newyorker--2020-09-24--The Extraordinary Newspaper Life of Harold Evans

At his first-ever job on a newspaper , at the Ashton-under-Lyne Reporter , outside his home town of Manchester , the young Harry Evans was approached by a surly editor who demanded that Evans tell him exactly how many spokes there are in a bicycle wheel .
( In those parched wartime years , Evans was cycling fourteen miles to work . )
“ I don ’ t know , sir , ” the cub reporter replied .
“ Find out !
Curiosity is the thing in journalism .
Curiosity !
Ask questions , Evans !
” the crusty editor @ @ @ @ @ @ @ Of all the memorable things about Evans , who died on Wednesday , at the age of ninety-two , the most memorable one was the quality and constancy of his curiosity .
Curiosity can seem a secondary virtue , like courtesy or punctuality , but the quality of Harry ’ s curiosity was always a reminder that in the right hands , or in the right mind , it could be a primary one—and that for newspaper and magazine folks , curiosity is , along with courage , the virtue that matters most @ @ @ @ @ @ @ omnivorously curious , demandingly curious , and , to the people who worked for him , sometimes exhaustingly curious : curious about politics , curious about writing , curious about love , curious about the world .
Above all , curious about the truth of things—not the official truth or the acceptable truth or the cosmetic truth but the unvarnished reality of significant events .
He sought that relentlessly and fearlessly , and the charm and ingenuous boyishness of his personal manner was never more than a cover for someone who thought that @ @ @ @ @ @ @ secrets , it was his job in life to know .
He begins his wonderful memoir of his newspaper life , “ My Paper Chase ” —published when he was already in his eighties , but still beautifully , breathlessly high-hearted in tone and spirit—with a story of seeing exhausted soldiers on a beach , just evacuated from Dunkirk , and realizing , though only a child , that the standard story of Dunkirk as a morale-boosting “ triumph ” was far from the lived experience of Dunkirk for its witnesses .
That @ @ @ @ @ @ @ with the confidence that the official story was not necessarily , or even probably , the adequate story—and that the official story might contain elements of the truth rearranged .
It was this pursuit of truth , often in the face of resistance , that made him the most famous newspaperman in Britain in the second half of the twentieth century .
As a newspaper editor , he was on a level of legend that , in America , only Ben Bradlee at the Washington Post can quite equal .
At his first @ @ @ @ @ @ @ Echo , Evans led a quixotic fight to clear the reputation of a young man named Timothy Evans , who was wrongly convicted and hanged for murder .
The reporting spurred the struggle against capital punishment in Britain and caused Evans to believe that it is just at the moment when a newspaper is getting bored with its own crusade that the public really starts paying attention .
His reputation earned in the North of England led him to be named the editor of the Sunday Times , when he was thirty-eight .
@ @ @ @ @ @ @ “ Insight ” team of investigative reporters , who , among many other things , got justice , or at least recompense , for the children maimed by a morning-sickness drug called Thalidomide .
( The story was the subject of a fine recent documentary , “ Attacking the Devil.
” ) Evans and his reporters also dug deep , against establishment resistance , into the true scale of Kim Philby ’ s spying for the Soviet Union .
Evans was one of that truly great generation of British working-class heroes who came @ @ @ @ @ @ @ after the Second World War .
He described how simply saying that you wanted to go to university was , for a working-class Northern boy of his generation , like announcing that you wanted to marry Betty Grable ; it was that arrogant and that improbable .
It was a sign of his clarity of mind that Evans was never narrowly partisan in his politics .
The son of a left-wing father who was frankly pro-Soviet during the war , he carried that egalitarian passion into his fights with the British authorities and @ @ @ @ @ @ @ Rupert Murdoch , who would both elevate him to the editorship of the daily Times and then fire him for being insufficiently obedient to the Thatcherite cause .
Yet Evans was also sympathetic to Murdoch ’ s battle , in 1986 , with what he saw as the “ Luddite ” newspaper unions .
His subsequent flight to America in the eighties saw him transformed from “ the James Bond of Fleet Street , ” as some had called him , to famous , in some measure , as the husband of his @ @ @ @ @ @ @ she became the editor of Vanity Fair and then of this magazine .
But , in truth , his accomplishments in America were extraordinary in their own way : as a publisher , at Random House , he signed and produced countless first-rate books and was a matchlessly supportive cheerleader for slow-moving authors .
( He signed this writer to two books , one on art—still undelivered thirty years later—and the other , on Paris , fulfilled . )
Yet he never evidenced the least jealousy of his wife ’ s extraordinary rise @ @ @ @ @ @ @ and his instinctive feminism made him prouder of her accomplishments than of his own .
But even more notable than his editorial work were the fine and ambitious books that he wrote after he left office life , including studies of American history , a guide to good writing , and that wonderful memoir of newspaper life , where the smell and feel of hot type is palpable .
He was curious , brave , and energetic .
And he was lovable , too .
Few can have earned that word more readily @ @ @ @ @ @ @ one of those rare people who , if you knew him at all , you were always glad to see—knowing that , without affectation or malice , he would quiz you backward and forward on the state of things , the real state of things : what you ’ d seen in the last place you ’ d been and what it had made you think .
In his nineties , Harry Evans was still counting bicycle spokes and chasing stars .

At his first-ever job on a newspaper, at the Ashton-under-Lyne Reporter, outside his home town of Manchester, the young Harry Evans was approached by a surly editor who demanded that Evans tell him exactly how many spokes there are in a bicycle wheel. (In those parched wartime years, Evans was cycling fourteen miles to work.) “I don’t know, sir,” the cub reporter replied. “Find out! Curiosity is the thing in journalism. Curiosity! Ask questions, Evans!” the crusty editor insisted.
And the boy did. Of all the memorable things about Evans, who died on Wednesday, at the age of ninety-two, the most memorable one was the quality and constancy of his curiosity. Curiosity can seem a secondary virtue, like courtesy or punctuality, but the quality of Harry’s curiosity was always a reminder that in the right hands, or in the right mind, it could be a primary one—and that for newspaper and magazine folks, curiosity is, along with courage, the virtue that matters most. Harry was always curious—charmingly curious, omnivorously curious, demandingly curious, and, to the people who worked for him, sometimes exhaustingly curious: curious about politics, curious about writing, curious about love, curious about the world. Above all, curious about the truth of things—not the official truth or the acceptable truth or the cosmetic truth but the unvarnished reality of significant events. He sought that relentlessly and fearlessly, and the charm and ingenuous boyishness of his personal manner was never more than a cover for someone who thought that, whether about bicycle spokes or buried secrets, it was his job in life to know.
He begins his wonderful memoir of his newspaper life, “My Paper Chase”—published when he was already in his eighties, but still beautifully, breathlessly high-hearted in tone and spirit—with a story of seeing exhausted soldiers on a beach, just evacuated from Dunkirk, and realizing, though only a child, that the standard story of Dunkirk as a morale-boosting “triumph” was far from the lived experience of Dunkirk for its witnesses. That scene on the shore informed his life with the confidence that the official story was not necessarily, or even probably, the adequate story—and that the official story might contain elements of the truth rearranged.
Evans’s flight to America saw him transformed, in some measure, as the husband of his second wife, Tina Brown. Photograph by Ann Clifford / The LIFE Picture Collection / Getty
It was this pursuit of truth, often in the face of resistance, that made him the most famous newspaperman in Britain in the second half of the twentieth century. As a newspaper editor, he was on a level of legend that, in America, only Ben Bradlee at the Washington Post can quite equal. At his first significant editorship, of the Darlington Northern Echo, Evans led a quixotic fight to clear the reputation of a young man named Timothy Evans, who was wrongly convicted and hanged for murder. The reporting spurred the struggle against capital punishment in Britain and caused Evans to believe that it is just at the moment when a newspaper is getting bored with its own crusade that the public really starts paying attention.
His reputation earned in the North of England led him to be named the editor of the Sunday Times, when he was thirty-eight. It was there that he launched his “Insight” team of investigative reporters, who, among many other things, got justice, or at least recompense, for the children maimed by a morning-sickness drug called Thalidomide. (The story was the subject of a fine recent documentary, “Attacking the Devil.”) Evans and his reporters also dug deep, against establishment resistance, into the true scale of Kim Philby’s spying for the Soviet Union.
Evans was one of that truly great generation of British working-class heroes who came of age in the first Labour government after the Second World War. He described how simply saying that you wanted to go to university was, for a working-class Northern boy of his generation, like announcing that you wanted to marry Betty Grable; it was that arrogant and that improbable. It was a sign of his clarity of mind that Evans was never narrowly partisan in his politics. The son of a left-wing father who was frankly pro-Soviet during the war, he carried that egalitarian passion into his fights with the British authorities and, later, into his confrontations with Rupert Murdoch, who would both elevate him to the editorship of the daily Times and then fire him for being insufficiently obedient to the Thatcherite cause. Yet Evans was also sympathetic to Murdoch’s battle, in 1986, with what he saw as the “Luddite” newspaper unions.
His subsequent flight to America in the eighties saw him transformed from “the James Bond of Fleet Street,” as some had called him, to famous, in some measure, as the husband of his second wife, Tina Brown, when she became the editor of Vanity Fair and then of this magazine. But, in truth, his accomplishments in America were extraordinary in their own way: as a publisher, at Random House, he signed and produced countless first-rate books and was a matchlessly supportive cheerleader for slow-moving authors. (He signed this writer to two books, one on art—still undelivered thirty years later—and the other, on Paris, fulfilled.) Yet he never evidenced the least jealousy of his wife’s extraordinary rise as an editor of American magazines, and his instinctive feminism made him prouder of her accomplishments than of his own.
But even more notable than his editorial work were the fine and ambitious books that he wrote after he left office life, including studies of American history, a guide to good writing, and that wonderful memoir of newspaper life, where the smell and feel of hot type is palpable. He was curious, brave, and energetic. And he was lovable, too. Few can have earned that word more readily or deserved it more. He was one of those rare people who, if you knew him at all, you were always glad to see—knowing that, without affectation or malice, he would quiz you backward and forward on the state of things, the real state of things: what you’d seen in the last place you’d been and what it had made you think. In his nineties, Harry Evans was still counting bicycle spokes and chasing stars.


newyorker--2020-09-23--Carrie’s Voice-Overs If “Sex and the City” Were Set in 2050

The Sumatran orangutan officially became extinct today .
As I sat by the phone waiting for Big to call , I couldn ’ t help but wonder : Will good men be the next species to be put on the watch list ?
New York ’ s smog had landed Charlotte in the I.C.U .
But she always found any cloud ’ s silver lining , and before long had a date with the on-call doctor .
If only they could capture carbon as fast as Charlotte captured hearts .
.
.
.
There I was , settling into the @ @ @ @ @ @ @ month .
As I bartered my last pack of Marlboro Lights for a cot , I couldn ’ t help but wonder : If hundred-year storms are happening every year , why aren ’ t once-in-a-lifetime romances ?
I felt a knot in the pit of my stomach .
Maybe Samantha was on to something .
Maybe monogamy had become as outdated as the fossil-fuel-based economy .
Big and I had been dating for a month , so I decided to cook him a romantic dinner : dehydrated beef , hardtack , and @ @ @ @ @ @ @ appétit , mon chéri !
They say that honey is one of the only foods that never goes bad .
Which got me thinking : Do relationships have expiration dates ?
Can expired relationships make you sick ?
Also , it ’ s probably fine to eat this honey after using it for a D.I.Y .
wax , right ?
’ Cause the Amazon is gone , but Brazilians are back !
I couldn ’ t believe it .
After inviting me all the way to his Kansas survivalist bunker , Big didn @ @ @ @ @ @ @ toothbrush in his medicine cabinet .
I wondered : Even in a fortified concrete compound , can you ever feel secure in a relationship ?
With New York descending into anarchy , I felt as though my life were descending into manarchy—a constant state of relationship drama .
As I sipped my canned-peach cosmo , I couldn ’ t help but wonder : Where are the fallout shelters to house you during the fallout from a breakup ?
They said that women with children were to board the evacuation barge first .
As @ @ @ @ @ @ @ couldn ’ t help wondering : If childless women weren ’ t celebrated during an overpopulation crisis , would we ever be ?
I stepped onto the barge .
In my new Manolo Blahnik flood galoshes , I felt invincible .
But , as the megaphones warned of a twelve-foot storm surge , I felt a surge in my heart .
There he was , across the barge : Big .
And , this time , there was nowhere he could run .

The Sumatran orangutan officially became extinct today. As I sat by the phone waiting for Big to call, I couldn’t help but wonder: Will good men be the next species to be put on the watch list?
New York’s smog had landed Charlotte in the I.C.U. But she always found any cloud’s silver lining, and before long had a date with the on-call doctor. If only they could capture carbon as fast as Charlotte captured hearts. . . .
There I was, settling into the storm shelter for the third time this month. As I bartered my last pack of Marlboro Lights for a cot, I couldn’t help but wonder: If hundred-year storms are happening every year, why aren’t once-in-a-lifetime romances?
I felt a knot in the pit of my stomach. Maybe Samantha was on to something. Maybe monogamy had become as outdated as the fossil-fuel-based economy.
Big and I had been dating for a month, so I decided to cook him a romantic dinner: dehydrated beef, hardtack, and dried beans in tomato sauce. Bon appétit, mon chéri!
They say that honey is one of the only foods that never goes bad. Which got me thinking: Do relationships have expiration dates? Can expired relationships make you sick? Also, it’s probably fine to eat this honey after using it for a D.I.Y. wax, right? ’Cause the Amazon is gone, but Brazilians are back!
I couldn’t believe it. After inviting me all the way to his Kansas survivalist bunker, Big didn’t let me leave my pink toothbrush in his medicine cabinet. I wondered: Even in a fortified concrete compound, can you ever feel secure in a relationship?
With New York descending into anarchy, I felt as though my life were descending into manarchy—a constant state of relationship drama. As I sipped my canned-peach cosmo, I couldn’t help but wonder: Where are the fallout shelters to house you during the fallout from a breakup?
They said that women with children were to board the evacuation barge first. As I stood aside with Samantha, I couldn’t help wondering: If childless women weren’t celebrated during an overpopulation crisis, would we ever be?
I stepped onto the barge. In my new Manolo Blahnik flood galoshes, I felt invincible. But, as the megaphones warned of a twelve-foot storm surge, I felt a surge in my heart. There he was, across the barge: Big. And, this time, there was nowhere he could run.


newyorker--2020-09-25--I, the Dog, Will Give You a Tour of My House!

Hello !
I have never met you and now you are my best friend and I love you so much !
I am the dog and I would love to give you a tour of my home , where I keep my toys and my food and my pet humans and now you live here , too , because you are my best friend !
I own this house despite not only not knowing what a mortgage is but also not even really knowing what my name is , especially when called , eighty-five per cent of the time !
@ @ @ @ @ @ @ and nothing !
In fact , you can call me anything you want ; just don ’ t call me late for dinner !
Seriously , that is the only time I will bark and seem to love you a little less—oh , my God , just kidding , I would never love you less—I can ’ t live without you !
Anyway , where were we .
.
.
Oh , right !
My home !
You can tell it ’ s mine because of the carpeting , which is made entirely @ @ @ @ @ @ @ in a way that paints a picture of a dog that knows how to use a shaving kit but not a trash can—and is also blindfolded but can smell something a good fifty feet away !
I am able to achieve this randomized aesthetic result by simply walking or doing nothing !
Just one of God ’ s great mysteries !
This home is perfect .
Like they say , “ Location , location .
.
.
” I forgot the third one because I just saw a dragonfly—who are you again ?
@ @ @ @ @ @ @ They always say that !
So , by the front door , you ’ ll notice that there ’ s a doormat !
This doormat is great for getting my paws ready to wipe on the real mat , which is the wall !
You might think that it ’ s inconvenient to wipe my paws on the wall , which is vertical , because of gravity !
And it is !
Let ’ s go to my living room , shall we ?
The living room is the end of the couch @ @ @ @ @ @ @ their feet up before I was able , gently , to set the example that that ’ s not what it ’ s for !
Sure , it ’ s a small space , but it serves as ideal storage for my art materials !
Yes , I am an artist , and all of my art projects are abstract !
The medium I use is mainly my pet humans ’ pillows , but I have recently begun working on my “ Sock Series , ” which dares to ask the question , @ @ @ @ @ @ @ with a large hole ?
” Anyway , if we stay put , you ’ ll find my dining room !
Yes , it is exactly where my living room is !
I will not eat anywhere else but on this corner of the sofa !
It ’ s very efficient to use this space for both my art projects and my food , despite having a spacious kitchen in which to eat !
Plus , the crumbs on my “ dining table ” make for a great late-night snack when I refuse @ @ @ @ @ @ @ no fun .
When I can ’ t sleep , I count sheep , but then I try to eat them and I wake up and run into a vase .
There are always so many vases in my house !
Aaaaahhhhhh !
Oh , sorry !
You stopped petting me for a second , so I assumed you died !
Anyway , on to the bedroom !
My bedroom is right here—the bottom half of this big bed !
You ’ ll notice that I have a cushioned crate that ’ s @ @ @ @ @ @ @ .
to circle around and start howling in !
I absolutely love doing this—it ’ s sort of my personal Calm app .
Then I jump onto my real bed , where I sleep soundly , knowing that my pet people actually want to sleep on the couch !
They spend their days rubbing their shoulders , which means they miss sleeping in ways that apply a lot ( too much ?
—no such thing ! )
of pressure on their necks and they can ’ t wait till bedtime to do it @ @ @ @ @ @ @ so much , and I show this by sneezing on them and screaming at them if they ever pay attention to my No .
1 ( and only ) enemy—their phones !
Right , I haven ’ t shown you the bathroom yet .
This place is technically a two-bed , one-bath !
And the bath ?
Why , it ’ s the whole house !
It ’ s true !
You can do anything anywhere !
That ’ s the toilet !
And that ’ s the toilet !
And that ’ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ s my above-ground porcelain water bowl , so I ’ d prefer you didn ’ t do it there .
Thank you so much for joining me on my tour !
Now , if you ’ d like to stick around , I ’ m going to make eye contact with you while I lick myself—I ’ ll politely ask that you not look away !

Hello! I have never met you and now you are my best friend and I love you so much! I am the dog and I would love to give you a tour of my home, where I keep my toys and my food and my pet humans and now you live here, too, because you are my best friend! I own this house despite not only not knowing what a mortgage is but also not even really knowing what my name is, especially when called, eighty-five per cent of the time! I’ll answer to both everything and nothing! In fact, you can call me anything you want; just don’t call me late for dinner! Seriously, that is the only time I will bark and seem to love you a little less—oh, my God, just kidding, I would never love you less—I can’t live without you! Anyway, where were we . . .
Oh, right! My home! You can tell it’s mine because of the carpeting, which is made entirely of clumps of my fur spaced out in a way that paints a picture of a dog that knows how to use a shaving kit but not a trash can—and is also blindfolded but can smell something a good fifty feet away! I am able to achieve this randomized aesthetic result by simply walking or doing nothing! Just one of God’s great mysteries!
This home is perfect. Like they say, “Location, location . . . ” I forgot the third one because I just saw a dragonfly—who are you again? Oh, right, best friend! They always say that!
So, by the front door, you’ll notice that there’s a doormat! This doormat is great for getting my paws ready to wipe on the real mat, which is the wall! You might think that it’s inconvenient to wipe my paws on the wall, which is vertical, because of gravity! And it is! Let’s go to my living room, shall we?
The living room is the end of the couch where my pet humans used to put their feet up before I was able, gently, to set the example that that’s not what it’s for! Sure, it’s a small space, but it serves as ideal storage for my art materials! Yes, I am an artist, and all of my art projects are abstract! The medium I use is mainly my pet humans’ pillows, but I have recently begun working on my “Sock Series,” which dares to ask the question, “What would a sock look like with a large hole?”
Anyway, if we stay put, you’ll find my dining room! Yes, it is exactly where my living room is! I will not eat anywhere else but on this corner of the sofa! It’s very efficient to use this space for both my art projects and my food, despite having a spacious kitchen in which to eat! Plus, the crumbs on my “dining table” make for a great late-night snack when I refuse to go to bed! Sleeping is no fun. When I can’t sleep, I count sheep, but then I try to eat them and I wake up and run into a vase. There are always so many vases in my house!
Aaaaahhhhhh! Oh, sorry! You stopped petting me for a second, so I assumed you died! Anyway, on to the bedroom!
My bedroom is right here—the bottom half of this big bed! You’ll notice that I have a cushioned crate that’s a perfect size for me . . . to circle around and start howling in! I absolutely love doing this—it’s sort of my personal Calm app. Then I jump onto my real bed, where I sleep soundly, knowing that my pet people actually want to sleep on the couch! They spend their days rubbing their shoulders, which means they miss sleeping in ways that apply a lot (too much?—no such thing!) of pressure on their necks and they can’t wait till bedtime to do it all over again! I love them so much, and I show this by sneezing on them and screaming at them if they ever pay attention to my No. 1 (and only) enemy—their phones!
Right, I haven’t shown you the bathroom yet. This place is technically a two-bed, one-bath! And the bath? Why, it’s the whole house! It’s true! You can do anything anywhere! That’s the toilet! And that’s the toilet! And that’s the—well, actually, that’s my above-ground porcelain water bowl, so I’d prefer you didn’t do it there.
Thank you so much for joining me on my tour! Now, if you’d like to stick around, I’m going to make eye contact with you while I lick myself—I’ll politely ask that you not look away!


newyorker--2020-09-25--The Troubling State of Medical Care in ICE Detention

Last week , a nurse at a privately run immigration-detention facility in Irwin County , Georgia , filed a whistle-blower complaint alleging that women at the facility were undergoing hysterectomies without their informed consent .
The whistle-blower , Dawn Wooten , filed her complaint to the office of the Department of Homeland Security ’ s inspector general , which is now investigating the claims ; Immigration and Customs Enforcement has responded by saying that there are only records of two hysterectomies performed in the past two years on women at the facility , which is run by LaSalle Corrections .
@ @ @ @ @ @ @ about their experiences of gynecological exams and procedures while at Irwin , and some have hired lawyers .
Wooten ’ s complaint also states that the facility ’ s operators did not take proper safety measures for COVID-19 ; this was the subject of a separate complaint , made in July by another whistle-blower , about a LaSalle facility in Louisiana .
To discuss the whistle-blower complaint , and what we know about the Irwin County facility and ICE detention centers more broadly , I spoke by phone with Eunice Cho , a @ @ @ @ @ @ @ s National Prison Project .
In 2016 , she wrote a report for the Southern Poverty Law Center about ICE detention facilities across the South , which singled out Irwin for the low quality of its medical care .
During our conversation , which has been edited for length and clarity , we discussed the greatest dangers that immigrant women face at poorly run facilities , how language barriers make detention and medical care even worse , and the ways in which the Trump Administration has exacerbated the already dire circumstances of ICE @ @ @ @ @ @ @ we know about ICE detention facilities , especially the ones that are contracted out , and especially in the South , if you think that considering these things in regional terms is helpful ?
In the South , in particular , these facilities are known for harsh conditions and their remote nature .
Recently , we put together a report at the A.C.L.U .
called Justice Free Zones .
It looks at the expansion of immigration detention under the Trump Administration .
And the vast majority of that has happened in the rural @ @ @ @ @ @ @ emptied out by criminal-justice reform .
So these are beds that are now empty , because of the decrease in the numbers of people in mass incarceration , and they ’ re now being filled with immigrant detainees .
And the thing about these detention facilities , particularly in the South , is that they are notable for the fact that they ’ re incredibly remote , often hours away from the nearest metropolitan area .
That means detainees are remotely located from friends , family , and any infrastructure of support , @ @ @ @ @ @ @ can help support detainees in what they are facing in these facilities .
The fact that most , if not all , of these facilities are run by private-prison companies through contracts with local counties also reflects something about the economics .
Many small counties have basically hitched their ride to mass incarceration .
And they have now become dependent on ICE to fill those beds—and they see that as an economic engine for local economies , because the per diem in the South tends to be much lower .
Basically , it @ @ @ @ @ @ @ facilities in general , across the board .
The per diem is paid by ICE .
It is a rate of payment per day for each person housed in a detention center .
It usually covers the costs of housing , food , security , and onsite medical care .
On average , the per diem for an ICE detainee is around two hundred dollars per day .
But at contract facilities in the South , the per diem rate is regularly much lower than the national average , sometimes forty-five or sixty @ @ @ @ @ @ @ see is very poor standards of care across the country with respect to ICE detention .
There are even more corners being cut in these facilities because profit margins are even smaller .
Why did ICE begin subcontracting these facilities ?
Just to save money ?
The expansion of ICE ’ s detention facilities basically hinges on the private-prison industry .
So as of January , 2020 , we found that eighty per cent of people in immigration-detention beds are in facilities that are either owned or operated by private-prison companies .
And @ @ @ @ @ @ @ detention beds that have been added under Trump , ninety per cent of those beds are owned or operated by private-prison companies .
When I say owned or operated , that means that it can follow two models .
One is , ICE will contract directly with a private-prison company like G.E.O .
or CoreCivic , or it will contract with a local county that then turns around and contracts with a private-prison company , and takes a tiny bit off the top for the county .
What does medical care often look @ @ @ @ @ @ @ that medical care within ICE facilities raises concern across the board , whether they ’ re in metropolitan areas or whether they ’ re in a rural area , because what happens inside a facility is really subject to the problems that plague many correctional institutions in terms of poor medical care—under-staffing , lack of responsiveness to people with chronic-care issues , all of the things that happen in correctional and detention facilities nationwide .
The problem for rural facilities , in particular , is that they ’ re located so far away @ @ @ @ @ @ @ care and trauma care , that when there ’ s a need for that sort of thing , it is going to be too late , or you are in a place where you have very underdeveloped medical resources in general .
So there ’ s less ability to provide the necessary specialized care to people in detention .
How were you able to learn about the care at these facilities ?
For those reports , the process is really going into the facilities and getting permission from ICE to do a tour @ @ @ @ @ @ @ organizations and legal groups may request the ability to tour the facilities and hold stakeholder interviews with people who are in detention .
So what we have done is schedule those and go in and really be able to see what ’ s going on inside the facilities .
The access that we have is , of course , not quite the same as if we were litigating against ICE , where the court is mandating that you are able to see documents and depose employees and that sort of thing , but @ @ @ @ @ @ @ of what is happening .
Detainees always tell us , “ The food is way better today .
They ’ ve repainted the whole facility .
They ’ ve cleaned everything up in advance of your visit.
” But even given those cosmetic improvements , very serious violations and very serious issues with respect to conditions of confinement are usually visible .
What are some of the conditions you have found in your reports ?
So in terms of medical care , what we ’ re finding is actually not very different from @ @ @ @ @ @ @ themselves .
For example , at Irwin , the Office of Detention Oversight arm of ICE conducted reviews of the facilities .
And what is notable about the government inspections is that they have actually been criticized widely , even by the office of the inspector general [ O.I.G . ]
and the Government Accountability Office , for basically rubber-stamping and giving a free pass to many of these potential facilities .
Because , as part of the appropriation framework , if a facility receives two failing grades on an inspection , the @ @ @ @ @ @ @ since that provision was added , in 2009 , only one out of a hundred facilities have failed inspections [ according to a 2015 finding ] .

Last week, a nurse at a privately run immigration-detention facility in Irwin County, Georgia, filed a whistle-blower complaint alleging that women at the facility were undergoing hysterectomies without their informed consent. The whistle-blower, Dawn Wooten, filed her complaint to the office of the Department of Homeland Security’s inspector general, which is now investigating the claims; Immigration and Customs Enforcement has responded by saying that there are only records of two hysterectomies performed in the past two years on women at the facility, which is run by LaSalle Corrections. Several women have come forward to complain about their experiences of gynecological exams and procedures while at Irwin, and some have hired lawyers. Wooten’s complaint also states that the facility’s operators did not take proper safety measures for COVID-19; this was the subject of a separate complaint, made in July by another whistle-blower, about a LaSalle facility in Louisiana.
To discuss the whistle-blower complaint, and what we know about the Irwin County facility and ICE detention centers more broadly, I spoke by phone with Eunice Cho, a senior staff attorney at the A.C.L.U.’s National Prison Project. In 2016, she wrote a report for the Southern Poverty Law Center about ICE detention facilities across the South, which singled out Irwin for the low quality of its medical care. During our conversation, which has been edited for length and clarity, we discussed the greatest dangers that immigrant women face at poorly run facilities, how language barriers make detention and medical care even worse, and the ways in which the Trump Administration has exacerbated the already dire circumstances of ICE detainees across the country.
What do we know about ICE detention facilities, especially the ones that are contracted out, and especially in the South, if you think that considering these things in regional terms is helpful?
In the South, in particular, these facilities are known for harsh conditions and their remote nature. Recently, we put together a report at the A.C.L.U. called Justice Free Zones. It looks at the expansion of immigration detention under the Trump Administration. And the vast majority of that has happened in the rural South, in jails that have been emptied out by criminal-justice reform. So these are beds that are now empty, because of the decrease in the numbers of people in mass incarceration, and they’re now being filled with immigrant detainees. And the thing about these detention facilities, particularly in the South, is that they are notable for the fact that they’re incredibly remote, often hours away from the nearest metropolitan area. That means detainees are remotely located from friends, family, and any infrastructure of support, including legal support and other advocacy that can help support detainees in what they are facing in these facilities.
The fact that most, if not all, of these facilities are run by private-prison companies through contracts with local counties also reflects something about the economics. Many small counties have basically hitched their ride to mass incarceration. And they have now become dependent on ICE to fill those beds—and they see that as an economic engine for local economies, because the per diem in the South tends to be much lower. Basically, it takes much less to sustain these Southern facilities in general, across the board. The per diem is paid by ICE. It is a rate of payment per day for each person housed in a detention center. It usually covers the costs of housing, food, security, and onsite medical care. On average, the per diem for an ICE detainee is around two hundred dollars per day. But at contract facilities in the South, the per diem rate is regularly much lower than the national average, sometimes forty-five or sixty dollars per day. But what we see is very poor standards of care across the country with respect to ICE detention. There are even more corners being cut in these facilities because profit margins are even smaller.
Why did ICE begin subcontracting these facilities? Just to save money?
The expansion of ICE’s detention facilities basically hinges on the private-prison industry. So as of January, 2020, we found that eighty per cent of people in immigration-detention beds are in facilities that are either owned or operated by private-prison companies. And if you look at the number of detention beds that have been added under Trump, ninety per cent of those beds are owned or operated by private-prison companies. When I say owned or operated, that means that it can follow two models. One is, ICE will contract directly with a private-prison company like G.E.O. or CoreCivic, or it will contract with a local county that then turns around and contracts with a private-prison company, and takes a tiny bit off the top for the county.
What does medical care often look like at these facilities?
I think that medical care within ICE facilities raises concern across the board, whether they’re in metropolitan areas or whether they’re in a rural area, because what happens inside a facility is really subject to the problems that plague many correctional institutions in terms of poor medical care—under-staffing, lack of responsiveness to people with chronic-care issues, all of the things that happen in correctional and detention facilities nationwide. The problem for rural facilities, in particular, is that they’re located so far away from any medical infrastructure, including emergency care and trauma care, that when there’s a need for that sort of thing, it is going to be too late, or you are in a place where you have very underdeveloped medical resources in general. So there’s less ability to provide the necessary specialized care to people in detention.
How were you able to learn about the care at these facilities?
For those reports, the process is really going into the facilities and getting permission from ICE to do a tour. Members of the public and nonprofit organizations and legal groups may request the ability to tour the facilities and hold stakeholder interviews with people who are in detention. So what we have done is schedule those and go in and really be able to see what’s going on inside the facilities. The access that we have is, of course, not quite the same as if we were litigating against ICE, where the court is mandating that you are able to see documents and depose employees and that sort of thing, but it does give you a good sense of what is happening. Detainees always tell us, “The food is way better today. They’ve repainted the whole facility. They’ve cleaned everything up in advance of your visit.” But even given those cosmetic improvements, very serious violations and very serious issues with respect to conditions of confinement are usually visible.
What are some of the conditions you have found in your reports?
So in terms of medical care, what we’re finding is actually not very different from what the government inspectors have also found themselves. For example, at Irwin, the Office of Detention Oversight arm of ICE conducted reviews of the facilities. And what is notable about the government inspections is that they have actually been criticized widely, even by the office of the inspector general [O.I.G.] and the Government Accountability Office, for basically rubber-stamping and giving a free pass to many of these potential facilities. Because, as part of the appropriation framework, if a facility receives two failing grades on an inspection, the contract can be pulled. And ever since that provision was added, in 2009, only one out of a hundred facilities have failed inspections [according to a 2015 finding].
But what these oversight inspections have revealed is that medical care provided to detainees is substandard, and that people can go for weeks, if not months, with life-threatening conditions, without getting the proper medical care. People are typically told to take a Tylenol, or aspirin, or drink more water as the standard recommendation or response for any illness. It is very challenging to have a specialist’s care approved. And, in general, many detainees have reported that they are actually unaware of what is happening to them in detention because of poor translation in these medical appointments. We’ve had detainees tell us that they have no idea what’s happening. We’ve had many people who were detained say that they have been pulled in to come translate for other detained people in their medical care provided by ICE facilities, because the medical staff could not speak the person’s language, which obviously raises many issues regarding patient confidentiality. Even where there’s no bilingual staff, detention staff is supposed to be able to use telephone language lines, but that’s either not used or not actually very effective in terms of providing care sufficient for informed consent.
What is your view, broadly speaking, of the people who work at ICE facilities? Are these problems about resources and people being stuck in a bad position? Or is there really poor care and sadistic behavior going on?


newyorker--2020-09-25--Marilynne Robinson’s Essential American Stories

It is the only one left .
A hundred years ago , Robert Frost bought a ninety-acre farm near South Shaftsbury , Vermont ; it came with an old stone house and a pair of barns , but he also wanted an orchard , so he planted hundreds of apple trees .
Time and wind and winter storms have had their way with them , and today only one remains .
Earlier this summer , Marilynne Robinson followed a path through the fallow field that used to be Frost ’ s orchard , then looked for a long time at @ @ @ @ @ @ @ does not generally like visiting the houses of writers gone from this world .
“ They feel like mausoleums , ” she says .
“ I prefer to think of my favorite writers off somewhere writing.
” Because of the pandemic , though , it had been months since she had left her summer house , by a lake in Saratoga Springs , so she was open to an adventure .
She ambled around the farmhouse and its grounds , looking at Frost ’ s books and through his windows , studying his @ @ @ @ @ @ @ flower gardens while photographing the poet ’ s , and admiring a bronze statue of Frost before posing obligingly beside it .
But it was the apple tree that seemed particularly charged in Robinson ’ s presence .
More trunk than tree , barren except for a single branch with a few withered attempts at fruit , its shadow was barely longer than hers .
As a writer , Robinson is a direct descendant of Frost , carrying on his tradition of careful , democratic observations of this country ’ s landscapes and @ @ @ @ @ @ @ on the eternal and the other on the everyday .
As a Calvinist , she has spent a lot of her life thinking about apple trees .
This one seemed very far from Eden , but Robinson is accustomed to tending gardens that others have forsaken .
She has devoted her life to reconsidering figures whom history has seen fit to forget or malign , and recovering ideas long misinterpreted or neglected .
Her writing is best understood as a grand project of restoration , aesthetic as well as political , which she @ @ @ @ @ @ @ in six works of nonfiction and five novels , including a new one this fall .
“ Jack ” is the fourth novel in Robinson ’ s Gilead series , an intergenerational saga of race , religion , family , and forgiveness centered on a small Iowa town .
But it is not accurate to call it a sequel or a prequel .
Rather , this book and the others— “ Gilead , ” “ Home , ” and “ Lila ” —are more like the Gospels , telling the same story four @ @ @ @ @ @ @ career by writing a book she believed was unpublishable , and has persisted in writing books she believes are unfashionable , she has earned the Pulitzer Prize and the National Humanities Medal , the praise of Presidents and archbishops , and an audience as devoted to her work as mystics are to visions .
At seventy-six , she is still trying to convince the rest of us that her habit of looking backward isn ’ t retrograde but radical , and that this country ’ s history , so often seen now as @ @ @ @ @ @ @ their remedy , too .
Last fall , at the end of a day spent working on “ Jack , ” Robinson sat down for an improvised dinner at her home in Iowa City , where she has lived for three decades and where she taught at the Iowa Writers ’ Workshop until she retired , four years ago .
She considered the day a success because she had perfected a single sentence .
“ I feel that everything has to be structurally integral , and that , if I write even one @ @ @ @ @ @ @ it ’ s a flawed structure , ” she says .
Robinson has converted her dining room into something like a rare-books library , its long table covered in enormous seventeenth-century volumes of John Foxe ’ s “ Actes and Monuments , ” and the cushions and blankets that protect them , so she had arranged small dishes of crackers and cheese and assorted tarts in the kitchen .
The result seemed like something out of a Louisa May Alcott novel , she observed .
Then she clarified that it actually was out @ @ @ @ @ @ @ Girl , ” which features an unconventional meal in a sculptor ’ s studio , a scene Robinson has always cherished for its depiction of the freedom of the artistic life .
Robinson read Alcott as a child , the way many American girls do ; she also read “ Moby-Dick , ” at age nine .
Born during the Second World War , she was brought up in the Idaho Panhandle , where her family had lived for four generations .
Just about the only thing that wasn ’ t rationed at @ @ @ @ @ @ @ ’ s unruly opus was one of her favorites : an endless font for the vocabulary lists she liked to compile , and a metaphysical primer for making sense of the world .
When she wrote her first novel , decades later , her nickname for the manuscript was “ Moby-Jane , ” and the conversation between it and Melville is obvious from the opening sentence : “ My name is Ruth.
” That book ’ s actual title is “ Housekeeping , ” which , Robinson points out , might just as @ @ @ @ @ @ @ ’ s “ Walden , ” another influence .
Like “ Walden , ” “ Housekeeping ” is concerned with how the self stands in relation to society .
Ruth and her younger sister , Lucille , have been abandoned by their mother and left at their family ’ s homestead , where they are raised by a series of female relatives—first their grandmother , then two great-aunts , and finally their mother ’ s eccentric sister , Sylvie .
Lucille follows the path of respectability , apprenticing herself to her home-economics teacher @ @ @ @ @ @ @ into the wilderness around and within her .
What Melville did with a whaling ship and an ocean , Robinson does with a family home and a lake .
“ We both drowned a lot of people , ” she says , laughing .
With her serene gravitas , Robinson can seem somewhat like a benevolent mountain , but her sense of humor is quick and abundant .
“ Housekeeping ” is an epic made from the domestic , a depiction of childhood that takes seriously the strangeness of being a sentient creature @ @ @ @ @ @ @ novel with a writer friend , who found it remarkable and sent it along to his agent , Ellen Levine .
Levine read the manuscript on a dreary day at a dreary hotel while accompanying her husband to a medical conference and found that it changed the weather .
“ It was just transporting , ” she says .
“ The language and the feeling of it was haunting and beautiful.
” She has represented Robinson for more than forty years .
As much as she loved the book , Levine warned Robinson @ @ @ @ @ @ @ publish it ; when Farrar , Straus & Giroux decided to do so , the publisher warned them that it might attract very little in the way of readers or reviews .
Robinson ’ s editor thought some revisions might help , but she agreed to only two changes : striking a passage about a lumberyard deemed too lyrical , and changing a dog ’ s name from Hitler to Brutus .
When “ Housekeeping ” came out , in 1981 , Doris Lessing declared that “ every sentence is a delight ” @ @ @ @ @ @ @ as sharp and clear as light and air and water.
” Anatole Broyard , in his review for the Times , wrote , “ Here ’ s a first novel that sounds as if the author has been treasuring it up all her life , waiting for it to form itself .
It ’ s as if , in writing it , she broke through the ordinary human condition with all its dissatisfactions , and achieved a kind of transfiguration .
”

Robinson felt that she and her brother grew close because of the isolation of their childhood; wanting the same for her own children, she took them to Brittany for a year, in 1978, while she and her husband taught at the Université de Haute Bretagne. “We were the only Americans—it was really something,” her older son, James, recalled. “We went to this rural school, and people made such a big deal about us.” Because of a higher-education strike, Robinson had plenty of time to work on “Housekeeping.” “I was probably the only person in France thinking of Idaho,” she says.
The experiment abroad was so successful that the family did it again in 1983, when both parents taught at the University of Kent. By then, “Housekeeping” had been out in the world for two years; another twenty-one would pass before Robinson published her second novel. But she never stopped writing, and it was while living in Canterbury that she found the subject for her next book—an exposé inspired by daily news coverage of nuclear pollution from a plant on the northwest coast of England called Sellafield.
“It’s my most important book,” Robinson says of “Mother Country: Britain, the Welfare State and Nuclear Pollution.” “If I had to choose, and I could only publish one book, ‘Mother Country’ would be it.” This is a surprising preference, since many of Robinson’s readers have never heard of it. “I was clipping these articles, reading about plutonium and cancer rates,” Robinson recalls. “Everyone seemed to know what was going on, but no one seemed to be doing anything about it. So when we came back to America I didn’t even really unpack, I just started writing about it.”
Although her journalism up to that point included little more than a few columns and a profile of John Cheever for her college newspaper, Robinson quickly wrote a magazine article, which Levine placed with Harper’s in early 1985. Farrar, Straus & Giroux then commissioned a book on the subject, in which Robinson drastically scaled up her argument. The latter half of “Mother Country” is an expansion of the article, an account of the nuclear program at Sellafield and its literal and figurative fallout—including an indictment of environmental activists with Greenpeace UK and Friends of the Earth, who Robinson felt were complicit in covering up the extent of the catastrophe. The first half is something else entirely: a thoroughgoing and thoroughly scathing political and social history of modern England.
As Robinson saw it, the roots of the Sellafield crisis lay in failures of political economy and moral reasoning which went back to the sixteenth century and the beginnings of the Poor Laws. While the developed world grandstanded about the superiority of its scientists and its social order, she alleged, one of its leading nations was poisoning its own people for profit. “My attack will seem ill-tempered and eccentric, a veering toward anarchy, the unsettling emergence of lady novelist as petroleuse,” she wrote. “I am angry to the depths of my soul that the earth has been so injured.”
The reviews were mixed. Some critics challenged her conclusions and the facts on which she had based them, while others seemed affronted that an American would presume to criticize the nuclear program of any other country and by the claim that Britain’s political foundations were so compromised. Although the book was a finalist for the National Book Award in the United States, Greenpeace UK sued Robinson for libel, and, when she refused to remove the passages in question, the book was banned in Britain.
For Robinson, the book’s reception was evidence of the very cultural hubris she had diagnosed, and only confirmed her sense that the economic interests of the ruling few routinely inflict tragedy on everyone else, with nuclear pollution being simply the most recent and potentially most disastrous iteration. The state had failed its citizens, advocacy groups had failed the public, and an entire civilization had cosseted itself in a deluded sense of its own rectitude. Only the individual conscience could be trusted, she concluded, and moral courage would often place individuals at odds with society.
So far, at least, “Mother Country” has not joined the ranks of “Silent Spring” or “The Other America.” But, if the book did not change the world, it did change the course of Robinson’s career. After its publication, she began writing long, tendentious essays about the things she thought were worth thinking about: “Puritans and Prigs,” “Decline,” “Slander,” “The Tyranny of Petty Coercion.” Robinson has published five essay collections, four of them in the past ten years. Like “Mother Country,” the essays bear a trace of the high-school debater who could leave other students trembling: Robinson does not suffer fools, or foes, or sometimes, it must be said, friends. Even those who admire her can leave an argument feeling a little singed.
“Mother Country” also helped determine the future of Robinson’s fiction. After the Sellafield lawsuit, she sought solace in historical examples of people whose moral clarity was disregarded by their contemporaries. She read about Dietrich Bonhoeffer and the Confessing Church in Nazi Germany, then turned her attention to the life and work of abolitionists in the United States. The year after “Mother Country” was published, Robinson accepted the job in Iowa, and, once in the Midwest, began exploring a constellation of colleges those abolitionists had built, among them Grinnell, Oberlin, Carleton, and Knox. Many of these institutions were integrated by race or gender or both—an egalitarianism so radical that a century later it took federal courts and the National Guard to enforce it elsewhere—and Robinson wondered what had happened to the visionary impulses behind them. The Second Great Awakening began as a broad movement for social and moral reform and spread across the entire frontier, only to be snuffed out after a single generation and misremembered today as nothing but an outburst of cultish religious enthusiasm.
What puzzled Robinson was not the moral clarity of the abolitionists but how the communities they established could so quickly abandon their ideological origins. This was Jonathan Edwards all over again: historical figures, flawed because they are human but full of promise for the same reason, who are maligned, underestimated, or forgotten. We often say that those who do not remember the past are condemned to repeat it, but that suggests that all we can learn from history is its errors and its failures. Robinson believes this to be a dangerously incomplete understanding, one that distorts our sense of the present and limits the possibilities of the future by overstating our own wisdom and overlooking the visionaries of earlier generations. “It is important to be serious and accurate about history,” she says. “It seems to me much of what is said today is shallow and empty and false. I believe in the origins of things, reading primary texts themselves—reading the things many people pretend to have read, or don’t even think need to be read because we all supposedly know what they say.”
This conviction was evident in Robinson’s seminars at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, and remains so today in her lectures around the world. She has assigned Calvin and Edwards when teaching Melville, read all of Sidney in order to talk about Shakespeare’s sonnets, and constructed her critiques of modern scientism from close readings of Darwin, Nietzsche, and Freud. She pursues the same project at her Congregational church, where she advocates for the reading of texts like John Winthrop’s “A Model of Christian Charity” while also calling for more outreach to immigrants and multilingual carols for children.
Robinson has been a member of her church for almost as long as she’s lived in Iowa. She can regularly be found arranging the flowers in the sanctuary, socializing during coffee hour, and bowing her head during the Prayers of the People. Occasionally, she has preached exegetically rich sermons on, among other things, economics, scriptural language, and grace. Those sermons are sometimes disarmingly personal. “I have never been much good at the things most people do,” she confesses in one of them, before describing the single day she spent as a waitress—a spectacular failure, in which she spilled soup on a customer and was banished to the kitchen, where an older waitress, taking pity on her, tried to give her that day’s tips. Robinson likens the waitress’s offer to the widow’s mite, in the Gospels: “a gift made freely, in contempt of circumstance.” Yet she felt that she could not accept it, and struggles still with the question of whether she should have done so. She credits the waitress with teaching her that generosity is “a casting off of the constraints of prudence and self-interest.” In that respect, she notes, it “is so like an art that I think it may actually be the impulse behind art.”
Robinson is a gifted preacher, and when, after two decades, she finally started writing another novel, it was because she had begun to hear the voice of a Congregationalist minister. He was an old man, and she sensed that he was writing something at his desk while a young child played at his feet. This turned out to be the Reverend John Ames, drafting a letter to his son, a miracle from a late-in-life marriage—so late that he fears his heart condition will kill him before he can teach the boy so much as the Ten Commandments or their family’s history. “It came easily, like he was telling me the story, and all I had to do was listen,” she recalls, pointing to a grassy bank beside the Iowa River not far from her old office, where, eighteen months after she first heard the reverend’s voice, the novel’s final pages came together. A plain patch of riverbank, near one of the university’s footbridges, it is akin to many of the places Robinson conjures in her work: simple, yet rendered beautiful by our attention. “I don’t mean that I was ever seized, or that what I experienced was a vision,” she says, “but I felt engaged by the character—his voice, his mind. I liked listening to him. He was such good company that I missed him when I had finished writing.”
Cartoon by Mick Stevens Copy link to cartoon Copy link to cartoon Shop Shop
That book, “Gilead,” which was published in 2004, definitively established Robinson as one of the world’s greatest living novelists. Her nonfiction had taken on the thunderous tones of a prophet, but in her fiction she found the range of the psalmist, sometimes gentle, sometimes wild, and always full of empathy and wonder. “I have a bicameral mind,” she says, explaining that her lectures and essays are a way of “aerating” ideas that often originate in agitation or outrage, whereas the novels are a different exercise entirely. The essays are the most explicit expression of her ideas, the novels the most elegant. “With any piece of fiction, any work of literature, the assumption is that a human life matters,” Robinson says. For her, this is a theological commitment, a reflection of her belief in the Imago Dei: the value of each of us, inclusive of our faults. “That is why I love my characters. I can only write about characters I love.”
“Gilead” is sometimes mistaken for nothing more than a plainspoken novel about good-hearted religious people in a small Midwestern town. But, in reality, it is the morally demanding result of Robinson’s encounter with the abolitionists. She modelled the eponymous town of Gilead on the real town of Tabor, Iowa, which was founded by clergymen who created a college and maintained a stop on the Underground Railroad. The narrator’s grandfather, also a Reverend John Ames, was a radical abolitionist who went west to the Kansas Territory from Maine in the decades before the Civil War. At the time, that territory was the site of violent clashes between Border Ruffians, who wanted slavery to be legal there after statehood, and Free-Staters, who wanted to outlaw it; somewhere between fifty and two hundred people died in the conflict, which became known as Bleeding Kansas. After his stint there, the first John Ames settled in Iowa, where he preached with a pistol in his belt, wore shirts bloodied from battle, gave John Brown sanctuary in his church, and served as a chaplain in the Union Army. His son, the second Reverend John Ames, was a pacifist who rejected his father’s zealotry, recoiling from the violence of the First World War and quarrelling with his father over Christian ethics.


newyorker--2020-09-25--Burmese Food and a Hopeful Vision at Yun Café & Asian Mart

Just outside the entrance to Yun Café & Asian Mart are two small folding tables , at which I can ’ t exactly recommend sitting , and not only because of the pandemic .
Yun Café , which opened in August , is subterranean , at the bottom of a set of stairs leading to the Jackson Heights–Roosevelt Avenue subway station .
Even in a more relaxed era , most people would find the atmosphere lacking , although it ’ s fun to be reminded that the city contains a whole universe underground ; the café faces a tiny bodega @ @ @ @ @ @ @ don ’ t , and wear a mask ) of a barbershop .
Luckily , you can sit at other tables upstairs , en plein air on a lively plaza , or take your food to go .
Most everything here travels well ; without much of a kitchen , the tiny café is limited largely to sandwiches and cold salads , specifically Burmese salads , which are the clear draw of the place .
Yun ’ s married owners , Tin Ko Naing and Thidar Kyaw , are from Myanmar , where @ @ @ @ @ @ @ ; the year-round average temperature is eighty degrees .
You could liken Burmese food to cuisines that use similar ingredients and flavors , including Thai , Vietnamese , Indian , and Chinese .
But it might be more useful to home in on what sets it apart : laphet , for one , fermented tea leaves that are eaten instead of brewed .
For Yun ’ s version of laphet thoke , or tea-leaf salad , the leaves , darkest green and imparting of a deep vegetal funk , are mixed with shredded @ @ @ @ @ @ @ tomatoes , coins of garlic so caramelized they look like golden raisins , roasted soy nuts and peanuts , sesame oil , snips of fiery green chili , dried shrimp , fish sauce , and lemon juice .
Umami on umami on umami .
Brightly astringent fermented ginger replaces the laphet in another salad .
In others you ’ ll find shreds of tart green papaya , or green mango ; a tangle of thick yellow egg noodles or white-rice vermicelli ; shaggy morsels of chicken or neat cubes of tripe ; wedges @ @ @ @ @ @ @ A samosa “ salad ” turns out to be more of a soup , for which the tricornered pastries are smashed open , mashed potato and chickpea spilling out , topped with mint and cabbage , and bathed in a thick golden broth , heady with garam masala , that gets warmed on a hot plate if you want to eat it right away and packed in a separate container if you don ’ t .
The same goes for the lemongrass-and-chili-laced fish stock that ’ s the base of the mohinga , @ @ @ @ @ @ @ Myanmar ’ s national dish and is traditionally served for breakfast .
Naing and Kyaw , whose twenty-three-year-old daughter , Yun , helps run Yun Café , did not intend to open a Burmese restaurant , least of all during a global pandemic .
In Myanmar , they owned a restaurant and , later , a tea shop , but in 2008 they left for Singapore , where Naing worked as an engineer .
In 2014 , Kyaw immigrated to the U.S. , got her real-estate license , and took over a cheap @ @ @ @ @ @ @ Heights , selling mostly drygoods imported from Myanmar .
Business was never great , because of the isolated location , and when her husband and daughter followed her , two years ago , they talked about looking for a space with better foot traffic .
It wasn ’ t until May of this year that they found one they could afford .
“ Everybody around us was , like , ‘ This does not sound like a good idea , everybody ’ s struggling , people are closing , and you want to @ @ @ @ @ @ @ trains , ’ ” Yun told me recently .
“ But things will go back to normal one day , ” she said .
“ If we can just hold up until then , we should be fine.
” Initially , they planned to focus on coffee , smoothies , sandwiches— “ good for rushing , ” Yun explained .
It was Kyaw ’ s idea to add Burmese salads , which made Yun and her father skeptical at first .
“ We were , like , ‘ Nobody knows Burmese food.
’ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ s have a little corner , ” she said .
“ Then we opened the store , and people were coming for the Burmese food.
” ( Burmese salads and soups $ 3- $ 15 . )
♦

Just outside the entrance to Yun Café & Asian Mart are two small folding tables, at which I can’t exactly recommend sitting, and not only because of the pandemic. Yun Café, which opened in August, is subterranean, at the bottom of a set of stairs leading to the Jackson Heights–Roosevelt Avenue subway station. Even in a more relaxed era, most people would find the atmosphere lacking, although it’s fun to be reminded that the city contains a whole universe underground; the café faces a tiny bodega and is within spitting distance (but don’t, and wear a mask) of a barbershop.
Because of its location, the family who opened Yun initially conceived of the café as a quick stop for rushed commuters; they have been surprised, instead, to find themselves catering to adventurous eaters seeking out Burmese food. Photograph by Zachary Zavislak for The New Yorker
Luckily, you can sit at other tables upstairs, en plein air on a lively plaza, or take your food to go. Most everything here travels well; without much of a kitchen, the tiny café is limited largely to sandwiches and cold salads, specifically Burmese salads, which are the clear draw of the place. Yun’s married owners, Tin Ko Naing and Thidar Kyaw, are from Myanmar, where salad is a pillar of the cuisine; the year-round average temperature is eighty degrees.
Salads—and sandwiches and smoothies—are made to order behind a counter at the back of the shop. Photograph by Zachary Zavislak for The New Yorker
You could liken Burmese food to cuisines that use similar ingredients and flavors, including Thai, Vietnamese, Indian, and Chinese. But it might be more useful to home in on what sets it apart: laphet, for one, fermented tea leaves that are eaten instead of brewed. For Yun’s version of laphet thoke, or tea-leaf salad, the leaves, darkest green and imparting of a deep vegetal funk, are mixed with shredded cabbage, thinly sliced red and green tomatoes, coins of garlic so caramelized they look like golden raisins, roasted soy nuts and peanuts, sesame oil, snips of fiery green chili, dried shrimp, fish sauce, and lemon juice. Umami on umami on umami.
A few hot dishes are prepared off-site and warmed up on a hot plate, including the broth that gets poured over a salad of samosas. Photograph by Zachary Zavislak for The New Yorker
Brightly astringent fermented ginger replaces the laphet in another salad. In others you’ll find shreds of tart green papaya, or green mango; a tangle of thick yellow egg noodles or white-rice vermicelli; shaggy morsels of chicken or neat cubes of tripe; wedges of house-made tofu or fish cake. A samosa “salad” turns out to be more of a soup, for which the tricornered pastries are smashed open, mashed potato and chickpea spilling out, topped with mint and cabbage, and bathed in a thick golden broth, heady with garam masala, that gets warmed on a hot plate if you want to eat it right away and packed in a separate container if you don’t. The same goes for the lemongrass-and-chili-laced fish stock that’s the base of the mohinga, a noodle soup that’s considered Myanmar’s national dish and is traditionally served for breakfast.
Shelves are lined with packaged snacks, plus canned and jarred goods, many imported from Myanmar, Thailand, and Taiwan. Photograph by Zachary Zavislak for The New Yorker
Naing and Kyaw, whose twenty-three-year-old daughter, Yun, helps run Yun Café, did not intend to open a Burmese restaurant, least of all during a global pandemic. In Myanmar, they owned a restaurant and, later, a tea shop, but in 2008 they left for Singapore, where Naing worked as an engineer. In 2014, Kyaw immigrated to the U.S., got her real-estate license, and took over a cheap lease in a shopping arcade in Jackson Heights, selling mostly drygoods imported from Myanmar. Business was never great, because of the isolated location, and when her husband and daughter followed her, two years ago, they talked about looking for a space with better foot traffic. It wasn’t until May of this year that they found one they could afford.
“Everybody around us was, like, ‘This does not sound like a good idea, everybody’s struggling, people are closing, and you want to open? No one is taking the trains,’ ” Yun told me recently. “But things will go back to normal one day,” she said. “If we can just hold up until then, we should be fine.” Initially, they planned to focus on coffee, smoothies, sandwiches—“good for rushing,” Yun explained. It was Kyaw’s idea to add Burmese salads, which made Yun and her father skeptical at first. “We were, like, ‘Nobody knows Burmese food.’ But then we thought, Let’s have a little corner,” she said. “Then we opened the store, and people were coming for the Burmese food.” (Burmese salads and soups $3-$15.) ♦


newyorker--2020-09-25--James E. Hinton’s Unseen Films Reframe the Black Power Movement

As a photographer , James E. Hinton made pictures of some of the most prominent figures of the civil-rights era : leaders , athletes , and artists including Martin Luther King , Jr. , Stokely Carmichael , Muhammad Ali , Mahalia Jackson , and Miles Davis .
Yet the majority of his images—more than forty thousand , many of which are being digitized by Emory University—capture the specifics of more ordinary Black life in mid-century America , that of small-business owners , activists , and , often , children .
Hinton ’ s work as a cinematographer and filmmaker achieved @ @ @ @ @ @ @ grander sweep of history and considering the nature , appearance , manner , and presence of the individual people making it .
We see that eye , with its deft movement from wide to narrow focus , in “ The New-Ark ” and “ May Be the Last Time , ” two documentaries that Hinton filmed in the late sixties , about the poet Amiri Baraka and the Black Arts Movement , respectively .
Both films were recently digitized by the Harvard Film Archive , which holds a collection of Hinton ’ s @ @ @ @ @ @ @ from them in the video above .
The films , as the historian Elizabeth Hinton ( no relation ) notes , show what organizing and activism looked like on a granular level , and upend some of the popular narratives of Black nationalism , revealing “ the joy and energy of the movement that in many ways gets left out of our understandings of this period.
” In one scene , Hinton films inside a Black independent school , where young people recite the alphabet , with each letter corresponding to a word @ @ @ @ @ @ @ the class with a pledge , their voices ringing out , “ I am Black !
I am Black !
I am strong !
I am strong !
”

As a photographer, James E. Hinton made pictures of some of the most prominent figures of the civil-rights era: leaders, athletes, and artists including Martin Luther King, Jr., Stokely Carmichael, Muhammad Ali, Mahalia Jackson, and Miles Davis. Yet the majority of his images—more than forty thousand, many of which are being digitized by Emory University—capture the specifics of more ordinary Black life in mid-century America, that of small-business owners, activists, and, often, children.
Hinton’s work as a cinematographer and filmmaker achieved a similar balance between taking in the grander sweep of history and considering the nature, appearance, manner, and presence of the individual people making it. We see that eye, with its deft movement from wide to narrow focus, in “The New-Ark” and “May Be the Last Time,” two documentaries that Hinton filmed in the late sixties, about the poet Amiri Baraka and the Black Arts Movement, respectively. Both films were recently digitized by the Harvard Film Archive, which holds a collection of Hinton’s work, and you can see excerpts from them in the video above.
The films, as the historian Elizabeth Hinton (no relation) notes, show what organizing and activism looked like on a granular level, and upend some of the popular narratives of Black nationalism, revealing “the joy and energy of the movement that in many ways gets left out of our understandings of this period.” In one scene, Hinton films inside a Black independent school, where young people recite the alphabet, with each letter corresponding to a word related to racial justice, and begin the class with a pledge, their voices ringing out, “I am Black! I am Black! I am strong! I am strong!”


newyorker--2020-09-25--The TikTok Fiasco Reflects the Bankruptcy of Trump’s Foreign Policy

At first glance , the Trump Administration ’ s decision to ban the popular Chinese apps TikTok and WeChat had the look of hard-nosed diplomacy .
China , after all , already blocks more than ten of the largest American tech companies , including Google , Facebook , and Twitter , out of fear that they facilitate unmanageable levels of free speech and organization .
In Washington , U.S. officials have been increasingly worried about the rise of TikTok , which is best known for its minute-long videos of people dancing , and WeChat , the vast social-media platform that @ @ @ @ @ @ @ pay bills , buy things , and , of course , swap videos of people dancing .
Like similar apps , they collect valuable data on the viewing habits of millions of Americans and could , it is feared , allow the Chinese Communist Party to expose Americans to propaganda and censorship .
Under Chinese law , authorities have broad power to intervene in the work of private companies ; a spy agency , for instance , could examine the private chats of an American user , or , in theory , direct @ @ @ @ @ @ @ that could shape the perceptions of viewers in one part of the United States .
Last month , in an unusual intervention in the operations of a business , President Trump ordered ByteDance , the Beijing-based company that owns TikTok , to find an American owner for its U.S. operations .
That touched off a chaotic scramble for a sale , culminating last Saturday , when Trump abruptly announced a deal involving Walmart and Oracle , which is headed by one of his major supporters , Larry Ellison .
The announcement was vague @ @ @ @ @ @ @ of a new U.S.-based company , TikTok Global , which would shift ownership into American hands while creating both twenty-five thousand new jobs in the U.S. and a very ill-defined five-billion-dollar educational fund .
As Trump put it , that money would be applied so that “ we can educate people as to [ the ] real history of our country—the real history , not the fake history.
” Within days , those promises were unravelling .
In Beijing , TikTok ’ s parent company said that it would retain control over the @ @ @ @ @ @ @ core of its power .
Analysts could discern hardly any improvements in data security or protections against propaganda , and people involved let reporters know that the education fund was a notion added , at the last minute , to assuage Trump .
All sides agreed that Oracle and Walmart would gain a stake worth twenty per cent of the new U.S.-based company , and data from American users would reside in Oracle ’ s cloud .
But the parties agreed on little else , especially who would own what ; ByteDance said @ @ @ @ @ @ @ of TikTok , while Oracle countered that the stake would belong to ByteDance ’ s investors , many of whom are American .
Many critics noted that Oracle , led by a Trump supporter , potentially stood to earn a huge windfall in revenue , such that , as one put it , “ the very concept of the rule of law is in shambles.
” Taking stock of the mess , Bill Bishop , a China analyst and the author of the Sinocism newsletter , commented , “ Struggling to find the @ @ @ @ @ @ @ !
” Meanwhile , the effort to bar WeChat also has , for the moment , run into objections .
On Sunday , a federal judge in California issued an injunction against regulations issued by the Commerce Department , which seeks to bar U.S. companies from offering downloads or updates for TikTok and WeChat .
Free-speech advocates had raised questions about whether the ban would harm First Amendment rights .
For the moment , WeChat and TikTok would remain accessible to American users , but their futures were as unclear as Trump ’ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ what Trump presented as a bold expression of American values and power has turned out to be precisely the opposite : a gesture of wall-building and retreat , suffused with the aroma of potential corruption .
In a new book , “ An Open World , ” the foreign-policy scholars Rebecca Lissner and Mira Rapp-Hooper begin the process of planning for a “ day after Trump ” —which they compare to a period of “ post–natural disaster recovery ” —in which the United States should focus on keeping “ the international system open @ @ @ @ @ @ @ professor at the U.S .
Naval War College , told me that the threat to ban TikTok and WeChat “ has put the United States on the wrong side , and set an unfavorable precedent.
” There are plausible concerns , she said , that the Chinese Communist Party could use popular apps to collect data on American users , or continue to bar American companies in the name of governing the Internet according to its political anxieties .
But the response should not be “ replicating a C.C.P.-style approach to assertions of @ @ @ @ @ @ @ ” Instead , she said , the U.S. should seek to be a leader in establishing rules that protect privacy and the free flow of information “ regardless of the nationality of programs they ’ re using.
” Lissner added , “ Trump ’ s whack-a-mole approach doesn ’ t actually address the underlying risks , which reach far beyond TikTok and WeChat .
Even worse , it makes it more likely that China ’ s preferred approach to Internet governance will triumph.
” The implications of this dispute extend far beyond the @ @ @ @ @ @ @ able to post to Chinese social-media sites .
It represents what the Financial Times ’ Tom Mitchell called the latest “ proxy wars between the two reigning superpowers.
” In contrast to America ’ s showdowns with the former Soviet Union , these battles are stirring not in Afghanistan and El Salvador but in corporate boardrooms .
The Trump Administration opened its first front , in the spring of 2018 , by banning American tech companies from selling components to ZTE , a Chinese telecom company that had been caught violating U.S. export @ @ @ @ @ @ @ Trump , who was eager to make a big trade deal with China , cut the pressure on ZTE , which settled with the U.S. Commerce Department .
The battles have continued , though , and , as Mitchell observed , “ it is China that has the early lead.
” The effort to wrest TikTok from China ’ s grip has been a boon for nationalist media sources in Beijing , which cited it as evidence that the U.S. is determined to prevent China from challenging American primacy .
On Chinese state @ @ @ @ @ @ @ Pan Tao derided the “ hunt ” for TikTok , asking , “ Isn ’ t that behavior akin to a hostage situation ?
A deadline to sell on their terms , or else ?
” The opening of this “ Pandora ’ s box , ” Pan suggested , would make it impossible to trust American intentions .
“ If someone does this on Day One , who knows what they ’ re capable of doing on day fifteen ?
” Global Times , a nationalist state tabloid newspaper , called it @ @ @ @ @ @ @ s domineering behavior and gangster logic , ” and predicted that leaders in Beijing would not ratify the agreement .
To Trump ’ s admirers in Washington , the move against Chinese tech companies is an act of reciprocity , an acknowledgment that China was the first to splinter the Internet into separate domains divided by a digital iron curtain .
That sequence , of course , is true—but it does not follow that the right response to China ’ s fear is to impose additional barriers , instead of demonstrating that Americans @ @ @ @ @ @ @ win on the strength of our competition .
David Wertime , the author of the China Watcher newsletter at Politico , likened Trump ’ s decision to bar Americans from access to WeChat to the discomfiting new era in which America ’ s failure in the face of the coronavirus pandemic has left its people unwelcome at foreign borders .
A U.S. passport “ no longer ranks among the world ’ s most powerful , ” he wrote .
“ A series of moves away from global institutions like the World Health Organization @ @ @ @ @ @ @ elements out while also trapping Americans further within their homeland .
”

At first glance, the Trump Administration’s decision to ban the popular Chinese apps TikTok and WeChat had the look of hard-nosed diplomacy. China, after all, already blocks more than ten of the largest American tech companies, including Google, Facebook, and Twitter, out of fear that they facilitate unmanageable levels of free speech and organization. In Washington, U.S. officials have been increasingly worried about the rise of TikTok, which is best known for its minute-long videos of people dancing, and WeChat, the vast social-media platform that allows users to text, call, pay bills, buy things, and, of course, swap videos of people dancing. Like similar apps, they collect valuable data on the viewing habits of millions of Americans and could, it is feared, allow the Chinese Communist Party to expose Americans to propaganda and censorship. Under Chinese law, authorities have broad power to intervene in the work of private companies; a spy agency, for instance, could examine the private chats of an American user, or, in theory, direct a stream of TikTok videos and advertisements that could shape the perceptions of viewers in one part of the United States.
Last month, in an unusual intervention in the operations of a business, President Trump ordered ByteDance, the Beijing-based company that owns TikTok, to find an American owner for its U.S. operations. That touched off a chaotic scramble for a sale, culminating last Saturday, when Trump abruptly announced a deal involving Walmart and Oracle, which is headed by one of his major supporters, Larry Ellison. The announcement was vague and grandiose: it heralded the creation of a new U.S.-based company, TikTok Global, which would shift ownership into American hands while creating both twenty-five thousand new jobs in the U.S. and a very ill-defined five-billion-dollar educational fund. As Trump put it, that money would be applied so that “we can educate people as to [the] real history of our country—the real history, not the fake history.” Within days, those promises were unravelling. In Beijing, TikTok’s parent company said that it would retain control over the algorithms and the code that constitute the core of its power. Analysts could discern hardly any improvements in data security or protections against propaganda, and people involved let reporters know that the education fund was a notion added, at the last minute, to assuage Trump.
All sides agreed that Oracle and Walmart would gain a stake worth twenty per cent of the new U.S.-based company, and data from American users would reside in Oracle’s cloud. But the parties agreed on little else, especially who would own what; ByteDance said that it would retain eighty per cent of TikTok, while Oracle countered that the stake would belong to ByteDance’s investors, many of whom are American. Many critics noted that Oracle, led by a Trump supporter, potentially stood to earn a huge windfall in revenue, such that, as one put it, “the very concept of the rule of law is in shambles.” Taking stock of the mess, Bill Bishop, a China analyst and the author of the Sinocism newsletter, commented, “Struggling to find the right Chinese translation for clusterf$$!”
Meanwhile, the effort to bar WeChat also has, for the moment, run into objections. On Sunday, a federal judge in California issued an injunction against regulations issued by the Commerce Department, which seeks to bar U.S. companies from offering downloads or updates for TikTok and WeChat. Free-speech advocates had raised questions about whether the ban would harm First Amendment rights. For the moment, WeChat and TikTok would remain accessible to American users, but their futures were as unclear as Trump’s purported deal. Taken together, what Trump presented as a bold expression of American values and power has turned out to be precisely the opposite: a gesture of wall-building and retreat, suffused with the aroma of potential corruption.
In a new book, “An Open World,” the foreign-policy scholars Rebecca Lissner and Mira Rapp-Hooper begin the process of planning for a “day after Trump”—which they compare to a period of “post–natural disaster recovery”—in which the United States should focus on keeping “the international system open and free.” Lissner, an assistant professor at the U.S. Naval War College, told me that the threat to ban TikTok and WeChat “has put the United States on the wrong side, and set an unfavorable precedent.” There are plausible concerns, she said, that the Chinese Communist Party could use popular apps to collect data on American users, or continue to bar American companies in the name of governing the Internet according to its political anxieties. But the response should not be “replicating a C.C.P.-style approach to assertions of cyber sovereignty, as Trump has done.” Instead, she said, the U.S. should seek to be a leader in establishing rules that protect privacy and the free flow of information “regardless of the nationality of programs they’re using.” Lissner added, “Trump’s whack-a-mole approach doesn’t actually address the underlying risks, which reach far beyond TikTok and WeChat. Even worse, it makes it more likely that China’s preferred approach to Internet governance will triumph.”
The implications of this dispute extend far beyond the question of whether American teen-agers will be able to post to Chinese social-media sites. It represents what the Financial Times’ Tom Mitchell called the latest “proxy wars between the two reigning superpowers.” In contrast to America’s showdowns with the former Soviet Union, these battles are stirring not in Afghanistan and El Salvador but in corporate boardrooms. The Trump Administration opened its first front, in the spring of 2018, by banning American tech companies from selling components to ZTE, a Chinese telecom company that had been caught violating U.S. export controls on shipments to Iran. But Trump, who was eager to make a big trade deal with China, cut the pressure on ZTE, which settled with the U.S. Commerce Department. The battles have continued, though, and, as Mitchell observed, “it is China that has the early lead.”
The effort to wrest TikTok from China’s grip has been a boon for nationalist media sources in Beijing, which cited it as evidence that the U.S. is determined to prevent China from challenging American primacy. On Chinese state television last week, the news anchor Pan Tao derided the “hunt” for TikTok, asking, “Isn’t that behavior akin to a hostage situation? A deadline to sell on their terms, or else?” The opening of this “Pandora’s box,” Pan suggested, would make it impossible to trust American intentions. “If someone does this on Day One, who knows what they’re capable of doing on day fifteen?” Global Times, a nationalist state tabloid newspaper, called it a “thorough exhibit of Washington’s domineering behavior and gangster logic,” and predicted that leaders in Beijing would not ratify the agreement.
To Trump’s admirers in Washington, the move against Chinese tech companies is an act of reciprocity, an acknowledgment that China was the first to splinter the Internet into separate domains divided by a digital iron curtain. That sequence, of course, is true—but it does not follow that the right response to China’s fear is to impose additional barriers, instead of demonstrating that Americans have the capacity and the confidence to win on the strength of our competition. David Wertime, the author of the China Watcher newsletter at Politico, likened Trump’s decision to bar Americans from access to WeChat to the discomfiting new era in which America’s failure in the face of the coronavirus pandemic has left its people unwelcome at foreign borders. A U.S. passport “no longer ranks among the world’s most powerful,” he wrote. “A series of moves away from global institutions like the World Health Organization signal an inward retreat, keeping foreign elements out while also trapping Americans further within their homeland.”
Trump’s approach to TikTok and WeChat, like much of his foreign policy, is a gesture of defeatism camouflaged as strength. From his earliest days in politics, he has stood for the closure of the American mind, and the withdrawal of American power and confidence. He exited the Trans-Pacific Partnership, the Paris climate accord, and the Iran nuclear agreement; he ordered American troops in Syria to abandon the Kurds and other American allies, a move that James Mattis regarded as so disloyal and imprudent that he resigned as Secretary of Defense. In the present case, Trump would rather wall off Americans digitally and philosophically than establish guidelines on privacy, free speech, and data collection.
The TikTok fiasco is a product of cronyism, empty bombast, and nationalism—a political recipe that, historically, America has tended to criticize in its opponents. But, as a Pew survey reported this month, global confidence in the United States, especially among allies, is as low as it has been since the measurements began, nearly two decades ago. In the most damning indicator, Trump inspires less confidence than Vladimir Putin and Xi Jinping.
It takes some doing to earn less trust than those leaders, but Trump has achieved that. In a similar spirit, it is not often that one finds a note of prudent prediction in Global Times. But it’s hard to disagree with one of the paper’s observations in an editorial this week, in comments on the TikTok case. “As cybersecurity becomes more of a universal issue,” the paper observed, “there will be imitators around the world who will take action against U.S. companies. The bad precedent set by the United States will eventually come back to bite it.”


newyorker--2020-09-25--Misty Copeland and Alessandra Ferri on Dancing the Role of Juliet

Ask any young dancer what role she fervently desires , and she ’ s likely to say Juliet in “ @ @ @ @ @ ballerinas , such as Alessandra Ferri ( above , left ) , dance this role @ @ @ @ @ the character each time : braver , more vulnerable , stronger .
American Ballet Theatre @ @ @ @ @ above , right ) danced Juliet for the first time five years ago , with @ @ @ @ @ .
In a City Center “ Studio 5 ” conversation , online Sept. 30-Oct. 6 @ @ @ @ @ how their approaches to Juliet have changed over time .

Ask any young dancer what role she fervently desires, and she’s likely to say Juliet in “Romeo and Juliet.” Some ballerinas, such as Alessandra Ferri (above, left), dance this role their entire careers, reimagining the character each time: braver, more vulnerable, stronger. American Ballet Theatre’s Misty Copeland (above, right) danced Juliet for the first time five years ago, with a whiff of teen-age willfulness. In a City Center “Studio 5” conversation, online Sept. 30-Oct. 6, the two ballerinas discuss how their approaches to Juliet have changed over time.