August 21, 2017 Issue

“Phil Stewart, an affably geeky, sandy-haired strawberry geneticist, offered me a yellowish-white specimen with rosy stains, like a skinned knee when the blood starts seeping through.” I enjoyed that sentence. It’s from Dana Goodyear’s absorbing “Strawberry Valley,” in this week’s issue. The piece is about Driscoll’s, “the world’s largest berry company,” and its attempt to breed the perfect strawberry. It’s also about rival strawberry breeding programs – Driscoll’s proprietary program versus the “public, open, non-exclusive” program of the University of California, Davis. Until I read Goodyear’s piece, I had no idea the berry business was so brass-knuckle. Lawsuits, talent raids, illegal breeding – it’s war!

Another piece in this week’s issue that hooked my attention is Raffi Khatchadourian’s “Man Without a Country,” a sequel to his great “No Secrets” (The New Yorker, June 7, 2010). Both pieces profile WikiLeaks's embattled founder, Julian Assange. In “No Secrets,” WikiLeaks is still a work in progress; Assange is portrayed as a “mixture of seriousness and amusement, devilishness and intensity.” Khatchadourian writes, “Soon enough, Assange must confront the paradox of his creation: the thing that he seems to detest most—power without accountability—is encoded in the site’s DNA, and will only become more pronounced as WikiLeaks evolves into a real institution.”

In “Man Without a Country,” that paradox still hasn’t been confronted; Assange’s portrait is much darker; WikiLeaks appears to be an instrument of Russian state hackers. Khatchadourian writes, “Whatever one thinks of Assange’s election disclosures, accepting his contention that they shared no ties with the two Russian fronts requires willful blindness.”

Khatchadourian’s “I” is more pronounced in “Man Without a Country” than it is in “No Secrets.” His own attempt to understand Assange is part of the story. For this reason, I think I prefer it slightly more. Both pieces are superb – intricate portraits of a brilliant, combative, possibly crazy cryptographer, who craves the world’s attention.