Thursday, August 3, 2017
July 31, 2017 Issue
Notes on this week’s issue:
1. Ben Taub, in his superb “We Have No Choice” (The New Yorker, April 10, 2017),
followed the ordeal of a Nigerian teen-ager trying to reach Europe via a vast
people-smuggling network of forced labor and sex work. It ended in a migrant
camp on the outskirts of Messina, Sicily. Now, in “The Wrong Man,” Taub
continues his brilliant reporting on the refugee crisis, this time focusing on the
overzealous prosecution of an Eritrean man whom Sicilian prosecutors wrongly
believe to be a kingpin of East African human smuggling. The piece takes us
deep inside the corrupt Sicilian justice system, showing prosecutors twisting
and misinterpreting the evidence. Taub is a digger; he writes the kind of
first-person experiential journalism I relish (e.g., “One afternoon in Palermo,
I had lunch with Francesco Viviano, a sixty-eight-year-old Sicilian
investigative reporter who says that he has been wiretapped, searched, or
interrogated by the authorities ‘eighty or ninety times’ ”). “We Have No Choice”
is his masterpiece; “The Wrong Man” is a close second.
2. I’m indebted to Louis Menand for pointing out, in his
“The Defense of Poetry,” that Michael Robbins’s new book, Equipment for Living: On Poetry and Pop Music, contains an
“admiring chapter” on Pauline Kael. Kael’s writing is, for me, a touchstone. After
I read what Robbins has to say about her, I’ll post my response here.
3. My favorite sentence in this week’s issue is Peter
Schjeldahl’s “Cradled in a hammock the other day, I couldn’t imagine anywhere
in the world I would rather be, tracking subtle variations in the changing
slides: for example, a matchbook first closed, then open, then burning, then,
finally, burned” (“Full Immersion”).
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