The Father of a Star High-School Athlete Confronts New York City's

For Immediate Release: September 28, 2015 Press Contacts: Natalie Raabe, (212) 286-6591 Molly Erman, (212) 286-7936 Adrea Piazza, (212) 286-4255 The Father of a Star High-School Athlete Confronts New York City’s Patterns of Violence In the October 5, 2015, issue of The New Yorker, in “A Daughter’s Death” (p. 52), Jennifer Gonnerman investigates the violence occur- ring in New York City’s public-housing projects, and examines one father’s efforts to bring peace to his Harlem neighborhood in the aftermath of his teen-age daughter’s murder. “Last year, there were three hundred and thirty-three homicides in New York City, the lowest number of any year on record,” Gonnerman writes. “But almost twenty per cent of the shootings in the city occur in public-housing developments, which hold less than five per cent of the population.” Violent crime is so concentrated in some projects that to residents it can feel as if shootings and side- walk memorials were part of everyday life. For decades, the General Ulysses S. Grant Houses and Manhattanville Houses in Harlem have been embroiled in a feud, perpetuated by young residents who belong to “crews.” As Gonnerman explains, the crews are not affiliated with estab- lished gangs, and their disputes were not about drugs or money. “Rather, they fought over turf and status,” she writes. Taylonn Murphy’s eigh- teen-year-old daughter Tayshana—widely known by her nickname, Chicken—was a star athlete on the verge of applying to college when she was killed inside the Grant Houses, where she lived, on September 11, 2011. Prior to his daughter’s death, Murphy had never thought much about how to reduce the disproportionately high rates of violence in certain parts of the city. In its aftermath, he could think of little else. Gon- nerman details how he joined forces with an unlikely ally—Arnita Brockington, the mother of one of the two young men from the Manhat- tanville Houses who have been convicted of killing Chicken—to quell the violence through community mentorship and support. Although the city has its own tactics—in 2014, the Manhattan district attorney, Cyrus R. Vance, Jr., indicted over a hundred young men who were al- legedly crew members—many believe in the effectiveness of community-led outreach. This summer, Murphy and Brockington secured a lease in a space between the two housing projects for what they hope, with grant funding, will become a crisis center. “Everyone else in their right mind would say, ‘You can’t pay me enough to deal with this headache,’ ” Murphy tells Gonnerman. But a friend of Murphy’s says he understands why he never seems to stop working. “If his daughter is able to be murdered like that and nothing structurally changes in black communities, then that’s a type of waste that cannot be rationalized, that’s a complete waste,” he says. Jorge Ramos, America’s Most Trusted News Anchor, is Making Immigrant Voices Heard In “The Man Who Wouldn’t Sit Down” (p. 40), William Finnegan profiles Jorge Ramos, the evening-news co-anchor on Univision— the country’s largest Spanish-language TV network—who recently made headlines when he publicly sparred with Donald Trump over his stance on immigration. Ramos, who has held his position at Univision since 1986, “occupies a peculiar place in the American news media,” Fin- negan writes. “He has won eight Emmys and an armload of journalism awards, covered every major story since the fall of the Berlin Wall, and interviewed every American President since George H. W. Bush.” But, Finnegan contends, his af- filiation can work against him. After Trump denied his request for an interview, Ramos—who was born in Mexico City but is an American citizen—challenged him on immigration at a press conference on the campaign trail, and was escorted from the room when he refused to take a seat. “I know I was right not to sit down,” Ramos tells Finnegan, who was with him that day. “If I had sat down, Latinos would have been so disappointed.” He explains how a journalist can find himself in the role of advocate, telling Finnegan, “We’re a young community,” adding, “You wouldn’t expect ABC, or any of the mainstream networks, to take a position on immigration, health care, anything. But at Univision it’s different. We are pro-immigrant. That’s our audience, and people depend on us. When we are better represented politically, that role for us will recede.” Latinos in the United States “have almost no political representation,” Ramos says. “Marco Rubio and Ted Cruz won’t defend the undocumented.” Ramos tells Finnegan that some interviews can be a nonviolent form of combat. “My only weapon is the question,” he says. “And, living here, it’s not risky. I can make powerful people angry, and show our audience what they really are, and then go home and live a normal life.” Ramos strongly endorses the conventional wisdom that no party can now win the White House with less than a third of the Latino vote, and is “an evangelist for Latino political power,” Finnegan writes. “Our turn is coming,” Ramos says. “And the attitude is changing, espe- cially since Barack Obama was elected.” He continues: “I hope to be able to cover the Inauguration. I don’t care if it’s a Republican or a Democrat. It could even be Rubio or Cruz.” PETER DE SÈVE A Former Prostitute Tries to Rescue Iraq’s Most Vulnerable Women In “Out of Sight” (p. 34), Rania Abouzeid reports from Iraq, where she explores the country’s violent underworld of sex trafficking and examines grassroots efforts to rescue the ever-widening population of at-risk women. “In 2012, Iraq passed its first law specifically against human trafficking, but the law is routinely ignored, and sexual crimes, including rape and forced prostitution, are common, women’s-rights groups say,” Abouzeid writes. The lawlessness taking over the country is exacerbating the issue—the U.S. State Department noted, in its 2015 “Trafficking in Persons” report, that the vulnerability of women and children to trafficking had “gravely increased” in the past year, and that security and law-enforcement officials, as well as criminal gangs, were involved in sexual slavery. “I never imagined that we would reach this level of chaos, this degree of complete disintegration of the state,” Hanaa Edwar, a prominent women’s-rights advocate, tells Abouzeid. “You don’t see that there is rule of law, that there are national institutions. You just see militias, gangsters. There is no respect for diversity, for human rights in this country.” Abouzeid speaks extensively with Layla, a rape victim and former prostitute who, since 2006, has been secretly mapping Iraq’s network of sex trafficking and prostitution. Through her contacts in the sex trade, she gathers information about who is selling whom and for how much, where the victims are from, and where they are prostituted and trafficked. “She passes the information, through intermediaries, to Iraqi authorities, who usually fail to act on it,” Abouzeid writes. “Still, her work has helped to convict several pimps, including some who kidnapped children.” The work, Abouzeid notes, is extremely dangerous. The pimps whom Layla encounters are women, but behind them is a tangled hierarchy of armed men: corrupt police, militias that profit from the sex trade, and militias that brutally oppose it. In the dangerous Baghdad neighborhood Bataween, Abouzeid visits a safe house run by the Or- ganization of Women’s Freedom in Iraq, an organization that runs eight safe houses across the country, and is looking to open one for Yazidi women, in the north. It is the only organization outside Iraqi Kurdistan to operate such facilities. The young woman who runs the Bataween safe house tells Abouzeid, “I am proud that I have helped—that one day, whatever happens, somebody might say, ‘There used to be a girl called Amira who helped women.’ ” Layla says that she sometimes feels the situation is hopeless but that she would continue her work regardless. “Those who bear scars must help the wounded,” she says. Kenneth Goldsmith’s Poetry Elevates Copying to an Art, But Did He Go Too Far? In “Something Borrowed” (p. 26), Alec Wilkinson examines the controversy surrounding the experimental poet Kenneth Goldsmith, who this year drew widespread criticism after publicly reading a work he called “The Body of Michael Brown,” which was an appropriation of the late teen-ager’s autopsy report. Goldsmith, who is fifty-four, is a founder of a movement known as conceptual poetry, and it has made him “as famous as an experimental poet usually gets,” Wilkinson writes, noting that he has read at the White House, and that in 2013 he became the first poet laureate of the Museum of Modern Art. “He’s received more attention lately than any other living poet,” Cathy Park Hong, a poet and a professor at Sarah Lawrence, tells Wilkinson. Goldsmith likes pranks and provocations and making people uncomfortable—challeng- ing behavior, he thinks, is an artist’s prerogative. “Day,” the book for which he is probably best known, is a typed copy of the edition of the New York Times for September 1, 2000. “People who don’t like Goldsmith’s poems tend to think that using another writer’s words, coherently or not, and arranging how they look on the page, are gestures that have no emotional power,” Wilkinson writes. At a conference at Brown University last March, Goldsmith read “The Body of Michael Brown,” a poem that he thought might have been a fitting addition—as the “eighth Amer- ican disaster”—in his 2013 book “Seven American Deaths and Disasters.” According to Wilkinson, Goldsmith thought the thirty-minute reading had been powerful, and that he had demonstrated that conceptual poetry could handle inflammatory material and provoke outrage in the service of a social cause.

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