Search Results for: The New Yorker

‘Premonitions Are Impossible, and They Come True All the Time’

Before a mining disaster in Wales, some parents claimed their children predicted their own deaths. / Getty Images

Here’s the creepy, confounding tale of the life and death of John Barker, an English psychiatrist who, in the 1960s, began to believe that some people have the power to predict the future. Told in The New Yorker, by Sam Knight, with just the right mix of credulousness and skepticism, the story winds its way around Barker’s psychiatric studies at Shelton Hospital, the the phenomena of placebos and “nocebos,” and the awesome power of anticipation — all done in a kind of demented trick that will keep you up at night with fear, wondering if fear can kill you. After a mining accident in Wales that killed 116 children, Barker was drawn to the eerie anecdotes of children who foretold the disaster:

In the hours that he spent in Aberfan, Barker was struck by “several strange and pathetic incidents” connected with the coal slip. Bereaved families spoke of dreams and portents. On the eve of the disaster, an eight-year-old boy named Paul Davies had drawn massed figures digging in the hillside under the words “the end.” Davies died in the school. Barker heard the story of Eryl Mai Jones, a ten-year-old girl, “not given to imagination,” who had told her mother two weeks before the collapse that she was not afraid to die.

Barker began assembling a database of premonitions, and a horrifying number of them come to pass. Then, a man predicts Barker’s own death:

Shortly before one in the morning, Barker’s telephone rang. It was a panicked-sounding Hencher, who told Barker to check his gas supply. He had been worried about him all day. Barker lived with Jane and their three young children in a large rented house named Barnfield, on the edge of the village of Yockleton. There was no gas supply.

“Have you a dark car?” Hencher asked. Barker replied that it was dark green. “Be very careful,” Hencher warned. “Look after yourself.” Barker asked Hencher if he believed that his life was in danger.

“Yes,” the seer replied.

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Hanif Abdurraqib on Loving A Tribe Called Quest

Hanif Abdurraqib by Kate Sweeney / University of Texas Press

Jonny Auping  | Longreads | February 2019 | 20 minutes (5,266 words)

Hanif Abdurraqib claims that he “wasn’t interested in writing the definitive book on A Tribe Called Quest.” What he produced instead was much more powerful. Abdurraqib’s recently released book, Go Ahead In the Rain: Notes To A Tribe Called Quest, does provide a history of the revolutionary rap group, but more importantly it’s a memoir of listening and feeling, a deeply personal book unafraid to pair music criticism with intimate reflections.

A Tribe Called Quest debuted in 1990 with the album People’s Instinctive Travels and the Paths of Rhythm, an eclectic layering of samples produced by the group’s de facto leader, Q-Tip, and rhymed over with quirky stories and confident punch lines. Their first three albums, all released by 1993, are considered hip-hop canon and three of the most influential albums of the past 30 years across any genre.

A Tribe Called Quest’s 2016 comeback album seemed destined to debut amidst doomed circumstances. Phife Dawg, the group’s swaggering and quick-witted lyricist, had died of diabetes between the making of the album and it’s release. Three days before the album came out Donald Trump won a shocking presidential election. No singles had been released prior to We’ve Got it From Here…Thank You 4 Your Service, but it turned out to be powerful response to the politics of the time, a prophetic pushback against inequality, as well as a statement of the group’s place in popular culture. Pitchfork called the album, “the first time in their career that the entire group was at their peak.”

You could argue that Go Ahead In the Rain is the type of dream project that anyone who has ever felt immense fandom — or even love — for a particular music would want to write. It’s a tribute to a group, and who doesn’t enjoy explaining why their favorite should also be your favorite? But Abdurraqib earns the authority to actually pull it off, not just through his elegant writing but also by having the courage to use Tribe’s music to examine his own place in the world and reckon with what he discovered. Read more…

‘The Most Versatile Criminal In History’

Getty / Penguin Random House

Jonny Auping | Longreads | February 2019 | 16 minutes (4,367 words)

 

Paul Le Roux is unequivocally a criminal mastermind, and if you’ve never heard his name, that only proves the point. After all, a criminal mastermind isn’t just defined by the audacity of his crimes, but the extent to which he gets away with them, and by that measure Le Roux is nothing short of brilliant.

Journalist Evan Ratliff has spent years piecing together who Le Roux is and the unbelievable nature of his crimes. In his recently released book, The Mastermind, Ratliff paints a picture of a man considered by one source to be the “most versatile criminal in history.” Throughout the mid-aughts, Le Roux, a South African computer programmer, ran an illegal online pharmaceutical scam that sold addictive painkillers to Americans at astonishing rates. Real doctors signed off on the scam. Real pharmacists sold the drugs. But it was Le Roux, usually operating from a computer in Manila, who was pulling all the strings. The painkiller scheme grossed him hundreds of millions of dollars.

That money would go on to fund a global criminal enterprise that included literal boatloads of cocaine, shipments of methamphetamine from North Korea, weapons deals with Iran, and a team of ex-military mercenaries who were ordered to kill anyone who threatened Le Roux’s bottom line.

The Mastermind is an incredible feat of reporting that takes the reader step by step into the journeys of Le Roux’s employees, accomplices and hired killers, as well as the law enforcement teams trying to take him down. Most of these parties were largely unaware of the scope of Le Roux’s enterprise. The shocking details and twists that Ratliff reveals are unrelenting; they tell a story that would be impossible to believe if Ratliff didn’t bring the reader along on the reporting upon which it all rests. Read more…

We’ve All Been Unreliable Witnesses to Lorena

Documentary subject Lorena Gallo, formerly Lorena Bobbitt, is interviewed at the premiere of the film "Lorena" during the 2019 Sundance Film Festival, Tuesday, Jan. 29, 2019, in Park City, Utah. (Photo by Danny Moloshok/Invision/AP)

For the New York Times, Amy Choznik spent time with Lorena Gallo in the lead-up to “Lorena,” a four-part Jordan Peele-produced documentary that launches this Friday. Many of us could probably spit out a synopsis of what made Lorena a household name (and a household punchline) — her last name, at the height of her notoriety, was Bobbitt. Many of us would probably be very wrong about the details.

Lorena is correct, of course, that most people forget that before she was tried for what she did, John was charged with marital sexual assault. (He was acquitted.) At the time, marital rape only recently had been made a crime in all 50 states and was nearly impossible to prove in Virginia. Many in the media, including Ladies’ Home Journal and Gay Talese on assignment for The New Yorker, questioned whether it was an oxymoron. (“Wife Rape? Who Really Gets Screwed?” an earlier column in Penthouse read.) Al Franken, as the character Stuart Smalley on Saturday Night Live, implored Lorena to apologize to John’s penis. And, she is correct, that people forget that a jury found her not guilty by reason of temporary insanity. We forget about the string of witnesses at her trial who testified that they had seen bruises on her arms and neck and that she had called 911 repeatedly and that John had bragged to friends about forcing his wife to have sex. In the years since the trial, he was arrested several times and served jail time for violence against two different women. (He denied the allegations.) “This is about a victim and a survivor and this is about what’s happening in our world today,” Lorena told me.

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The Paid Manipulators of Reality

Dominic Lipinski/PA Wire

By using avatars, Facebook, fake websites, and fake news, new private intelligence firms staffed by Israeli intelligence personnel are waging wars on perception to alter targeted groups’ beliefs and behavior. In their story for The New Yorker, Adam Entous and Ronan Farrow profile one firm called Psy-Group to delve deep into this disturbing frontier, which one Israeli intelligence officer described as “a place where wars are fought, elections are won, and terror is promoted.” Psy-Group wanted to tap the growing, lucrative field of American elections. So why was it planning an “influence campaign” over a hospital board election in rural Tulare, California?

The 2016 election changed the calculus. In the U.S., investigators pieced together how Russian operatives had carried out a scheme to promote their preferred candidate and to stoke divisions within U.S. society. Senior Israeli officials, like their American counterparts, had been dubious about the effectiveness of influence campaigns. Russia’s operation in the U.S. convinced Tamir Pardo, the former Mossad director, and others in Israel that they, too, had misjudged the threat. “It was the biggest Russian win ever. Without shooting one bullet, American society was torn apart,” Pardo said. “This is a weapon. We should find a way to control it, because it’s a ticking bomb. Otherwise, democracy is in trouble.”

Some of Pardo’s former colleagues took a more mercenary approach. Russia had shown the world that information warfare worked, and they saw a business opportunity. In early 2017, as Trump took office, interest in Psy-Group’s services seemed to increase. Law firms, one former employee said, asked Psy-Group to “come back in and tell us again what you are doing, because we see this ability to affect decisions that we weren’t fully aware of.” Another former Psy-Group employee put it more bluntly: “The Trump campaign won this way. If the fucking President is doing it, why not us?”

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Shelved: Sonny Rollins Live at Carnegie Hall

Bob Parent / Hulton Archives / Getty

Tom Maxwell | Longreads | February 2019 | 16 minutes (3,055 words)

 

Sonny Rollins was busy in 1957. The tenor saxophonist was present for about sixteen recording sessions, some private, most released, with his own bands as well as with groups led by Miles Davis, Max Roach, Dizzy Gillespie, and Kenny Dorham. His landmark A Night At The Village Vanguard, a live recording of two sets, one in the afternoon and one in the evening performed on November 3rd at New York’s legendary jazz club, became a standard by which other improvisers are judged. In addition, Rollins debuted at Carnegie Hall and headlined the first Monterey Jazz Festival the following year.

“When I look back, people say, ‘Oh, you did a lot of records in 1957…’ Well, I mean, I had to be told about it,” Rollins recently told an interviewer. “So, I guess it was more or less of a norm, you know.”

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The Top 5 Longreads of the Week

Christian Senyk / U.S. Navy via Getty Images

This week, we’re sharing stories from Christian Miller, Megan Rose, and Robert Faturechi; Robin Hemley; David Gauvey Herbert; Ian Parker; and Meghan Daum.

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The Paths of Rhythm

Pfife, Q-Tip, and Ali Shaheed Muhammad of A Tribe Called Quest in the recording studio in New York City on September 10, 1991. Michael Ochs Archives / Getty

Hanif Abdurraqib Go Ahead in the Rain | University of Texas Press | February 2019 | 17 minutes (3,425 words)

 

In the beginning, from somewhere south of anywhere I come from, lips pressed the edge of a horn, and a horn was blown. In the beginning before the beginning, there were drums, and hymns, and a people carried here from another here, and a language stripped and a new one learned, with the songs to go with it. When slaves were carried to America, stolen from places like West Africa and the greater Congo River, with them came a musical tradition. The tradition, generally rooted in one-line melodies and call-and-response, existed to allow the rhythms within the music to reflect African speech patterns—in part so that everyone who had a voice could join in on the music making, which made music a community act instead of an exclusive one.

Once in America, where the slaves were sent to work in America’s South, this ethos was blended with the harmonic style of the Baptist church. Black slaves learned hymns, blended them with their own musical stylings that had been passed down through generations, and thus, the spiritual was born. In the early nineteenth century, free black musicians began picking up and playing European stringed instruments, particularly violin. It started as a joke—to mimic European dance music during black cakewalk dances.

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Shelved: Fiona Apple’s Extraordinary Machine

Paul R. Giunta / Getty

Tom Maxwell | Longreads | January 2019 | 17 minutes (3,315 words)

 

The remarkable thing about Fiona Apple’s album Extraordinary Machine is that it’s actually two albums. Each has its own fans and critics; each was reviewed in the mainstream press; each is available to the casual listener.

Upon closer inspection, the story of Extraordinary Machine becomes a room made of mirrors: The album was shelved, perhaps by Apple’s label, or, according to her own admission, by Apple herself. That version of the album, produced by longtime collaborator Jon Brion, was leaked to the internet. It’s called the “Jon Brion version,” but in actuality is a pastiche of original sessions and new material. The official release was mixed without the presence of either of its two producers. The first version was shelved in part because Apple didn’t feel the songs were fully her own, and partly because her label didn’t believe it had commercial potential; the released version proved them right, at least by yielding no hit singles.

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The Top 5 Longreads of the Week

Bryan Singer. (Photo by J. Vespa/WireImage)

This week, we’re sharing stories from Alex French and Maximillian Potter, Wesley Morris, Ruxandra Guidi, Robert Caro, and Mark Abley.

Sign up to receive this list free every Friday in your inbox. Read more…