The problem with advertising these days is that it is too focused on sales. For an ad like this one to be considered successful, it has to first get your attention and then provide you with some- thing so amazing — like a set of features or unique selling points or a solid promise — that you’ll put down the magazine you are reading and rush to the store to purchase the product. To help increase the chances of this happening, some ads include a “call to action” feature, which is a gimmick so ridiculously unbelievable — like buy one and get 197 free — that you don’t have any choice but to put down the maga- zine you are reading and rush to the store to purchase the product. Good thing that this ad for Oatgurt* isn’t like all those modern ads. It’s only interested in providing you with an oversized cute visual of the package, an over- promising headline, a totally nonsensical call to action but- ton and an asterisk with a side note to tell you what the product actually is. *As a side note, Oatgurt is not yogurt, because yogurt is made with dairy and has no oats, while Oatgurt is made with oats and has no dairy. IF THIS AD DOESN'T CONVINCE YOU TO TRY OUR OATGURT, NOTHING WILL. CALL TO ACTION 4 GOINGS ON ABOUT TOWN 13 THE TALK OF THE TOWN Steve Coll on why Trump is still refusing to concede; ballot-counting in Philly; wreckage on the 7 train; a missing Jacob Lawrence; Cazzie David’s anxiety. AMERICAN CHRONICLES Jill Lepore 20 The Trump Papers Will the President burn the evidence? SHOUTS & MURMURS Zach Zimmerman 27 First Lines of Rejected “Modern Love” Essays LETTER FROM CALIFORNIA Shane Bauer 28 An Unstoppable Force The deadly power of one city’s police department. ANNALS OF ACTIVISM Andrew Marantz 36 The Anti-Coup How civil resistance works, and wins. A REPORTER AT LARGE Suki Kim 46 Follow the Leader A mysterious mission to liberate North Korea. FICTION Salman Rushdie 56 “The Old Man in the Piazza” THE CRITICS ON TELEVISION Hilton Als 64 Imperial and familial decay in “The Crown.” BOOKS Louis Menand 67 Wikipedia and “Jeopardy!” in the Internet age. Ruth Franklin 71 The radical strangeness of Paul Celan. 73 Briefly Noted THE CURRENT CINEMA Anthony Lane 76 “Mank” revisits a mythic collaboration. POEMS Tracy K. Smith 40 “We Feel Now a Largeness Coming On” Kirmen Uribe 60 “Back from the Cannery” COVER Kadir Nelson “Election Results” DRAWINGS Barbara Smaller, Elisabeth McNair, Sarah Akinterinwa, Kaamran Hafeez and Al Batt, Maddie Dai, Avi Steinberg, David Sipress, Zachary Kanin, Suerynn Lee, Danny Shanahan, Frank Cotham, Roz Chast, Harry Bliss and Steve Martin, Colin Tom, Pat Achilles SPOTS Cari Vander Yacht NOVEMBER 23, 2020 2 THE NEW YORKER, NOVEMBER 23, 2020 CONTRIBUTORS PERSONAL HISTORY Can someone stave off the grief of losing one pet by getting another? Sarah Miller on the bridge dog. PERSONAL HISTORY Laura Curran, a county executive on Long Island, looks back on the first wave of the coronavirus. Download the New Yorker app for the latest news, commentary, criticism, and humor, plus this week’s magazine and all issues back to 2008. THIS WEEK ON NEWYORKER.COM LEFT: FAYE MOORHOUSE; RIGHT: JOSEPH GOUGH Suki Kim (“Follow the Leader,” p. 46) is an investigative journalist and a novelist. Her latest book is “Without You, There Is No Us.” Shane Bauer (“An Unstoppable Force,” p. 28), the author of “American Prison,” is at work on a book about Americans who fought in Syria. Tracy K. Smith (Poem, p. 40) served two terms as the United States Poet Laureate. Her poetry collections include “Wade in the Water” and “Such Color,” which will be out in 2021. Kadir Nelson (Cover) won a Caldecott Medal for his illustrations for Kwame Alexander’s book-length poem, “The Undefeated.” Ruth Franklin (Books, p. 71) is the au- thor of “Shirley Jackson,” which received the 2016 National Book Critics Circle Award for biography. Salman Rushdie (Fiction, p. 56) has written fourteen novels, including, most recently, “Quichotte.” Andrew Marantz (“The Anti-Coup,” p. 36), a staff writer, has been contrib- uting to The New Yorker since 2011. He is the author of “Antisocial.” Jill Lepore (“The Trump Papers,” p. 20) is a professor of history at Harvard. Her fourteenth book, “If Then,” came out in September. Steve Coll (Comment, p. 13), a staff writer, is the dean of Columbia University’s Graduate School of Journalism. He most recently published “Directorate S.” Alexandra Schwartz (The Talk of the Town, p. 18) joined the magazine in 2013 and became a staff writer in 2016. Zach Zimmerman (Shouts & Murmurs, p. 27), a standup comedian and a writer, released the album “Clean Comedy” last year. Kirmen Uribe (Poem, p. 60) is a Basque writer of poetry, fiction, and nonfiction. His novel “Bilbao-New York-Bilbao” was awarded the 2009 Spanish National Literature Prize for Narrative. Narrated stories, along with podcasts, are now available in the New Yorker app. Now hear this. Download it at newyorker.com/app in the 2012 Presidential election chose Obama, for instance.) Although it is certainly true that Asian American electoral participation varies by eth- nicity, among other factors, the exis- tence of a large group of liberal-vot- ing Asian Americans should not be given short shrift. Michael Allen Brooklyn, N.Y. 1 OBAMACARE AND ME Barack Obama’s memoir of how the Affordable Care Act was passed illu- minated the origins of a policy that has affected me profoundly (“The Health of a Nation,” November 2nd). I am a career commercial fisherman. In the nineteen-seventies, when I started working, fishermen and mer- chant mariners like me had federally supported health coverage through a scheme that had existed for decades. That scheme was terminated, in 1981, by Ronald Reagan. For a time, I bought private insurance, but eventually it be- came too expensive for my seasonally fluctuating income. When A.C.A. insurance became available, I quickly signed up. A year later, I had a heart attack, and needed a cardiac stent. The plan I obtained through the health-insurance ex- change covered my extensive medi- cal bills and, as a result, my wife and I were able to keep our home, our truck, and our fishing boat. I am now seventy. This summer, I spent a hun- dred and ten days on the ocean. No one gets where they are without the help of others. It was a pleasure to read this piece, which illustrated in such detail how I was helped by folks I will never get to meet. Ken Bates Eureka, Calif. WHAT’S IN A VOTE? Hua Hsu’s piece on Asian American voters raises many interesting points, but it mentions only briefly an impor- tant element of history that may have had a bearing on the lack of voter turn- out that Hsu discusses (“Bloc by Bloc,” November 2nd). From the late eigh- teenth century until the middle of the twentieth century, the naturalization of Asian immigrants was against the law in the U.S. The bar against citi- zenship began with the Naturaliza- tion Act of 1870, which initially ap- plied only to Chinese immigrants. In 1910, however, the Supreme Court held that the act prohibited the naturaliza- tion of any Asian. Chinese immigrants were only per- mitted to apply for citizenship with the passage of the Magnuson Act, in 1943. Other Asian immigrants had to wait for the McCarran-Walter Act, a decade later, to have the same oppor- tunity. Both acts established stringent quotas on immigration from Asia. These long-standing barriers delayed most Asian immigrants in gaining the right to vote, and they may well have shaped some Asian Americans’ voting habits during the decades that fol- lowed. Given the proliferation of anti- immigrant rhetoric in the past four years, this history seems too import- ant to elide. Joan E. Thompson Golden Valley, Minn. Hsu’s piece is an informative profile of the political sympathies of specific pockets of the Asian American pop- ulation, but I worry that readers will surmise that most undecided Asian American voters might easily be per- suaded to favor Republican candidates. The existing record of Asian Ameri- can voting preferences provides some evidence to the contrary. Exit polls from the 2008, 2012, and 2016 elec- tions show that most Asian Ameri- cans who voted did so in support of Democratic candidates. (Three-quar- ters of Asian Americans who cast votes • Letters should be sent with the writer’s name, address, and daytime phone number via e-mail to