The New Yorker - August 26, 2024

In this issue

THE TALK OF THE TOWN
Amy Davidson Sorkin on Trump’s legal prospects; newspaper thefts; Chris Perfetti at the zoo; from the Nile to the Housatonic; bear suggestions.

A REPORTER AT LARGE
The Infiltrators - David D. Kirkpatrick
Tracking down right-wing extremists.

My Life's Work- All I have in the world is a paternal aunt and a tank of fish that love me. And my work. I'm nobody.

Who am I? I’m nobody. I was cut from every team in high school. I didn’t go to an Ivy League college.

3 mins

Sea Change- Mountains, oddly, are the reason most of us have learned to think of the level of the sea as a stable point, a baseline, an unmoving benchmark against which one might reasonably measure the height of great peaks.

In 2019, a plaque was erected to commemorate the first glacier in Iceland to shrink so much that it could no longer be considered a glacier. Like the tsunami stones of the past, the plaque carried a message for the future, a warning to believe in changes that might at first seem implausible. It also carried a recognition of responsibility. “In the next 200 years all our glaciers are expected to follow the same path,” the plaque reads. “This monument is to acknowledge that we know what is happening and what needs to be done. Only you know if we did it.”

10+ mins

THE INFILTRATORS

Who’ leading the way in investigating far-right extremists: FBI. agents or leftist vigilantes?

10+ mins

A Cult in the Forest - The vast majority of Kenyans are Christian, a faith that arrived with early colonization. A group of Finnish missionaries brought Pentecostalism in the nineteen-hundreds

The vast majority of Kenyans are Christian, a faith that arrived with early colonization. A group of Finnish missionaries brought Pentecostalism in the nineteen-hundreds. The colonial government tried to suppress it, because a faction of pro-independence freedom fighters belonged to the African Independent Pentecostal Church of Africa, which included messages about decolonization in its hymns. But after independence, in 1963, Pentecostalism and other forms of evangelical Christianity spread. They emphasized charismatic forms of worship—visions, spiritual healing, speaking in tongues—and a gospel that promised prosperity to the faithful. “If you want your church to be full, do what I call ‘spiritual gymnastics,’ ” Martin Olando, a scholar of African Christianity at the Bishop Hannington Institute, in Mombasa, told me. “Jump up and down, prophesize good tidings, tell people what they want to hear.” By the nineties, Kenya’s President, Daniel arap Moi, enjoyed a beneficial relationship with Arthur Kitonga, an influential Pentecostal bishop. “President Moi has been appointed by God to lead this country,” Kitonga said at the time. William Ruto, Kenya’s current President, and its first evangelical one, brought gospel singers into his campaign team and party, and has donated cars, and thousands of dollars, to evangelical churches. His wife, Rachel, invited the U.S.-based televangelist Benny Hinn to preach with her at a crusade. (This year, Hinn apologized for giving fake prophecies. “There were times when I thought God had showed me something that He wasn’t showing me,” he told the Christian podcast “Strang Report.”)

10+ mins

THE NARAYANS

Mrs. Narayan was small, dark-skinned, oval-faced. She had a wonderful singsong voice.

10+ mins

The Kamala Show

The evolution of Harris’ public persona.

9 mins

FUTURE IMPERFECT

“Hum,” Helen Phillips’s third novel, begins with a needle being drawn, steadily and irreversibly, across a woman named May’s face.

8 mins

OUT OF THE PAST

At the beginning of “The Spirit of the Beehive” (1973), Víctor Erice’s sublime first feature, a travelling projectionist arrives at a remote Castilian village, bearing a print of James Whale’s “Frankenstein.”

6 mins

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