For Immediate Release: April 10, 2017
IN THIS WEEK’S ISSUE
The Impresario Behind Neil Gorsuch’s Confirmation
In the April 17, 2017, issue of The New Yorker, in “Full-Court Press” (p. 24), Jeffrey Toobin profiles Leonard Leo, the conservative lawyer and networker who, now that Gorsuch has been confirmed, is responsible, to a considerable extent, for a third of the Supreme Court. The longtime executive vice-president of the Federalist Society, a national organization of conservative and libertarian law students and attorneys, Leo played a
crucial part in the nominations of John Roberts and Samuel Alito, and has served, in effect, as Donald Trump’s subcontractor on the selection of Gorsuch, who was confirmed by a vote of 54–45, last week. Leo recalls a conversation he had last spring with Trump, who was then a candidate: “What
he said in very explicit terms was he wanted people who were exceptionally well qualified, quote, ‘respected by all, not weak’—those are his words, ‘not
weak’—and somebody who was going to, quote, ‘interpret the Constitution the way the Framers meant it to be.’ ” Finding potential candidates, Leo
said, “is easy, in the sense that when you’ve been working in this vineyard for twenty-five years you know everybody.” Carrie Severino, the chief counsel of the Judicial Crisis Network, another conservative organization, told Toobin, “When Leonard walks in that room, everyone knows who he is.”
Leo “knew how to play the game—how to find a nominee who met Trump’s ideological requirements as well as his own,” Toobin writes. Leo
wants to see the power of government restrained in some ways but not in others. He said, “If you look at the areas where a true conservative is
willing to tolerate restrictions on the individual, by dint of government power, it’s generally fraud, force, and threats to human life and security.”
Abortion, Leo told Toobin, is “an act of force. It’s a threat to human life. It’s just that simple.” He described his first child, Margaret, who was
born with spina bifida, as “a real miracle, despite having a really serious handicap.” Clarence Thomas still keeps her drawings under glass on his
desk, according to Leo. Margaret encouraged Leo, whose life has been shaped as much by Catholicism as by conservatism, to go to daily Mass.
Shortly after he promised to resume the practice, Margaret died, at the age of fourteen. “I will always think that she did her job,” Leo told Toobin.
The Leos have six other children, including a son who also has spina bifida.
Nan Aron, the president of the Alliance for Justice, which advocates for a progressive judiciary, tells Toobin that the Federalist Society is “very
engaged in identifying and recruiting for judges candidates who are ultra-conservatives—who are opposed to our rights and liberties across the
board, whether it’s women, the environment, consumer protections, worker protections.” Leo is preparing for yet more vacancies on the Supreme
Court, and identifying candidates for some of the hundred-plus vacancies on the lower federal courts, deepening his imprint on the judiciary. If
Trump has the opportunity to replace Justice Ginsburg, who is eighty-four, Justice Kennedy, who is eighty, or Justice Breyer, who is seventy-eight,
much less all of them, “the ideological balance of the Court will be transformed for at least a generation,” Toobin writes.
Margaret Atwood’s Dark “Speculative Fiction” Eerily Anticipated Today’s Crises
In “The Prophet of Dystopia” (p. 38), Rebecca Mead profiles Margaret Atwood, Canada’s most famous writer, whose “speculative fiction” has
long portrayed societies riddled with misogyny, oppression, and environmental havoc—visions that now feel all too real. Atwood’s bibliography
runs to around sixty books—novels, poetry, short-story collections, works of criticism, children’s books, and, most recently, a comic-book series.
Her 1986 novel, “The Handmaid’s Tale,” is a dystopian vision of the near future, in which the United States has become a fundamentalist theocracy, and the few women whose fertility has not been compromised by environmental pollution are forced into childbearing. Following the
election of Donald Trump, “The Handmaid’s Tale” has reappeared on best-seller lists. It is also about
to be serialized on television, in an adaptation starring Elisabeth Moss, which will stream on Hulu.
Atwood, who attended the Toronto iteration of the Women’s March, remarked, “After sixty years,
why are we doing this again? But, as you know, in any area of life, it’s push and pushback. We have
had the pushback, and now we are going to have the push again.”
Atwood was an early adopter of Twitter, signing up in 2009; she now has more than a million and
a half followers, though she is aware that some of that number must be bots. “I do sometimes get ‘I
miss your dick’—they don’t read the fine print,” she said. Atwood believes that early fears, among
HARRY BLISS
Mead accompanied Atwood to the Thomas Fisher Rare Book Library, at the University of Toronto,
where she has donated her archive: four hundred and seventy-four boxes’ worth of papers, so far. One
box contained Atwood’s handwritten draft of “The Handmaid’s Tale”; another, labelled “Handmaid’s
Tale: Background,” contained sheaves of newspaper clippings from the mid-eighties. As Atwood
paged through the clippings, she said of Trump’s Cabinet, “Absolutely they want to overturn Roe v. Wade,
and they will have to deal with the consequences if they do. You’re going to have a lot more orphanages,
aren’t you? A lot more dead women, a lot more illegal abortions, a lot more families with children in
them left without a mother.” Trump’s vilification of Hillary Clinton, Atwood believes, is more explicable when seen through the lens of the Puritan witch-hunts. “You can find Web sites that say Hillary was
actually a Satanist with demonic powers,” she said. “It is so seventeenth-century that you can hardly believe it. It’s right out of the subconscious—just lying there, waiting to be applied to people.”
some observers, that the advent of the Web would mean the end of books were misplaced. “I think we know now that, neurologically, there are
reasons why that isn’t going to happen,” she said. “Installments on a phone—those, the brain can handle. ‘War and Peace,’ maybe not.”
Coming of age as a writer in the sometimes divisive years of second-wave feminism, Atwood reserved the right to remain nonaligned. “I didn’t
want to become a megaphone for any one particular set of beliefs,” she told Mead. “Having gone through that initial phase of feminism when
you weren’t supposed to wear frocks and lipstick—I never had any use for that.” Atwood resists critics’ attempts to find parallels between her life
story and her fiction, and has no desire to write a memoir. “I am interested in reading other people’s, if they have had fascinating or gruesome
lives, but I don’t think my life has been that fascinating or gruesome,” she said.
Coachella and the Resurgence of the Music Festival
In “The Immaculate Lineup” (p. 30), John Seabrook profiles Paul Tollett, the creator of the Coachella Valley Music and Arts Festival, which,
every April, draws the world’s biggest performers to the California desert. In addition to curating the lineup, Tollett books the acts himself, from
newcomers to headliners, negotiating all the offers with agents. “Coachella is a delicate ecosystem of the grand and the intimate. Tollett creates
the biosphere that sustains it,” Seabrook writes. Last October, Tollett staged Desert Trip, or “Oldchella,” featuring some of the biggest classicrock acts, including the Who, Bob Dylan, and the Rolling Stones. With a hundred-and-sixty-million-dollar gross, it was the largest ever musicfestival box office. Seabrook visited the seven-hundred-acre festival grounds during Desert Trip. Tollett pointed out the cushioned V.I.P. seats in
front, which cost $1,599 for the three nights. The people who were in their seats were certainly older than the Coachella demographic. “At least
no one brought an oxygen tank,” Tollett said.
This year, Lady Gaga will be the first woman to headline Coachella since Björk, in 2007, and, Beyoncé is set to headline in 2018 (she postponed
this year’s performance following news of her pregnancy). It marks a move toward pop for Coachella. Tollett recalls the festival’s début, in 1999,
when “we lost between eight hundred and fifty thousand and a million.” Failure didn’t crush him, however. “I tend to dissect failures meticulously, but I’m
never embarrassed by them or let them bog me down. Just take a shower and move on—some of the failures have needed two showers, though,” he said.
By 2011, the festival had grown so popular that Tollett offered a second weekend, with the same lineup. He sold almost two hundred thousand tickets to
last year’s Coachella, over two weekends, grossing ninety-five million dollars. About three-quarters of the tickets for this year’s shows were sold in advance,
to give fans the chance to pay in installments; when the rest went on sale, the day after the lineup’s release, they were gone within two hours.
Tollett believes that ultimately, one great world-class New York festival will emerge from the growing number of city-based festivals, such as Governors Ball and Panorama. He envisions a kind of Coachella East, a multiday urban event that would involve not just music but “tech, art, fashion, and culinary leaders in New York,” he explained. Reflecting on the evolution of music over the course of his career, Tollett said, “Twenty years
ago, alternative artists grew slower.” He continued, “I make an offer for small bands, and in six months the world can change for them so much.
Or you buy them at their peak and their numbers are dropping off each day. It’s like gambling.”
Learning the Language of the Prophet and the People
In “Talk Like an Egyptian” (p. 48), Peter Hessler writes about learning to speak Arabic as an adult, when his family moved to Cairo, Egypt, in
October of 2011. It was the first fall after the Arab Spring, and Arabic lessons were a way to absorb language, culture, and politics. “On many
days, I went to Tahrir Square, to report on the ongoing revolution,” Hessler writes. He learned words like “embassy,” “Israel,” “spy,” “tear gas,”
“slaughter,” and “conspiracy theory.” His vocabulary lists reflected both the country’s shifting politics and its enduring difficulties. “Sometimes I
wondered about the strangeness of Tahrir-speak, and what my Arabic would have been like if I had arrived ten years earlier,” he writes. “But it
would have been different at any time, in any place: you can never step into the same language twice. Even eternal phrases took on a new texture
in the light of the revolution.”
Plus: In Comment, Steve Coll writes about the implications of the U.S. air strike in Syria (p. 19); in the Financial Page, Sheelah Kolhatkar
speaks with Martin Shkreli, the infamous founder and C.E.O. of Turing Pharmaceuticals, about his role in the downfall of S.A.C. Capital, and
his forthcoming trial on charges of fraud (p. 23); in Shouts & Murmurs, Henry Alford imagines Cookie Monster’s thoughts on unemployment
under the Trump Administration (p. 29); Emily Nussbaum reviews “The Late Show with Stephen Colbert,” on CBS (p. 64); Kathryn Schulz
reads a new biography of the writer, activist, legal theorist, and Episcopal priest Pauli Murray (p. 67); Peter Schjeldahl views “Frédéric Bazille
and the Birth of Impressionism,” at the National Gallery, in Washington, D.C. (p. 74); Alex Ross attends the Shift Festival, a convocation of
American orchestras in Washington, D.C. (p. 76); Anthony Lane watches James Gray’s “The Lost City of Z,” based on David Grann’s 2005
New Yorker article and subsequent book of the same name, and Elliott Lester’s “Aftermath,” starring Arnold Schwarzenegger (p. 78); poetry by
Rebecca Morgan Frank (p. 45) and Andrew Motion (p. 54); and new fiction by Akhil Sharma (p. 58).
Podcasts: Dorothy Wickenden and Evan Osnos discuss the U.S. bombing of Syria; Andrew Marantz speaks with Lucian Wintrich, the twentyeight-year-old White House correspondent for the alt-right Web site The Gateway Pundit; and Akhil Sharma reads his short story “You Are
Happy?”
Digital Extras: Archival photos and posters from Coachella; Rebecca Morgan Frank reads her poem; and paintings from the Frédéric Bazille
retrospective at the National Gallery.
The April 17, 2017, issue of The New Yorker goes on sale at newsstands beginning Monday, April 10.
Press Contacts: Natalie Raabe, (212) 286-6591, Erica Hinsley, (212) 286-7936, Adrea Piazza, (212) 286-4255