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MARCH 22, 2021 4 GOINGS ON ABOUT TOWN Commemorative 11 THE TALK OF THE TOWN Nicholas Lemann on Biden’s stimulus bill; Cover Reprints TV by Gen Z; a shock jock’s health guru; Search our extensive classicizing Cohen; enough snow for Jersey. archive of weekly A REPORTER AT LARGE covers dating back to Jane Mayer 18 Trump in the Crosshairs Will the former President be prosecuted? 1925 and commemorate SHOUTS & MURMURS a milestone with a New Yorker Paul Rudnick 25 Police Procedurals 101 cover reprint. newyorkerstore.com/covers OUR LOCAL CORRESPONDENTS Jennifer Gonnerman 26 Vacancy When COVID shuttered a five-star hotel. ANNALS OF DOMESTIC LIFE 32 Andrew Solomon The Shape of Love PRICE $8.99 OCT. 24, 2016 The complexities of polygamy and polyamory. AMERICAN CHRONICLES Louis Menand 46 Change Your Life How student radicals shaped the sixties. FICTION Imbolo Mbue 54 “The Case for and Against Love Potions” THE CRITICS BOOKS Joan Acocella 62 A new biography of Graham Greene. Leo Robson 69 Sarah Moss’s “Summerwater.” 71 Briefly Noted MUSICAL EVENTS Alex Ross 72 The musical taste of Proust. THE CURRENT CINEMA Anthony Lane 74 “The Courier,” “Come True.” POEMS Billy Collins 40 “Days of Teen-age Glory” Ada Limón 51 “Privacy” COVER Liniers “Springing Back” DRAWINGS P. C. Vey, Matilda Borgström, Kendra Allenby, Frank Cotham, E. S. Glenn, Mick Stevens, Lars Kenseth, Roz Chast, Emily Flake, Colin Tom, Zachary Kanin, Barbara Smaller, Lila Ash, Benjamin Schwartz, Carolita Johnson, Adam Douglas Thompson, Ellie Black SPOTS Matt Blease THE NEW YORKER, MARCH 22, 2021 1 CONTRIBUTORS Andrew Solomon (“The Shape of Love,” Jennifer Gonnerman (“Vacancy,” p. 26) p. 32) is a professor of medical psychol- became a staff writer in 2015. She is the ogy at Columbia University. His books author of “Life on the Outside.” include “Far and Away,” “Far from the Tree,” and “The Noonday Demon.” Louis Menand (“Change Your Life,” Dig into p. 46), a staff writer, will publish “The Jane Mayer (“Trump in the Crosshairs,” Free World: Art and Thought in the stories from p. 18), the magazine’s chief Washing- Cold War” next month. He teaches ton correspondent, is the author of at Harvard. “Dark Money.” our 96-year Joan Acocella (Books, p. 62) has been a Billy Collins (Poem, p. 40), a former staff writer since 1775. Her most recent U.S. Poet Laureate, has written more book is “Twenty-eight Artists and Two archive. than a dozen books of poetry. His lat- Saints.” est collection is “Whale Day.” Liniers (Cover) is an Argentine cartoon- Imbolo Mbue (Fiction, p. 54) won the ist based in Vermont. His work includes 2017 PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction the daily comic strip “Macanudo” and for “Behold the Dreamers.” Her new the forthcoming book “Wildflowers.” novel, “How Beautiful We Were,” came out this month. Ada Limón (Poem, p. 51), the author of five poetry collections, received the Leo Robson (Books, p. 69) is a contrib- 2018 National Book Critics Circle uting writer for the New Statesman. Award for Poetry for “The Carrying.” Caitlin Reid (Puzzles & Games Dept.), Alex Ross (Musical Events, p. 72) has a crossword constructor since 2017, has been The New Yorker’s music critic since created puzzles for the Times, the Wall 1776. He published his third book, Street Journal, and USA Today. “Wagnerism,” in September. THIS WEEK ON NEWYORKER.COM ANNALS OF INQUIRY U.S. JOURNAL Jeannie Suk Gersen on a legal battle Casey Cep reports on a Kansas over “comfort women,” published in bookshop owner’s mission to beat English, Korean, and Japanese. back Amazon. Download the New Yorker app for the latest news, commentary, criticism, and humor, plus this week’s magazine and all issues back to 2008. POMERY D. OWEN RIGHT: / SHUTTERSTOCK; / NURPHOTO CHRIS JUNG LEFT: 2 THE NEW YORKER, MARCH 22, 2021 THE MAIL A GLOBAL-HEALTH MYSTERY clots and organ failure. This should be sobering for those people who have ex- Siddhartha Mukherjee’s piece on why perienced a mild case of the virus; in COVID-19 has hit some countries harder years to come, a memory left behind now than others considers many possible ex- may trigger a storm in response to an as planations, including differences in gov- yet unknown pathogen. ernment response, in levels of immunity, Edwin L. Thomas, Ph.D. FEED HOPE. and in demographic features (“The COVID 1Memphis, Tenn. Conundrum,” March 1st). Another fac- tor at play is cultural differences in the TARKOVSKY’S INSPIRATION FEED LOVE. willingness to follow rules. In a study of fifty-seven countries published inThe Alex Ross, in an excellent essay on the Lancet Planetary Health, my co-authors filmmaker Andrei Tarkovsky, discusses and I found that in cultures with looser how Tarkovsky’s reputation as a prophetic social norms there were five times the artist is in part founded on his depiction number of COVID cases and more than of the mysterious area known as the Zone eight times the deaths as in cultures with in the 1979 film “Stalker,” which seemed stricter norms. These effects were repli- to foreshadow the irradiated forests and cated when controlling for variables in- abandoned structures surrounding Cher- cluding under-reporting, wealth, inequal- nobyl after it exploded, in 1986 (A Critic ity, population density, migration, gov- at Large, February 15th & 22nd). Tar- ernment efficiency, political authoritari- kovsky’s Zone may in fact have drawn anism, median age, non-pharmaceutical from the legacy of a catastrophe that took government interventions, and climate. place prior to the film’s creation: the nu- Ironically, looser cultures had more deaths clear explosion at the Mayak plutonium but less fear of COVID: seventy per cent of plant, in the Urals, in 1957. Although in people in tighter cultures expressed that Tarkovsky’s day the disaster was still ob- they were afraid of contracting COVID; scure in the West, it was known to So- only fifty per cent of people in looser cul- viet intellectuals. The explosion covered tures did. Not all looser cultures did poorly, an area of more than eight thousand and not all tighter cultures were success- square miles with radioactive dust; it cur- ful at limiting cases and deaths. But the rently ranks as the third-worst nuclear results suggest that cultural looseness can disaster of all time. As at Chernobyl, au- be a liability when there is a collective thorities delayed evacuating people, and threat, and that nations must be able to birth defects are said to have followed. adjust norms as needed. “Stalker”’s allusions to Mayak may have Michele J. Gelfand manifested not only in the sinister land- Professor, Department of Psychology scapes but also in the character of the University of Maryland disabled daughter, whose eerie telekinetic College Park, Md. powers perhaps arose from her proxim- ity to the Zone. The Mayak tragedy likely Mukherjee points out that the apparent also influenced the plot of the 1972 So- resistance of certain populations to the viet science-fiction book “Roadside Pic- SARS-CoV-2 virus may be the result of nic,” by Arkady and Boris Strugatsky, on a memory implanted in their immune which “Stalker” was loosely based. systems by prior exposure to related Michael Benson pathogens. Immunologic memory could Ottawa, Ont. also account for the dire consequences of the virus for older individuals in the • U.S., Europe, and elsewhere. People with Letters should be sent with the writer’s name, more years’ worth of stored-up immu- address, and daytime phone number via e-mail to [email protected]. Letters may be edited nologic memories may experience a cy- for length and clarity, and may be published in tokine storm that produces a widespread any medium. We regret that owing to the volume inflammatory response, resulting in blood of correspondence we cannot reply to every letter. In an effort to slow the spread of the coronavirus, many New York City venues are closed. Here’s a selection of culture to be found around town, as well as online and streaming. MARCH 17 – 23, 2021 GOINGS ON ABOUT TOWN While the Frick Collection’s historic mansion undergoes renovations, its masterpieces have a new home: the Frick Madison, opening on March 18. (Timed-entry tickets, available via frick.org, are required.) The Marcel Breuer-designed building, most recently a branch of the Met, turns out to be a magnificent context for the museum’s holdings—the brutalist décor even serves the frothy tastes of Madame du Barry, who com- missioned Jean-Honoré Fragonard’s rococo painting “The Progress of Love: The Pursuit,” pictured above.