Last Week’s New Yorker, week of July 27

Must-Read:

“The Enabler” (A Reporter at Large) - Haven’t stopped thinking about this phenomenal David D. Kirkpatrick piece since I read it; the question of whether the Biden administration’s approach to Israel was catastrophic primarily due to malice or to ineptitude is one I was already interested in, and Kirkpatrick comes down hard, and extremely convincingly, on the side of ineptitude. This is not a piece that will win over the conspiratorial left, but thankfully Kirkpatrick isn’t here to mount a defense, either. Biden and his team’s cascade of blunders, which are rooted in the former president’s self-assured condescension but also implicate just about everyone (with the notable exception of unknown wonk Christopher Le Mon, who Kirkpatrick presents as a sole voice of sanity, and treats with such anomalous respect one can only guess he was a key source). The beat-by-beat political approach could easily feel dull or disconnected from Gazan lives (and I’m not sure I would have selected a photo of bombed-out houses to run with this particular piece) but Kirkpatrick manages to make the stakes clear without relying on pathos, and finds both the excitement and the tragedy of high-stakes decisionmaking gone brutally and, frankly, predictably wrong. By the end, one understands how the Biden team ended up where it did – which is not to say one can forgive them.

Window-Shop:

“No Way Home” (The Current Cinema) - Won’t get the press of the Emily Wilson takedown, but Brody finds a similar theme, going through the many ways Nolan is unfaithful not so much to the plot of Homer’s tale as to its characterizations. He renders the story “purely human”, then renders the humans mostly flat. The film is “tamed and tempered”. Possibly because he doesn’t feel the need to retell us this story and can instead focus on his analyses, Brody gets this one exactly right.

“Making Contact” (A Critic at Large) - A lovely and fairly extended poetic remembrance, wedded a bit awkwardly to a positive review of a show Als keeps reaching beyond (there are more than a few pieces he has to clarify are not included although he’s referencing them). Something more than a press release, something less and more than a review.

Skip Without Guilt:

“Driven” (Letter from Tennessee) - Too short for Charles Bethea to do justice to this man’s pain over his daughter’s death, which ends up crowding a piece that is otherwise essentially a Talk of the Town about a guy with a strange public-service hobby. The most fun part, honestly, is seeing if you can figure out his politics.

“Renaissance Woman” (Onward and Upward with the Arts) - Lauren Oyler, a plugged-in enfant mediocre, is famously iffy at prosecraft; this isn’t an especially ambitious profile, but its chronology is still a bit confusing and it stops short of really finding a thesis through which to consider Florentina Holzinger. She is especially bad on Holzinger’s queerness, which is treated with shallow, outsidery dismissiveness.¹ That said, Holzinger is interesting enough, and her work fleeting and inaccessible enough, that I had some fun just reading descriptions of the wild nights she manufactures.

“Mouth to Mouth” (Books) - Everyone in the language loss world is very mad about this piece, which is, to be fair, relentlessly dismissive. I can’t quite bring myself to share that opinion, which I suspect is mostly a reaction to the hideous online-only headline, “Sometimes It’s O.K. to Let a Language Die”. Nikil Khrishnan’s actual approach is to narrow his argument again and again until, by the end of the piece, he’s directly saying that language preservation should be encouraged and funded, the cultures with dying languages should be supported, and the only thing he’s actually against is the rhetorical move of framing these initiatives as meaningfully tied to actual language revival. Which is fair, but also meaningless; do we really care this much about whether good initiatives use mildly misleading rhetoric in their pursuit of funding? More to the point: Can Khrishnan find even one federally funded program that is entirely devoid of rhetorical overreach in its stated goals? He narrows his own argument to such an absurd degree one can only wonder why he didn’t scrap the piece and try again. Petty!

Shut the Fuck Up:

“Opposition in Exile” (Profiles) - Oh my god, are we actually publishing soft-focus takes (literally – look at that fucking photo!) on wannabe fascists now? Taladrid, an excellent abortion reporter who’s done some very good coverage of Latino communities in the states, is entirely unprepared to do real-deal foreign policy coverage, and sanctifies a figure whose actual claim to lead Venezuela is extremely weak. Machado wants to become synonymous with the push for democracy in the country so that she can grab power, like Viktor Orbán or Erdoğan (or, from a very different starting place, Chavez himself), in which a popular mandate leads to institutional capture and authoritarianism. Taladrid falls directly into this rhetorical trap, quoting a historian who says that “if Machado fades politically, there's very little chance of democratization”. Taladrid is also bizarrely uninterested in actually thinking through what Machado in power would look like in Venezuela, despite just about every other Latin American country providing a clear picture of what neoliberal monetary policies lead to, and where the wealth goes under those systems. The story rests entirely on Machado’s conception of the Venezuelan people, yet there are remarkably few actual Venezuelan people in the story. The magazine should be above this embarrassing whitewash, and I hope some of its other writers, who have been largely excellent on Latin America, will speak against this disgraceful piece.

The Weekend In Brief:

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

“The Rise of the ‘Scenario,’ a Trendy Way of Forecasting our Dystopian Future” (Weekend Essay) - Gideon Lewis-Kraus presents two pieces in one: A convincing and entertaining mixed-negative review of Annie Jacobson’s new ‘scenario’ of a book, and a fascinating but frustrating extension of the book’s apocalyptic focus to address A.I. doomerism. The first piece is acute: Jacobson’s “methodological commitment comes to seem like a creative constraint”; she’s written “a scrupulously realistic book about the inconceivable”. My virologist friend was similarly frustrated, texting me that Jacobson seems to have “worked backward from her third act (martial law, dystopia, government continuity plans, etc) and from there found sources (almost exclusively secondary, also with known issues around credibility) that could be bent/tweaked/exaggerated to lead to her desired conclusion… Which is the exact opposite of how science works. And also journalism.” Lewis-Kraus’ A.I. argument is a surprisingly nuanced take on something I’d been largely dismissive of; basically, he writes that while society has never really transformed overnight, it doesn’t mean that the assumption of continuity is inherently a measure of an even temperament. (Besides, “…something well short of an extinction-level event can introduce real historical discontinuity.”) But it’s strange that Lewis-Kraus mentions the two causes of most previously unprecedented events, “imperial ambition or climate change”, then moves on. It seems to me that Lewis-Kraus and Jacobson both insist on our guarding against novel apocalypses, when there are a few distinctly predictable apocalypses on the horizon that we’re doing little about. One Thingy.

“Earthly Delights” (Fiction) - Absolutely wonderful. A whimsical, comedic parable on love and sex that is resolutely intimate even as it’s also zany as hell. After a few years of more strained efforts, Heti has here finally managed to combine the distinct mode of her landmark autofiction with her more recent interest in extrinsic, situational storytelling. She gets there through a convincing update of a Thornton Wilder-ish style that a lot of contemporary fiction has abandoned. That this wild, shimmering, near-flawless story was allegedly the result of Heti misreading a commission for an essay is truly kismet. Three Thingys.

can’t wait to listen to some great new music, i wonder wha