Last Week’s New Yorker, week of July 20

ok sorry however much work i thought this teaching intensive would be it’s been more work than that, but it’s gone well and is wrapping up so I’m just gonna chug through these issues (I’ve kept up with the reading, just haven’t had a second to record thoughts) as fast as I can.

Must-Reads:

“Locked Away” (A Reporter at Large) - The Trump immigrant-imprisonment-abuse-and-neglect scandal remains the administration’s worst domestic travesty, and Jonathan Blitzer does superb work telling a few of its stories and tracking a few of its consequences, enabling an understanding of the human stakes without overwhelming the reader. The ICE-shooting-people-in-the-streets story is more visceral and perhaps more politically potent, but the moral weight rightfully ought to be on the closely related ICE-killing-people-in-their-prisons story that Blitzer tells here. Blitzer could justifiably have spread this into a series of three stories, one for each of his immigrant protagonists. As a whole, it’s a big slab, but a vital one.

Window-Shop:

“A.I. in the Family” (Brave New World Dept.) - Jessica Contrera is yet another Post refugee who has landed at the magazine. I don’t know that we need more closely observed human interest journalism about people using AI, but I’m not nearly as soured on the genre as a whole as I am on the musing-about-consciousness genre or the economically-analyzing-AI-without-considering-its-human-impact genre. This has space to breathe; the family at its center are neither condescended to nor sanctified. It’s not showily written, and it’s much vibier and less interested in providing histories and contexts than most of what’s in this magazine. I found the contrast welcome.

“Two Plays, Three Opinions” (The Theatre) - Emily Nussbaum absolutely nails the troubling Birthright to the wall; after three frustrating hours with that show, I appreciated that this review both gave the play a fair shake and properly diagnosed its structural cowardice. The already-sold-out-by-publication-date Giant is sort of a weird comparison, though; the thematic line is direct, but as Nussbaum points out, a historical play seeking to comment slyly on the present moment can “take refuge in the past” in a way the new play can’t. I’m also just not sure two pieces of media (Giant and the animated sitcom Long Story Short) serving as some kind of critical counterpoint vis-a-vis Jewish identity is doing the work Nussbaum hopes it will. You can safely skip that little ending section, the rest is a superb review on its own.

“One Last Thing” (Books) - Wish we got more regular Dan Chiasson, but I’ll take what I can get; I don’t find the snippets of Wright he selects especially revelatory, and Chiasson’s tone is bouncier than usual, perhaps in an attempt to offset Wright’s thematic grimness. Thuds a bit, but I’ll still take a clever close reading of an interesting text over just about anything else.

“Only Connect” (Books) - Male Friendship discourse slop is beneath Katy Waldman’s attention, really, but she correctly diagnoses it as reliant on a “romanticized and brittle” depiction of the social world, and also on some equally brittle gender norms. I wish she found more time to discuss a Jeremy Gordon novel that sounds, at least, compelling.

“Go East” (The Art World) - Zachary Fine finds a funny, contrarian angle here – basically, the painter the Met show says is more authentic in his depictions of Orientalism is mostly “cloying or dull”, whereas the crowd-pleasing mashup artist is also a “tantalizing” master of “pure visual stimulation”. Borderline cute, but I’ll give it to him.

Skip Without Guilt:

“Outline” (Onward and Upward with the Arts) - I already know who Ana Mendieta is, Rebecca Mead. Her art is fantastic, but this can’t figure out what it wants to be; Mead knows her piece will conclude with the claim that every piece about Mendieta obsesses over her death, so she self-consciously avoids obsessing over that death until the midway point, which just ends up seeming cagy or even in bad taste – it’s not a twist, man! And the piece still ends up mostly being about Mendieta’s death, just in a slightly more meta way. (“People focus too much on her death” is still a way of focusing on her death, man.) If Mead really wanted to avoid the titillation, she should have written something about Cuban-American art or body art or performance photography, and included extensive discussion of Mendieta. Her issues with coverage of Mendieta are embedded into the posthumous-profile format, so she should have chosen a different format.

“Rope-a-Dope” (The Sporting Scene) - Wants to be a fun, skeptical dive into a twisted world; is instead just a relentlessly unpleasant chronicle of a few days spent around assholes.

“Pissed Off” (Books) - I like Isaac Butler’s work, but his new book is premised on the awfully shaky idea that the contemporary culture wars started in the late 80s (see his Weekend Essay, which poked at another Catholic artifact of the era). This is a story of manufactured outrage hijacking the media in order to advance reactionary viewpoints; perhaps the reason media types continue to find it so fascinating is because they see it as a sort of original sin of their field’s descent. But making that argument without considering the economics of the thing will inevitably miss the whole point. Louis Menand here manages to miss the point even harder, by claiming that this is all really a class issue and that the right-wingers were reacting to an insult – maybe overreacting, but still. That forty years and a book aren’t enough for Menand to realize he’s falling into their trap (it’s “their right to object”, he says, as if that means the fight is fair), means we might be past hope.

The Weekend In Brief:

Even getting one Thingy is good. They’re like restaurant stars or whatever.

“The Voice of Google” (Weekend Essay) - An ex-Googler I know says that Claire Stapleton is the real deal, capable of producing “one of the few honest looks at the inside of Google” with this new book. Unfortunately, judging by this belabored, saggy excerpt, she’s not much of a writer. Plus, there’s remarkably little that’s new here for even a semi-casual follower of tech news. Either the company was a leaky sieve or the real dirt is elsewhere. Too bad. No Thingys.

“Testing” (Fiction) - I find Min Jin Lee’s style conceptually interesting – basically, she aims to write contemporary social novels on Korean themes – but, in practice, achieving the stiltedness and political obviousness with very little of the wit and none of the lush detail is absolutely perverse on the page. Somehow, I’m alone in this; Pachinko, which I struggled through to little effect, was a huge hit and is now a TV show. This new story has all the same issues, and although the look into the Korean hagwon system is compelling, the story reads like propaganda minus the opinions. Yes, real life is complicated, but most writers show this through complicated situations; the meticulous pointedness of MJL’s scenarios clashes wildly with her ideology. I’ll still give this One Thingy because it’s propulsive in a way her endless, lumpy novel wasn’t.

hey look who it is, our good friend…