mind went immediately to the wild delusions of the QAnon conspiracy , itself an exercise in fictional world-building , albeit @ @ @ @ @ @ @ certain point , the noise of contemporary echoes was blocking out the novel ’ s own sounds .
Eventually , I came all the way around , and began questioning the tendency to be drawn to fiction that seems to mirror current catastrophes , whether it ’ s “ 1984 , ” which flew off the shelves in the early years of the Trump Presidency , or Albert Camus ’ s “ The Plague , ” which has , since March , reappeared on best-seller lists all over the world .
These books @ @ @ @ @ @ @ forever worth reading , but the maps they may appear to provide to the present can obscure the real territory just as easily as they can illuminate it .
Although “ I Burn Paris ” was intended as a provocation , and , in its own day , received as such , I found it perversely comforting .
The epidemic within the novel was an allegorical fantasy , and one that even offered , amid all the suffering , a hopeful outcome , in which a better and more caring society emerged out @ @ @ @ @ @ @ it replaced .
Real life , as Jasieński ’ s own reminds us , is an even messier and more confounding thing , and some of the great pleasures of fiction have little to do with it .

“I Burn Paris” was a sensation when it was first published, serially, in L’Humanité, a Communist newspaper, in 1928. Its author, Bruno Jasieński, had come to Paris from Poland, and he began the novel as a refutation of “Je brûle Moscou” (“I Burn Moscow”), a short anti-Soviet and anti-Semitic satire written by Paul Morand, an upper-class French writer who would later collaborate with the Nazis. Jasieński’s father, Jakub Zysman, was Jewish, though he converted to Protestantism before marrying Jasieński’s Catholic mother; when their son, Wiktor Bruno, was born, in 1901, they quickly changed the boy’s last name to Jasieński, possibly as an effort to conceal his Jewish lineage. The family spent Bruno’s adolescence in Moscow, years that coincided with the Russian Revolution. When they returned to Poland, Bruno began wearing a monocle, and developed a reputation as a radical literary gadfly of Krakow’s burgeoning avant-garde scene. He co-founded a futurist group that sought to transform Poland—“a menagerie nation producing mummies and relics”—through avant-garde literature. The state harassed him for his efforts, and eventually barred him from reading his poetry in public. After publishing multiple manifestos and a novella, he disbanded the futurist group and fled, in 1925, for Paris, where he began writing for Polish-language newspapers and joined the Communist Party.
“It started with a minor, seemingly insignificant incident that was decidedly private in nature,” Jasieński’s first novel begins. Structurally, “I Burn Paris” is a strange and at times confounding work, but it opens conventionally enough. We meet a man named Pierre, who proceeds to lose his factory job, his home, and his girlfriend, and who then, on Bastille Day, takes revenge on the miserable world by dumping two stolen vials of bubonic plague into Paris’s water supply. Here ends the first section. In the second, as an outbreak of the plague consumes Paris, the narration turns communal—Pierre is referred to simply as a “red-haired man”—mirroring the way the crisis forces the city from the individuality of capitalism into the collectivity of communism.
In Soren Gauger and Marcin Piekoszewski’s translation, Jasieński’s description of a contagion infecting, paralyzing, and eviscerating a large metropolis is vivid, and now feels darkly prophetic. The first infections, which arrive amid Bastille Day celebrations, inspire denial. The “first time someone dropped the word ‘epidemic,’ ” Jasieński writes, it “clattered like a coin and rolled through the crowd. Nobody believed it, and the dancing resumed.” Over the following two days, newspapers report an exponential rise in cases and fatalities, and the city enters lockdown. The prefecture urges “residents to stay calm and rational, and not to leave their apartments.”
After five days of containment, “Parisians who had been impatiently crammed in their apartments” wander “irresolute into the streets,” and there is a desperate assertion of personal agency over communal responsibility. “In the face of the leveling trickle of death, the people dissolving in the giant vat of the city clung spasmodically, in a blind centrifugal urge, to every shred of their individuality, crowding together around the temples of their own rituals, like iron filings around the poles of a magnet.” Breaking quarantine doesn’t go well: deaths mount, and the city fractures into segregated territories of Russian, Jewish, Chinese, French, and Anglo-American residents. One self-contained chapter of the book, “The Tale of the Navy-Blue Republic,” details the plight of “the disoriented and superfluous police,” who sequester themselves on Île de la Cité, in the middle of the Seine. “The unemployed blue folk swiftly came to realize that they were less real creatures with every passing day, becoming metaphysical fiction, purse nonsense, insubstantial, like the very concept of ‘police for police’s sake.’ ”
Meanwhile, “a dozen Chinese bacteriology assistants and students” work around the clock “to find the grail of the vaccine to immunize against the murderous disease,” and protesters swarm the mansion of an American tycoon, who orders their dispersal by violent means. “The crowd panicked to escape,” Jasieński writes. “In the space of five minutes the square was evacuated, with a dozen people left lying motionless on the asphalt.”
The plague in “I Burn Paris” represents a cleansing by fire of the social order: what rises out of the ashes of capitalism is a communist reinvention of the state. The proletariat visionaries here are literal prisoners, whose incarceration saves them from the rampaging sickness outside. In the novel’s final section, they emerge from jail into an abandoned city, which they reclaim as a worker’s utopia. The novel’s politics are not subtle, and its critique of capitalism and its advocacy of social upheaval appear to have played a role in Jasieński’s subsequent deportation from France. After the novel was published in book form in Polish, he was banned from entering his native country, too, and he attempted to settle in Belgium, Luxembourg, and Germany, before heading to Leningrad, in 1929.
The first Russian printing of “I Burn Paris” reportedly sold a hundred and thirty thousand copies. Upon his arrival in Moscow, Jasieński was received by Stalin as a hero and awarded Soviet citizenship. He began writing in Russian, producing state-sanctioned work such as the social-realist novel “Man Sheds His Skin,” which extolled the engineering feats of Soviet irrigation systems in Tajikistan. He became an official in the Union of Soviet Writers, and supported purges of seditious literary figures that were conducted by the N.K.V.D. and overseen by Genrikh Grigoryevich Yagoda, who became an ally. But then, in 1937, Yagoda fell out of favor with Stalin and was arrested; soon afterward, Jasieński was accused of “ideological alienation” and sentenced to fifteen years in the gulag. On September 17, 1938, he was executed in Moscow’s Butyrka prison and buried in a mass grave outside the city.
I had not been prepared for how topical “I Burn Paris” was going to seem in 2020, and I was initially beguiled by its correlations with our current news cycle. But, as I kept reading, the echoes came to seem inevitable, and, to some degree, superficial. Plagues of various kinds have been with us always; the political hopes we know today are plenty more than a century old. Jasieński’s fictional Paris, contorted by capitalist excess, includes a brothel of child prostitutes that cater to a pedophilic Parisian élite. Encountering this passage in 2020, my mind went immediately to the wild delusions of the QAnon conspiracy, itself an exercise in fictional world-building, albeit a deliberately deceptive one. At a certain point, the noise of contemporary echoes was blocking out the novel’s own sounds.
Eventually, I came all the way around, and began questioning the tendency to be drawn to fiction that seems to mirror current catastrophes, whether it’s “1984,” which flew off the shelves in the early years of the Trump Presidency, or Albert Camus’s “The Plague,” which has, since March, reappeared on best-seller lists all over the world. These books, including Jasieński’s, are forever worth reading, but the maps they may appear to provide to the present can obscure the real territory just as easily as they can illuminate it. Although “I Burn Paris” was intended as a provocation, and, in its own day, received as such, I found it perversely comforting. The epidemic within the novel was an allegorical fantasy, and one that even offered, amid all the suffering, a hopeful outcome, in which a better and more caring society emerged out of the bleak ruins of the one it replaced. Real life, as Jasieński’s own reminds us, is an even messier and more confounding thing, and some of the great pleasures of fiction have little to do with it.


newyorker--2020-10-30--Pay Phones Turned Into Public Art, in “Titan”

New York City ’ s pay phones are obsolete , and , by early next year , they will also @ @ @ @ @ for Wi-Fi kiosks .
Through Jan. 3 , a dozen artists ( including Glenn Ligon @ @ @ @ @ Jimmie Durham , whose contribution is pictured above ) are making creative use of phone @ @ @ @ @ from Fifty-first to Fifty-sixth Streets .
The project , called “ Titan , ” was @ @ @ @ @ Bree Zucker , in collaboration with the Kurimanzutto gallery .

New York City’s pay phones are obsolete, and, by early next year, they will also be history—removed to make way for Wi-Fi kiosks. Through Jan. 3, a dozen artists (including Glenn Ligon, Patti Smith, and Jimmie Durham, whose contribution is pictured above) are making creative use of phone booths along Sixth Avenue, from Fifty-first to Fifty-sixth Streets. The project, called “Titan,” was co-curated by Damián Ortega and Bree Zucker, in collaboration with the Kurimanzutto gallery.


newyorker--2020-10-30--The Pandemic-Proof Atmosphere of the Odeon Outside

The death knell has been rung , in recent months , for both jeans ( luxury sweatpants have deposed them ) and New York City ( “ The hot dog stands outside of Lincoln Center ?
Finished , ” claimed a much tweeted August op-ed in the New York Post ) .
And yet one afternoon not long ago , as I was having lunch outside at the iconic Tribeca restaurant the Odeon , a young woman walking by caught my eye .
She wore a crop top , a furry jacket , and jeans , which I suspected were @ @ @ @ @ @ @ detail I had never seen before : not one but two waistbands , a sliver of bare midriff visible between them .
She was managing , despite the surgical mask pulled down to her chin , to strut .
Before my lunch and a subsequent dinner at the Odeon , which turned forty in October , I had avoided eating anywhere with table service , even outdoors .
If it were up to me , restaurants would be closed for anything other than takeout and delivery until the pandemic is contained significantly .
@ @ @ @ @ @ @ , of course , on sustained government aid , for both affected businesses and their employees .
Instead , the government has failed the hospitality industry miserably .
When I decided to go to the Odeon , it was as much out of curiosity as it was an impulse to offer support .
How does an establishment whose appeal is primarily atmospheric adapt to the unsexiest of safety protocols ?
Inside , the scene was less than enchanting .
Before using the bathroom , I was asked to step up to a thermometer @ @ @ @ @ @ @ of the tables had been removed from the normally crowded , often celebrity-filled dining room , leaving behind the wistful air of a beloved apartment on moving day .
Outside , signs reminded diners to wear masks when engaging with servers ( who never take theirs off ) .
Tables were separated by sheets of plexiglass and protected from traffic by wooden barriers topped with Astroturf .
And yet I was heartened and amused : because the Odeon is on a corner , the restaurant has tables not only in front of its @ @ @ @ @ @ @ but also around the side , on a sleepy stretch of Thomas Street .
This means that even the makeshift patio has its own Siberia , as a dining room ’ s least desirable section is known .
One particularly unlucky couple sat within swinging distance of the door to the kitchen , through which produce is loaded and line cooks emerge for cigarette breaks .
The abiding social hierarchy was as comforting as my dirty Martini , extra olives , and the squarely decent food .
The menu consists mostly of French-bistro @ @ @ @ @ @ @ , croutons , and blue cheese ; a peppery strip steak—with a smattering of curious but now familiar outliers , including Buffalo-chicken dumplings and a “ purple sticky rice bowl ” topped with kale and avocado .
I was tempted by the soothing blandness of a recent addition to the entrées , though it seemed meant for a child : “ orecchiette , plain , with butter or olive oil.
” In prime seating territory , a duo of stylish middle-aged women wore nearly identical Breton-style striped shirts .
A younger twosome asked @ @ @ @ @ @ @ s signature baseball caps with their check .
A leashed dog lifted its enormous , boxy head as its owner was presented with an aromatic hamburger and a bouquet of golden French fries , wrapped in crisp butcher paper in a metal cup .
( When the fries temporarily disappeared from the menu , in late summer , the Web site Artnet News described “ a salty spud stick drought that has sent Tribeca ’ s artists , writers , and dealers into a full-on tailspin , the world they once inhabited ripped @ @ @ @ @ @ @ thirtysomethings celebrating a birthday plucked a bunch of eerily fresh-looking calla lilies out of a public trash can .
The attached note , on customized stationery , read : “ Dear NUGGLETON , I ’ ve missed you sooo much !
That nis [ sic ] why I gotteded [ sic ] you these flowers .
PLEASE TELL ME ALL ABOUT YOUR TRIP .
Love , Trip.
” New York lives .
( Dishes $ 12- $ 38 . )
♦

The death knell has been rung, in recent months, for both jeans (luxury sweatpants have deposed them) and New York City (“The hot dog stands outside of Lincoln Center? Finished,” claimed a much tweeted August op-ed in the New York Post). And yet one afternoon not long ago, as I was having lunch outside at the iconic Tribeca restaurant the Odeon, a young woman walking by caught my eye. She wore a crop top, a furry jacket, and jeans, which I suspected were brand new, on account of a detail I had never seen before: not one but two waistbands, a sliver of bare midriff visible between them. She was managing, despite the surgical mask pulled down to her chin, to strut.
The social hierarchy of the outdoor dining area—with the most desirable tables directly in front of the restaurant, and the least desirable around the corner, on a quieter side street—is as comforting as the squarely decent French-bistro-style food. Photograph by Eric Helgas for The New Yorker
Before my lunch and a subsequent dinner at the Odeon, which turned forty in October, I had avoided eating anywhere with table service, even outdoors. If it were up to me, restaurants would be closed for anything other than takeout and delivery until the pandemic is contained significantly. Such a drastic measure would be contingent, of course, on sustained government aid, for both affected businesses and their employees. Instead, the government has failed the hospitality industry miserably. When I decided to go to the Odeon, it was as much out of curiosity as it was an impulse to offer support. How does an establishment whose appeal is primarily atmospheric adapt to the unsexiest of safety protocols?
Inside, the scene was less than enchanting. Before using the bathroom, I was asked to step up to a thermometer to have my forehead scanned. Most of the tables had been removed from the normally crowded, often celebrity-filled dining room, leaving behind the wistful air of a beloved apartment on moving day. Outside, signs reminded diners to wear masks when engaging with servers (who never take theirs off). Tables were separated by sheets of plexiglass and protected from traffic by wooden barriers topped with Astroturf.
Clockwise from left: the Odeon’s beloved French fries, with spicy mayo; steak frites; frisée salad with lardons, croutons, and a poached egg. Photograph by Eric Helgas for The New Yorker
And yet I was heartened and amused: because the Odeon is on a corner, the restaurant has tables not only in front of its façade, on bustling West Broadway, but also around the side, on a sleepy stretch of Thomas Street. This means that even the makeshift patio has its own Siberia, as a dining room’s least desirable section is known. One particularly unlucky couple sat within swinging distance of an emergency exit door that’s been converted to a service entrance, busy with bussers shuttling to and fro.
The abiding social hierarchy was as comforting as my dirty Martini, extra olives, and the squarely decent food. The menu consists mostly of French-bistro classics—a snarl of frisée spangled with lardons, croutons, and blue cheese; a peppery strip steak—with a smattering of curious but now familiar outliers, including Buffalo-chicken dumplings and a “purple sticky rice bowl” topped with kale and avocado. I was tempted by the soothing blandness of a recent addition to the entrées, though it seemed meant for a child: “orecchiette, plain, with butter or olive oil.”
Safety measures include a request that guests wear masks when engaging with servers and required temperature checks for anyone who enters the premises. Photograph by Eric Helgas for The New Yorker
In prime seating territory, a duo of stylish middle-aged women wore nearly identical Breton-style striped shirts. A younger twosome asked for a pair of the restaurant’s signature baseball caps with their check. A leashed dog lifted its enormous, boxy head as its owner was presented with an aromatic hamburger and a bouquet of golden French fries, wrapped in crisp butcher paper in a metal cup. (When the fries temporarily disappeared from the menu, in late summer, the Web site Artnet News described “a salty spud stick drought that has sent Tribeca’s artists, writers, and dealers into a full-on tailspin, the world they once inhabited ripped to shreds.”) A group of thirtysomethings celebrating a birthday plucked a bunch of eerily fresh-looking calla lilies out of a public trash can. The attached note, on customized stationery, read: “Dear NUGGLETON, I’ve missed you sooo much! That nis [sic] why I gotteded [sic] you these flowers. PLEASE TELL ME ALL ABOUT YOUR TRIP. Love, Trip.” New York lives. (Dishes $12-$38.) ♦
An earlier version of this piece misstated the use of a side door at the Odeon.


newyorker--2020-10-30--How a C.I.A. Coverup Targeted a Whistle-blower

McConnell had uncovered what he described as a “ criminal conspiracy ” perpetrated by the C.I.A .
and the F.B.I .
Every year , entries in the Helios database lead to hundreds of drug busts , which lead to prosecutions in American courts .
The entries are typically submitted to Helios by the Drug Enforcement Administration , the F.B.I.
, and a division of the Department of Homeland Security .
But McConnell had learned that more than a hundred entries in the database that were labelled as originating from F.B.I .
investigations were actually from a secret C.I.A .
surveillance @ @ @ @ @ @ @ officers and F.B.I .
agents , in violation of federal law and Department of Justice guidelines , had concealed the information ’ s origins from federal prosecutors , leaving judges and defense lawyers in the dark .
Critics call such concealment “ intelligence laundering.
” In the nineteen-seventies , after C.I.A .
agents were found to have performed experiments with LSD on unwitting Americans and investigated Vietnam War protesters , restrictions were imposed that bar the agency from being involved in domestic law-enforcement activities .
Since the country ’ s founding , judges @ @ @ @ @ @ @ had the right to know how evidence used in a trial was gathered .
“ This was undisclosed information , from an agency working internationally with different rules and standards , ” Nancy Gertner , a retired federal district judge and a senior lecturer at Harvard Law School , told me .
“ This should worry Trump voters who talk about a ‘ deep state.
’ This is the quintessential deep state .
This is activities beyond your view , fundamentally affecting what happens in American courts.
” But the scheme benefitted the @ @ @ @ @ @ @ the former received information obtained during operations , and the latter reported increased arrests and was able to secure additional federal funding as a result .
The scope of the scheme was corroborated in hundreds of pages of e-mails , transcripts , and other documents obtained by The New Yorker .
For weeks , C.I.A .
officials had been trying to stop McConnell from revealing the agency ’ s activities .
They sent a lawyer to Key West with nondisclosure agreements , but McConnell refused to sign .
A day before his early @ @ @ @ @ @ @ learned of an order to delete the screenshots on his computer .
“ I knew that I had to get the electronic evidence to outside investigators , ” he told me .
“ There was no doubt about what I needed to do , and there was no doubt retaliation against me would follow.
” He worked quickly , not knowing when security officers would arrive .
Later that day , they came to McConnell ’ s office and deleted the images .
A little more than a month later , after C.I.A @ @ @ @ @ @ @ ” classified information , the director of the task force suspended him .
Soon , the C.I.A .
director , Gina Haspel , visited the task force and was briefed on the matter .
According to a sworn affidavit that McConnell filed with the Senate Intelligence Committee , and to a source with knowledge of the meeting , Haspel said that there needed to be repercussions for McConnell .
( A C.I.A .
spokesperson , Timothy Barrett , called the allegation “ inaccurate and a gross mischaracterization.
” ) The military leadership of @ @ @ @ @ @ @ appeal of his suspension , and discussions about future assignments came to an abrupt halt .
Six officials said that they believed the C.I.A .
had retaliated against McConnell , leaving him nominally employed but unable to find a new post after decades of public service .
“ This was appalling and blatant , ” Tom Padden , one of McConnell ’ s supervisors , who has filed his own whistle-blower complaint , told me .
“ It was a blatant attempt to silence a career public servant who identified a real issue.
@ @ @ @ @ @ @ Hovakimian , the Associate Deputy Attorney General , of failing to protect McConnell .
Hovakimian is President Trump ’ s nominee to become the general counsel for the Office of the Director of National Intelligence , and his handling of whistle-blower issues has been a central question in his confirmation process .
( A Justice Department spokesperson said that Hovakimian enlisted a department lawyer and other officials “ to ensure that any whistle-blower was treated appropriately.
” ) Last month , the House Judiciary Committee chairman , Jerrold Nadler , notified Attorney General @ @ @ @ @ @ @ F.B.I .
director , that the committee would be investigating McConnell ’ s allegations and requested records related to his case .
Senator Ron Wyden , of Oregon , said that he would be calling on the Senate Intelligence Committee to investigate as well , and told me , “ Senior officials should never punish employees who raise concerns about abuse , especially when it concerns secret programs or activities.
” McConnell said , “ The C.I.A .
has corrupted F.B.I .
agents to violate basic rules as to how the Department of @ @ @ @ @ @ @ , 2017 , McConnell was assigned to the Joint Interagency Task Force South , in Key West .
It comprises people from various parts of the military , law-enforcement agencies including the D.E.A .
and the F.B.I.
, and intelligence agencies including the C.I.A .
and the N.S.A .
McConnell kept his office sparse—the only sign of his military service was a photograph of the decorated marine Chesty Puller , with the quote “ We ’ re surrounded .
That simplifies things.
” Shortly after McConnell began working at the task force , @ @ @ @ @ @ @ Cambre stopped by his office .
Cambre , a Louisiana native who had worked drug cases at the D.E.A .
for more than fifteen years , told him that he had discovered troubling entries in the Helios database .
They were labelled as having been submitted by the F.B.I.
, based on unclassified sources and methods , but they contained G.P.S .
coördinates that were updated with unusual frequency .
The entries were marked “ SECRET/NOFORN , ” a classification level that prevents disclosure to foreign nationals .
Intelligence and law-enforcement officials later @ @ @ @ @ @ @ a C.I.A .
special-access program , one of the highest categories of classification in the government .
The program , which one intelligence official described to me as “ inherently extra-sensitive , ” involved national-security surveillance .
It also captured information that was unrelated to its mission but useful for finding drug traffickers .
Cambre told McConnell that the F.B.I .
had refused to answer questions about the source of the information , which he believed came from “ the Christians ” —slang for the C.I.A .
“ This is what they ’ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ told him .
“ It ’ s a lie.
” ( An F.B.I .
spokesperson said that the Bureau reviewed the arrangement with the C.I.A .
and considered it “ consistent with our internal protocols and legal requirements.
” ) Searching Helios , McConnell ultimately found more than a hundred entries that bore the deceptive labelling Cambre had described .
An F.B.I .
agent estimated that fifty-seven prosecutions had relied on these entries .
I was able to identify nineteen resulting criminal convictions .
In all of the cases , U.S. Coast Guard @ @ @ @ @ @ @ , had intercepted small vessels on the open waters of the Pacific .
They confiscated bales of cocaine , and arrested men from Ecuador , Colombia , and Mexico , who were taken to the U.S. to face trial .
All nineteen pleaded guilty to federal drug charges and are now serving sentences ranging from six to fourteen years .
The men , who worked at the lowest level of the drug trade , were poor and uneducated .
Antonio Jorge Narvaez Tubay , a fisherman and a construction worker from Guayaquil , @ @ @ @ @ @ @ in February , 2018 .
A sixty-year-old with four children , he had been struggling to care for his infirm father .
“ I was so desperate , and I was so poor , ” he told the judge in his case .
It was not disclosed in the court proceedings that classified C.I.A .
information had led the Coast Guard to the locations of the smugglers .
In most of the cases , including Narvaez ’ s , F.B.I .
agents submitted affidavits attributing the arrests to routine patrols .
McConnell and @ @ @ @ @ @ @ intentionally misleading , denying prosecutors the information they needed to properly meet discovery obligations , and undermining the resulting convictions .
“ If I had learned that a law-enforcement agent had not been forthcoming about reliance on classified information in a case that was prosecuted , I would have had a conniption , ” David Laufman , a former prosecutor and a senior Department of Justice official , said .
“ We always wondered how the fuck they figured out where these fishermen were , ” Ricardo Hermida , who represented Narvaez , @ @ @ @ @ @ @ a discovery violation .
We were operating under misconceptions.
” ( The Justice Department spokesperson said , “ The government believed at the time , and continues to believe after its careful review , that the information underlying this claim was simply not discoverable.
” ) Under current law , federal prosecutors can disclose the presence of classified C.I.A .
information to judges and request that it be shielded during trials for national-security reasons .
Michael V. Hayden , who directed the C.I.A .
under Presidents George W. Bush and Barack Obama , @ @ @ @ @ @ @ to fabricate information , but he insisted that some programs are too sensitive for even limited court consultations , and defended the use of concealed intelligence in domestic trials .
“ We do that routinely , ” he told me .
“ We know something , but we can ’ t say it , so we have to say it through someone else .
Then we use it in court .
It ’ s not illegal , but it ’ s complicated.
” Other experts questioned that view .
Mary McCord , a @ @ @ @ @ @ @ Attorney General for National Security , said that , when a court refuses to protect sensitive intelligence , “ we have to say we ’ ll just dismiss the case .
That ’ s the way it ’ s supposed to work .
And government officials aren ’ t supposed to say , ‘ We don ’ t want to deal with that , so we ’ re just going to lie.
’ ” In the following months , other officials independently raised concerns about the concealed intelligence .
In late February , @ @ @ @ @ @ @ prosecutor in the Southern District of Florida , e-mailed McConnell , asking to talk about “ cases where targeting information does not appear to be LE-sourced ” ( the abbreviation stands for “ law enforcement ” ) .
The same day , Getchell e-mailed the F.B.I .
about a case resulting from a deceptive database entry .
“ Please advise as to the nature and substance of the information which FBI Miami provided which resulted in this seizure , ” he wrote .
Rhonda Squizzero , an F.B.I .
special agent , replied @ @ @ @ @ @ @ in an F.B.I .
operation called Black Pearl , made up of investigations called World ’ s End , Calypso , and Wicked Wench—all references to the “ Pirates of the Caribbean ” film series .
She wrote that those investigations had generated “ case debriefs and electronic evidence ” that pointed to a Mexican crime organization called La Victoria .
McConnell and several other sources said that the investigations were a cover and could not be the source of the information .
In a subsequent e-mail , Getchell expressed skepticism about La @ @ @ @ @ @ @ was a group that “ our office has never heard of.
” In fact , there is no evidence that any such organization exists .
The F.B.I .
spokesperson said that the Bureau takes “ a host of precautions to protect both the intelligence we receive and the sources and methods used to gather it .
This can include using code names.
” “ Everyone in the building knew this was crap , ” one law-enforcement official told me .
“ What they were doing was bullshitting.
” McConnell and Padden also raised @ @ @ @ @ @ @ .
officials , who defended the concealment .
In February , 2018 , they met for three hours with the agency ’ s senior operative on the task force .
( The New Yorker is not publishing the C.I.A .
operative ’ s name , for safety reasons . )
The operative argued against disclosing the C.I.A.
’ s role , either in the database or to prosecutors , saying that the arrangement benefitted both the C.I.A .
and the F.B.I .
The F.B.I.
, the C.I.A .
operative said , was “ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ summer , the C.I.A .
operative grew increasingly hostile to McConnell .
During a meeting in March , according to McConnell , the operative warned , “ If people keep talking about our program , someone is going to need to go to prison.
” A month later , a meeting devolved into a shouting match .
“ If that cocksucker Cambre wants to fuck me in the ass , the least he can do is use some lubricant , ” several people familiar with the conversation recalled the operative saying , referring @ @ @ @ @ @ @ initially raised the matter .
“ He ’ s going all ballistic , ” McConnell told me , of the operative .
“ He was just lit .
”

Before dawn on January 23, 2019, Mark McConnell arrived at the Key West headquarters of the military and civilian task force that monitors drugs headed to the United States from the Southern Hemisphere. McConnell, a prosecutor at the Department of Justice and a former marine, left his phone in a box designed to block electronic transmissions, and passed through a metal detector and a key-card-protected air lock to enter the building. On the second floor, he punched in the code for his office door, then locked it behind him. On a computer approved for the handling of classified information, he loaded a series of screenshots he had taken, showing entries in a database called Helios, which federal law enforcement uses to track drug smugglers. McConnell e-mailed the images to a classified government hotline for whistle-blowers. Then he printed backup copies and, following government procedures for handling classified information, sealed them in an envelope that he placed in another envelope, marked “SECRET.” He hid the material behind a piece of furniture.
McConnell had uncovered what he described as a “criminal conspiracy” perpetrated by the C.I.A. and the F.B.I. Every year, entries in the Helios database lead to hundreds of drug busts, which lead to prosecutions in American courts. The entries are typically submitted to Helios by the Drug Enforcement Administration, the F.B.I., and a division of the Department of Homeland Security. But McConnell had learned that more than a hundred entries in the database that were labelled as originating from F.B.I. investigations were actually from a secret C.I.A. surveillance program. He realized that C.I.A. officers and F.B.I. agents, in violation of federal law and Department of Justice guidelines, had concealed the information’s origins from federal prosecutors, leaving judges and defense lawyers in the dark. Critics call such concealment “intelligence laundering.” In the nineteen-seventies, after C.I.A. agents were found to have performed experiments with LSD on unwitting Americans and investigated Vietnam War protesters, restrictions were imposed that bar the agency from being involved in domestic law-enforcement activities. Since the country’s founding, judges, jurors, and defendants have generally had the right to know how evidence used in a trial was gathered. “This was undisclosed information, from an agency working internationally with different rules and standards,” Nancy Gertner, a retired federal district judge and a senior lecturer at Harvard Law School, told me. “This should worry Trump voters who talk about a ‘deep state.’ This is the quintessential deep state. This is activities beyond your view, fundamentally affecting what happens in American courts.”
But the scheme benefitted the C.I.A. and the F.B.I.: the former received information obtained during operations, and the latter reported increased arrests and was able to secure additional federal funding as a result. The scope of the scheme was corroborated in hundreds of pages of e-mails, transcripts, and other documents obtained by The New Yorker.
For weeks, C.I.A. officials had been trying to stop McConnell from revealing the agency’s activities. They sent a lawyer to Key West with nondisclosure agreements, but McConnell refused to sign. A day before his early arrival at the office, McConnell had learned of an order to delete the screenshots on his computer. “I knew that I had to get the electronic evidence to outside investigators,” he told me. “There was no doubt about what I needed to do, and there was no doubt retaliation against me would follow.” He worked quickly, not knowing when security officers would arrive. Later that day, they came to McConnell’s office and deleted the images.
A little more than a month later, after C.I.A. officials accused McConnell of “spilling” classified information, the director of the task force suspended him. Soon, the C.I.A. director, Gina Haspel, visited the task force and was briefed on the matter. According to a sworn affidavit that McConnell filed with the Senate Intelligence Committee, and to a source with knowledge of the meeting, Haspel said that there needed to be repercussions for McConnell. (A C.I.A. spokesperson, Timothy Barrett, called the allegation “inaccurate and a gross mischaracterization.”) The military leadership of the task force ignored McConnell’s appeal of his suspension, and discussions about future assignments came to an abrupt halt. Six officials said that they believed the C.I.A. had retaliated against McConnell, leaving him nominally employed but unable to find a new post after decades of public service.
“This was appalling and blatant,” Tom Padden, one of McConnell’s supervisors, who has filed his own whistle-blower complaint, told me. “It was a blatant attempt to silence a career public servant who identified a real issue.” McConnell and other officials accused Patrick Hovakimian, the Associate Deputy Attorney General, of failing to protect McConnell. Hovakimian is President Trump’s nominee to become the general counsel for the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, and his handling of whistle-blower issues has been a central question in his confirmation process. (A Justice Department spokesperson said that Hovakimian enlisted a department lawyer and other officials “to ensure that any whistle-blower was treated appropriately.”)
Last month, the House Judiciary Committee chairman, Jerrold Nadler, notified Attorney General William Barr and Christopher Wray, the F.B.I. director, that the committee would be investigating McConnell’s allegations and requested records related to his case. Senator Ron Wyden, of Oregon, said that he would be calling on the Senate Intelligence Committee to investigate as well, and told me, “Senior officials should never punish employees who raise concerns about abuse, especially when it concerns secret programs or activities.” McConnell said, “The C.I.A. has corrupted F.B.I. agents to violate basic rules as to how the Department of Justice does criminal prosecutions.”
Mark McConnell, who is sixty-six, was born and raised in Jacksonville, Florida. He was brought up by his grandparents, a paper-mill worker and a homemaker. When McConnell was seven, he took to wearing the garrison cap of his father, a former marine. McConnell was the first in his family to go beyond high school; he counted coins at the Federal Reserve Coin Vault to pay for junior college, which he attended at night. He earned a bachelor’s degree and a law degree from Florida State University before returning to Jacksonville to work as a public defender. Later, he spent six years on active duty in the U.S. Marines. After leaving active duty, in 1995, he worked as a state prosecutor and at the Department of Justice, where for sixteen years he has investigated fraud, corruption, national-security matters, and drug trafficking. McConnell has a salt-and-pepper mustache and speaks in a clipped Southern accent. “He’s of a high moral character,” a law-enforcement official who has worked with him told me. “Matter of fact, he’s so straight it sometimes annoys people.”
In July, 2017, McConnell was assigned to the Joint Interagency Task Force South, in Key West. It comprises people from various parts of the military, law-enforcement agencies including the D.E.A. and the F.B.I., and intelligence agencies including the C.I.A. and the N.S.A. McConnell kept his office sparse—the only sign of his military service was a photograph of the decorated marine Chesty Puller, with the quote “We’re surrounded. That simplifies things.”
Shortly after McConnell began working at the task force, a D.E.A. special agent named William Cambre stopped by his office. Cambre, a Louisiana native who had worked drug cases at the D.E.A. for more than fifteen years, told him that he had discovered troubling entries in the Helios database. They were labelled as having been submitted by the F.B.I., based on unclassified sources and methods, but they contained G.P.S. coördinates that were updated with unusual frequency. The entries were marked “SECRET/NOFORN,” a classification level that prevents disclosure to foreign nationals. Intelligence and law-enforcement officials later told me that the information came from a C.I.A. special-access program, one of the highest categories of classification in the government. The program, which one intelligence official described to me as “inherently extra-sensitive,” involved national-security surveillance. It also captured information that was unrelated to its mission but useful for finding drug traffickers. Cambre told McConnell that the F.B.I. had refused to answer questions about the source of the information, which he believed came from “the Christians”—slang for the C.I.A. “This is what they’re writing in Helios,” Cambre told him. “It’s a lie.” (An F.B.I. spokesperson said that the Bureau reviewed the arrangement with the C.I.A. and considered it “consistent with our internal protocols and legal requirements.”)
Searching Helios, McConnell ultimately found more than a hundred entries that bore the deceptive labelling Cambre had described. An F.B.I. agent estimated that fifty-seven prosecutions had relied on these entries. I was able to identify nineteen resulting criminal convictions. In all of the cases, U.S. Coast Guard cutters, relying on information from Helios, had intercepted small vessels on the open waters of the Pacific. They confiscated bales of cocaine, and arrested men from Ecuador, Colombia, and Mexico, who were taken to the U.S. to face trial. All nineteen pleaded guilty to federal drug charges and are now serving sentences ranging from six to fourteen years. The men, who worked at the lowest level of the drug trade, were poor and uneducated. Antonio Jorge Narvaez Tubay, a fisherman and a construction worker from Guayaquil, Ecuador, was apprehended south of Mexico in February, 2018. A sixty-year-old with four children, he had been struggling to care for his infirm father. “I was so desperate, and I was so poor,” he told the judge in his case.
“I found the protagonist unsympathetic.” Cartoon by Kate Isenberg Copy link to cartoon Copy link to cartoon Shop Shop
It was not disclosed in the court proceedings that classified C.I.A. information had led the Coast Guard to the locations of the smugglers. In most of the cases, including Narvaez’s, F.B.I. agents submitted affidavits attributing the arrests to routine patrols. McConnell and other officials said that the affidavits were intentionally misleading, denying prosecutors the information they needed to properly meet discovery obligations, and undermining the resulting convictions. “If I had learned that a law-enforcement agent had not been forthcoming about reliance on classified information in a case that was prosecuted, I would have had a conniption,” David Laufman, a former prosecutor and a senior Department of Justice official, said.
“We always wondered how the fuck they figured out where these fishermen were,” Ricardo Hermida, who represented Narvaez, told me. “It’s a discovery violation. We were operating under misconceptions.” (The Justice Department spokesperson said, “The government believed at the time, and continues to believe after its careful review, that the information underlying this claim was simply not discoverable.”)
Under current law, federal prosecutors can disclose the presence of classified C.I.A. information to judges and request that it be shielded during trials for national-security reasons. Michael V. Hayden, who directed the C.I.A. under Presidents George W. Bush and Barack Obama, cautioned that law enforcement is not allowed to fabricate information, but he insisted that some programs are too sensitive for even limited court consultations, and defended the use of concealed intelligence in domestic trials. “We do that routinely,” he told me. “We know something, but we can’t say it, so we have to say it through someone else. Then we use it in court. It’s not illegal, but it’s complicated.” Other experts questioned that view. Mary McCord, a law professor and a former acting Assistant Attorney General for National Security, said that, when a court refuses to protect sensitive intelligence, “we have to say we’ll just dismiss the case. That’s the way it’s supposed to work. And government officials aren’t supposed to say, ‘We don’t want to deal with that, so we’re just going to lie.’ ”
In August, 2017, McConnell called his supervisor Tom Padden, who was in Washington, D.C. “When I get really pissed,” McConnell told me, “I get monotone, I don’t blink.” He related to Padden what he had found in the Helios database. Padden, sixty and heavyset, with a neatly cropped white beard, served in the Marines for twelve years before becoming a civilian prosecutor. He met McConnell when they were both stationed in Quantico, Virginia, and recruited him for the task force. Padden shared McConnell’s respect for rules. “We are talking about the withholding and misrepresentation of information to prosecutors by agents who are supposedly part of the prosecutorial team. We’ve got discovery problems, ethical problems there,” Padden told me. “You gotta have at least a prosecutorial supervisor in the know.”
In the following months, other officials independently raised concerns about the concealed intelligence. In late February, 2018, Dick Getchell, a federal prosecutor in the Southern District of Florida, e-mailed McConnell, asking to talk about “cases where targeting information does not appear to be LE-sourced” (the abbreviation stands for “law enforcement”). The same day, Getchell e-mailed the F.B.I. about a case resulting from a deceptive database entry. “Please advise as to the nature and substance of the information which FBI Miami provided which resulted in this seizure,” he wrote. Rhonda Squizzero, an F.B.I. special agent, replied that the targeting information had been gathered in an F.B.I. operation called Black Pearl, made up of investigations called World’s End, Calypso, and Wicked Wench—all references to the “Pirates of the Caribbean” film series. She wrote that those investigations had generated “case debriefs and electronic evidence” that pointed to a Mexican crime organization called La Victoria. McConnell and several other sources said that the investigations were a cover and could not be the source of the information. In a subsequent e-mail, Getchell expressed skepticism about La Victoria as well, writing that it was a group that “our office has never heard of.” In fact, there is no evidence that any such organization exists. The F.B.I. spokesperson said that the Bureau takes “a host of precautions to protect both the intelligence we receive and the sources and methods used to gather it. This can include using code names.”


newyorker--2020-10-30--Noam Chomsky Believes Trump Is “the Worst Criminal in Human History”

When I called Chomsky , who is ninety-one , last month for a long-scheduled interview , I had meant to discuss his career and life , and his latest book , “ Climate Crisis and the Global Green New Deal , ” written with Robert Pollin and C. J. Polychroniou—but he spent most of the hour-long session railing against the Trump Administration with a vehemence that slightly surprised me .
Chomsky has always been extremely pragmatic in his political analysis , diverging from some other leftists in his belief in the necessity of voting for mainstream Democrats against Republicans .
@ @ @ @ @ @ @ this year , he told me that Donald Trump is “ the worst criminal in human history ” and expressed serious concerns about the future of American democracy ( although he conceded that it “ was never much to write home about ” ) .
With perhaps not equal concern , but with the same passion he seems to bring to every topic , he also railed against “ cancel culture ” and explained why he signed the recent Harper ’ s letter on free expression .
And yet , Chomsky noted that @ @ @ @ @ @ @ are philosophy , science , and language .
“ To tell you the truth , ” he said , “ while I ’ m giving interviews and talking about things , one part of my mind is working on technical problems , which are much more interesting.
” Our conversation , which has been edited for length and clarity , is below .
Over the past four years , have we been in a strange and new period of American history ?
Or are we seeing a continuation of American history that is @ @ @ @ @ @ @ has always been ?
Of course , it ’ s the same country .
We haven ’ t undergone a major revolution , but the last four years are very much out of line with the history of Western democracies altogether .
By now , it ’ s becoming almost outlandish .
In the three hundred and fifty years of parliamentary democracy , there ’ s been nothing like what we ’ re seeing now in Washington .
I don ’ t have to tell you .
You read the same newspapers I @ @ @ @ @ @ @ if he doesn ’ t like the outcome of an election , he ’ ll simply not leave office , and is taken seriously enough that , for example , two high-level , highly respected , retired military officers—one of them very well known , Lieutenant Colonel John Nagl—actually went to the extent of writing an open letter to General [ Mark ] Milley , the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff , reminding him of his constitutional duties to send in the American military to remove the President from office if @ @ @ @ @ @ @ s a long article , which you ’ ve probably seen , by Barton Gellman , reviewing the strategies that Republican leadership is thinking of to try and undermine the election .
There has been plenty of tampering before .
We ’ re not unfamiliar with that .
In fact , one case that comes to mind is kind of relevant at the moment : 1960 .
Richard Nixon had pretty good reason to believe that he had won the election .
Nixon , who was not the most delightful person in the @ @ @ @ @ @ @ put the welfare of the country over his personal ambition .
That ’ s not what we ’ re seeing now , and that ’ s only one sign of a very significant change .
The executive has been almost totally purged of any critical independent voices—nothing left but sycophants .
If they ’ re not sufficiently loyal to the master , fire them and get someone else .
A striking example recently was the firing of the inspectors general when they started looking into the incredible swamp Trump created in Washington .
@ @ @ @ @ @ @ on .
How do you view the Trump Administration , in terms of America ’ s role in the world and whether it is new or not ?
Well , there are some new things which are not being much discussed .
I don ’ t know if it ’ s Trump , but the people around him are essentially creating an international alliance of extremely reactionary states , which can be controlled by the White House , which , of course , has shifted way far to the right , tearing up @ @ @ @ @ @ @ sight .
In the Western Hemisphere , a leading figure would be [ Jair ] Bolsonaro , in Brazil , kind of a Trump clone , and the Middle East , with Gulf dictatorships , the most reactionary states in the world , and Egypt under [ Abdel Fattah El- ] Sisi , probably the worst dictatorship in Egypt ’ s history .
Israel has moved very far to the right .
The current so-called peace agreements have nothing to do with peace agreements .
It ’ s a very natural Middle East @ @ @ @ @ @ @ In the East , [ Narendra ] Modi ’ s India is a prime candidate .
He ’ s smashing Indian secular democracy , trying to impose Hindu nationalist theocracy , crushing Kashmir .
They ’ re an obvious part of it .
In Europe , the prime candidate is [ Viktor ] Orbán ’ s Hungary .
Matteo Salvini ’ s not yet in power , but Italy ’ s right behind .
There are other pleasant figures around the world , but that ’ s basically the core of it .
@ @ @ @ @ @ @ of throwing out all international agreements and throwing out any concern whatsoever for the attitudes and priorities of others .
It was revealed with typical Trump Administration arrogance in [ Secretary of State Mike ] Pompeo ’ s announcement that the United Nations ’ sanctions are reinstituted against Iran .
Why ?
Because he says so .
The United States brought it to the Security Council and could get virtually no support .
So therefore we reinstitute the United Nations ’ sanctions unilaterally .
That ’ s the Godfather talking .
It doesn @ @ @ @ @ @ @ .
The same is true of every international agreement .
The arms-control regime has been torn to shreds , with great danger to us as well as everyone else .
You mention a bunch of dictators that the United States has cozied up to—and not respecting arms-control treaties—but those are things you ’ ve written about in the past .
I ’ m interested that you say that you think the Trump Administration is a break with the past .
How do you think it ’ s different in some way ?
Well @ @ @ @ @ @ @ than not having one .
That ’ s a break , and it ’ s a break on one of the two most significant issues in human history .
We ’ ve been living for seventy-five years under the shadow of possible nuclear destruction .
The arms-control regime that ’ s been slowly built up over the years—Eisenhower ’ s Open Skies proposal , the Reagan-Gorbachev I.N.F .
treaty , and other pieces—has mitigated the dangers .
Trump has been tearing every piece of it to shreds .
The only thing that ’ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ has to be ratified by next February .
If Trump wins the election or refuses to leave office , it will be gone by February .
The other major threat to human survival in any recognizable form is environmental catastrophe , and , there , Trump is alone in the world .
Most countries are doing at least something about it—not as much as they should be , but some of them rather significant , some less so .
The United States has pulled out of the Paris Agreement ; is refusing to @ @ @ @ @ @ @ help poorer countries deal with the problem ; is racing toward maximizing the use of fossil fuels ; and , at the same time , just opened the last major nature reserve in the United States for drilling .
He has to make sure that we maximize the use of fossil fuels , race to the precipice as quickly as possible , and eliminate the regulations , which not only limit the dangerous effects but also protect Americans .
Step by step , eliminate everything that might protect Americans or that will preserve @ @ @ @ @ @ @ threat of environmental catastrophe .
There is nothing like this in history .
It ’ s not breaking with the American tradition .
Can you think of anyone in human history who has dedicated his efforts to undermining the prospects for survival of organized human life on earth ?
In fact , some of the productions of the Trump Administration are just mind-boggling .
To answer your last question , even if it was rhetorical , it seems like the Republican Party leading up to Trump had very similar views on climate-change science @ @ @ @ @ @ @ it in a more nihilistic direction .
What leading figure in human history has dedicated policy toward maximizing the use of fossil fuels and cutting down on regulations that mitigate the disaster ?
Name one .
Bolsonaro perhaps , but yes , I get your— Bolsonaro , a Trump clone , and that ’ s following Trump ’ s lead .
Yes , he ’ s doing it dangerously , but even he hasn ’ t gone as far as Trump .
You ’ ve written a lot of books about American foreign @ @ @ @ @ @ @ is that American foreign policy is often driven by the economic interests of élites .
I think that there is a way in which that is still true , and obviously Trump is of the economic élite .
But , with Trump , it seems like perhaps his personal desire for money is driving American foreign policy now .
I wonder if that ’ s made you think differently about how American foreign policy is carried out .

Noam Chomsky, the American linguist, activist, and political writer, is one of the most famous and harshest critics of American foreign policy. His critiques of Presidential Administrations from Nixon to Obama, and the stridency of his views—comparing 9/11 to Bill Clinton’s bombing of a factory in Khartoum, for example—have made him the target of much ire, as well as a hero of the global left. “Chomsky always refuses to talk about motives in politics,” Larissa MacFarquhar wrote in her Profile of him for The New Yorker, in 2003. “Like many theorists of universal humanness, he often seems baffled, even repelled, by the thought of actual people and their psychologies.”
When I called Chomsky, who is ninety-one, last month for a long-scheduled interview, I had meant to discuss his career and life, and his latest book, “Climate Crisis and the Global Green New Deal,” written with Robert Pollin and C. J. Polychroniou—but he spent most of the hour-long session railing against the Trump Administration with a vehemence that slightly surprised me. Chomsky has always been extremely pragmatic in his political analysis, diverging from some other leftists in his belief in the necessity of voting for mainstream Democrats against Republicans. But in addition to supporting Joe Biden this year, he told me that Donald Trump is “the worst criminal in human history” and expressed serious concerns about the future of American democracy (although he conceded that it “was never much to write home about”). With perhaps not equal concern, but with the same passion he seems to bring to every topic, he also railed against “cancel culture” and explained why he signed the recent Harper’s letter on free expression. And yet, Chomsky noted that what he most loves to think about are philosophy, science, and language. “To tell you the truth,” he said, “while I’m giving interviews and talking about things, one part of my mind is working on technical problems, which are much more interesting.” Our conversation, which has been edited for length and clarity, is below.
Over the past four years, have we been in a strange and new period of American history? Or are we seeing a continuation of American history that is pretty much in line with what it has always been?
Of course, it’s the same country. We haven’t undergone a major revolution, but the last four years are very much out of line with the history of Western democracies altogether. By now, it’s becoming almost outlandish. In the three hundred and fifty years of parliamentary democracy, there’s been nothing like what we’re seeing now in Washington. I don’t have to tell you. You read the same newspapers I do. A President who has said if he doesn’t like the outcome of an election, he’ll simply not leave office, and is taken seriously enough that, for example, two high-level, highly respected, retired military officers—one of them very well known, Lieutenant Colonel John Nagl—actually went to the extent of writing an open letter to General [Mark] Milley, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, reminding him of his constitutional duties to send in the American military to remove the President from office if he refuses to leave.
There’s a long article, which you’ve probably seen, by Barton Gellman, reviewing the strategies that Republican leadership is thinking of to try and undermine the election. There has been plenty of tampering before. We’re not unfamiliar with that. In fact, one case that comes to mind is kind of relevant at the moment: 1960. Richard Nixon had pretty good reason to believe that he had won the election. Nixon, who was not the most delightful person in the history of Presidential politics, decided to put the welfare of the country over his personal ambition. That’s not what we’re seeing now, and that’s only one sign of a very significant change. The executive has been almost totally purged of any critical independent voices—nothing left but sycophants. If they’re not sufficiently loyal to the master, fire them and get someone else. A striking example recently was the firing of the inspectors general when they started looking into the incredible swamp Trump created in Washington. This kind of thing goes on and on.
How do you view the Trump Administration, in terms of America’s role in the world and whether it is new or not?
Well, there are some new things which are not being much discussed. I don’t know if it’s Trump, but the people around him are essentially creating an international alliance of extremely reactionary states, which can be controlled by the White House, which, of course, has shifted way far to the right, tearing up every international agreement, wrecking everything in sight. In the Western Hemisphere, a leading figure would be [Jair] Bolsonaro, in Brazil, kind of a Trump clone, and the Middle East, with Gulf dictatorships, the most reactionary states in the world, and Egypt under [Abdel Fattah El-]Sisi, probably the worst dictatorship in Egypt’s history. Israel has moved very far to the right. The current so-called peace agreements have nothing to do with peace agreements. It’s a very natural Middle East base for the Trump-run reactionary international. In the East, [Narendra] Modi’s India is a prime candidate. He’s smashing Indian secular democracy, trying to impose Hindu nationalist theocracy, crushing Kashmir. They’re an obvious part of it. In Europe, the prime candidate is [Viktor] Orbán’s Hungary. Matteo Salvini’s not yet in power, but Italy’s right behind. There are other pleasant figures around the world, but that’s basically the core of it.
Now, that’s one side of throwing out all international agreements and throwing out any concern whatsoever for the attitudes and priorities of others. It was revealed with typical Trump Administration arrogance in [Secretary of State Mike] Pompeo’s announcement that the United Nations’ sanctions are reinstituted against Iran. Why? Because he says so. The United States brought it to the Security Council and could get virtually no support. So therefore we reinstitute the United Nations’ sanctions unilaterally. That’s the Godfather talking. It doesn’t matter what anyone else thinks. The same is true of every international agreement. The arms-control regime has been torn to shreds, with great danger to us as well as everyone else.
You mention a bunch of dictators that the United States has cozied up to—and not respecting arms-control treaties—but those are things you’ve written about in the past. I’m interested that you say that you think the Trump Administration is a break with the past. How do you think it’s different in some way?
Well, having an arms-control regime is different than not having one. That’s a break, and it’s a break on one of the two most significant issues in human history. We’ve been living for seventy-five years under the shadow of possible nuclear destruction. The arms-control regime that’s been slowly built up over the years—Eisenhower’s Open Skies proposal, the Reagan-Gorbachev I.N.F. treaty, and other pieces—has mitigated the dangers. Trump has been tearing every piece of it to shreds. The only thing that’s left is New START. It has to be ratified by next February. If Trump wins the election or refuses to leave office, it will be gone by February.
The other major threat to human survival in any recognizable form is environmental catastrophe, and, there, Trump is alone in the world. Most countries are doing at least something about it—not as much as they should be, but some of them rather significant, some less so. The United States has pulled out of the Paris Agreement; is refusing to do any of the actions that might help poorer countries deal with the problem; is racing toward maximizing the use of fossil fuels; and, at the same time, just opened the last major nature reserve in the United States for drilling. He has to make sure that we maximize the use of fossil fuels, race to the precipice as quickly as possible, and eliminate the regulations, which not only limit the dangerous effects but also protect Americans.


newyorker--2020-10-30--Democratic Voters Hope Election Day Means Democrats Will Stop Texting Them

WASHINGTON ( The Borowitz Report ) —Democratic voters are anxiously awaiting Election Day in the hope that Democratic candidates and activists will finally stop texting them , a new poll shows .
In conversations with Democratic voters across the country , “ No longer being texted by Democrats ” has emerged as one of the most important issues to them in the 2020 campaign .
“ Don ’ t get me wrong : I love the fact that they ’ re trying to end this Trump nightmare , ” Carol Foyler , a Democratic voter in New Hampshire , said @ @ @ @ @ @ @ sure that I need to be reminded five times a day to vote when I voted by mail a month ago.
” Harland Dorrinson , who lives in Las Vegas , agreed .
“ I got a phone call in the middle of the night , and my heart raced because I thought it might be a family emergency , ” he said .
“ It was just Joe Biden telling me that he and Kamala need my support.
” Tracy Klugian , a resident of Des Moines , said that , while @ @ @ @ @ @ @ first , “ It now feels like borderline stalking.
” “ They keep texting me because I donated twenty-five dollars to defeat Joni Ernst a few months ago , ” he said .
“ But I guess now I feel like—oh , wait a second , I ’ m getting a call .
Never mind , it ’ s just Barack Obama .
”

WASHINGTON (The Borowitz Report)—Democratic voters are anxiously awaiting Election Day in the hope that Democratic candidates and activists will finally stop texting them, a new poll shows.
In conversations with Democratic voters across the country, “No longer being texted by Democrats” has emerged as one of the most important issues to them in the 2020 campaign.
“Don’t get me wrong: I love the fact that they’re trying to end this Trump nightmare,” Carol Foyler, a Democratic voter in New Hampshire, said. “I’m just not sure that I need to be reminded five times a day to vote when I voted by mail a month ago.”
Harland Dorrinson, who lives in Las Vegas, agreed. “I got a phone call in the middle of the night, and my heart raced because I thought it might be a family emergency,” he said. “It was just Joe Biden telling me that he and Kamala need my support.”
Tracy Klugian, a resident of Des Moines, said that, while he appreciated the texts from Democrats at first, “It now feels like borderline stalking.”
“They keep texting me because I donated twenty-five dollars to defeat Joni Ernst a few months ago,” he said. “But I guess now I feel like—oh, wait a second, I’m getting a call. Never mind, it’s just Barack Obama.”


Trump in Review

The Presidency of Donald Trump has been unlike any other in America ’ s history .
While many of his @ @ @ @ @ he managed to reshape our politics in just four years .
On the cusp of @ @ @ @ @ Remnick assesses the Trump Administration ’ s impact on immigration policy , the climate , @ @ @ @ @ the judiciary .
He ’ s joined by Jeannie Suk Gersen , Jonathan Blitzer , @ @ @ @ @ , and Andrew Marantz .
The legal scholar Jeannie Suk Gersen on the call for @ @ @ @ @ Court .
The Trump Administration ’ s Chaotic Attack on the Undocumented The White House @ @ @ @ @ immigrants with high drama and executive orders .
But its efforts have become more sophisticated @ @ @ @ @ expert Bill McKibben explains how the Trump Administration has steadily undone the momentum of the @ @ @ @ @ Politics of the Trump Era Donald Trump ’ s rhetoric toward people of color and @ @ @ @ @ changed what it means to be white in America .

Illustration by Golden Cosmos
The Presidency of Donald Trump has been unlike any other in America’s history. While many of his core promises remain unfulfilled, he managed to reshape our politics in just four years. On the cusp of the 2020 election, David Remnick assesses the Trump Administration’s impact on immigration policy, the climate, white identity politics, and the judiciary. He’s joined by Jeannie Suk Gersen, Jonathan Blitzer, Bill McKibben, Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor, and Andrew Marantz.
Remaking the Federal Courts
The legal scholar Jeannie Suk Gersen on the call for Democrats to pack the Supreme Court.
The Trump Administration’s Chaotic Attack on the Undocumented
The White House launched its campaign against undocumented immigrants with high drama and executive orders. But its efforts have become more sophisticated over time.
Bill McKibben on the Trumpocene
The climate expert Bill McKibben explains how the Trump Administration has steadily undone the momentum of the Obama era.
The Race Politics of the Trump Era
Donald Trump’s rhetoric toward people of color and the Black protest movement have changed what it means to be white in America.