The Dirty Secrets of a Smear Campaign | The Musical Legacy of a Mississippi Prison Farm | The Unlikely Rise of the French Tacos | Despite Brexit and the government, British manufacturing is doing well

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The Dirty Secrets of a Smear Campaign - The New Yorker

In the summer of 2017, Hazim Nada, a thirty-four-year-old American living in Como, Italy, received an automated text message from his mobile-phone carrier: How was our customer service? Puzzled, he called a friend at the company. Someone impersonating Nada had obtained copies of his call history. A few weeks later, his account manager at Credit Suisse alerted him that an impostor who sounded nothing like Nada—he has a slightly nasal, almost childlike voice—had phoned and asked for banking details. “I started to feel like somebody was trying to scam me,” Nada told me.

Nada was the founder of a nine-year-old commodities-trading business, Lord Energy. The “Lord” stood for “liquid or dry,” because the company shipped both crude oil and such drygoods as cement and corn. He had carved out a lucrative niche by establishing unconventional routes: Libya to Korea, Gabon to Italy. By the summer of 2017, Lord Energy, which was based in Lugano, a Swiss city across the border from Como, had a satellite office in Singapore, another opening in Houston, and annual revenue approaching two billion dollars.

Nada, whose parents emigrated from Egypt and Syria, is tall and slender, with curly dark hair that’s neat at the sides and unruly on top. He’d recently married a Saudi woman he met while she was vacationing with her family in Switzerland. They now had a daughter, and were renovating a historic Liberty-style mansion that sat on a wooded hill overlooking Lake Como. The property’s sweeping views and hillside swimming pool were so spectacular that George Clooney—a neighbor—had filmed a Nespresso commercial there, along with Jack Black and various glamorous women; the ad’s running gag was the preposterous decadence of the setting. As a hobby, Nada had earned a pilot’s license and also taken up skydiving. That March, he had opened a second business, outside Milan: a vertical wind tunnel, which the Italian military and the United States Air Force used to train paratroopers.

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The Musical Legacy of a Mississippi Prison Farm - The New Yorker

The best-known version of the gospel song “I Give Myself Away,” by Pastor William McDowell, is an opulent display of religious praise. For more than nine minutes, backed by swelling instrumentation and a full choir, McDowell sings of surrendering himself in lines such as “Lord, my life is in your hands.” A stripped-down but equally powerful version of the song opens the new album “Some Mississippi Sunday Morning,” which was recorded inside the Mississippi State Penitentiary, a maximum-security prison also known as Parchman Farm. Around three minutes long, with piano as the lone accompaniment, the song begins with a single vocalist repeating the line “I give myself away / so you can use me.” Midway through, another singer joins in, and then another; the language doesn’t change, but the vocals accumulate, stunning and imperfect. If you feel uncertain about the existence of God—and therefore about the meaning of words of surrender echoing through the halls of a place like Parchman—you may find the performance only heartbreaking.

“S.M.S.M.” was recorded by Ian Brennan, a California-based producer who has collaborated with artists around the world, from the northern-Mali collective Tinariwen to a group of Cambodian musicians who survived the Khmer Rouge. Brennan worked for three years to get clearance to record at Parchman. He was finally granted a date this past February, with less than a week’s notice. He took a red-eye to Mississippi, arriving early on a Sunday morning, in time for church services. The prison chaplains had assembled a group of singers, who are credited on “S.M.S.M.” as Parchman Prison Prayer. The performers make the most of the limited resources at their disposal. Parts of the body become percussive instruments; two singers have the impact of an entire choir. The most captivating songs on the album rely almost entirely on the human voice, and some are tunes that you may recognize even if you’ve never set foot in a church.

The gruesome history of Parchman dates back to 1901, when the State of Mississippi bought up former plantation land in the heart of the Delta. Work on Parchman’s eighteen thousand acres took place from sunup to sundown. For years, the head driver would mete out punishment with a leather strap known as Black Annie. Lately, the brutalities at Parchman have taken more insidious forms—inoperable showers and toilets, cells that lack mattresses and are overrun with rats. In 2022, a U.S. Department of Justice report found reasonable cause that the facility violated the constitutional rights of the people incarcerated there, nearly seventy per cent of whom are Black.

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The Unlikely Rise of the French Tacos - The New Yorker

French tacos are tacos like chicken fingers are fingers. Which is to say, they are not tacos at all. First of all, through some mistranslation or misapprehension of its Mexican namesake, the French tacos is always plural, even when there’s only one, pronounced with a voiced “S.” Technically, the French tacos is a sandwich: a flour tortilla, slathered with condiments, piled with meat (usually halal) and other things (usually French fries), doused in cheese sauce, folded into a rectangular packet, and then toasted on a grill. “In short, a rather successful marriage between panini, kebab, and burrito,” according to the municipal newsletter of Vaulx-en-Velin, a suburb of Lyon in which the French tacos may or may not have been born.

In the American imagination, French cuisine can seem a static entity—the inevitable and unchanging expression of a culture as codified by Carême and Escoffier and interpreted by Julia Child. Bœuf bourguignon, quiche Lorraine, onion soup, chocolate mousse. Although these dishes remain standbys, alongside pizza and couscous and other adopted staples, French cuisine can be as fickle as any. The latest rage has nothing to do with aspics or emulsions. What are French people eating right now? The answer is as likely to be French tacos as anything else.

The precise genesis of the French tacos is the subject of competing folklores, but it’s commonly agreed that it was invented sometime around the turn of the twenty-first century in the snacks of the Rhône-Alpes region. “Snacks” are small independent restaurants offering a panoply of takeout and maybe a few tables: snack bars, basically. Typically, they sell kebabs, pizza, burgers, and, now, French tacos. The unifying concept is the lack of need for a fork.

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Despite Brexit and the government, British manufacturing is doing well - The Economist

IN A RECENT survey of the British public, respondents were asked where they believed the country ranked in the global manufacturing league table. The median answer, 43rd, was a little wide of the mark. The latest comparable data, for 2021, make Britain the world’s eighth-biggest manufacturer, up one place from 2020 and (better still) overtaking France.

You might have supposed the past decade to have been hard for British factories. The Brexit referendum in 2016 begat four years of uncertainty, followed by a trade deal that introduced friction to a formerly near-frictionless border. The covid-19 pandemic ruptured global supply chains. Then a spike in energy prices pushed up costs in what remains an energy-hungry sector.

Yet British manufacturing has been remarkably successful. According to the OECD, a club mostly of rich economies, its productivity growth comfortably outstripped that of any other G7 country in the 14 years after the onset of the financial crisis in 2007 (see chart). Gross value added (a measure of output) per manufacturing employee rose by 37.3% between 2007 and 2021, against an average of 12.1% among Britain’s peers.

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