another eye opens

During this deeply disheartening week in American life, I have nourished myself with the feast that is this week’s issue of The New Yorker, with its stellar if dismaying contents.

Two extraordinarily pertinent, deeply reported pieces demand wide attention: Adam Davidson’s “No Questions Asked,” which lays out the evidence that Donald Trump’s real estate dealings have engaged extensively in illegal international money-laundering, and Raffi Khatchadourian’s long but riveting “Man Without a Country,” which incorporates both unusually abundant access to Julian Assange and scrupulous outside reporting to establish that Assange set out very purposefully to do everything in his power to sabotage Hilary Clinton’s campaign for presidency, a desire so red-hot in his heart that it’s possible he allowed himself to be used by Russian cybersecurity experts wanting to influence the election in favor Donald Trump. There will never be a smoking gun that says “The American President is a crook and must be removed from office.” It will take the accretion of carefully reported stories like these and the kind of relentless work of following the money trail that Rachel Maddow has been doing.

In “Is There Any Point to Protesting?” Nathan Heller reviews a bunch of books analyzing the impact of street activism on social and political change, and the conclusions he reaches are uncomfortable but persuasive, especially the ideas presented by Zeynep Tufekci in her book Twitter and Tear Gas: The Power and Fragility of Networked Protest. Here’s a key passage:

Tufekci believes that digital-age protests are not simply faster, more responsive versions of their mid-century parents. They are fundamentally distinct. At Gezi Park, she finds that nearly everything is accomplished by spontaneous tactical assemblies of random activists—the Kauffman model carried further through the ease of social media. “Preexisting organizations whether formal or informal played little role in the coordination,” she writes. “Instead, to take care of tasks, people hailed down volunteers in the park or called for them via hashtags on Twitter or WhatsApp messages.” She calls this style of off-the-cuff organizing “adhocracy.” Once, just getting people to show up required top-down coördination, but today anyone can gather crowds through tweets, and update, in seconds, thousands of strangers on the move.

At the same time, she finds, shifts in tactics are harder to arrange. Digital-age movements tend to be organizationally toothless, good at barking at power but bad at forcing ultimatums or chewing through complex negotiations. When the Gezi Park occupation intensified and the Turkish government expressed an interest in talking, it was unclear who, in the assembly of millions, could represent the protesters, and so the government selected its own negotiating partners. The protest diffused into disordered discussion groups, at which point riot police swarmed through to clear the park. The protests were over, they declared—and, by that time, they largely were.

The missing ingredients, Tufekci believes, are the structures and communication patterns that appear when a fixed group works together over time. That practice puts the oil in the well-oiled machine. It is what contemporary adhocracy appears to lack, and what projects such as the postwar civil-rights movement had in abundance. And it is why, she thinks, despite their limits in communication, these earlier protests often achieved more.

I’ve been curious to read Garth Greenwell’s highly praised novel What Belongs to You, so it was great to get a taste of his meticulous prose style in the short story “An Evening Out.” Amanda Petrusich’s piece on Adam Graduciel and his rock band The War on Drugs definitely makes me want to hear their most recent albums. And I’m grateful to Alex Ross for his detailed description of Peter Sellars’ production of Mozart’s La Clemenza di Tito at the Salzburg Festival.

I love being well-informed, culturally enriched, and entertained by the New Yorker — the issue also has a bunch of especially good cartoons.