Forget Trump’s “Meltdown”—Follow the Testimony

Plus: Jelani Cobb on Elijah Cummings, Charles Duhigg on reporting on Amazon, and a matriarch of American home cooking. View in browser | Update your preferences Letter from Trump’s Washington Forget Trump’s “Meltdown”—Follow the Testimony On a week of revelations in the House’s impeachment inquiry. By Susan B. Glasser Daily Comment What Elijah Cummings Meant to Baltimore In his home town and on the national stage, the congressman, who died on Thursday, spoke like a concerned neighbor. By Jelani Cobb Annals of Gastronomy A Matriarch of American Home Cooking An ode to Sheila Lukins, the author responsible for a tectonic shift in American culinary imagination. By Helen Rosner PAID POST Make your own power In her “bold and subversive” (New York Times) novel, Madeline Miller reimagines the life of Circe, formidable sorceress of The Odyssey, in an epic of love and loss and a celebration of indomitable female strength. “Spellbinding,” raves O, The Oprah Magazine. Q. & A. with Charles Duhigg “It wasn’t fair to call Amazon a cult, but it wasn’t entirely unfair, either,” Charles Duhigg writes this week in The New Yorker. His piece explores the retailer’s readiness to fight regulators, the company’s intense culture, and the tabloid scandal that engulfed Jeff Bezos, its founder. In a conversation that has been edited for length and clarity, Duhigg discussed what he learned. You wrote that “Amazon now has such a severe image problem that it can no longer count on being able to do whatever it pleases.” In fact, Elizabeth Warren tweeted your piece, arguing that a company can be an umpire or own a team but can’t do both in the same game. How is this image problem affecting Amazon’s relationship with consumers? For the first time—for all of the tech industry, but Amazon is front and center on this—you’re seeing this reëvaluation on the part of shoppers and consumers and voters and politicians to say, “This thing we thought was great—now we’re beginning to understand there are vast downsides associated with it.” Before, we couldn’t even perceive the downsides. What’s happening right now is there’s this very complicated and very challenging reëvaluation of the age we’re living in. Part of that is saying, “Let’s look at these companies with a more gimlet eye,” but also, “Let’s look at our lives with a more critical eye.” You wrote about the National Enquirer’s coverage of Jeff Bezos’s extramarital affair, which was more personal than the other controversies that have shaken Amazon. What implications did the scandal have for the company, beyond Bezos’s own reputation? I don’t think the National Enquirer has many implications for Amazon, except what this one guy said: Amazon is a reflection of Jeff Bezos’s brain. Jeff Bezos is at the core of everything Amazon does. He is the spiritual center. I heard this from a lot of people: the reason Jeff Bezos has moral authority within Amazon is because of his integrity. Everything at Amazon is so rational and logical. For this guy to take what seemed like a crazy risk, to become tabloid fodder—it really shook people’s sense of the company, and of Bezos, and of themselves. For people inside Amazon, it was shocking. If you had another two months to report this story, what would you have wanted to explore? Amazon is one of the biggest lobbyists in Washington, D.C. It’s harder to track state-by-state lobbying. As a result, companies are much less transparent when they’re lobbying state legislatures than when they’re lobbying the federal government. If I had more time, I would have looked at what Amazon is doing in states. Amazon now has fulfillment centers in almost forty states—most of them are in different congressional districts. They have more than six hundred thousand employees. Amazon lobbies lawmakers, but they don’t ask citizens to become lobbyists for Amazon. But if they ever decided to, or they ever asked their employees to become lobbyists on behalf of Amazon, the political impact could be enormous. Read Duhigg’s story, “Is Amazon Unstoppable?” Culture and More The Current Cinema “The Lighthouse” Is Salted with Madness Its monologues swaying between aria and rant, Robert Eggers’s whirlpool of a film is so crammed with oddities that it is hard to hold fast. By Anthony Lane Page-Turner Motherhood Meets Lust and Violence in “Die, My Love” In her début novel, Ariana Harwicz explores the depiction of motherhood as a trap—of having one’s self subsumed by another human’s needs. By Rumaan Alam Pop Music Vagabon Goes Her Own Way Laetitia Tamko, a black woman in an indie-rock community that has long been defined by white fans’ tastes, makes music with herself at the center. By Hua Hsu The Art World The Exuberance of MOMA’s Expansion The museum’s unparalleled collection spreads out in an enlarged space with updated stories to tell. By Peter Schjeldahl Humor from The New Yorker Daily Shouts Back in My Day When I was a kid, we didn’t bother with sunscreen. What, everyone’s too good for cancer now? By Sarah Hutto Daily Cartoon Friday, October 18th By Maddie Dai Sign up for more newsletters from The New Yorker. Visit The New Yorker shop. Question about your subscription? Contact Customer Care. New Yorker digital subscribers get unlimited access to everything on newyorker.com. Log in to your account here. We’d love your feedback on this newsletter. Please send your thoughts and suggestions to TNYinbox@newyorker.com. This e-mail was sent to you by The New Yorker. 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