Last Week’s New Yorker, week of August 10

Thanks for bearing with me, seriously. Thursday (or thereabouts), a back-to-normal edition for the August 17 issue will drop.

Must-Read:

🗣️ “Identity Politics” (Dept. of Nomenclature) - Jon Allsop’s comic rhythm here is spot-on; the escalating number of Dan Sullivans involved keeps paying dividends.

🗣️ “Extra! Extra!” (Same Shit Dept.) - Come on, you can’t be cynical about this sort of thing. (Zach Helfand is, thankfully, largely appreciative and only a bit wry.) May this enterprise spread joy for as long as it’s solvent. If they’d like to stock printouts of this newsletter, they should hit me up.

Window-Shop:

“The Future, Made in China” (Letter from Beijing) - Evan Osnos takes his sweet time getting going, opening with two sections of stultifying setup, then a far more compelling personal history that’s still basically vestigial to his actual hook, which he finally articulates a third of the way through: Despite American visions of China becoming the new world superpower, young Chinese people are pessimistic about the future and aren’t having children, and both the US and China are run by largely unpopular “small oligarchic groups”; it’s possible we’re heading for a period of no superpower, “a jungle in which every country hedges, arms, subsidizes, hoards, and searches for choke points to exploit.” Osnos doesn’t bring the intimacy or wit of the magazine’s other China correspondents Jiayang Fan and Peter Hessler, but he’s aiming for something a bit cooler and more theoretical, showing how China’s ‘engineer culture’ has its own foibles. The last three sections, which move from anecdote to synthesis, are easily the most interesting part of this piece.

“The Loneliest Number” (Books) - I always enjoy Katy Waldman’s fiction-world missives, though this one could stand to be longer; only the last few paragraphs are actually devoted to the new book of short stories by Harpman, and they get short shrift; in fact, Waldman only discusses one of them. She plays compare-and-contrast with that “arch, light-fingered, and very funny” story and Harpman’s more portentous novel, which share a focus on alienation but arrive at different conclusions concerning it.

🗣️ “Same River Thrice” (The Pictures) - Nick Paumgarten chills in the park with a filmmaker. His project sounds neat; a kind of gorpcore Seven Up.

“The Anomaly” (The Art World) - Porter’s work, which is all about subtle interplay of colors, reproduces terribly, so I’ll have to catch the Art Students League show to see whether Zachary Fine’s assessments hold water. I don’t see, for example, the “radioactive organism” he speaks of in Oak Tree, and I wish he’d explain about the “color as a chronological instrument” he senses in another piece. But huzzah for long art reviews of shows that aren’t in giant museums. (Next week, Fine has coverage of the Pope.L show at the ever-reliable Drawing Center – even better!)

Skip Without Guilt:

“For Ransom” (Our Far-Flung Correspondents) - I wish this Alexis Okeowo piece about a basically political issue would spend more time on the politics of Nigeria’s kidnapping crisis; blindly promoting police-and-military funding as a solution risks a Duterte situation. (I don’t think Okeowo comes anywhere near calling for such a thing, to be clear.) Instead, this is mostly a fairly concise narrative of one particular man’s brutal kidnapping and double escape; it’s reasonably gripping; though, oddly, a second kidnapping story much more briefly addressed near the end actually has higher stakes.

“Director’s Cuts” (The Current Cinema) - Just hearing that Richard Brody dug this movie in the same way he dug Asteroid City and Barbie is a big endorsement, suggesting splendor with stakes. Too bad this review gets very bogged down in plot synopsis and never figures out much to say about the movie beyond that it’s probably “deeply personal” for Schoenbrun. (Gosh, you don’t say.) Brody also decides that naming dichotomies is akin to dissecting them, and goes hog-wild for most of the second half.

“Victim Complex” (On Television) - I greatly enjoyed Dying for Sex, and I like about a sixth of the scripted TV I watch (which isn’t much to begin with) so if Inkoo Kang says the new Meriwether joint is even better, my interest is piqued. I still have to struggle through her usual iffy prose and lack of interest in formal discussion. There’s hardly even discussion of the performances here; this could practically be a review of a printed copy of the script.

“Kaboom!” (U.S. Journal) - Never finds a story to tell, and spends a lot of time on goofy litany instead. I don’t even mind goofy litany, and I was still worn out by this piece, which is never as funny as Paige Williams hopes it might be. Fireworks by Grucci seems largely like an ordinary family business, with the sleazy edge that generally implies. Williams can’t decide whether to be awed or cynical, but I wish she’d just be nerdy instead; this story is weirdly light on the technical details of fireworks design. It doesn’t go off.

“The Mentor” (American Chronicles) - Thoroughly irrelevant. There was a documentary released about Cohn seven years ago, a fictionalization of the material came out two years ago, and there are zero new details I could make out in this retread of the same material. Yes, the authors got Trump on the record, but – “predictably” would be an understatement – he bloviates, offering nothing worth quoting. I get that this is excerpted from Kai Bird and Susan Goldmark’s new biography, explicitly positioned as a sequel to the book that got turned into Nolan’s Oppenheimer, but that doesn’t mean I have to care.

“The Quiet Life” (Books) - Anthony Lane has read an extremely long book full of anecdotes about silence and thinks the best way to tell us about it is to mention all the things its writer forgot to include. What a grumpy approach! It’s not that anything he mentions deserved elision, but the art of “pouncing” on what a book might have been – as Lane admits he’s doing, but doesn’t actually provide an excuse for – is only fun for the writer, and totally disconnected from the art of examining the book that is. As if it couldn’t get worse, the third section is mostly just Lane getting sour that the writer dares to mention her personal politics. What, does he think she should shut up and dribble?

The Weekend In Brief:

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

“My Birthright” (Weekend Essay) - Two Thingies. A really lovely, thoughtful essay by Karan Mahajan, exploring his continuing interest in writing about India despite his American home, and delving into his jadedness toward American culture, even after all this time – and the privilege that jadedness reveals. Just the right length, neither dashed-off nor self-indulgent; just the right amount of poetry, neither flowery nor sparse. A bit too philosophical to be actually moving, but well worth reading.

“The Blight” (Fiction) - No Thingies. Emma Cline at first verges on self-parody with her latest exploration of an emotionally closed-off older man; eventually, once the conceit is fully revealed, there is enough anticipatory pathos to at least get a reader through the thing without cringing. But a whole book of this? I can’t possibly imagine that working.

play me off