The New Yorker - March 28, 2016.pdf

(7912 KB) Pobierz
PRICE $7.99
MAR. 28, 2016
MARCH 28, 2016
5
GOINGS ON ABOUT TOWN
21
THE TALK OF THE TOWN
Jeffrey Toobin on the Supreme Court nomination;
Donald Trump’s friends; flash-funding schools;
an upstate seed library; a downtown apothecary.
ANNALS OF SCIENCE
Siddhartha Mukherjee
26
Runs in the Family
Schizophrenia, genes, and identity.
SHOUTS & MURMURS
Susanna Wolff
David Sedaris
33
New Wireless-Internet Plans
PERSONAL HISTORY
34
The Perfect Fit
Shopping in Tokyo.
A REPORTER AT LARGE
George Packer
38
Exporting Jihad
What has the Arab Spring unleashed in Tunisia?
ONWARD AND UPWARD WITH THE ARTS
Andrew O’Hagan
52
Imaginary Spaces
Designing sets for Adele, the Met, and more.
FICTION
Ian McEwan
62
“My Purple Scented Novel”
THE CRITICS
BOOKS
Louis Menand
Nicholas Lemann
Elizabeth Gumport
68
72
76
79
80
Charles Duhigg’s “Smarter Faster Better.”
Bigness and its discontents.
Pat Barker’s “Noonday.”
Briefly Noted
THE CURRENT CINEMA
Anthony Lane
Robin Becker
Claudia Rankine
Barry Blitt
“Midnight Special,” “My Golden Days.”
POEMS
47
64
“Theory”
“Sound & Fury”
COVER
“The Big Short”
Bob Eckstein, Zachary Kanin, Paul Noth, Edward Koren, Amy Hwang,
Liana Finck, J. C. Duffy, Robert Leighton, Tom Chitty, Harry Bliss, Brendan Loper,
P. C. Vey, David Sipress, Avi Steinberg
SPOTS
Anthony Russo
THE NEW YORKER, MARCH 28, 2016
1
DRAWINGS
CONTRIBUTORS
George Packer
(“Exporting
Jihad,”
Andrew O’Hagan
(“Imaginary
Spaces,”
p. 38)
is a staff writer. His most recent
book is “The Unwinding,” for which
he won a National Book Award.
Jeffrey Toobin
(Comment,
p. 21),
the au-
p. 52)
published “The Illuminations,”
his fifth novel, last year.
Ian McEwan
(Fiction,
p. 62)
has written
thor of “The Oath: The Obama White
House and the Supreme Court,” has a
new book, “American Heiress: The
Wild, Strange Saga of the Kidnapping,
Crimes and Trial of Patty Hearst,” com-
ing out in August.
Siddhartha Mukherjee
(“Runs
in the
thirteen novels and three short-story
collections. This story was inspired by
“L’Image Volée,” a group art show cu-
rated by Thomas Demand, now on view
at the Fondazione Prada, in Milan.
Claudia Rankine
(Poem,
p. 64)
is the au-
Family,” p. 26)
won the 2011 Pulitzer
Prize for nonfiction for “The Emperor
of All Maladies: A Biography of Can-
cer.” His new book, “The Gene: An
Intimate History,” will be published in
May.
Susanna Wolff
(Shouts
& Murmurs,
thor of “Citizen: An American Lyric,”
the winner of the 2014 National Book
Critics Circle Award for poetry.
Louis Menand
(Books,
p. 68)
teaches En-
glish at Harvard. His books include
“The Marketplace of Ideas.”
Nicholas Lemann
(Books,
p. 72),
a staff
p. 33)
has contributed humor pieces to
The New Yorker
and to newyorker.com
since 2012.
David Sedaris
(“The
Perfect Fit,” p. 34)
writer, is the Joseph Pulitzer II and
Edith Pulitzer Moore Professor of Jour-
nalism at Columbia.
Barry Blitt
(Cover) drew the illustra-
is the author of, most recently, “Let’s
Explore Diabetes with Owls.”
tions for the children’s book “You Never
Heard of Casey Stengel?!,” which has
just been published.
NEWYORKER.COM
Everything in the magazine, and more.
SUBSCRIBERS:
Get access to our magazine app for tablets and smartphones at the
App Store, Amazon.com, or Google Play. (Access varies by location and device.)
2
THE NEW YORKER, MARCH 28, 2016
LEFT: CARSON VAUGHAN
PAGE-TURNER
A visit to the National Cowboy
Poetry Gathering, in Nevada, where
cowboys recite odes to the range.
PODCAST
Zadie Smith, Michael Cunningham,
and Tom Hanks read their short
stories from the magazine.
THE MAIL
A STEM-CELL SCANDAL
I read Dana Goodyear’s article on the
disturbing events surrounding the sci-
entist Haruko Obokata’s discoveries in
stem-cell research with both delight
and a sinking heart (“The Stress Test,”
February 29th). As a research fellow at
Harvard Medical School, I, like many
of my peers, can identify with Obokata.
Despite suspicions of unethical conduct,
including misleading publications, her
underlying motivation was in line with
the understandable desire to make it in
academia. Goodyear writes that bylines
in prominent publications are, unoffi-
cially, “a measure of hirability.” This could
not be more true. The dictum “Publish
or perish” goes beyond job prospects: a
scientist’s funding is based largely on her
name and publication record, and with-
out the endorsement of top journals in
the field it can be difficult to fund re-
search, or a livelihood. This pressure can
encourage young scientists to make bold
claims and to publish too soon. Oboka-
ta’s misdeeds are not surprising in a sys-
tem of such skewed incentives. The real
question is whether we will be able to
change this system before another mis-
take discredits the efforts of innovative
scientists.
Olivia J. Kelada
Boston, Mass.
In the tumultuous saga of Obokata’s dis-
credited research, much has been made
of the scientist’s gender and appearance.
In Goodyear’s article, Obokata is intro-
duced as “a stylish, self-possessed beauty,”
and her colleagues invariably focus on
her femininity. Obokata’s lab assistant re-
fers to her as “Princess Haruko,” and her
former mentor and lab director calls her
“the most intelligent, hardest working,
nicest, most creative and driven scientist”
he’s ever worked with—“also, the most
beautiful.” Because Obokata is a young
female scientist from Japan, a country
with an especially patriarchal scientific
community, her research seemed partic-
ularly impressive, especially to people in
her home country. But emphasizing
Obokata’s gender and appearance exac-
erbates the problem of taking superficial
achievements too seriously—the same
error that infected Obokata’s work. The
most important component of any new
procedure is verifying its collection of
facts. I am shocked that such a simple
concept was overlooked by someone who
was supposed to be among the smartest
and most innovative scientists in the field,
regardless of gender—and that no one
else caught the scientific process break-
ing down.
Raquel Arias-Camison
New York City
1
SCALIA’S CATHOLICISM
I’ve wondered for years how a devout
Catholic like the Supreme Court Justice
Antonin Scalia could support or write
decisions so clearly harmful to average
Americans (Comment, February 29th).
Like Scalia, I grew up in Queens and at-
tended a Catholic high school and a
Jesuit university, though a few genera-
tions after the Justice. In trying to un-
derstand Scalia, it’s useful to remember
that he grew up before the Second Vat-
ican Council, the ecumenical meeting
held between 1962 and 1965, which made
the Church far more inclusive of the mod-
ern world—for example, by allowing Mass
to be conducted in languages other than
Latin. When I started high school, in
1965, the liberating effects of Vatican II
were clear: no catechism, no fire and brim-
stone. Religion class centered on social
issues, more Dorothy Day than Torque-
mada. Scalia despised Vatican II and
lamented the loss of the Latin Mass. He
never wavered from his loyalty to a darker,
unquestioning, archaic vision of Cathol-
icism. If he had embraced the new
Church, he would perhaps have been a
far different jurist.
Vince Cosgrove
Berkeley, Calif.
•
Letters should be sent with the writer’s name,
address, and daytime phone number via e-mail to
themail@newyorker.com. Letters may be edited
for length and clarity, and may be published in
any medium. We regret that owing to the volume
of correspondence we cannot reply to every letter.
THE NEW YORKER, MARCH 28, 2016
3

Plik z chomika:

Inne pliki z tego folderu:

Inne foldery tego chomika:

Zgłoś jeśli naruszono regulamin