PRICE $7.99 MAR. 9, 2015 MARCH 9, 2015 7 GOINGS ON ABOUT TOWN 27 THE TALK OF THE TOWN Jeffrey Toobin on the cynical health-care case; ISIS in Brooklyn; Imagine Dragons; Knicks knocks; James Surowiecki on Greece. Peter Hessler 34 TRAVELS WITH MY CENSOR In Beijing for a book tour. paul Rudnick 41 TEST YOUR KNOWLEDGE OF SEXUAL DIFFERENCE JOHN MCPHEE 42 FRAME OF REFERENCE What if someone hasn’t heard of Scarsdale? ERIC SCHLOSSER 46 BREAK-IN AT Y-12 How pacifists exposed a nuclear vulnerability. Saul Leiter 70 HIDDEN DEPTHS Found photographs. FICTION stephen king 76 “A DEATH” THE CRITICS A CRITIC AT LARGE KELEFA SANNEH 82 The New York hardcore scene. BOOKS KATHRYN SCHULZ 90 “H Is for Hawk.” 95 Briefly Noted ON TELEVISION emily nussbaum 96 “Fresh Off the Boat,” “Black-ish.” THE THEATRE HILTON ALS 98 “Hamilton.” THE CURRENT CINEMA ANTHONY LANE 100 “Maps to the Stars,” “ ’71.” POEMS WILL EAVES 38 “A Ship’s Whistle” Philip Levine 62 “More Than You Gave” Birgit Schössow COVER “Flatiron Icebreaker” DRAWINGS Charlie Hankin, Zachary Kanin, Liana Finck, David Sipress, J. C. Duffy, Drew Dernavich, Matthew Stiles Davis, Michael Crawford, Edward Steed, Benjamin Schwartz, Alex Gregory, Roz Chast, Bruce Eric Kaplan, Jack Ziegler, David Borchart, Barbara Smaller, Kaamran Hafeez, Paul Noth, Jason Adam Katzenstein SPOTS Guido Scarabottolo 2 THE NEW YORKER, MARCH 9, 2015 CONTRIBUTORS eric schlosser (“BREAK-IN AT Y-12,” P. 46) is the author of “Fast Food Nation” and “Command and Control: Nuclear Weapons, the Damascus Accident, and the Illusion of Safety.” jeFFrey toobin (COMMENT, P. 27) has written six books, including “The Nine: Inside the Secret World of the Supreme Court” and “The Oath: The Obama White House and the Supreme Court.” peter hessler (“TRAVELS WITH MY CENSOR,” P. 34), a staff writer for the magazine, spent eleven years in China. “Strange Stones: Dispatches from East and West” is his latest book. john mcphee (“FRAME OF REFERENCE,” P. 42) is a longtime New Yorker contributor. He has published twenty-eight books, including “Silk Parachute.” philip levine (POEM, P. 62) began contributing poems to the magazine in 1958, and was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for poetry in 1995 for his collection “The Simple Truth.” He died last month, at the age of eighty-seven. stephen king (FICTION, P. 76), whose first story for the magazine, “The Man in the Black Suit,” appeared in 1994 and earned an O. Henry Award, has a new novel, “Finders Keepers,” coming out in June. kathryn schulz (BOOKS, P. 90), the author of “Being Wrong: Adventures in the Margin of Error,” recently joined The New Yorker as a staff writer. emily nussbaum (ON TELEVISION, P. 96) is the magazine’s television critic and the winner of the 2014 National Magazine Award for columns and commentary. birgit schössow (COVER) is working on the illustrations and the text for two books, which will be published next year. She lives near Hamburg. NEWYORKER.COM Everything in the magazine, and more than fifteen original stories a day. ALSO: DAILY COMMENT / CULTURAL COMMENT: PODCASTS: On the Political Scene, Opinions and reflections by Joan Jeffrey Toobin and Ryan Lizza join Acocella, Jeffrey Toobin, and others. Dorothy Wickenden for a discussion about the backlash in Congress and VIDEO: The Moth and The New Yorker the courts regarding the President’s celebrate the magazine’s ninetieth immigration policy. Plus, Kelefa anniversary with a night of stories Sanneh, Sarah Larson, and David from David Remnick, Larissa Haglund on Out Loud. MacFarquhar, and others. HUMOR: A Daily Cartoon on the THE SPORTING SCENE: Our blog news, drawn by Emily Flake. Plus, covering the world of sports. the Shouts & Murmurs blog. 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.) 4 THE NEW YORKER, MARCH 9, 2015 THE MAIL PSYCHEDELIC MEDICINE verse the Nixon-Ford policy that placed most psychedelics on the D.E.A.’s In reporting on the use of psychedelic Schedule 1 list, prohibiting their use. drugs to treat cancer and other pathol- Congress would almost certainly have ogies, Michael Pollan could have turned blocked this change, but had we been his attention to more critical studies able to lift the ban on scientific research (“The Trip Treatment,” February 9th). into medical applications, doctors would In my work as a psychiatrist, I have probably now have a far better under- read research on psilocybin—the ac- standing of brain function, and the un- tive ingredient in “magic mushrooms”— necessary suffering of many terminally that is at odds with the benign out- ill patients could have been alleviated. comes he mentions in his piece. In a We should applaud the heroic scien- 2013 article in the Schizophrenia Bul- tists and clinicians Pollan mentions, letin, the psychopharmacologist Robin who are clearly committed to advanc- Carhart-Harris proposed that psilocy- ing the frontiers of science. bin-induced brain changes could be Peter G. Bourne, M.D. used “as a model of early psychosis.” Spotsylvania, Va. This fits with another study, by Franz X. Vollenweider, from 1998, in which he 1 reported a schizophrenia-like psycho- ELEGANT EQUATIONS sis lasting about two hours in twenty- five healthy volunteers after they were As Alec Wilkinson points out in his given psilocybin. In many cases, the Profile of the math genius Yitang volunteers who participate in psyche- Zhang, results in pure mathematics can delic research have a history of using be sources of wonder and delight, re- hallucinogenic drugs. Participants in gardless of their applications (“The the Carhart-Harris study had used psi- Pursuit of Beauty,” February 2nd). Yet locybin an average of sixteen times. In applications do crop up. Nineteenth- a study of cancer patients conducted century mathematicians showed that by Charles S. Grob in 2011, eight out there are geometries as logical and com- of twelve test subjects had used hallu- plete as Euclidean geometry, but which cinogens in the past. No one wants to are utterly distinct from it. This seemed deprive desperate cancer patients of of no practical use at the time, but Al- the opportunity for a better quality of bert Einstein used non-Euclidean ge- life, but there are far too many ques- ometry to make the most successful tions about the safety of psilocybin to model that we have of the behavior of promote its use. the universe on large scales of distance Charles E. Dean, M.D. and time. Abstract results in number Apple Valley, Minn. theory, Zhang’s field, underlie cryptog- raphy used to protect communication Pollan’s article about using psychedel- on devices that many of us use every ics in medical treatments offers a sad day. Abstract mathematics, beautiful in commentary on how government fund- itself, continually results in helpful ap- ing for scientific research is influenced plications, and that’s pretty wonderful heavily by political and cultural values and delightful, too. that are unrelated to science. With few David Lee exceptions, federal support for research Sandy Spring, Md. on so-called drugs of abuse has taken into consideration only their adverse • effects, reinforcing the bias of policy- Letters should be sent with the writer’s name, address, and daytime phone number via e-mail makers and funders. As a former di- to [email protected]. Letters may be rector of the White House Office of edited for length and clarity, and may be pub- lished in any medium. We regret that owing to Drug Abuse Policy, I now feel a sense the volume of correspondence we cannot reply of shame at having failed to try to re- to every letter or return letters. THE NEW YORKER, MARCH 9, 2015 5 GOINGS ON ABOUT TOWN MARCH WEDNESDAY • THURSDAY • FRIDAY • SATURDAY • SUNDAY • MONDAY • TUESDAY 2015 4TH 5TH 6TH 7TH 8TH 9TH 10TH Björk can sometimes fail her songs by writing lyrics that are overlush and insistent, but she managed to untangle her words to superb effect on “Vespertine” (2001), and, now, on “Vulnicura,” her new ART | ABOVE & BEYOND album, she makes much of a common occurrence: the dissolution of a marriage. By working with artists NIGHT LIFE | movies such as the late John Tavener, she has learned how to use the emotional power of an aging singer’s THE THEATRE voice (she turns fifty next year) to make music that is not pop but a kind of classical melodrama. This month, the Icelandic star performs concerts at Carnegie Hall, Kings Theatre, and City Center, and CLASSICAL MUSIC on March 8 MOMA opens a retrospective of the artist’s work that will no doubt be interesting and DANCE | FOOD & DRINK complicated, since museums are known to fix artists in time, while Björk insists on moving through it. illustration by sachin teng Museums and Libraries New York Public Library ART “Public Eye: 175 Years of Sharing Photography” This engrossing show of more than five hundred pictures from the library’s collections puts social media in historical context. To make the case that “photography has always been social,” the curator Stephen C. Pinson presents pictorial evidence in books, magazines, newspapers, albums, frames, and vitrines, culminating in an interactive display, on a huge touch screen, which animates the entire length of Broadway through Instagram feeds and Google street views. The artists range from anon- ymous hobbyists to investigative photojournalists (Lewis Hine) to contemporary Conceptualists (Zoe Leonard). It’s a rare opportunity to see the library’s collection in depth, and the premise makes even vintage material feel of the moment. Through Jan. 3, 2016. 3 Galleries—Uptown Giulio Paolini This historically minded veteran of Arte Povera offers a portrait of the artist as equal parts Re- naissance man, bricoleur, comic, and con man.