The New Yorker

“The enthusiasm is real, but I don’t think it’s so much around an agenda of Harris’s as much as it is around an agenda of stopping Trump,” Susan B. Glasser says. On the latest episode of The Political Scene, The Washington Roundtable discusses the highs and lows of the Democratic National Convention and Vice-President Kamala Harris’s rousing acceptance speech. Listen here. https://lnkd.in/gqSeXy-J

Andrea Modica, whose photography career has spanned 40 years, was a young graduate student at Yale’s School of Art when she embarked on the project that would become “Catholic Girl.” In the spring of 1984, she decided to take the subway to visit an old art teacher at her alma mater, an all-girls Catholic high school in Bay Ridge, Brooklyn. When she arrived at the school, she asked some students if she could take their portraits. Modica continued to take pictures at the Bay Ridge school, and at a few Catholic schools in New Haven, Connecticut. In these black-and-white photographs, Modica captures the alienation of the teen-girl experience. “I recognized something there that I had to deal with about my time in high school—something both horrible and wonderful,” she told Naomi Fry. See more of the photographs: https://lnkd.in/gnMtFK3s

On Friday, Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., ended his bid for the Presidency and endorsed Donald Trump. “Kennedy’s mercenary quest to extract value from his withdrawal has been a fascinating subplot in this Presidential race,” Clare Malone writes. https://lnkd.in/ghbcKp_H

At the Democratic National Convention, the sense of relief was as overwhelming as the general euphoria—but the campaign against Donald Trump has only just begun. Can the excitement last? “If a nominating Convention is traditionally a pep rally for the superfans, the Democrats were turning it into a popularity contest,” Jonathan Blitzer reports from the scene of D.N.C. https://lnkd.in/gJV2TxW5

A cartoon by Sophie Lucido Johnson and Sammi Skolmoski. #NewYorkerCartoons https://lnkd.in/gY9MCyK7

When people think of elections, they usually focus on who might win and the policies that the winner is likely to enact once in office. But equally important in a democracy is how the loser reacts. If he or she does not accept the vote, portions of a country can become ungovernable. “Democracies survive only if losers accept the results,” Barbara F. Walter writes. As the United States barrels toward another contentious election, the spectre of violence looms. The last Presidential election was followed by an attack on the Capitol, and just weeks ago the man who encouraged that attack, Donald Trump, was nearly assassinated. In a new essay, Walter, who for decades has been studying contested elections in deeply divided democracies, writes about the ways in which an election loss can spark violence, and what risk factors make unrest more likely. In order to accept defeat, citizens need hope, Walter argues. “Hope—the belief that every election will not be the last—is the glue that binds citizens to the democratic process. It drives them to vote, to run for office, and to care that the system survives. When people and parties believe that they can win in the future, they are more likely to accept temporary setbacks. But hope relies on uncertainty. If people feel that they know the outcome of an election in advance, either because their party does not have enough votes or they believe the outcome is rigged, hope disappears,” Walter writes. “In its place, violence tends to break out.” Walter explores the history of losers in democratic nations, and speculates on what might happen in the event of a Trump defeat: https://lnkd.in/gYpgHtwS

A cartoon by Jack Ziegler, from 2009. #NewYorkerCartoons https://lnkd.in/gAybdXhr

Helen Phillips’s latest novel, “Hum,” takes place in a dystopian world that is at once recognizable and subtly different from our own. Climate change has devastated the environment. Cameras and screens are as omnipresent as the pollution in the air; privacy, access to nature, and freedom from advertising have become luxury goods. Against this backdrop, a mother named May and her husband struggle to find work and raise their two children. The book belongs to a class of literature that Katy Waldman calls “eco-anxiety mom lit”: books that entwine everyday descriptions of parenting with fears about climate catastrophe. The narrators of these books are painfully aware of anthropogenic climate change and runaway capitalism. They radiate terror about the dystopian world that coming generations stand to inherit. The vision of the future presented in “Hum” is less apocalyptic than others in the genre; the book’s chief interest is not the Armageddon hovering in the wings but the dehumanizing, anhedonic grind of May’s daily life. “In Phillips’s plausible dystopia, people rely on technology to compensate for ecological ruin; they bathe in the beauty of screens because they’ve made the physical world ugly,” Waldman writes. Read her full review: https://lnkd.in/gbK_ScFA

From “While It’s Happening,” by Deborah Landau. Read the full poem: https://lnkd.in/g2V4iDar

A cartoon by Paul Noth. #NewYorkerCartoons https://lnkd.in/gFMVfYaU