For Immediate Release: September 21, 2015 Press Contacts: Natalie Raabe, (212) 286-6591 Molly Erman, (212) 286-7936 Adrea Piazza, (212) 286-4255

In the Aftermath of the Emanuel Nine

In the September 28, 2015, issue of The New Yorker, in “Blood at the Root” (p. 26), David Remnick travels to Charleston, South Caro- lina, and explores the city’s resistance and resilience in the aftermath of the June murders of nine people at Emanuel A.M.E. Church. Like many people in Charleston, Pastor Norvel Goff, Sr., at Emanuel, says that members of the community remain in shock and immense pain “(‘post-traumatic-stress syndrome’ was the term they often used), but they were alive, and feeling joy in their pews—and at their jobs, and at their Bible classes and dinner tables and Sunday strolls—because of the depth of their spiritual lives,” Remnick writes. “This was the way of a church that had been around since the days when enslaved black men and women, in a quest for safety, community, dignity, co- hesion, empowerment, ritual, and peace, broke from white churches and built ‘invisible’ institutions, sometimes called ‘hush harbors.’ ” The black church, even as it has changed, aged, and, in some places, lost ground to mega-churches, Remnick writes, remains a powerful insti- tution of black life, and of black political influence. The families of the Emanuel Nine shocked the nation with their message of forgive- ness at the killer Dylann Roof ’s hearing the day after the murders. That forgiveness is hard to understand for anyone “who hasn’t had to cope with that kind of powerlessness,” James H. Cone, an exponent of black-liberation theology who grew up in the A.M.E. Church, tells Remnick. He continues, “When they forgive, it is a form of resistance, a kind of resilience. It is not bowing down. That is misunderstood by a lot of people, even black people, and even some black ministers. It’s part of that tragic experience of trying to express your humanity in the face of death and not having any power.” But the Reverend Joseph Darby, the former pastor of Morris Brown A.M.E. Church, in Charleston, and a leader of the state chapter of the N.A.A.C.P., tells Remnick that the city’s peaceful response will be meaningless with- out combatting the institutional racism that still defines the state “and the state of the union”: underfunded, segregated schools, neglected black towns, unjust voter-I.D. laws, gentrification and joblessness in the cities, outsized rates of African-Americans in prison. “The sur- face tone of conciliation, Darby and many others believe, helps to smother the possibility of political change in places like Charleston,” Remnick writes. Remnick met with Muhiyidin d’Baha, one of the organizers of Black Lives Matter Charleston, who says that the voices of forgiveness at Roof ’s hearing struck him as understandable in the context of the black church and the legacy of civil-rights-era think- ing but, at the same time, as a form of political masochism. “That was Charleston,” he tells Remnick. “That was accommodating white feelings and white superiority. It was ‘Yes, Massa, can I have another?’ But, at the same time, it was spiritual fortitude forged in a crucible of terrorism. It speaks of a spiritual level that I haven’t attained.” He continues, “There has been an arrangement here, created over gener- ations, to be able to endure terrorism. At this point, this is the way it is. We endure. We don’t ask for more.”

After Three Decades, Has the Brother of a Victim of the Lockerbie Bombing Solved the Case?

In “The Avenger” (p. 40), Patrick Radden Keefe explores how Ken Dornstein, who lost his older brother, David, on Pan Am Flight 103, spent twenty-five years relentlessly investigating the perpetrators of the Lockerbie bombing, and, in filming his new documentary “My Brother’s Bomber”—which premières this month—may have identified new leads in the case. When Dornstein first read of the attack—which destroyed Pan Am Flight 103 in midair over Scotland while en route from London to New York on December 22, 1988—he didn’t realize his brother was aboard. David, who was twenty-five and living in Israel, was heading home early to surprise his family. Dornstein, who for years has kept his brother’s memory alive through his tireless ef- forts to solve the case, tells Keefe that he believes that Abdelbaset al-Megrahi, the Libyan intel- ligence operative who was sentenced to life in prison for the crime, was a guilty party, but not the only one. When the Libyan leader Muammar Qaddafi—who never acknowledged authorizing Lockerbie—established a $2.7-billion fund to compensate the victims, in 2003, Dornstein saw an opportunity. “The money is supposed to be the end of it for them,” he says. “But for me the money was the beginning, because it enabled me to try to get what I really wanted—the story.” Dornstein suspected that other perpetrators remained at large in Libya. The lead Scottish inves- tigator on the case, Stuart Henderson, gave him a list of eight “unindicted co-conspirators” who had never been captured. As Keefe details, Dornstein quit his job as a producer at PBS “Front- line” and funded his way to war-torn Libya three separate times starting in 2011, seeking out the men on the list. One by one, he struck them off it. “After Dornstein’s pursuit of perpetrators in MARK ULRIKSEN Libya came up empty, he widened his purview to look at the broader community of Libyan terrorists who had been operating during the eighties,” Keefe writes. He found a lead in Musbah Eter, a Libyan operative who was one of the key perpetrators of the bombing of the La Belle discothèque in Berlin in 1986. With new intel from Eter, Dornstein was able to uncover details, and identities, that appear to confirm Libya’s involvement in Lockerbie and which had evaded American investigators for decades. Dornstein was able to identify and locate a mysterious player in the bombing named Abu Agila Mas’ud, whom he determined was alive—and in prison—in Libya.

Dornstein presented his findings to Richard Marquise, a retired F.B.I. agent who was one of the lead investigators on the Lockerbie case. Marquise was impressed. “He showed me a bunch of stuff I’d never seen,” he tells Keefe. Marquise tells Keefe that investigators had heard stories about Mas’ud. “We always suspected that he was the guy that armed the bomb,” he says. “But we could never get any more informa- tion on him.” After Dornstein laid out his evidence, Marquise called the F.B.I. “I’ve got some information you should be aware of,” he said. “Maybe we’ll get some more indictments.” Dornstein’s friend Richard Suckle, a Hollywood producer, tells Keefe that he thinks Dornstein’s film, which will be shown in three parts on PBS “Frontline” starting on September 29th, “goes beyond emotional catharsis.” He continues: “Nobody ever got to the bottom of it, all the thousands of people who worked on the investigation. It’s about being the guy that got to the finish line when nobody else did.”

Can a Former Noise Musician Become a Star?

In “Pop for Misfits” (p. 54), Kelefa Sanneh profiles the musician Claire Boucher, who is better known by her stage name and alter ego, Grimes. Boucher has been producing and singing home-brewed electronic music as Grimes since 2009. The music “is irreducibly weird but insistently pop, a term that describes both its sound and, increasingly, its reception,” Sanneh writes. “She fills tents at festivals, and this sum- mer she toured with Lana Del Rey.” In her own songs, Boucher, who is twenty-seven, takes delight in rewriting the old music-industry story of the female performer in the spotlight and the male mastermind behind the curtain. “It’s like I’m Phil Spector, and then there’s Grimes, which is the girl group,” Boucher says. She got her start in Montreal, part of an underground experimental-music scene, “but now she her- self is the experiment, as she tries to figure out what ‘pop star’ means in 2015, and whether she might become one,” Sanneh writes. Boucher, who is a pop-music connoisseur, acquired some important allies in 2013, when she signed with Roc Nation, the artist-management­ com- pany founded by Jay Z, which counts Kanye West and Shakira among its clients. “But she still records for a small label, 4AD, which gives her freedom from just about any imperative except the financial one—she can’t afford not to think practically about her career,” Sanneh writes. Though she hasn’t announced an exact release date, the long-awaited new Grimes album is expected to arrive sometime in the next month or two. Boucher knows that the new album—her first since signing with Roc Nation—will be scrutinized not only by her fans but also by lots of people wondering whether she deserves all the attention she gets. “They didn’t sign Grimes because they want money,” she says, of Roc Nation. “They signed Grimes because they want to diversify. And they’re really adamant about me not feeling any pressure to do pop stuff.” According to Sanneh, Boucher appeals to music executives because she seems unusually equipped to navigate a changing in- dustry. “She has mastered the kind of radical transparency that social media rewards, and, equally important, she makes music cheaply and on her own—a do-it-yourself approach that can make more traditional business models seem bloated and obsolete,” he writes. “Of course, Roc Nation believes, too, that some of Boucher’s new songs have a chance to succeed on the radio, which retains a surprising influence on the industry.” Boucher tells Sanneh that she would be satisfied if her new record were merely “a successful indie album.” But, Sanneh notes, it would be slightly deflating if Boucher, after years of pop obsession, didn’t find a way to become part of the thing that has captivated her.

Plus: In Comment, Evan Osnos looks ahead to Chinese President Xi Jinping’s first state visit, on Friday, and considers the rising ten- sions between China and the United States at a time when the two countries have never been more interconnected (p. 21); in Shouts & Murmurs, Kelly Stout offers metaphorical dating advice (p. 35); in an essay, David Sedaris recounts learning that the Supreme Court had legalized gay marriage—and then deciding to propose to his boyfriend eighteen times (p. 36); James Wood reads “The Complete Works of Primo Levi,” a three-volume collection that illuminates how the writer survived eleven months in Auschwitz, never losing his sense of imagination or irony (p. 68); Thomas Mallon reads the diaries of Drew Pearson, who wrote the syndicated newspaper column Washington Merry-Go-Round in the sixties, and examines how he influenced politicians while reporting on them (p. 76); Peter Schjeldahl visits the Broad, Eli Broad’s “snazzy new museum of excellent contemporary art,” which has just opened to the public in down- town Los Angeles (p. 80); Anthony Lane watches Baltasar Kormákur’s “Everest” and Scott Cooper’s “Black Mass,” starring Johnny Depp (p. 82); and new fiction by Thomas McGuane (p. 64).

Online: On the Political Scene podcast, Evan Osnos and Hendrik Hertzberg discuss last week’s Republican Presidential debate with Dor- othy Wickenden; on the Out Loud podcast, Nicola Twilley and Joshua Rothman talk about what we find disgusting with Amelia Lester and David Haglund.

Tablet & Phone Extras: A slide show of photographs of Ken Dornstein’s research about the Lockerbie bombing; an excerpt from Ken Dornstein’s documentary about the Lockerbie bombing; a slide show of photographs of the new Broad Museum, in Los Angeles; Thomas McGuane reads his short story; poetry readings by Natalie Eilbert and Stanley Moss; and Richard Brody picks his Movie of the Week, Kazuo Hara’s “The Emperor’s Naked Army Marches On,” from 1987.

The September 28, 2015, issue of The New Yorker goes on sale at newsstands beginning Monday, September 21.