Why the Virus Won by Ed Yong E Power of American Denial by Ibram
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SEPTEMBER 2020 THEATLANTIC.COM WHY THE VIRUS WON H O W THE POWER OF AMERICAN DENIAL DDID I D IIT T CCOME O M E SEPTEMBER 2020 e Power of Why the Virus Won American Denial By Ed Yong T O By Ibram X. Kendi THEATLANTIC.COM THIS? 0920_Cover [Print]_13989870.indd 1 7/13/2020 4:45:24 PM TRIPLE THE GIFTS. TRIPLE THE TRAINING. TRIPLE THE LIVES CHANGED. When you give to Heifer International, you provide struggling families with the tools, training and opportunity needed to create sustainable futures. Your gift will help people like Aeysha in Bangladesh, who struggled for years to provide for her family. Heifer provided her chicks, along with lessons in gardening, animal care and how to sew and dye clothing. Now, she is using her new skills to provide for her family and help others. For a limited time, every $1 you give will be matched with $2 more through our special match for a total of $3 — tripling your impact! DONATE NOW AT HEIFER.ORG/ATLANTIC TRIPLE THE GIFTS. TRIPLE THE TRAINING. TRIPLE THE LIVES CHANGED. When you give to Heifer International, you provide struggling families with the tools, training and opportunity needed to create sustainable futures. Your gift will help people like Aeysha in Bangladesh, who struggled for years to provide for her family. Heifer provided her chicks, along with lessons in gardening, animal care and how to sew and dye clothing. Now, she is using her new skills to provide for her family and help others. For a limited time, every $1 you give will be matched with $2 more through our special match for a total of $3 — tripling your impact! DONATE NOW AT HEIFER.ORG/ATLANTIC HOW CAN GREATER CONNECTIVITY HELP KEEP OUR DATA SAFE? I AM JEN EASTERLY Global Head of the Fusion Resilience Center While the Internet has made our lives easier, its interconnectedness has also made our data less secure, with a cyberattack now occurring every 40 seconds.1 In the Morgan Stanley Fusion Center, we’re capitalizing on the connectivity of our talent and technology to not only respond rapidly to cyberthreats, but also to proactively keep client data safe. So while the volume, variety and velocity of data are ever expanding, so is our ability to protect it. To watch Jen’s Morgan Stanley Minute on “Cybersecurity in the Connected Age,” go to morganstanley.com/cybersecurity. 1 “13 Alarming Cyber Security Facts and Stats,” cybintsolutions.com/cyber-security-facts-stats, December 2018. © 2020 Morgan Stanley & Co. LLC and Morgan Stanley Smith Barney LLC. Members SIPC. CRC 2708333 09/19 OF NO PARTY OR CLIQUE VOL. 326–NO. 2 SEPTEMBER 2020 CONTENTS Features Cover Story Cover Stories Features 58 When China Sees All Xi Jinping is using articial intel- ligence to enhance his government’s totalitarian control—and he’s export- ing this technology around the globe. 32 48 By Ross Andersen By Ibram X. Kendi 70 By Ed Yong Donald Trump has revealed the What Is MasterClass How the virus won depths of the country’s prejudice— Actually Selling? and forced Americans to confront e ads are everywhere: Learn to serve a racist system. like Serena Williams or write like Margaret Atwood. But MasterClass The United States has just percent of the world’s population, delivers something altogether dierent. but a quarter of its confirmed COVID- cases and deaths. By Carina Chocano DINA LITOVSKY / REDUX 0920_FRM_ToC [Print]_13908522.indd 3 7/13/2020 2:25:11 PM SEPTEMBER 2020 Front Culture & Critics Back 6 78 90 The Commons OMNIVORE ESSAY Discussion & Debate David Coppereld’s “No Novel About Any Wild Ride Black Woman Could Ever Armando Iannucci’s mad, Be the Same After is” loving, and brilliant adapta- at’s how Toni Morrison tion of Dickens’s novel described Gayl Jones’s rst book By James Parker in 1975. Jones has published to great acclaim and expe- rienced unspeakable tragedy. Dispatches 80 Now she’s releasing her rst novel in more than 20 years. BOOKS By Calvin Baker 9 22 What to Do About OPENING ARGUMENT POLITICS William Faulkner e Mythology of Protest Works A white man of the Jim Crow 100 Racial Progress How the Black Lives Mat- South, he couldn’t escape the Believing that things are ter demonstrations will shake burden of race, yet derived Ode to Balloons always getting better actually up the 2020 election—and creative force from it. By James Parker makes them worse. reshape American politics for By Drew Gilpin Faust By Jennifer A. Richeson a generation to come By Daniel Q. Gillion 83 14 BOOKS SOCIETY 26 Lying as an Art Form Police Reform Is Not EnoughEnough SKETCH Elena Ferrante’s new novel e moral failure of incremen- e Relentless about adolescence explores the tal change Erin Brockovich power of ctions. By Mychal Denzel Smith She was an early crusader By Merve Emre for environmental justice. Today, she’s sounding the 18 alarm louder than ever. 86 On the Cover By Amanda Fortini HISTORY BOOKS Looking for e World Putin Made Frederick Douglass How KGB methods, tactics, How a visit to his birthplace 30 and operations have fueled helped me understand this VIEWFINDER Russia’s quest for glory moment in America e Black Yearbook By Anne Applebaum TYPOGRAPHY BY By Clint Smith Photographs by MENDELSUND/MUNDAY Adraint Khadafhi Bereal 89 I Feel Good A poem by Nikky Finney 4 SEPTEMBER 2020 0920_FRM_ToC [Print]_13908522.indd 4 7/13/2020 2:25:12 PM This content was created by Atlantic Re:think, the branded content studio at The Atlantic, and made SPONSOR CONTENT possible by ServiceNow. It does not necessarily reflect the views of The Atlantic’s editorial staff. Your Business Has Gone Digital. Now What? Future-proofing your company isn’t just a matter of “digital transformation.” It’s about understanding your consumers and building a digital experience around what they need. usiness leaders are told they need to do a lot of – The percentage of best practices that have been implemented things when it comes to technology. They need to by organizations to date build an app. They need an AI chatbot. They need B – The percentage of implementation they expect to reach by 2023 more data. They need a social-media strategy. In short: To better serve their customers, they need 50% to go digital—and fast. But beyond buzzwords, Developing digital skills what’s actually at stake in this transformation? 21% To better understand the challenges that organizations face and help them plan their digital transitions, ServiceNow surveyed 600 global executives in an array 45% Implementing a of industries—including telecoms, health care, customer-experience manufacturing, the public sector, and financial services— management system 20% in February and March of 2020. They discovered that businesses have a lot of catching up to do. 45% Aligning experience 18% with business goals You’re probably not prepared, and you aren’t alone. Creating a positive customer experience isn’t just about building a beautiful website or app. It’s about creating Identifying a digital workflow that enables customers to seamlessly key customer 44% access what they need, and most organizations don’t touchpoints 18% have a plan in place to do that. Even companies leading in digitization—those who have adopted the best practices of building a digital customer experience 43% (listed here)—have a long way to go. Creating an immersive and personalized experience 18% To gain more insight on how to keep pace with digitization, read the full article at: TheAtlantic.com/NowWhat Behind the Cover: A picture is worth a thousand allowed the dual crises of COVID-19 and racism to fester. words—but sometimes only a few words are necessary. ey look squarely, too, at the choices the country now is month’s unadorned cover poses an urgent national faces if it is to have any hope of recovery. On occasions question in stark typographic terms. Ed Yong and Ibram such as this, a designer’s touch should be light, giving the X. Kendi, in their respective essays, elucidate answers by language space to resonate on its own terms. THE interrogating the uniquely American failures that have — Oliver Munday, Senior Art Director ere is a saying in the African American community that was captured by Sam Fulwood III in a 2015 article titled “When White Folks Catch a Cold, Black Folks Get Pneumonia.” ose of us in the African American community who are cognizant In America, George Packer of our history and have experi- wrote, the coronavirus enced American inequities are Underlying not shocked by the ineptness of has revealed a sick and the health-care system in poor Conditions unequal society incapable of and urban minority communi- ties. However, white America self-government (June). appears to be. I could not agree more with Mr. Packer when he says, “Inva- sion and occupation expose a society’s fault lines … clarifying essential truths, raising the smell of buried rot.” If nothing else, the coronavirus has served as a harsh reminder that while white etters America is catching a cold, Black America is suering a potential As I read this excellent article, I York City and have been simul- death threat. was struck by the clarity of the taneously awed by the work of Yolanda Brown-Spidell writer’s vision. my health-care colleagues and Westland, Mich. I was completely unprepared, furious at how much has been however, to burst into tears when asked of them because our federal Comparing President Donald I read the last paragraph. The government willfully stopped Trump’s performance to that phrase “We can use this pause in working like one long ago.