Last Week’s New Yorker, week of August 3

Must-Read:

“A Map of the Stars” (Books) - Dayna Tortorici has an absolute blast selling the reader on structuralist and post-structuralist theory, which, contra its reputation, is “exciting”, even “‘sexy’”. Also, far more interconnected than it often seems; a new book presents the lives of eight French theoreticians as though they’re the Real Housewives of the École Normale Supérieure: Each gets their own catchphrase, but no matter how they fight they’re ultimately on the same show. So we get Barthes modeling his early work on Lévi-Strauss but eventually abandoning taxonomies in favor of “open-ended interpretive possibility”. And we also get Barthes dying after being hit by a laundry van: This opera has soap. Did you know Lacan was both Guattari and Sartre’s therapist, allowing the former to drive him home for a fee? (“‘the experience was “part of the analysis.”’”) Tortorici draws the profound and apt conclusion that a central experience shared by almost all these men was the stifling nightmare of French boarding school education, compared to which even a mental hospital seemed a place of respite. Of course college students love these texts: “most of them have never not been in school. The forces of normalization, containment, repression, and evaluation are constants in their lives. As far as they are aware—as far as they’ve experienced—there really is no outside.” Wait… did she just tell me to touch grass?

“Parting Shot” (American Chronicles) - Mike Spies presents the absolutely harrowing story of a woman who lost both her shitty husbands to gun suicide. Because Spies is on the NRA beat, the story naturally has an NRA hook – the second husband gave all his money to the fuckers, and Kay was only able to wrest back a sliver. But that’s really just the last beat of a story that’s largely a character study of Kay – a good choice, and one that broadens the story’s emotional palette. There are only so many ways to say “those fuckers!” and there’s not much else to say about the NRA, but the complicated pain and estrangement wrought by American life gets a far more acute treatment here than in any Male Loneliness trend piece.

Window-Shop:

“Down to Clown” (The Theatre) - Emily Nussbaum makes Dukes sound properly fun, giving enough details to make her enjoyment tangible without totally spoiling the show. She’s a bit soft on Big Feelings, which I didn’t vibe with, but she’s also right that its audience-as-children conceit is largely effective even when its script really isn’t.

🗣️ “Brainball” (The Sporting Scene) - Very well-written. Ben McGrath is throwing heaters, and neurosurgeons are, unsurprisingly, insane.

“Breaking Ranks” (Letter from Israel) - Eisenkot is something like the Israeli Biden, a grief-stricken anti-charismatic centrist who accidentally makes an excellent foil for a smirking fascist. Just like Biden, there’s a serious risk that even in success, he’ll fail. David Remnick uses Eisenkot’s psychology to humanize him, but isn’t ready to reckon with the human implications of his own suggestion that Eisenkot might not be willing or able to change the system much at all. He seems to have no political program beyond his opposition to Bibi. Remnick overextends this story, eventually using Eisenkot as a frame/excuse to provide a look into Israeli politics more broadly – and, especially, to once again profile Netanyahu, whose name appears more in this piece than Eisenkot’s.

Skip Without Guilt:

“Picture This” (Dept. of Science) - Scattershot, with only a very small handful of details I hadn’t already heard from various other press coverage of these stories, which all involve color processing but are each rooted in different scientific fields, such that when Rivka Galchen asks various color experts about the central anecdote – scientists firing a laser to create an imaginary color called ‘olo’ that consists entirely of M cones – they inevitably shrug. I would, unfortunately, say that the Wikipedia page for “Impossible Color” is a treatment of this material that’s both more comprehensive and more compelling than what Galchen has whipped up. That’s not as bad a thing as it sounds – it’s a really good Wikipedia page, and this story is fun for what it is. But the subhed claims that olo “tells us a lot about our color vision”, and that’s a claim Galchen can’t actually back up.

“Sub Story” (The Current Cinema) - As Justin Chang describes it, Greg Araki’s latest sounds pretty half-hearted and frustrating. Chang wants to give him credit for a long career of ambitious swings, but if the new movie is bad, he needs to face that fact with a bit more bite on the ball-gag.

“American Daredevil” (Profiles) - Knoxville is a deeply fascinating figure, but Molly Young’s framing device – why does Knoxville do what he does? – is ill-considered, since the answer is self-evident: Because risk, vicarious or otherwise, is fun; because chaos is beautiful. Young has to abandon that schema quite quickly, and doesn’t find much new to say about the Jackass phenomenon, which has already basically spawned its own field of dirtbag and faux-dirtbag cultural criticism. Nuts!

“Modern Love” (Pop Music) - I wasn’t entirely convinced by the new Steve Lacy record, which has three excellent songs (The Feeling, show you me, Nice Shoes/In Your World) but is otherwise almost entirely dashed-off, low-energy filler; still, producing even one Bad Habit-equivalent every four years is nothing to scoff at. Amanda Petrusich isn’t able to figure anything out about the guy, though, and Lacy’s digressive style of speech is a much better fit for an online Q&A; chopped to bits, his quotes just seem meaningless. Petrusich also can’t quite convey what she liked so much about the album; she calls it “deeply humane”, which seems to be a high-minded way of saying that it’s a bunch of funk songs about sex. She’s so impressed it gets a bit laughable, especially because the album’s charms are tied directly to a feeling, true or not, that there isn’t an obsessive amount of energy being exerted by Lacy.

“The Food-Desert Mirage” (Books) - A small truth wedded to a big hunk of bullshit. Yes, it’s true enough that ‘food desert’ vocabulary was sometimes welded like soda taxes, a way of condescending to poor communities with broad-brush tactics that didn’t actually help many people. But Kelefa Sanneh just wants to punch left at Mamdani’s grocery store initiative without actually considering what his own version of ‘food justice’ might look like. Instead, he ends up insisting there actually is no problem, that the entire thing is a mirage (there’s no “actual starvation”) cooked up to avoid harder questions. It’s a nihilistically dismissive viewpoint, once again proposing that better things aren’t possible.

The Weekend In Brief:

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

“Forget Albums – Pop Stars Measure Their Careers in Eras Now” (Weekend Essay) - A perfectly fun and quick little piece, but one I found basically unconvincing. Mitch Therieau punctures his own argument, which rests on the terminology of “eras”, by noting that they’re actually just album rollouts, which have been a strategy, in pop, for introducing a whole new image since at least Madonna. Apparently the difference is that now even “milquetoast” artists indulge in this strategy - but his only examples are Ed Sheeran, who’s just using the term because he’s besties with Taylor. Therieau’s analysis of Charli is actually less deep than the text of her new album, a brilliant, depressive excoriation of the drive to sell reinventions at the cost of actual change. I’m happy the magazine is at least writing about pop music, and it’s too bad Therieau considers the branding so separately from the music part. The whole point of pop is that they’re twinned. No Thingies.

“The Promise” (Fiction) - Rachel Yoder, previously known mostly for Nightbitch, delivers a probing, mostly realistic narrative about how and when we choose which parts of our child-selves to preserve and hold onto. Unfortunately, this quite short story spends its whole first third on place descriptions that are surely meant to introduce a reader gradually to a unique locale, but instead just feel overwrought and a bit romanticized. The rest of the story is far more striking, and this could definitely have been edited into flash fiction. The parts that focus on character study, and not just a character’s study of every object around her, are very strong. One Thingy.

here she is, boys!