newyorker--2020-11-02--Does Knowing God Just Take Practice?

Does Knowing God Just Take Practice?

The extremity of emotion that pulsed through the congregation every Sunday alarmed me .
I came to think of that church as the place where grownups weep .
Charismatic or evangelical churches are theatres of spiritual catharsis .
You come to such places and lay your burdens before the Lord , open your soul to the Holy Spirit , and “ let all the sadness and evil out ” ( as my mother once put it ) .
This crisis of transformation was often physically arduous .
People shuddered and their eyes filled with tears , while others who had @ @ @ @ @ @ @ hands or prayed over them .
“ Free prayer ” was encouraged ; worshippers might blurt out their hopes , secrets , prophecies .
The natural order of things was inverted : adults , spasming in emotion , appeared to need the calm intervention of the dry-eyed child .
This was where perfectly ordinary English people seemed to lead a kind of double life , an existence that , in its strange abandon and abnormality , appeared almost criminally intense .
What was unsettling to the child , in other words , was @ @ @ @ @ @ @ adult convert : the drama of transferred authority .
The believing adult , pulled toward the commanding Christ , felt the divine power of God ’ s call , and the divinely inspired power of the pastors and the elders who voiced that call : You must change your life .
But the unbelieving or skeptical child , with no great desire to change his life , felt abandoned by those who should have been in charge , and wondered furtively at the authority of that divine command .
Who was this God @ @ @ @ @ @ @ ?
If he didn ’ t exist , then Sunday morning was a mass sickness , nothing more than the contagion of hallucination .
That prospect seemed quite troubling .
But the alternative scenario didn ’ t seem any better .
Evangelical practice presumes a highly interventionist Jesus , a surveillance God who not only numbers the hairs on your head but cares about your job interview , whom you go out with , the house you want to buy .
When my mother told the pastor that I had done well in @ @ @ @ @ @ @ me a hug and offered a hearty “ Praise the Lord !
” I thought that this God probably didn ’ t exist , but , if he did exist , he had all the scrutinizing powers of a meddlesome headmaster , always alert for the smallest failures and successes .
I know how unbalanced this is .
I ’ m sure I should have seen all the human goodness and decency—there was plenty of that around , too .
I bring it up as a way of explaining my somewhat unbalanced interest @ @ @ @ @ @ @ T. M. Luhrmann , who has been studying American evangelical worship for at least twenty years .
In 2012 , Luhrmann published “ When God Talks Back , ” an account of her experiences in charismatic churches in Chicago and the San Francisco area .
These were part of the Vineyard Christian Fellowship , a network of congregations founded in California in the nineteen-seventies .
Curious about everything , open-eyed , endlessly patient , Luhrmann embedded herself like a military correspondent .
Over several years , she interviewed more than fifty congregants , @ @ @ @ @ @ @ Bible-study groups , and reported , with scrupulous neutrality , on their daily spiritual practice .
Her new book , “ How God Becomes Real ” ( Princeton ) , represents a distillation of that deep work on American Evangelicalism , and expands her acute discussion of spiritual practice across other forms of religious devotion that she has studied or encountered over the years—charismatic Christian worship in Ghana and India , Santería ( “ a blend of Yoruba spirit possession and Catholicism that emerged among West African slaves in the Caribbean ” ) @ @ @ @ @ @ @ s first book , “ Persuasions of the Witch ’ s Craft : Ritual Magic in Contemporary England , ” from 1989 , was the product of field work among apparently ordinary Londoners who practiced magic and witchcraft ) .
This comparative framework suits Luhrmann , precisely because she is not interested in the questions that so gripped me when I was young : what or who is God , and how can we know if this God exists ?
Luhrmann passes over questions of belief in search of questions of practice—the technologies @ @ @ @ @ @ @ how worshippers open themselves up to their experiences of God ; how they communicate with gods and spirits and in turn hear those gods and spirits reply to them , and she is interested in the kind of therapeutic transformation that such prayerful conversation has on the worshipper .
She calls this activity “ real-making , ” and adds that her new book is not a believer ’ s or an atheist ’ s , but an anthropologist ’ s work .
“ Rather than presuming that people worship because they believe , @ @ @ @ @ @ @ they worship , ” she writes .
Thus “ the puzzle of religion , ” as she defines it , “ is not the problem of false belief but the question of how gods and spirits become and remain real to people and what this real-making does for humans.
” Whether these questions—of belief and of practice—can be separated quite as staunchly as she wishes is the “ puzzle ” that surely haunts her own work .
These believers speak to their creator , and hear him speak to them .
Generally , @ @ @ @ @ @ @ , and “ God ” is merely the mental attribution of what a voiced divine reply would be like .
But sometimes Luhrmann ’ s subjects attest to having heard an actual voice .
Elaine , who is one of Luhrmann ’ s principal witnesses and the leader of the Bible-study group she joins , tells her that she was praying when she heard the Lord clearly say the words “ Start a school.
” But what believers hear , Luhrmann discovers , depends on where they ’ re from .
In her @ @ @ @ @ @ @ India and Ghana God seems to speak more audibly than in America : “ People reported experiencing God talking more palpably , as if He spoke from outside their inner mind , than He did in the United States.
” She thinks that a culture of skepticism—and perhaps an embarrassment about appearing weird or insane—prompts American worshippers to be somewhat suspicious of such audibility .
Luhrmann emphasizes that one needs a talent for this kind of highly attuned prayer .
She notices how hard her subjects work at their relationships with God .
@ @ @ @ @ @ @ says , is a “ richly layered skill , ” and her subjects speak of developing it as one would speak of any expertise ; they think that “ repeated exposure and attention , coupled with specific training , helps the expert to see things that are really present but that the raw observer just can not .
” At various moments , Luhrmann likens the way her congregants view this aptitude for prayerful communication to wine tasting , being a sonogram technician , playing tennis .
The Vineyard members talk to her @ @ @ @ @ @ @ ” a word that Paul uses in I Corinthians , where he lists various “ gifts ” of the Spirit—the powers of prophecy , of healing , of speaking in tongues , and the “ discerning of spirits.
” I remember how important that talismanic phrase “ gifts of the Spirit ” was in our congregation , because it distinguished those churches fortunate enough to be in possession of such charismatic powers .
Luhrmann tells us that no one at the Vineyard laid out any rules of discernment , but that when she @ @ @ @ @ @ @ was speaking to them they would revert to four “ tests.
” First , did a suggestion seem spontaneous , unlikely , not the kind of thing you would normally say or imagine ?
Second , was what you were hearing the kind of thing God might say , and not in contradiction to Biblical example or teaching ?
( Luhrmann stresses that the Vineyard ’ s God is not the severe God of the Hebrew Bible—who , for instance , orders Abraham to kill his son—but the loving God of the New @ @ @ @ @ @ @ revelation be verified by asking other people who were praying for the same outcome whether they had heard a similar message ?
Fourth , did hearing God ’ s voice impart a sense of peace ?
“ If what you heard ( or saw ) did not , it did not come from God.
” There ’ s a story that the lovable German poet ( and convert from Judaism ) Heinrich Heine , lying on his deathbed in 1856 , calmly uttered these final words about God ’ s forgiveness : “ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ ’ s his job.
” Heine , one imagines , was making fun of the whole contraption of last-minute bargains ; more subtly , he was mocking the idea that we control God , that we know what tricks this little brass effigy we have fabricated in our own image will perform on our behalf .
Evangelicals are very good at knowing what God ’ s job is .
Heine sounds like Ludwig Feuerbach , who proposed , fifteen years before Heine ’ s death , in “ The Essence of Christianity , @ @ @ @ @ @ @ need , projecting onto this creation our deepest anxieties and desires .
Modern Christians in the West like to think of themselves as believers who have left behind any cultic relationship with a usable God .
Doubtless not a few of them harbor a special disdain for American Evangelicalism , with its gaudy , prosperous instrumentalism .
Certainly , if belief were plotted along a spectrum , at one end might lie the austere indescribability of the Jewish or Islamic God ( “ Silence is prayer to thee , ” Maimonides wrote ) @ @ @ @ @ @ @ all-too-knowable God of charismatic worship , happy to be chatted to and apparently happy to chat back .
But it is still a spectrum , and , indeed , any kind of petitionary prayer presumes a God onto whom one is projecting local human attributes .
In this sense , you could say that Christianity is essentially a form of idolatry .
The difficult , unspeakable Jewish God becomes the incarnated Jesus , a God made flesh , who lived among us , who resembles us .
Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer blamed @ @ @ @ @ @ @ the man-God : “ Christ the incarnated spirit is the deified sorcerer.
” They called this “ the spiritualization of magic.
” Evangelicals are hardly the only Christian believers to draw this Jesus , the deified sorcerer , near to them .
I ’ m reminded of that whenever I see professional soccer players crossing themselves as they run onto the field , as if God really cared whether Arsenal beats Manchester United .
Luhrmann would say , with some justice , that in such cases we should focus more on the practice @ @ @ @ @ @ @ is ritualistic , and she would probably add that the soccer player then performs on the field as if he and his team alone determined the outcome of the game , which is to say that—in a sense—he performs as if God didn ’ t exist after all .
In “ How God Becomes Real , ” Luhrmann calls this the art of possessing “ flexible ontologies , ” because “ people may talk as if the gods are straightforwardly real , but they don ’ t act that way.
” A driver @ @ @ @ @ @ @ without his using the brakes “ would seem mad , not devout.
” The real world , dependent on the laws of physics , runs easily alongside a highly elaborated and imagined belief-world , which shares several of the properties of fiction-making and fiction-reading .
The Vineyard believers , Luhrmann discovered , learn how to “ pretend that God is present and to make believe that he is talking back like the very best of buddies.
” As with a fictional character , this God is at once absolutely real and not quite @ @ @ @ @ @ @ imaginative absorption to being “ engrossed in good magical fiction of the Harry Potter kind.
” One of the spiritual guidebooks she consults suggests that worshippers relate to God not as an “ Author , ” a view that will make you “ go mad or despair , ” but as a “ character.
” As she notes , this move effectively abolishes heresy and doubt , by personalizing God ’ s authority .
The “ question of evil , ” the ancient dilemma that has driven people to madness or despair—why is @ @ @ @ @ @ @ providential and loving Author created it ?
—becomes a much easier therapeutic question : why is my life the way it is , and how can Jesus help me to make it better ?
Luhrmann neglects to say that the interventionist evangelical God ought to make the believer feel the problem of evil all the more acutely , since a deity mundane enough to have an interest in the outcome of a job interview might also be presumed to have had some role to play during , say , the Holocaust .
Luhrmann @ @ @ @ @ @ @ constitutes a great deal of evangelical charismatic belief .
Yet her work , at least to the religious skeptic , also carries with it an almost unbearable tension .
She is , for the most part , carefully neutral about the existence of God , or even somewhat hospitable to the notion .
When she talks about the playful or pretend elements of charismatic belief , she reminds her readers that of course it isn ’ t just pretend , that these worshippers are making “ a real claim about the nature of @ @ @ @ @ @ @ objective reality of the Holy Spirit and God ’ s supernatural presence.
” In “ How God Becomes Real , ” when she emphasizes how much training and technique go into spiritual absorption and prayerful communication , she concedes that such an argument might seem to “ explain gods and spirits away , as if the experience of a god were nothing more than a temperamental byproduct.
” That ’ s not what she thinks , she quickly adds , though without telling us why she doesn ’ t think so .
At @ @ @ @ @ @ @ done a bit of “ real-making ” of her own—having apparently been so deeply embedded in Elaine ’ s prayer group that “ I was her prayer partner in house group , and week after week we prayed for specific upcoming job interviews ” for Elaine .
“ These practices work , ” she writes at the start of “ When God Talks Back.
” “ They change people .
That is , they change mental experience , and those changes help people to experience God as more real.
” A page later @ @ @ @ @ @ @ problem that faces “ anyone who believes or wants to believe in God ” is “ not whether God exists , in some abstract , in-principle , out-in-the-universe way , but how to find God in the everyday world and how to know that what you have found is God , and not someone else ’ s deluded fantasy or your own selfish wish.
” This sounds like a reasonable caveat , but it ’ s something of a fudge .
Can the practice of finding God be so easily separated from the @ @ @ @ @ @ @ God to find ?
Presumably , once you are convinced that the God you have found is not a “ deluded fantasy , ” you also believe that God exists , both as an abstract proposition and as an actual presence .
Luhrmann ends “ When God Talks Back ” by telling us that she doesn ’ t “ presume to know ultimate reality ” but does feel that she has “ come to know God.
” She wouldn ’ t call herself a Christian , but finds herself defending Christianity .
( @ @ @ @ @ @ @ denomination that most evangelicals would consider essentially godless . )
At the end of “ How God Becomes Real , ” she announces that she doesn ’ t believe that God exists , if by God one means “ an invisible other somehow out there , sitting apart , a man with a beard in the sky.
” On the other hand , she finds it “ uncomfortable to characterize what one might call believers as having false beliefs.
” Instead , she finds herself caught in the middle—between discounting the idea of @ @ @ @ @ @ @ in the world as “ table and chairs ” and discounting the words of the believers she has interviewed as “ mere metaphors ” ( which would seem as if she were judging their beliefs as false ) .

I was nine or ten when my parents left their stolid Anglican church for one that was undergoing what was known as “charismatic renewal.” This was the mid-nineteen-seventies, in the northern English city of Durham, but the energies were all American. The young congregants—our church was popular with local university students—played guitars, gave testimonials, raised their hands in rhapsody, and “danced with the spirit” in the aisles. Sometimes, though not often, people spoke in tongues, a diabolical glossolalia that I found deeply fascinating. There was a church band—twelve-string guitars, tambourines, trumpet, and flute. We sang American hymns, songs I vaguely thought of as “Californian.” I grew to dread one of the most popular, “I Am the Bread of Life,” which had a chorus with the words “And I will raise him up.” As the chorus soared, earnest hands were raised heavenward—including the hands of my parents, who were always moved by this song to forgo their customary physical reticence. I would glance sideways at them and then quickly look away, as if I’d witnessed the throes of some primal scene.
The extremity of emotion that pulsed through the congregation every Sunday alarmed me. I came to think of that church as the place where grownups weep. Charismatic or evangelical churches are theatres of spiritual catharsis. You come to such places and lay your burdens before the Lord, open your soul to the Holy Spirit, and “let all the sadness and evil out” (as my mother once put it). This crisis of transformation was often physically arduous. People shuddered and their eyes filled with tears, while others who had already been through such experiences held their hands or prayed over them. “Free prayer” was encouraged; worshippers might blurt out their hopes, secrets, prophecies. The natural order of things was inverted: adults, spasming in emotion, appeared to need the calm intervention of the dry-eyed child. This was where perfectly ordinary English people seemed to lead a kind of double life, an existence that, in its strange abandon and abnormality, appeared almost criminally intense.
What was unsettling to the child, in other words, was probably what was so exciting to the adult convert: the drama of transferred authority. The believing adult, pulled toward the commanding Christ, felt the divine power of God’s call, and the divinely inspired power of the pastors and the elders who voiced that call: You must change your life. But the unbelieving or skeptical child, with no great desire to change his life, felt abandoned by those who should have been in charge, and wondered furtively at the authority of that divine command. Who was this God, this Jesus, this Holy Spirit? If he didn’t exist, then Sunday morning was a mass sickness, nothing more than the contagion of hallucination. That prospect seemed quite troubling. But the alternative scenario didn’t seem any better. Evangelical practice presumes a highly interventionist Jesus, a surveillance God who not only numbers the hairs on your head but cares about your job interview, whom you go out with, the house you want to buy. When my mother told the pastor that I had done well in a recent school exam, he gave me a hug and offered a hearty “Praise the Lord!” I thought that this God probably didn’t exist, but, if he did exist, he had all the scrutinizing powers of a meddlesome headmaster, always alert for the smallest failures and successes.
I know how unbalanced this is. I’m sure I should have seen all the human goodness and decency—there was plenty of that around, too. I bring it up as a way of explaining my somewhat unbalanced interest in the work of the Stanford anthropologist T. M. Luhrmann, who has been studying American evangelical worship for at least twenty years. In 2012, Luhrmann published “When God Talks Back,” an account of her experiences in charismatic churches in Chicago and the San Francisco area. These were part of the Vineyard Christian Fellowship, a network of congregations founded in California in the nineteen-seventies. Curious about everything, open-eyed, endlessly patient, Luhrmann embedded herself like a military correspondent. Over several years, she interviewed more than fifty congregants, worshipped and prayed with them, joined Bible-study groups, and reported, with scrupulous neutrality, on their daily spiritual practice.
Her new book, “How God Becomes Real” (Princeton), represents a distillation of that deep work on American Evangelicalism, and expands her acute discussion of spiritual practice across other forms of religious devotion that she has studied or encountered over the years—charismatic Christian worship in Ghana and India, Santería (“a blend of Yoruba spirit possession and Catholicism that emerged among West African slaves in the Caribbean”), and British witchcraft (Luhrmann’s first book, “Persuasions of the Witch’s Craft: Ritual Magic in Contemporary England,” from 1989, was the product of field work among apparently ordinary Londoners who practiced magic and witchcraft).
This comparative framework suits Luhrmann, precisely because she is not interested in the questions that so gripped me when I was young: what or who is God, and how can we know if this God exists? Luhrmann passes over questions of belief in search of questions of practice—the technologies of prayer. She wants to know how worshippers open themselves up to their experiences of God; how they communicate with gods and spirits and in turn hear those gods and spirits reply to them, and she is interested in the kind of therapeutic transformation that such prayerful conversation has on the worshipper. She calls this activity “real-making,” and adds that her new book is not a believer’s or an atheist’s, but an anthropologist’s work. “Rather than presuming that people worship because they believe, we ask instead whether people believe because they worship,” she writes. Thus “the puzzle of religion,” as she defines it, “is not the problem of false belief but the question of how gods and spirits become and remain real to people and what this real-making does for humans.” Whether these questions—of belief and of practice—can be separated quite as staunchly as she wishes is the “puzzle” that surely haunts her own work.
Readers without firsthand experience of evangelical communities were probably surprised by some of the day-to-day details in “When God Talks Back.” Luhrmann describes, at the Vineyard churches, a relationship with God of casual and remarkably friendly intimacy. She prepares us by cautioning that her evangelical subjects approach God in a way that, to traditional believers, might seem “vulgar, overemotional, or even psychotic.” Among her interviewees, Elaine prays for guidance about whether to take a roommate or move to a new apartment. Kate gets angry with God and “yells at him when things go wrong—when she organizes a trip for the church and the bus company is flaky or it rains.” Stacy prays for a good haircut, and Hannah asks God about whom to date, and sometimes feels he is pranking her in little ways: “I’ll trip and fall, and I’ll be like, Thanks, God.” Rachel asks for help with how to dress: “Like, God, what should I wear? . . . I think God cares about really, really little things in my life.” Other women speak of setting an evening aside for a “date night” with the Lord (men speak of “quiet time” with God, Luhrmann reports). They are perhaps encouraged in this thinking by their pastor, who suggests that his congregants should “set out a second cup of coffee for God in the morning—to pour God an actual cup of steaming coffee, to place it on an actual table, and to sit down at that table . . . to talk to God about the things on our minds.”
These believers speak to their creator, and hear him speak to them. Generally, God’s voice is not audible, and “God” is merely the mental attribution of what a voiced divine reply would be like. But sometimes Luhrmann’s subjects attest to having heard an actual voice. Elaine, who is one of Luhrmann’s principal witnesses and the leader of the Bible-study group she joins, tells her that she was praying when she heard the Lord clearly say the words “Start a school.” But what believers hear, Luhrmann discovers, depends on where they’re from. In her new book, she finds that in India and Ghana God seems to speak more audibly than in America: “People reported experiencing God talking more palpably, as if He spoke from outside their inner mind, than He did in the United States.” She thinks that a culture of skepticism—and perhaps an embarrassment about appearing weird or insane—prompts American worshippers to be somewhat suspicious of such audibility.
Luhrmann emphasizes that one needs a talent for this kind of highly attuned prayer. She notices how hard her subjects work at their relationships with God. Hearing God’s voice, she says, is a “richly layered skill,” and her subjects speak of developing it as one would speak of any expertise; they think that “repeated exposure and attention, coupled with specific training, helps the expert to see things that are really present but that the raw observer just cannot.” At various moments, Luhrmann likens the way her congregants view this aptitude for prayerful communication to wine tasting, being a sonogram technician, playing tennis. The Vineyard members talk to her about the importance of “discernment,” a word that Paul uses in I Corinthians, where he lists various “gifts” of the Spirit—the powers of prophecy, of healing, of speaking in tongues, and the “discerning of spirits.” I remember how important that talismanic phrase “gifts of the Spirit” was in our congregation, because it distinguished those churches fortunate enough to be in possession of such charismatic powers.
Luhrmann tells us that no one at the Vineyard laid out any rules of discernment, but that when she asked people how they knew that God was speaking to them they would revert to four “tests.” First, did a suggestion seem spontaneous, unlikely, not the kind of thing you would normally say or imagine? Second, was what you were hearing the kind of thing God might say, and not in contradiction to Biblical example or teaching? (Luhrmann stresses that the Vineyard’s God is not the severe God of the Hebrew Bible—who, for instance, orders Abraham to kill his son—but the loving God of the New Testament.) Third, could the revelation be verified by asking other people who were praying for the same outcome whether they had heard a similar message? Fourth, did hearing God’s voice impart a sense of peace? “If what you heard (or saw) did not, it did not come from God.”
I have a flyer from the Jehovah’s Witnesses that asks “Can We Really Believe What the Bible Says?” and lists three reasons for doing so, the third of which is “God cannot lie. The Bible plainly states: ‘It is impossible for God to lie.’ (Hebrews 6:18).” Below this, a friend of mine has written, in pen, “Q.E.D.” The four tests of the Vineyard are beset by a similar circularity, and, in fairness, it’s not clear how any so-called theological test could escape it. The evangelical relationship to God is so possessive, and so near-idolatrous, that it’s hard to see how one could get outside it and manage the necessary “verification.” Idolatrous, because conceiving a God who is interested in what shirt you wear can look a lot like inventing a God for your own small purposes. Again and again, evangelical worshippers seem to use God to validate the great luxury of capitalism: choice. Should I choose Denver or Chicago? This job or that job? That boyfriend or not? (The usual formulation for validating your decision is “I feel God calling me to do x.”)
“I’m buying some back-to-office clothes.” Cartoon by Amy Hwang Copy link to cartoon Copy link to cartoon Shop Shop
There’s a story that the lovable German poet (and convert from Judaism) Heinrich Heine, lying on his deathbed in 1856, calmly uttered these final words about God’s forgiveness: “He’ll forgive me; that’s his job.” Heine, one imagines, was making fun of the whole contraption of last-minute bargains; more subtly, he was mocking the idea that we control God, that we know what tricks this little brass effigy we have fabricated in our own image will perform on our behalf. Evangelicals are very good at knowing what God’s job is. Heine sounds like Ludwig Feuerbach, who proposed, fifteen years before Heine’s death, in “The Essence of Christianity,” that we make the God we need, projecting onto this creation our deepest anxieties and desires.
Modern Christians in the West like to think of themselves as believers who have left behind any cultic relationship with a usable God. Doubtless not a few of them harbor a special disdain for American Evangelicalism, with its gaudy, prosperous instrumentalism. Certainly, if belief were plotted along a spectrum, at one end might lie the austere indescribability of the Jewish or Islamic God (“Silence is prayer to thee,” Maimonides wrote) and at the other the noisy, all-too-knowable God of charismatic worship, happy to be chatted to and apparently happy to chat back. But it is still a spectrum, and, indeed, any kind of petitionary prayer presumes a God onto whom one is projecting local human attributes. In this sense, you could say that Christianity is essentially a form of idolatry. The difficult, unspeakable Jewish God becomes the incarnated Jesus, a God made flesh, who lived among us, who resembles us. Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer blamed Christian anti-Semitism on just this idolatry of the man-God: “Christ the incarnated spirit is the deified sorcerer.” They called this “the spiritualization of magic.” Evangelicals are hardly the only Christian believers to draw this Jesus, the deified sorcerer, near to them. I’m reminded of that whenever I see professional soccer players crossing themselves as they run onto the field, as if God really cared whether Arsenal beats Manchester United.
Luhrmann would say, with some justice, that in such cases we should focus more on the practice than on the beliefs. Crossing oneself is ritualistic, and she would probably add that the soccer player then performs on the field as if he and his team alone determined the outcome of the game, which is to say that—in a sense—he performs as if God didn’t exist after all. In “How God Becomes Real,” Luhrmann calls this the art of possessing “flexible ontologies,” because “people may talk as if the gods are straightforwardly real, but they don’t act that way.” A driver who prays that the car will stop without his using the brakes “would seem mad, not devout.” The real world, dependent on the laws of physics, runs easily alongside a highly elaborated and imagined belief-world, which shares several of the properties of fiction-making and fiction-reading. The Vineyard believers, Luhrmann discovered, learn how to “pretend that God is present and to make believe that he is talking back like the very best of buddies.” As with a fictional character, this God is at once absolutely real and not quite real. Luhrmann likens the capacity for imaginative absorption to being “engrossed in good magical fiction of the Harry Potter kind.” One of the spiritual guidebooks she consults suggests that worshippers relate to God not as an “Author,” a view that will make you “go mad or despair,” but as a “character.” As she notes, this move effectively abolishes heresy and doubt, by personalizing God’s authority. The “question of evil,” the ancient dilemma that has driven people to madness or despair—why is the world beset by tragedy if a providential and loving Author created it?—becomes a much easier therapeutic question: why is my life the way it is, and how can Jesus help me to make it better? Luhrmann neglects to say that the interventionist evangelical God ought to make the believer feel the problem of evil all the more acutely, since a deity mundane enough to have an interest in the outcome of a job interview might also be presumed to have had some role to play during, say, the Holocaust.


newyorker--2020-11-02--Shep Smith’s Fresh Start

Shep Smith’s Fresh Start

“ How ’ s Shep Smith doing ?
” President Trump tweeted earlier this year , in the same way that one might ask whatever happened to Tobey Maguire , or to Dunkaroos .
For twenty-three years , Smith worked at Fox News ; he was the host of “ Shepard Smith Reporting , ” one of the few nonpartisan programs on the network , which aired at 3 P.M. on weekdays .
Smith was one of the first people hired by Roger Ailes , Fox News ’ s founding C.E.O.
, and he stuck it out through the network @ @ @ @ @ @ @ ’ s sexual-harassment scandal to the breakup of Sean Hannity and Alan Colmes .
He tolerated abuse from Trump , who gave him the moniker “ low ratings Shep Smith.
” And , after coming out as gay , he put up with viewers demanding that his show be cancelled .
Then came Tucker Carlson , the channel ’ s new 8 P.M. guy .
One evening , Carlson mocked Smith on the air , implying that the daytime host had a liberal bias .
Two weeks later , Smith resigned , just @ @ @ @ @ @ @ extended his contract—a reported fifteen million dollars annually .
That was a year ago .
“ I ’ m doing great , ” Smith said the other day , over Zoom .
“ I feel like I have a new lease on life.
” Wearing a blue shirt and AirPods , he was wide-eyed and cheery—like Kimmy Schmidt if she had escaped from a right-wing news network rather than from a doomsday cult .
Last month , Smith returned to television as an anchor for CNBC , the business-news network owned by NBCUniversal @ @ @ @ @ @ @ novel concept of trying to do a newscast that ’ s about the news and eliminating opinion from it , ” he explained . )
His show , “ The News with Shepard Smith , ” is just Shepard Smith delivering the news .
“ We feel kind of like explorers , ” he said , of his team , “ but we ’ re recharting territory from long ago.
” He was Zooming from what he called his “ COVID office , ” at the CNBC headquarters , in Englewood Cliffs , @ @ @ @ @ @ @ , Poland Spring water , and P.P.E .
strewn about .
“ I haven ’ t done anything to it , ” he said .
“ I came in here , and a couple of days later we were on the air.
” At CNBC , the big names are Mark Cuban ( of “ Shark Tank ” ) , Jim Cramer ( of “ Mad Money ” ) , and Jay Leno ( of “ Jay Leno ’ s Garage ” ) .
“ We ’ re mostly a business place , @ @ @ @ @ @ @ of the discussion around here is about data and stocks and money .
I didn ’ t know how to fit in at first .
I was trying to do that same thing for which I have muscle memory , in a place that has no muscle memory for the thing that I do.
” What are the advantages of the move , aside from not having to worry about his more popular colleagues roasting him on air ?
One is that Smith has a prime-time slot .
( CNBC ’ s past @ @ @ @ @ @ @ No Deal ” and “ Make Me a Millionaire Inventor.
” ) But , as Smith pointed out , for many Americans , prime time is dinnertime .
He imagines that many of his viewers watch his show while they eat , and so he has designed it accordingly .
“ As they ’ re having their meal , we want to sort of present our metaphorical meal of the day , ” he said .
“ Here ’ s the interesting stuff , the ‘ gee whiz ’ stuff .
Here ’ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ s the stuff that ’ s hard to swallow .
Here ’ s something kind of fun , maybe to share with your friends .
And here ’ s something kind of soothing , like a nice glass of wine .
Maybe something inspiring , you know ?
We ’ re all lacking for inspiration.
” ( That night ’ s headlines included “ FIRE FATIGUE , ” “ EXTREME WEATHER , ” and “ MAN FINDS GIANT JELLYFISH WHILE RUNNING ON FLORIDA BEACH.
” ) The ratings haven ’ t been so @ @ @ @ @ @ @ Smith ” is in last place for its cable-news time slot , garnering fewer than three hundred thousand nightly viewers .
( “ Tucker Carlson Tonight ” recently broke a cable-news record , with an average nightly audience of 4.3 million . )
“ Who knows if we ’ ll ever get a boatload of viewers , ” Smith said .
“ But I know that we ’ re gon na put together something that , when the day is done , I ’ m gon na sleep well.
” He doesn ’ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ “ I get really stressed out by all of the yelling at each other about how mad everyone is , ” he said .
“ I know you ’ re mad—this is clear .
You on the left and you on the right and those of you stuck inside , you ’ re all angry .
I get it .
So everybody ’ s about to vote and we ’ ll move on .
I like thinking about , Are our votes going to get counted ?
Is this going to be fair @ @ @ @ @ @ @ on what ’ s happening in Pennsylvania , what ’ s happening in Texas right now , in Harris County .
Can you vote ?
Is your vote gon na count ?
These are the things I care about .
I don ’ t care about people yelling at each other .
I ’ ve had enough .
I can ’ t take any more yelling.
” ♦

Shepard Smith Illustration by João Fazenda
“How’s Shep Smith doing?” President Trump tweeted earlier this year, in the same way that one might ask whatever happened to Tobey Maguire, or to Dunkaroos. For twenty-three years, Smith worked at Fox News; he was the host of “Shepard Smith Reporting,” one of the few nonpartisan programs on the network, which aired at 3 P.M. on weekdays. Smith was one of the first people hired by Roger Ailes, Fox News’s founding C.E.O., and he stuck it out through the network’s various kerfuffles, from Ailes’s sexual-harassment scandal to the breakup of Sean Hannity and Alan Colmes. He tolerated abuse from Trump, who gave him the moniker “low ratings Shep Smith.” And, after coming out as gay, he put up with viewers demanding that his show be cancelled. Then came Tucker Carlson, the channel’s new 8 P.M. guy. One evening, Carlson mocked Smith on the air, implying that the daytime host had a liberal bias. Two weeks later, Smith resigned, just over a year after the network had extended his contract—a reported fifteen million dollars annually.
That was a year ago. “I’m doing great,” Smith said the other day, over Zoom. “I feel like I have a new lease on life.” Wearing a blue shirt and AirPods, he was wide-eyed and cheery—like Kimmy Schmidt if she had escaped from a right-wing news network rather than from a doomsday cult.
Last month, Smith returned to television as an anchor for CNBC, the business-news network owned by NBCUniversal. (“They were into this novel concept of trying to do a newscast that’s about the news and eliminating opinion from it,” he explained.) His show, “The News with Shepard Smith,” is just Shepard Smith delivering the news. “We feel kind of like explorers,” he said, of his team, “but we’re recharting territory from long ago.” He was Zooming from what he called his “COVID office,” at the CNBC headquarters, in Englewood Cliffs, New Jersey—a bare-bones space with Clorox wipes, Poland Spring water, and P.P.E. strewn about. “I haven’t done anything to it,” he said. “I came in here, and a couple of days later we were on the air.”
At CNBC, the big names are Mark Cuban (of “Shark Tank”), Jim Cramer (of “Mad Money”), and Jay Leno (of “Jay Leno’s Garage”). “We’re mostly a business place,” Smith said, “and all of the discussion around here is about data and stocks and money. I didn’t know how to fit in at first. I was trying to do that same thing for which I have muscle memory, in a place that has no muscle memory for the thing that I do.”
What are the advantages of the move, aside from not having to worry about his more popular colleagues roasting him on air? One is that Smith has a prime-time slot. (CNBC’s past prime-time programs have included “Deal or No Deal” and “Make Me a Millionaire Inventor.”) But, as Smith pointed out, for many Americans, prime time is dinnertime. He imagines that many of his viewers watch his show while they eat, and so he has designed it accordingly. “As they’re having their meal, we want to sort of present our metaphorical meal of the day,” he said. “Here’s the interesting stuff, the ‘gee whiz’ stuff. Here’s the important stuff. Here’s the stuff that’s hard to swallow. Here’s something kind of fun, maybe to share with your friends. And here’s something kind of soothing, like a nice glass of wine. Maybe something inspiring, you know? We’re all lacking for inspiration.” (That night’s headlines included “FIRE FATIGUE,” “EXTREME WEATHER,” and “MAN FINDS GIANT JELLYFISH WHILE RUNNING ON FLORIDA BEACH.”)
The ratings haven’t been so good. “The News with Shepard Smith” is in last place for its cable-news time slot, garnering fewer than three hundred thousand nightly viewers. (“Tucker Carlson Tonight” recently broke a cable-news record, with an average nightly audience of 4.3 million.) “Who knows if we’ll ever get a boatload of viewers,” Smith said. “But I know that we’re gonna put together something that, when the day is done, I’m gonna sleep well.”
He doesn’t watch his competitors’ shows. “I get really stressed out by all of the yelling at each other about how mad everyone is,” he said. “I know you’re mad—this is clear. You on the left and you on the right and those of you stuck inside, you’re all angry. I get it. So everybody’s about to vote and we’ll move on. I like thinking about, Are our votes going to get counted? Is this going to be fair? We’re diving into data on what’s happening in Pennsylvania, what’s happening in Texas right now, in Harris County. Can you vote? Is your vote gonna count? These are the things I care about. I don’t care about people yelling at each other. I’ve had enough. I can’t take any more yelling.” ♦


newyorker--2020-11-02--How the Coronavirus Hacks the Immune System

We tend to associate “ survival of the fittest ” with lions hunting antelope .
But disease—the predation of parasites upon hosts—is actually the most potent force in evolution .
“ Every single phase of life has been selected to try to avoid parasitism , ” Stephen Hedrick , an immunologist at the University of California , San Diego , told me .
“ It ’ s driven evolution as hard as it could be driven .
Because it ’ s life or death all the time .
And it ’ s a co-evolution.
” Whenever a host develops an @ @ @ @ @ @ @ survival of the very parasites that can defeat it .
Hosts , meanwhile , tend to be at an evolutionary disadvantage .
“ Bacterial or viral populations are truly vast in size , ” Robert Jack and Louis Du Pasquier write , in “ Evolutionary Concepts in Immunology , ” and the wide variation among them gives natural selection many candidate organisms upon which to work .
Viruses and bacteria also reproduce half a million times faster than we do .
Given this “ generation gap , ” Jack and Du Pasquier write @ @ @ @ @ @ @ on earth we could possibly have survived.
” A clue comes from the amoeba Dictyostelium discoideum .
It spends much of its life marauding alone , eating things .
But , when food is scarce , it releases molecules that serve as a flocking signal to others of its kind ; the amoebas merge , forming a superorganism of as many as a hundred thousand members .
For this multicellular “ slime mold ” to be effective , almost all the amoebas must give up their ability to eat , lest they prey @ @ @ @ @ @ @ retain it don ’ t eat for themselves ; rather , they swallow up debris and dispose of it to protect the organism .
The other amoebas , freed from the burdens of offense and defense , form a “ fruiting body ” that releases spores for reproduction .
Although none of the individuals would survive on their own , the collective thrives .
A human being is likewise a society of cells , with a coördinated defense .
Our circulatory system doubles as a communications network ; our blood vessels have an @ @ @ @ @ @ @ charged with the intelligent routing of immune cells .
When ordinary cells are infected by a pathogen , they send signals to their neighbors , who pass them on until they reach the endothelial cells .
In response , the blood vessels swell , creating off-ramps through which white blood cells , which are part of the immune system ’ s circulating defense force , can flow toward the site of infection .
This is merely the beginning of our immune response .
Our bodies , like the United States government , make @ @ @ @ @ @ @ Our bone marrow produces billions of immune cells each day , and then discards most of them .
Almost every one of our cells is perpetually scanning itself for evidence of invasion .
The system is complex—ask a microbiologist about immunology and she ’ ll whistle , wishing you luck .
Those who describe it often resort to metaphor .
Contemplating the enormous amounts of information that it collects and synthesizes throughout the body , Jack and Du Pasquier suggest that “ the immune system can be regarded , above all else , @ @ @ @ @ @ @ is so finely tuned that we seldom notice it at work .
Our guts burble with foreign microbes outnumbering human cells roughly ten to one , but the good are seamlessly sorted from the bad ; every day , some of our cells grow into cancers , but the immune system dispatches them before they become dangerous .
On a recent camping trip , I was bitten three times by some kind of insect while putting my arm into a jacket sleeve .
Who knows what entered my bloodstream .
Almost immediately , @ @ @ @ @ @ @ later , the welts came down .
In moments like that , it is easy to assume that we hold the advantage over the parasites .
Born to Dutch parents , tenOever grew up in rural Ontario .
Now forty-three , he approaches his work with an amused , easy confidence .
On March 26th , he gathered his team and they discussed their plan .
They would take half a dozen viruses—including SARS , MERS , and the new coronavirus—and induce infections in hosts , starting with cells in a petri dish @ @ @ @ @ @ @ d study the results to understand what made the new coronavirus unique .
Their goal was to have results in three weeks .
The infections took place inside the lab ’ s Biosafety Level-3 facility , a series of nested rooms in which each is kept at a lower pressure than the one surrounding it , so that air flows inward and up an exhaust chute containing sensitive filters .
In the “ warm zone , ” where there is always the danger of being exposed to a live virus , you must @ @ @ @ @ @ @ gloves , two sets of shoe covers , a respirator mask , a face shield , and a bouffant cap .
You work with your arms under a hood , protected by an extra set of disposable sleeves .
When you ’ re finished with your experiment , you disinfect this gear and throw it into an autoclave—a kind of kiln—where it cooks for twenty minutes .
To return to the “ cold zone , ” you remove your shoe covers before stepping over a red line .
In New York , at @ @ @ @ @ @ @ had a whiff of the absurd : in a city where around three thousand new coronavirus cases were being diagnosed each day , you were more likely to be exposed to a highly pathogenic virus in your neighborhood .
A Ph.D. student named Daisy Hoagland , who had herself just recovered from a mild case of COVID-19 , prepared the samples for analysis .
Using a shaker machine and test tubes loaded with sand and ceramic pellets , she turned a suspension of ferret lung cells—some from infected animals , and others from @ @ @ @ @ @ @ juice , then separated the solution in a centrifuge that generated fifteen thousand g ’ s .
It is painstaking work .
( “ I listen to a lot of podcasts , ” Hoagland said . )
Using a pipette , she carefully transferred the topmost layer , a pink liquid , into another tube , which she centrifuged again , until she had a purified sample of RNA .
This she handed off to her colleagues Rasmus Møller and Maryline Panis for sequencing .
The process takes sixteen hours to complete , @ @ @ @ @ @ @ of the pandemic lived in Greenpoint , Brooklyn , often biked home at dawn over the Pulaski Bridge .
Whereas the sequencing of DNA defined molecular biology in the early two-thousands , the sequencing of RNA defines it today .
If you imagine a cell as a kind of computer , then your DNA contains all the software that it could possibly run .
It is a somewhat astonishing fact of life that the exact same DNA is shared by every cell in your body , from the skin to the brain ; @ @ @ @ @ @ @ because , in each of them , a molecular gizmo “ transcribes ” some DNA segments rather than others into molecules of single-stranded RNA .
These bits of RNA are in turn used as the blueprints for proteins , the molecular machines that do most of a cell ’ s work .
If DNA is your phone ’ s home screen , then transcription is like tapping an icon .
By sampling the RNA present in a group of cells , researchers can see which programs those cells are running at that moment @ @ @ @ @ @ @ have been infected with a virus , they can see how that virus substitutes its own software .
TenOever ’ s team quickly discovered that SARS-CoV-2 was uncannily good at disrupting cellular programming .
A typical virus replaces less than one per cent of the software in the cells it infects .
With SARS-CoV-2 , tenOever said , about sixty per cent of the RNA in an infected cell is of viral origin— “ which is the highest I ’ ve ever seen .
Polio comes close.
” Among other things , the @ @ @ @ @ @ @ use to warn others about infection .
Normally , as part of what is known as the “ innate ” immune response—so called because it is genetically hardwired , and not tailored to a specific pathogen—a cell sends out two kinds of signals .
One signal , carried by molecules called interferons , travels to neighboring cells , telling them to build defenses that slow viral spread .
Another signal , transmitted through molecules called cytokines , gets a message to the circulatory system ’ s epithelial lining .
The white blood cells @ @ @ @ @ @ @ t just eat invaders and infected cells ; they also gather up their dismembered protein parts .
Elsewhere in the immune system , these fragments are used to create virus-specific antibodies , as part of a sophisticated “ adaptive ” response that can take six or seven days to develop .
Usually , the viruses that humans care about are successful because they shut down both of these signalling programs .
The coronavirus is different .
“ It seems to block only one of those two arms , ” tenOever told me .
@ @ @ @ @ @ @ nothing about the cytokines ; it evades the local defenses but allows the cells it infects to call for reinforcements .
White blood cells are powerful weapons : they arrive on an inflammatory tide , destroying cells on every side , clogging up passages with the wreckage .
They are meant to be used selectively , on invaders that have been contained in a small area .
With the coronavirus , they are deployed too widely—a carpet bombing , rather than a surgical strike .
As they do their work , inflammation distends @ @ @ @ @ @ @ like a fog .
In late May , tenOever ’ s team shared its findings in the biweekly journal Cell .
In their article , they argued that it ’ s this imbalanced immune response that gives severe COVID-19—which can sometimes cause blood clots , strange swelling in children , and ultra-inflammatory “ cytokine storms ” —the character of an autoimmune disorder .
As the virus spreads unchecked through the body , it drags a destructive immune reaction behind it .
Individuals with COVID-19 face the same challenge as nations during the pandemic @ @ @ @ @ @ @ small sites of infection early—so that a targeted response can root them out—they end up mounting interventions so large that the shock inflicts its own damage .
Immunology as we know it began in earnest in 1882 , at the Italian seaside .
Ilya Metchnikoff , a Russian zoologist who would later help popularize yogurt in Western Europe , had developed an obsession with digestion , and with the process by which one cell eats another .
In his memoir , Metchnikoff described the insight that would define his career .
His family @ @ @ @ @ @ @ he ’ d stayed home , “ observing the life in the mobile cells of a transparent starfish larva ” through his microscope .
Suddenly , a thought occurred to him :

A billion years ago, in the shallow waters where early life evolved, our ancestors led lives of constant emergency. In a barren world, each single-celled amoeba was an inconceivably rich concentration of resources, and to live was to be beset by parasites. One of these, the giant Mimivirus, masqueraded as food; within four hours of being eaten, it could turn an amoeba into a virus factory. And yet, as the nineteenth-century mathematician Augustus de Morgan said, “Great fleas have little fleas upon their backs to bite ’em, and little fleas have lesser fleas, and so ad infinitum.” The Mimivirus had its own parasites, which sometimes followed it as it entered an amoeba. Once inside, they crippled the Mimivirus factory. This trick was so useful that, eventually, amoebas integrated the parasites’ genes into their own genomes, creating one of the earliest weapons in the immune system.
We tend to associate “survival of the fittest” with lions hunting antelope. But disease—the predation of parasites upon hosts—is actually the most potent force in evolution. “Every single phase of life has been selected to try to avoid parasitism,” Stephen Hedrick, an immunologist at the University of California, San Diego, told me. “It’s driven evolution as hard as it could be driven. Because it’s life or death all the time. And it’s a co-evolution.” Whenever a host develops an immune defense, it perversely rewards the survival of the very parasites that can defeat it. Hosts, meanwhile, tend to be at an evolutionary disadvantage. “Bacterial or viral populations are truly vast in size,” Robert Jack and Louis Du Pasquier write, in “Evolutionary Concepts in Immunology,” and the wide variation among them gives natural selection many candidate organisms upon which to work. Viruses and bacteria also reproduce half a million times faster than we do. Given this “generation gap,” Jack and Du Pasquier write, “one might well ask how on earth we could possibly have survived.”
A clue comes from the amoeba Dictyostelium discoideum. It spends much of its life marauding alone, eating things. But, when food is scarce, it releases molecules that serve as a flocking signal to others of its kind; the amoebas merge, forming a superorganism of as many as a hundred thousand members. For this multicellular “slime mold” to be effective, almost all the amoebas must give up their ability to eat, lest they prey on one another. The few that retain it don’t eat for themselves; rather, they swallow up debris and dispose of it to protect the organism. The other amoebas, freed from the burdens of offense and defense, form a “fruiting body” that releases spores for reproduction. Although none of the individuals would survive on their own, the collective thrives.
A human being is likewise a society of cells, with a coördinated defense. Our circulatory system doubles as a communications network; our blood vessels have an “endothelial” lining—a surface that is charged with the intelligent routing of immune cells. When ordinary cells are infected by a pathogen, they send signals to their neighbors, who pass them on until they reach the endothelial cells. In response, the blood vessels swell, creating off-ramps through which white blood cells, which are part of the immune system’s circulating defense force, can flow toward the site of infection. This is merely the beginning of our immune response.
Our bodies, like the United States government, make a startlingly large investment in defense. Our bone marrow produces billions of immune cells each day, and then discards most of them. Almost every one of our cells is perpetually scanning itself for evidence of invasion. The system is complex—ask a microbiologist about immunology and she’ll whistle, wishing you luck. Those who describe it often resort to metaphor. Contemplating the enormous amounts of information that it collects and synthesizes throughout the body, Jack and Du Pasquier suggest that “the immune system can be regarded, above all else, as a computational device.”
This device is so finely tuned that we seldom notice it at work. Our guts burble with foreign microbes outnumbering human cells roughly ten to one, but the good are seamlessly sorted from the bad; every day, some of our cells grow into cancers, but the immune system dispatches them before they become dangerous. On a recent camping trip, I was bitten three times by some kind of insect while putting my arm into a jacket sleeve. Who knows what entered my bloodstream. Almost immediately, three welts formed; a few minutes later, the welts came down. In moments like that, it is easy to assume that we hold the advantage over the parasites.
On Friday, March 6th, a purified sample of the novel coronavirus arrived at the laboratory of a virologist named Benjamin tenOever, at the Icahn School of Medicine, in East Harlem. Many virology labs focus on a single pathogen, but tenOever’s studies dozens of viruses and how they change the cells they infect. During the winter, tenOever and his team were focussed on the flu. But, as the coronavirus pandemic began to escalate in the U.S., they initiated a side project, infecting lung cells in a dish with SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes COVID-19, and studying the results. TenOever posted their preliminary analysis to Twitter on March 14th. Within a week, a program manager at the Defense Department e-mailed to ask about the research. Two weeks later, Defense gave tenOever a $6.3-million grant to find out what the new virus was doing to our immune systems.
Born to Dutch parents, tenOever grew up in rural Ontario. Now forty-three, he approaches his work with an amused, easy confidence. On March 26th, he gathered his team and they discussed their plan. They would take half a dozen viruses—including SARS, MERS, and the new coronavirus—and induce infections in hosts, starting with cells in a petri dish and graduating to ferrets. They’d study the results to understand what made the new coronavirus unique. Their goal was to have results in three weeks.
The infections took place inside the lab’s Biosafety Level-3 facility, a series of nested rooms in which each is kept at a lower pressure than the one surrounding it, so that air flows inward and up an exhaust chute containing sensitive filters. In the “warm zone,” where there is always the danger of being exposed to a live virus, you must wear a gown, two sets of gloves, two sets of shoe covers, a respirator mask, a face shield, and a bouffant cap. You work with your arms under a hood, protected by an extra set of disposable sleeves. When you’re finished with your experiment, you disinfect this gear and throw it into an autoclave—a kind of kiln—where it cooks for twenty minutes. To return to the “cold zone,” you remove your shoe covers before stepping over a red line. In New York, at the end of March, these precautions had a whiff of the absurd: in a city where around three thousand new coronavirus cases were being diagnosed each day, you were more likely to be exposed to a highly pathogenic virus in your neighborhood.
A Ph.D. student named Daisy Hoagland, who had herself just recovered from a mild case of COVID-19, prepared the samples for analysis. Using a shaker machine and test tubes loaded with sand and ceramic pellets, she turned a suspension of ferret lung cells—some from infected animals, and others from members of the control group—into a homogeneous juice, then separated the solution in a centrifuge that generated fifteen thousand g’s. It is painstaking work. (“I listen to a lot of podcasts,” Hoagland said.) Using a pipette, she carefully transferred the topmost layer, a pink liquid, into another tube, which she centrifuged again, until she had a purified sample of RNA. This she handed off to her colleagues Rasmus Møller and Maryline Panis for sequencing. The process takes sixteen hours to complete, and Møller, who during the height of the pandemic lived in Greenpoint, Brooklyn, often biked home at dawn over the Pulaski Bridge.
Whereas the sequencing of DNA defined molecular biology in the early two-thousands, the sequencing of RNA defines it today. If you imagine a cell as a kind of computer, then your DNA contains all the software that it could possibly run. It is a somewhat astonishing fact of life that the exact same DNA is shared by every cell in your body, from the skin to the brain; those cells differ in appearance and function because, in each of them, a molecular gizmo “transcribes” some DNA segments rather than others into molecules of single-stranded RNA. These bits of RNA are in turn used as the blueprints for proteins, the molecular machines that do most of a cell’s work. If DNA is your phone’s home screen, then transcription is like tapping an icon. By sampling the RNA present in a group of cells, researchers can see which programs those cells are running at that moment; by sampling it after the cells have been infected with a virus, they can see how that virus substitutes its own software.
TenOever’s team quickly discovered that SARS-CoV-2 was uncannily good at disrupting cellular programming. A typical virus replaces less than one per cent of the software in the cells it infects. With SARS-CoV-2, tenOever said, about sixty per cent of the RNA in an infected cell is of viral origin—“which is the highest I’ve ever seen. Polio comes close.” Among other things, the virus rewires the alarm system that cells use to warn others about infection. Normally, as part of what is known as the “innate” immune response—so called because it is genetically hardwired, and not tailored to a specific pathogen—a cell sends out two kinds of signals. One signal, carried by molecules called interferons, travels to neighboring cells, telling them to build defenses that slow viral spread. Another signal, transmitted through molecules called cytokines, gets a message to the circulatory system’s epithelial lining. The white blood cells summoned by this second signal don’t just eat invaders and infected cells; they also gather up their dismembered protein parts. Elsewhere in the immune system, these fragments are used to create virus-specific antibodies, as part of a sophisticated “adaptive” response that can take six or seven days to develop.


newyorker--2020-11-02--Searching for Refuge After the Second World War

“ Don ’ t leave us in this bloody region , ” the notes continued .
“ Make effort to have doors of P ” —Palestine— “ & other countries open.
” Listening to him and others , Harrison wrote , “ Seldom have I been so depressed .
.
.
.
And to think I was told , quite officially , there was no need of my visiting Belsen.
” There were plenty of people in Washington and London who saw no need for Harrison to investigate at all , or even to make any “ particular reference ” @ @ @ @ @ @ @ in “ The Last Million : Europe ’ s Displaced Persons from World War to Cold War ” ( Penguin Press ) , Allied authorities initially maintained that it was wrong to differentiate Jews from other displaced people on the basis of their experience as Jews .
Indeed , Allied officials argued that to do so would constitute religious discrimination .
The week that Harrison met with Rosensaft , a senior British official said that giving targeted support to Jewish survivors would be “ unfair to the many non-Jews who have suffered on @ @ @ @ @ @ @ in the Allied cause ” —the dismissive “ All lives matter ” of the postwar days .
Instead , displaced persons were to be sorted out on what General Dwight D. Eisenhower described as a “ nationality basis , ” which meant that a Polish Jew who had survived the death camps might be left to share quarters with someone who had guarded a camp in Poland .
Harrison took a different view , writing , in a report to President Truman , that “ the first and plainest need of these people @ @ @ @ @ @ @ and by this I mean their status as Jews.
” Many had barely survived death marches as the Nazis retreated .
In the brief period between the liberation and Harrison ’ s arrival , more than thirteen thousand former prisoners at Belsen died , as typhus continued to ravage the camp .
Those who lived faced a second , bitter abandonment .
One Jewish chaplain wrote in June , 1945 , “ Did our leaders plan on the basis of the fact that no Jews would be alive ?
” Harrison ’ s @ @ @ @ @ @ @ , and on the organization of the D.P .
camps , which were placed under the auspices of the United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Administration and then of the International Refugee Organization ( the predecessor of the Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees ) .
But none of this took place without a struggle .
The objection that redressing a historic wrong amounts to reverse discrimination is , apparently , timeless .
So is the insistence that those who have suffered injustices must never be pushy about it : in @ @ @ @ @ @ @ the British Prime Minister , wrote to Truman that “ if our officers had placed the Jews in a special racial category at the head of the queue , my strong view is that the effect of this would have been disastrous for the Jews.
” Ernest Bevin , Attlee ’ s foreign secretary , echoed that theme in a press conference two months later : “ If the Jews , with all their sufferings , want to get too much at the head of the queue , you have the danger of @ @ @ @ @ @ @ ” in question was a long , serpentine thing .
The initial nation-based sorting of D.P.s was , on one level , an effort to impose order on a chaotic landscape .
When Harrison arrived , Germany ’ s cities and infrastructure were largely in ruins , and the collapse of the Third Reich had left millions of non-Germans stranded—including prisoners of war , forced and slave laborers , Dutch dissidents , willing collaborators , and what one American chaplain described as “ the men with the pajamas , you know , dirty @ @ @ @ @ @ @ to someone for aid.
” At the war ’ s close , in May , 1945 , there were more than six million D.P.s , by Nasaw ’ s tally ; by October of that year , after a series of repatriations , including those of two million Soviet prisoners of war and forced laborers , the majority were gone .
What Nasaw calls “ the Last Million ” were the “ non-repatriable ” remnant who refused to leave or had nowhere to go .
Only a fraction of them were Jews .
@ @ @ @ @ @ @ , Ukrainians , and Balts from Estonia , Latvia , and Lithuania .
Their reasons for remaining in Germany ran the gamut .
There were Poles aligned with the London-based government-in-exile and at odds with the regime forming in Warsaw .
There were Baltic S.S. recruits who had fled to Germany in the final days of the war , ahead of the Red Army , in some cases with their families .
Some Ukrainians were nationalists who knew that Stalin was in a killing mood ; others would have remembered the hunger of @ @ @ @ @ @ @ single story .
Nasaw , who has written well-regarded biographies of Andrew Carnegie and William Randolph Hearst , makes clear how much the Allied forces wished that those in the displaced remnant would simply go back to wherever it was they came from .
( At one point , Fiorello La Guardia tried to talk the Poles into it . )
Nasaw also captures the power of refusing to leave—the decision not to disperse .
This isn ’ t to say that the goal of the Last Million was to stay in Germany @ @ @ @ @ @ @ door , they were trying to open others .
For the Jews , the main options were , as Rosensaft laid them out , Palestine or some other place that had not been the recent site of genocidal murder , and the central conflict of “ The Last Million ” is the fight , in the years following the war , over which it was going to be .
One reason that the D.P.s were stuck was that so much around them had changed ; with maps redrawn , there was no such @ @ @ @ @ @ @ Stalin claimed the Baltic states , but the United States did not recognize their annexation , and was not about to force the Estonian , Latvian , and Lithuanian D.P.s to return .
Poland ’ s map had been radically reconfigured ; it lost some territory to the Soviet Union and gained other regions from Germany , including land that had been German even before the Third Reich .
( In effect , the entire country was picked up and moved to the west . )
Nasaw offers a glimpse of the mutual @ @ @ @ @ @ @ one in which an aid worker boosterishly presents the new map to a Polish refugee she is encouraging to return— “ Just look what Poland got in exchange ” —and is dismayed when the man keeps pointing to a village on the Soviet side of the line .
That ’ s home , he says , and as long as it ’ s in the U.S.S.R. he ’ s not going back .
Many Polish Jews did try to return home , only to be greeted with violence from neighbors or newcomers who @ @ @ @ @ @ @ possession of their houses .
The point of no return came with a pogrom on July 4 , 1946 , in the town of Kielce , in which forty-odd Jewish survivors were killed : “ stoned to death , beaten to death , thrown from windows , shot , bayoneted , ” Nasaw reports .
News of Kielce accelerated an exodus of Jews into the western occupation zones of Germany .
In May , 1945 , there were about thirty thousand survivors in those German D.P .
camps ; a little more than @ @ @ @ @ @ @ two hundred thousand .
The fate of the D.P.s , as Nasaw vividly shows , could hinge on how well they fit a certain stereotype of the worthy victim .
Nasaw quotes aid workers who were consistently impressed by the Baltic D.P.s— “ charming peoples to whom we could easily relate , ” as the wife of one British official recalled—and put off by what they saw as the neediness of the Jews—as if they were too pitiful to truly pity .
General George Patton , in his diaries , complained about how @ @ @ @ @ @ @ and his ilk believe that the Displaced Person is a human being , which he is not , and this applies particularly to the Jews who are lower than animals , ” he wrote .
He called the Balts “ the best of the Displaced Persons.
” In another entry , after a tour of a former German military hospital , Patton wrote that the facility was “ in a bad state of repair when we arrived , because these Jewish DP ’ s , or at least a majority of them , @ @ @ @ @ @ @ They decline , where practicable , to use latrines , preferring to relieve themselves on the floor.
” It was lost on him that there might be other reasons that people recovering from years of brutalization , malnutrition , death marches , and the destruction of their families were not cheerfully organizing themselves into plumbing-repair brigades .
Patton wasn ’ t alone in his anti-Semitism or his blindness , and both of these things had an effect when it came to resettling the refugees .
The prospect of increased Jewish immigration to Palestine @ @ @ @ @ @ @ , exasperated the British , who still controlled the region and worried about its stability .
In October , 1945 , Lord Halifax , the United Kingdom ’ s Ambassador to the United States , told Secretary of State James Byrnes that his government did not want to put itself “ into a position of accepting a Hitler thesis that there is no room for Jews in Europe.
” By “ Europe , ” the British plainly did not mean London ; there was no concurrent mobilization to bring Jewish refugees into the @ @ @ @ @ @ @ too , the number of Jews admitted during the first several years was achingly small .
The Western allies , when they did take in displaced persons , tended to go full Patton , cherry-picking those who were healthy , strong , and Christian .
A telling example is the British “ Balt Cygnet ” scheme , which gave sanctuary to thousands of young Estonian , Latvian , and Lithuanian women—the “ swans ” —who , as a government memorandum reassuringly put it , “ are of good appearance ; are scrupulously clean @ @ @ @ @ @ @ a natural dignity in their bearing.
” An aid worker wrote that most “ would look more at home in the drawing room than in the kitchen.
” ( They were put to work in kitchens , though , and in tuberculosis sanatoriums . )
A follow-up program , chirpily called Westward Ho !
, brought in men , with a preference for Balts , to address labor shortages in British agriculture and industry .
It hit a snag when a doctor in London noticed that many of the Latvian men had their @ @ @ @ @ @ @ , revealing them to have been members of the S.S .
The British authorities decided to accept a convoluted explanation for this : that the tattoos meant something different for Latvians than for everyone else .
They told the doctor to stop asking about the tattoos .
When British miners refused to work with the Baltic men whose S.S. tattoos they had spotted , the National Coal Board , Nasaw writes , recommended that they not be given jobs “ where they might have to remove their shirts.
” The American version of @ @ @ @ @ @ @ tragedy .
In late 1946 , the American Jewish Committee and other groups made the tactical decision that the best way to bring Jewish survivors to the United States was to make sure that the efforts to do so didn ’ t appear “ too visibly Jewish , ” as Nasaw puts it .
Through lobbying and coalition-building , they pushed Congress to pass legislation to accept four hundred thousand D.P.s ; the “ calculated gamble , ” based on the proportion of Jews in the D.P .
camps , was that a @ @ @ @ @ @ @ be Jews .
But it didn ’ t pay off : senators who didn ’ t want to let Jews in added language to what became the Displaced Persons Act of 1948—a preference for agricultural workers and those from nations that had been annexed , and a provision disqualifying anyone who entered the western zones after December 22 , 1945 , thereby excluding the Jews who had fled the Polish pogroms .
In the end , Jewish D.P.s were left with few spots .
( Nasaw makes the point that , because of @ @ @ @ @ @ @ to get fake papers or give false information to immigration authorities—something worth keeping in mind when considering the choices available to refugees today . )
The politesse recommended by Attlee , Bevin , and others had gained the American Jews almost nothing .

On July 23, 1945, less than three months after Germany’s surrender, Earl Harrison, the dean of the University of Pennsylvania Law School, sat down at Bergen-Belsen with a survivor named Yossel Rosensaft. Harrison, who was forty-six, was described by a fellow Philadelphia lawyer as a man with “broad shoulders, curly blond hair, clear blue eyes, a firm jaw and a big smile.” The State Department had sent him as a special emissary to investigate the conditions in the camps that were hastily being organized to shelter “displaced persons,” or D.P.s, and to report back “with particular reference to the Jewish refugees.” Rosensaft, Harrison noted in his diary, was “only 33—looks older.” He had been deported to Auschwitz from Będzin, Poland, escaped, been recaptured, and sent to Auschwitz, again, before ending up at Bergen-Belsen. Harrison recorded Rosensaft’s wishes for the future:
1. Peace & quiet—live out remaining years. 2. Can’t go back: Anti-S[emitism], parents killed—Land soaked with Jewish blood. 3. People outside E[urope] too quiet about what has happened—nobody seems concerned.
“Don’t leave us in this bloody region,” the notes continued. “Make effort to have doors of P”—Palestine—“& other countries open.” Listening to him and others, Harrison wrote, “Seldom have I been so depressed. . . . And to think I was told, quite officially, there was no need of my visiting Belsen.”
There were plenty of people in Washington and London who saw no need for Harrison to investigate at all, or even to make any “particular reference” to Jews. As David Nasaw recounts in “The Last Million: Europe’s Displaced Persons from World War to Cold War” (Penguin Press), Allied authorities initially maintained that it was wrong to differentiate Jews from other displaced people on the basis of their experience as Jews. Indeed, Allied officials argued that to do so would constitute religious discrimination. The week that Harrison met with Rosensaft, a senior British official said that giving targeted support to Jewish survivors would be “unfair to the many non-Jews who have suffered on account of their clandestine and other activities in the Allied cause”—the dismissive “All lives matter” of the postwar days. Instead, displaced persons were to be sorted out on what General Dwight D. Eisenhower described as a “nationality basis,” which meant that a Polish Jew who had survived the death camps might be left to share quarters with someone who had guarded a camp in Poland.
Harrison took a different view, writing, in a report to President Truman, that “the first and plainest need of these people is a recognition of their actual status and by this I mean their status as Jews.” Many had barely survived death marches as the Nazis retreated. In the brief period between the liberation and Harrison’s arrival, more than thirteen thousand former prisoners at Belsen died, as typhus continued to ravage the camp. Those who lived faced a second, bitter abandonment. One Jewish chaplain wrote in June, 1945, “Did our leaders plan on the basis of the fact that no Jews would be alive?”
Harrison’s report had an immediate effect on Truman, and on the organization of the D.P. camps, which were placed under the auspices of the United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Administration and then of the International Refugee Organization (the predecessor of the Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees). But none of this took place without a struggle. The objection that redressing a historic wrong amounts to reverse discrimination is, apparently, timeless. So is the insistence that those who have suffered injustices must never be pushy about it: in September, 1945, Clement Attlee, the British Prime Minister, wrote to Truman that “if our officers had placed the Jews in a special racial category at the head of the queue, my strong view is that the effect of this would have been disastrous for the Jews.” Ernest Bevin, Attlee’s foreign secretary, echoed that theme in a press conference two months later: “If the Jews, with all their sufferings, want to get too much at the head of the queue, you have the danger of another anti-Semitic reaction.”
The “queue” in question was a long, serpentine thing. The initial nation-based sorting of D.P.s was, on one level, an effort to impose order on a chaotic landscape. When Harrison arrived, Germany’s cities and infrastructure were largely in ruins, and the collapse of the Third Reich had left millions of non-Germans stranded—including prisoners of war, forced and slave laborers, Dutch dissidents, willing collaborators, and what one American chaplain described as “the men with the pajamas, you know, dirty, very short hair looking to talk to someone for aid.” At the war’s close, in May, 1945, there were more than six million D.P.s, by Nasaw’s tally; by October of that year, after a series of repatriations, including those of two million Soviet prisoners of war and forced laborers, the majority were gone. What Nasaw calls “the Last Million” were the “non-repatriable” remnant who refused to leave or had nowhere to go. Only a fraction of them were Jews. Most of the rest were Polish Catholics, Ukrainians, and Balts from Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania. Their reasons for remaining in Germany ran the gamut. There were Poles aligned with the London-based government-in-exile and at odds with the regime forming in Warsaw. There were Baltic S.S. recruits who had fled to Germany in the final days of the war, ahead of the Red Army, in some cases with their families. Some Ukrainians were nationalists who knew that Stalin was in a killing mood; others would have remembered the hunger of the famine years. There was no single story.
Nasaw, who has written well-regarded biographies of Andrew Carnegie and William Randolph Hearst, makes clear how much the Allied forces wished that those in the displaced remnant would simply go back to wherever it was they came from. (At one point, Fiorello La Guardia tried to talk the Poles into it.) Nasaw also captures the power of refusing to leave—the decision not to disperse. This isn’t to say that the goal of the Last Million was to stay in Germany forever. By not going through one door, they were trying to open others. For the Jews, the main options were, as Rosensaft laid them out, Palestine or some other place that had not been the recent site of genocidal murder, and the central conflict of “The Last Million” is the fight, in the years following the war, over which it was going to be.
One reason that the D.P.s were stuck was that so much around them had changed; with maps redrawn, there was no such thing as simply going back home. Stalin claimed the Baltic states, but the United States did not recognize their annexation, and was not about to force the Estonian, Latvian, and Lithuanian D.P.s to return. Poland’s map had been radically reconfigured; it lost some territory to the Soviet Union and gained other regions from Germany, including land that had been German even before the Third Reich. (In effect, the entire country was picked up and moved to the west.) Nasaw offers a glimpse of the mutual incomprehension that resulted in scenes like the one in which an aid worker boosterishly presents the new map to a Polish refugee she is encouraging to return—“Just look what Poland got in exchange”—and is dismayed when the man keeps pointing to a village on the Soviet side of the line. That’s home, he says, and as long as it’s in the U.S.S.R. he’s not going back.
Many Polish Jews did try to return home, only to be greeted with violence from neighbors or newcomers who, in some cases, had taken possession of their houses. The point of no return came with a pogrom on July 4, 1946, in the town of Kielce, in which forty-odd Jewish survivors were killed: “stoned to death, beaten to death, thrown from windows, shot, bayoneted,” Nasaw reports. News of Kielce accelerated an exodus of Jews into the western occupation zones of Germany. In May, 1945, there were about thirty thousand survivors in those German D.P. camps; a little more than a year later, there were some two hundred thousand.
The fate of the D.P.s, as Nasaw vividly shows, could hinge on how well they fit a certain stereotype of the worthy victim. Nasaw quotes aid workers who were consistently impressed by the Baltic D.P.s—“charming peoples to whom we could easily relate,” as the wife of one British official recalled—and put off by what they saw as the neediness of the Jews—as if they were too pitiful to truly pity. General George Patton, in his diaries, complained about how the Jewish survivors smelled. “Harrison and his ilk believe that the Displaced Person is a human being, which he is not, and this applies particularly to the Jews who are lower than animals,” he wrote. He called the Balts “the best of the Displaced Persons.” In another entry, after a tour of a former German military hospital, Patton wrote that the facility was “in a bad state of repair when we arrived, because these Jewish DP’s, or at least a majority of them, have no sense of human relationships. They decline, where practicable, to use latrines, preferring to relieve themselves on the floor.” It was lost on him that there might be other reasons that people recovering from years of brutalization, malnutrition, death marches, and the destruction of their families were not cheerfully organizing themselves into plumbing-repair brigades.
“Please, for the love of God, stop watering!” Cartoon by Alexander Andreades Copy link to cartoon Copy link to cartoon Shop Shop
Patton wasn’t alone in his anti-Semitism or his blindness, and both of these things had an effect when it came to resettling the refugees. The prospect of increased Jewish immigration to Palestine, which Harrison recommended and Truman endorsed, exasperated the British, who still controlled the region and worried about its stability. In October, 1945, Lord Halifax, the United Kingdom’s Ambassador to the United States, told Secretary of State James Byrnes that his government did not want to put itself “into a position of accepting a Hitler thesis that there is no room for Jews in Europe.” By “Europe,” the British plainly did not mean London; there was no concurrent mobilization to bring Jewish refugees into the U.K. In the United States, too, the number of Jews admitted during the first several years was achingly small.
The Western allies, when they did take in displaced persons, tended to go full Patton, cherry-picking those who were healthy, strong, and Christian. A telling example is the British “Balt Cygnet” scheme, which gave sanctuary to thousands of young Estonian, Latvian, and Lithuanian women—the “swans”—who, as a government memorandum reassuringly put it, “are of good appearance; are scrupulously clean in their persons and habits; have a natural dignity in their bearing.” An aid worker wrote that most “would look more at home in the drawing room than in the kitchen.” (They were put to work in kitchens, though, and in tuberculosis sanatoriums.) A follow-up program, chirpily called Westward Ho!, brought in men, with a preference for Balts, to address labor shortages in British agriculture and industry. It hit a snag when a doctor in London noticed that many of the Latvian men had their blood types tattooed under their left arms, revealing them to have been members of the S.S. The British authorities decided to accept a convoluted explanation for this: that the tattoos meant something different for Latvians than for everyone else. They told the doctor to stop asking about the tattoos. When British miners refused to work with the Baltic men whose S.S. tattoos they had spotted, the National Coal Board, Nasaw writes, recommended that they not be given jobs “where they might have to remove their shirts.”


newyorker--2020-11-02--In a Wisconsin Cookie Poll, Trump Wins by a Landslide

Sundays in Green Bay , Wisconsin , are for hunkering down in the den with wings and a sixer for the Packers game .
What makes a Friday afternoon is a trip to Uncle Mike ’ s Bake Shoppe to pick up a kringle—most likely the sea-salt-caramel-pecan version , which was voted the best kringle in North America .
The Wisconsin kringle , brought over by Danish immigrants in the nineteenth century , is a pizza-size confection composed of thirty-odd layers of flaky dough , filled with fruit , nuts , or cheese , and molded into an oval ring @ @ @ @ @ @ @ called the toilet-seat pastry .
In 2008 , to mark the Presidential election , Uncle Mike ’ s decided to start selling sugar cookies decorated with printed portraits , in icing , of the candidates ’ faces .
Barack Obama appeared on a blue background , John McCain on a pinkish one .
“ It was just sort of a fun thing to do , you know , because some people get a little stressed out about the elections , ” Mike Vande Walle , alias Uncle Mike , said on a recent @ @ @ @ @ @ @ phone rang constantly .
He was wearing a red Hawaiian shirt and a mask printed with ladybugs and bumblebees , only his eyes visible beneath white hair .
At some point , he decided to turn the cookie sales into a poll , or , rather , two polls : a national one , based on mail orders received from around the country , and a local one , based on purchases in the shop .
The cookie poll , like many such undertakings , is not science .
In 2012 , Uncle @ @ @ @ @ @ @ cookies , despite Obama ’ s taking the White House .
But four years ago , when Wisconsin unexpectedly broke for Donald Trump—the first time since 1984 that the state had gone red in a Presidential race—the cookie poll predicted the outcome , with Trump up by about four points .
“ It was right on the money , ” Vande Walle said .
Asked about this year ’ s results , Vande Walle pushed a piece of paper across the counter .
“ We ’ ve never seen anything like it , @ @ @ @ @ @ @ , according to his tabulation , stood at sixty-eight per cent Trump , thirty-two per cent Biden .
“ I don ’ t know if they ’ re buying the Trump ones as jokes , ” he said .
“ That ’ s the only thing I can think of , because that ’ s a big spread.
” There were more Bidens than Trumps left on a tray in a display case , positioned between kringles and doughnuts .
A young woman carrying a knockoff Louis Vuitton bag came into the shop @ @ @ @ @ @ @ .
“ Should I drop one of these off for Grandpa ?
” she asked , pointing to the Trump cookies .
Her mother looked horrified .
A public-school teacher waiting in line to buy doughnuts had a similar reaction .
“ Smash the pink cookie , ” she said .
A little girl in pink leggings and a pink T-shirt was standing next to the cookie case with her mother and older sister .
“ Biden , ” she said , pointing to the blue cookie .
She made a thumbs-down sign @ @ @ @ @ @ @ she said , “ Trump !
Yay !
” She gave a thumbs-up .
Uncle Mike ’ s is just outside Green Bay , in an area that is more Republican than the city proper .
According to a local report , Vande Walle said , roadside signage breaks down as follows : “ Trump is the No .
1 sign , then signs for pumpkins , and then Biden.
” The week before Election Day , the national cookie poll also had Trump winning , sixty-five per cent to thirty-five .
Vande @ @ @ @ @ @ @ .
“ I was thinking that after the election we should do some kind of special cookie , just because 2020 is such a weird year , ” he said .
“ So it might be neat to have a cookie wishing it gone.
” ♦

Sundays in Green Bay, Wisconsin, are for hunkering down in the den with wings and a sixer for the Packers game. What makes a Friday afternoon is a trip to Uncle Mike’s Bake Shoppe to pick up a kringle—most likely the sea-salt-caramel-pecan version, which was voted the best kringle in North America. The Wisconsin kringle, brought over by Danish immigrants in the nineteenth century, is a pizza-size confection composed of thirty-odd layers of flaky dough, filled with fruit, nuts, or cheese, and molded into an oval ring, which is why it’s called the toilet-seat pastry.
In 2008, to mark the Presidential election, Uncle Mike’s decided to start selling sugar cookies decorated with printed portraits, in icing, of the candidates’ faces. Barack Obama appeared on a blue background, John McCain on a pinkish one. “It was just sort of a fun thing to do, you know, because some people get a little stressed out about the elections,” Mike Vande Walle, alias Uncle Mike, said on a recent Friday at the shop, as the phone rang constantly. He was wearing a red Hawaiian shirt and a mask printed with ladybugs and bumblebees, only his eyes visible beneath white hair.
At some point, he decided to turn the cookie sales into a poll, or, rather, two polls: a national one, based on mail orders received from around the country, and a local one, based on purchases in the shop. The cookie poll, like many such undertakings, is not science. In 2012, Uncle Mike’s sold more Mitt Romney cookies, despite Obama’s taking the White House. But four years ago, when Wisconsin unexpectedly broke for Donald Trump—the first time since 1984 that the state had gone red in a Presidential race—the cookie poll predicted the outcome, with Trump up by about four points. “It was right on the money,” Vande Walle said.
Asked about this year’s results, Vande Walle pushed a piece of paper across the counter. “We’ve never seen anything like it,” he said. The local poll, according to his tabulation, stood at sixty-eight per cent Trump, thirty-two per cent Biden. “I don’t know if they’re buying the Trump ones as jokes,” he said. “That’s the only thing I can think of, because that’s a big spread.” There were more Bidens than Trumps left on a tray in a display case, positioned between kringles and doughnuts.
“It was an important election.” Cartoon by Ellis Rosen Copy link to cartoon Copy link to cartoon Shop Shop
A young woman carrying a knockoff Louis Vuitton bag came into the shop with her mother and perused the display. “Should I drop one of these off for Grandpa?” she asked, pointing to the Trump cookies. Her mother looked horrified. A public-school teacher waiting in line to buy doughnuts had a similar reaction. “Smash the pink cookie,” she said.
A little girl in pink leggings and a pink T-shirt was standing next to the cookie case with her mother and older sister. “Biden,” she said, pointing to the blue cookie. She made a thumbs-down sign and stuck out her tongue. Then she said, “Trump! Yay!” She gave a thumbs-up.
Uncle Mike’s is just outside Green Bay, in an area that is more Republican than the city proper. According to a local report, Vande Walle said, roadside signage breaks down as follows: “Trump is the No. 1 sign, then signs for pumpkins, and then Biden.”
The week before Election Day, the national cookie poll also had Trump winning, sixty-five per cent to thirty-five. Vande Walle has declined to take a side. “I was thinking that after the election we should do some kind of special cookie, just because 2020 is such a weird year,” he said. “So it might be neat to have a cookie wishing it gone.” ♦