PRICE $8.99 NOV. 27, 2017 NOVEMBER 27, 2017 5 GOINGS ON ABOUT TOWN 19 THE TALK OF THE TOWN Amy Davidson Sorkin on sexual harassment; Lee Ann Womack in hi-fi; a director’s sister act; pups behind bars; Lois Smith, looking back. A CRITIC AT LARGE Anthony Lane 24 For the Win Winston Churchill’s many faces in film. SHOUTS & MURMURS Colin Nissan 29 My LinkedIn Photo ANNALS OF CRIME Alec Wilkinson 30 The Serial-Killer Detector A program to connect unsolved murders. THE SPORTING SCENE Nick Paumgarten 36 Confidence Game The intense discipline of a skiing prodigy. A REPORTER AT LARGE Alexis Okeowo 46 The People’s Police In Mexico, a woman who became the law. COMIC STRIP Edward Steed 53 “A Brief History of Time” FICTION Will Mackin 56 “The Lost Troop” THE CRITICS POP MUSIC Carrie Batton 62 Taylor Swift’s “Reputation.” BOOKS James Wood 65 Jon McGregor’s subtle fictions. Ruth Franklin 70 Reassessing Mary Oliver. 73 Briefly Noted Paul Bloom 74 Looking for the root of human cruelty. THE ART WORLD Peter Schjeldahl 78 Leonardo, Michelangelo, and Edvard Munch. POEMS Eileen Myles 40 “The West” Timothy Donnelly 60 “Unlimited Soup and Salad” COVER Barry Blitt “Nowhere to Hide” DRAWINGS Mitra Farmand, Tom Toro, P. C. Vey, Will McPhail, Bruce Eric Kaplan, David Sipress, Liana Finck, Shannon Wheeler, Roz Chast, Harry Bliss, Emily Flake, Julia Suits, Frank Cotham, Drew Dernavich, Emma Hunsinger, Michael Maslin, Sofia Warren, Paul Noth, Edward Koren SPOTS Andy Rementer THE NEW YORKER, NOVEMBER 27, 2017 1 CONTRIBUTORS Nick Paumgarten (The Talk of the Town, Alexis Okeowo (“The People’s Police,” p. 20; “Confidence Game,” p. 36) has been p. 46) is a staff writer. Her first book, writing for the magazine since 2000. “A Moonless, Starless Sky: Ordinary Women and Men Fighting Extrem- Eileen Myles (Poem, p. 40) is a poet who ism in Africa,” came out in October. lives in New York and Marfa, Texas. “Afterglow (A Dog Memoir)” is their Will Mackin (Fiction , p. 56) retired from most recent book. the Navy in 2014. His début story col- lection, “Bring Out the Dog,” will be Alec Wilkinson (“The Serial-Killer published in March. Detector,” p. 30), a regular contributor, has published ten books, including Ruth Franklin (Books, p. 70) is the au- “The Protest Singer” and “The Ice Bal- thor of “Shirley Jackson: A Rather loon.” His next book is on learning math. Haunted Life,” now out in paperback. Carrie Battan (Pop Music, p. 62) is a Barry Blitt (Cover) is a cartoonist and contributing writer for the magazine illustrator. His latest book, “Blitt,” is a and for newyorker.com. collection of his illustrations for The New Yorker, the Times, Vanity Fair, and Anthony Lane (“For the Win,” p. 24), The elsewhere. New Yorker’s film critic since 1993, pub- lished “Nobody’s Perfect,” a collection Amy Davidson Sorkin (Comment, p. 19) , of his writings for the magazine, in 2003. a staff writer, is a regular contributor to Comment and writes a column for Paul Bloom (Books, p. 74) is the Brooks newyorker.com. and Suzanne Ragen Professor of Psy- chology and Cognitive Science at Yale. Edward Steed (Comic Strip, p. 53) has His latest book is “Against Empathy: been contributing cartoons to the mag- The Case for Rational Compassion.” azine since 2013. NEWYORKER.COM Everything in the magazine, and more. DAILY SHOUTS VIDEO Maggie Larson explores the Ronan Farrow discusses his investiga- emotional roller coaster of a last-minute tion of the sexual-assault allegations Thanksgiving trip to the supermarket. against Harvey Weinstein. 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.) COUCIERO CRISTIANA RIGHT: LARSON; MAGGIE LEFT: 2 THE NEW YORKER, NOVEMBER 27, 2017 THE MAIL HOMING INSTINCTS MacFarquhar briefly mentions the changing demographic of Orange Larissa MacFarquhar, in her profile of City’s farmworkers. Many rural towns my home town, Orange City, Iowa, nationwide are collapsing because of describes why it hasn’t stagnated the the loss of family farms. More than way many rural communities in the half of U.S. cropland is controlled by United States have (“Our Town,” No- farms larger than two thousand acres, vember 13th). As MacFarquhar writes, while the country loses forty acres of people in Orange City tend to stay farmland every hour. As our small and there, and to account for this she cites medium-sized farms are increasingly the attraction of its culture: an abun- unable to compete with industrial ag- dance of churches, a proud ethnic her- riculture or developers and disappear, itage, and the reality that everybody we lose not only land but also entire knows your genealogy. (“If you ain’t communities. Dutch, you ain’t much!”) But she Sarah Newman doesn’t give enough credit to the role 1Bethesda, Md. that thrift plays in sustaining the com- munity. Orange City residents exhibit THE END OF EXERCISE a Calvinist work ethic that avoids con- spicuous consumption. Extra cash is Nicola Twilley’s wry examination of put in banks, which in turn extend one of the pharmaceutical industry’s loans to finance long-term investments many quests for eternal youth—this in the community. This is the essence time in the form of GW501516, a drug of what it means to be conservative, a that, she writes, “confers the beneficial term that is misused in today’s polit- effects of exercise without the need to ical discourse. Washington, D.C., could move a muscle”—provides a fine ex- learn a lesson. ample of the vanity of human desires Daniel van der Weide (“The Exercise Pill,” November 6th). Madison, Wis. Even the term “exercise pill” is an oxy- moron, along the lines of “jumbo I’m a transplant to Orange City, and shrimp”; the idea that swallowing a still a bit of an outsider even though pill can harmlessly “mimic” a vigorous I’ve lived here for twenty-four years, half-hour swim defies logic. The en- teach math at the college in town, thusiastic endorsement of a man on married a local, and raised children the Web site MuscleChemistry.com, who are more than half Dutch in an- who goes by the handle Iron Julius, cestry. Despite my love for the moun- does little to recommend it. Indeed, tains and my issues with the regional after Twilley cites researchers’ claims politics here, I wouldn’t live anywhere that their creation works by tricking else. Without glossing over its flaws, “cells into thinking they are running MacFarquhar absolutely nails the out of energy,” she says that the ma- qualities that make Orange City a jority of the scientific community has wonderful place to call home. How- warned against ingesting a “likely car- ever, I do have a historical bone to cinogen.” It remains axiomatic that you pick with the article’s references to can’t fool Mother Nature. the Dutch Reformed Church, a con- Alan Dunn gregation affiliated with Northwest- Beaverton, Ore. ern College. Actually, it has not gone by that name for nearly two hundred • years, and officially adopted its cur- Letters should be sent with the writer’s name, rent name, the Reformed Church in address, and daytime phone number via e-mail to [email protected]. Letters may be edited America, in 1867. for length and clarity, and may be published in Kim Jongerius any medium. We regret that owing to the volume Orange City, Iowa of correspondence we cannot reply to every letter. THE NEW YORKER, NOVEMBER 27, 2017 3 NOVEMBER 22 Ð 28, 2017 GOINGS ON ABOUT TOWN The British painter David Hockney turned eighty this year. The Met, in cahoots with the Tate and the Pompidou, celebrates with a retrospective. Landscape and autobiography recur as entwined motifs, from the sun-splashed swimming pools of Los Angeles, the artist’s adopted home town, to the rolling hills of his native Yorkshire. After a trip to Japan in 1972, Hockney painted “Mt. Fuji and Flowers” (above), COURTESY THE METROPOLITAN MUSEUM OF ART OF MUSEUM THE METROPOLITAN COURTESY jogging his memory with a postcard and a guide to flower arranging. The exhibition opens on Nov. 27. NIGHT LIFE in 1983, halted by a towering drug habit, he left the scene to become a social worker and didn’t d.j. again for thirteen years. As Siano moved on, disco went with him; in its wake emerged new club customs that shape the spheres of music, fashion, and art to this day. Downtown New York hit puberty in the nineteen-eighties, a messy re- bellion from the shimmer of Studio 54, complete with stars of its own. It was in the burgeoning neighborhood of Tribeca that a young Justin Strauss came of age at the Mudd Club and the Paradise Garage, and eventually served as the Saturday-night d.j. at Area. Genres like post-punk, new wave, and hip-hop forced their way into d.j. sets; celebrities bopped alongside young aspirants like Keith Haring, Madonna, and Jean-Michel Basquiat; and clout peaked at being recognized by a door- man. Throughout the mid-eighties, Area reinvented its décor every six weeks: Jennifer Goode, who directed these changeovers, would load her pickup truck with retired Coney Island rides or props lifted from the set of “Mad Max,” hoping they’d fit in Area’s thirteen thousand square feet. “It started off as something that wasn’t meant to last,” Strauss said recently. “It was an art project—with an amazing sound system.” Today, photography books, docu- On Thanksgiving eve, the “Native New Yorker” party series returns to Good Room, in Greenpoint.