Last Week’s New Yorker, week of April 13

“‘The weather is demanding slow drive, but is awestriking. Do you need boots or socks?’”

This is the Future Issue, a tag that I quite strongly dislike, as it casts four ambitious feature pieces as, basically, comparable visions of a dreary, hopeless world-to-come. The excellent sponge cities piece at least concerns solutions to a climate catastrophe that is, in some form, inevitable. But these are the other predicted futures: One in which “American regulators lose their grip on the safety and the efficacy of drugs”, one in which Sam Altman controls “the future of humanity” even though “he could not be trusted”, and one in which Neo-Nazi Groypers “shape the country’s future by entering political institutions and changing them from within.” I’m not saying this to be an obnoxious where’s-the-good-news person, and I’m certainly aware that many of the narratives around the world getting better are really just messages in support of technocratic complacency. But to explicitly call this issue The Future and then make the future sound awful, while suggesting few if any ways for readers to fight back, is politically defeatist, even nihilistic. As an exercise, I brainstormed with the Today in Tabs Discord (subscribe to Tabs for access) to come up with four more hopeful, more radically positive pitches for feature pieces, in the same four categories as those in the magazine.

Medicine: mRNA vaccines are a major breakthrough, but as the pandemic has faded from the news, medical coverage has shifted away from scientists and toward skeptics; even when the intent is to undermine those skeptics, there is some reification at work. (It’s hard to counteract an argument with its negative formulation.) New AIDS vaccines look very promising, too. Deregulating medicine looks more appealing when it feels like regulated medicine is accomplishing nothing; coverage of their breakthroughs benefits us all.

Climate: Klinenberg’s piece is excellent, if narrow. The magazine has covered alternate energy sources, and contributor Bill McKibben’s recent book (excerpted online) goes in-depth into the transformation of solar. But Rivka Galchen’s iffy geothermal piece made the print edition and McKibben didn’t, so I have quibbles.

Tech: How about a piece that engages with children – you know, our future? The city got smartphones out of schools with better results than almost anyone expected, and while that effort has gotten some fun and fluffy coverage, I’d love to read a travelogue piece about various schools disincorporating tech and education. Alternately: Audrey Watters was far ahead of the curve on thoughtfully skeptical ed-tech approaches; where’s her profile?

Politics: Many possibilities here, but the magazine never ran a thorough feature on the Minneapolis uprising. A profile of Ilhan Omar might be one way of addressing that material without needing a new news hook, and could also touch on the rhetorical and literal attacks against her.

Alright, that was a long hypothetical. On to the actual articles!

Must-Read:

“Taking On Water” (The Control of Nature) - Eric Klinenberg knows that when it rains, it porous. An elegant little urban-planning piece. After touching on NYC’s water disasters, giving a very brief (and very skippable) history of flooding, and giving the origins of the sponge-city idea, which is really more about “rhetoric” (and, originally, Chinese philosophy) than any design breakthrough, Klinenberg gets to the meat of the piece, a pair of case studies, one in Copenhagen and one in Hoboken, of parks with built-in flood systems. Both are great fun; Lykke Leonardsen is hilariously Danish (“‘Don’t worry,’ she added, as she eased out onto the ice. ‘I’m an excellent driver!’) and the park of basins is a fascinating and lovely idea. (One quibble: Was there no room for a photo?) Hoboken, which I associate with another of its public-space triumphs, the total elimination of pedestrian deaths, also features a park that doubles as a massive underground cistern. The nice thing about green space is that people want it; a NIMBY and a YIMBY both want a PITBY. That’s a Park In Their BackYard, but it’s also a PIT BY another name.

Window-Shop:

“Initiation Rites” (Books) - Kristen Roupenian sits for a spell. More of an appreciation than a review as such, but that’s alright because it’s so short, its single section mostly a bloggy enticement. Roupenian’s fiction excels because it’s so immediate, and here her prose is doing something similar; your smart friend is chatting about a new book she loves. She admits that she’s unsure about its ultimate meaning, or “can’t fully express it”, which is a risky move – critics aren’t supposed to admit such things! – that works because she’s so quickly established intimacy. When she describes NDiaye as envisioning “the relationship between reader and writer as an encounter of equals”, one can see exactly how she’s inspired Roupenian, whose review puts the critic and her reader on equal ground.

“Bankrupt” (The Theatre) - Emily Nussbaum isn’t Afternoon delighted. I agree with Nussbaum’s assessment of this show, (“…a noisy sitcom punctuated by gunshots… frantic, full of violent slapstick and musty sex jokes… the tone is an uneasy blend of zany and sour”) even as I found it to succeed and even delight on its own bizarre, Brechtian terms. She’s right that Moss-Bachrach doesn’t figure out his Sal, and that this throws the show off-balance. But I think she dismisses the show’s “treatment of Sonny’s sexuality” too fully and too quickly. There is nuance and deep emotion in Esteban Andres Cruz’ performance, and the generalized insistence that trans representation must avoid supposedly easy jokes always bugs me; is there anything more queer than “uncontrolled sobbing… mined for laughs”? Nussbaum doesn’t need to be embarrassed on our behalf.¹

🗣️ “Reprise” (The Boards) - Alex Barasch gets better with age. Supremely elegant setup – a walk from the old theater to the new. A few good anecdotes – Pitbull! – and no bad ones.

“Pick Your Poison” (Brave New World Dept.) - Dhruv Khullar doesn’t like off-labels. Khullar’s prose is at its best here, finding the best bizarre details. (“Lee now keeps peptides for his family in the butter compartment of his fridge.”) The brief ending section where he attends a pseudo-health symposium is gonzo and extremely fun, and possibly could have been its own article. Why peptides matter in particular above other iffy supplements isn’t ever clear, and lead character Koniver, a peptide salesman, is, unfortunately, an everyday sleazeball who feels chosen at random. Khullar feels stuck between a broad aim (Junk science is everywhere! Deregulating medicine is a bad idea!) and a specific aim (Here’s the history of peptides!) that don’t quite match up. Skim the first half, devour the second (beginning “The idea…”). Bad peptidings!

Skip Without Guilt:

“The Human Mosaic” (Books) - Jerome Groopman presses immute. A quick introduction to somatic mutation and its relationship to our immune system. The mosaic metaphor, while beautiful, conveys less the more you think about it; to say that we all contain cells is to say that we all contain mutated cells, and that a mosaic is made up of cells is really all that the phrase refers to. What does it mean that “a single blood cell taken from someone who has reached the age of a hundred is likely to contain more than four thousand mutations”? Well, I don’t actually know. Groopman aims for awe, I think, but doesn’t deliver enough context to get us there. That issue repeats; the piece feels too simplified to convey the usefulness or even the meaning of these breakthroughs. It’s not bad, only so-somatic.

“Art of the Steal” (The Current Cinema) - Justin Chang is The Christophers’ guest. A few needless sidetracks here – the Weinstein stuff needs to be either more closely considered or edited out; the opening – what inspires Soderbergh? – reads mostly like Chang is trying not to give the last paragraph away too soon – the “quicksilver marriage of high-flying ideas and hands-on technique” inspires Soderbergh! That’s not an especially original reading; Chang even quotes from Brody, which is both charming and a little too cordial. These two will never pass for Siskel and Ebert, and in the context of a film that acts as “a work of criticism that deftly distinguishes different approaches to criticism”, I wish there was more of a sense of Chang’s approach; he’s a fantastic writer, but so reliant on auteurism it’d be nice to know what that approach means to him specifically. Critic, distinguish thyself.

“Back to the Future” (The Art World) - Zachary Fine will gladly pay you Tuesday for a memory today. Definitely some good stuff here – the Hall of Robots as “a Universal Studios Hollywood tour, if it took place in a large intestine”; the expansion that “works like a snorkel for the museum… which reveals its structure while producing its effects.” And I suppose it’s fitting that a review of a scattershot installation itself be scattershot, with Fine lobbing a series of guesses as to what the museum is trying to tell us, then declaring each one incomplete. Fine’s frustration with incoherence and his hope that the exhibition could “have tried to repair things” suggests a surprising faith in the transparency of communication technologies; his hope that the show could detect coming disasters is not a misreading of McLuhan, exactly, but I’d put more emphasis on his idea that art “can always be relied on to tell the old culture what is beginning to happen to it” – less an atrocity predictor than an ad for Coming Distractions.

“Guthrie’s Passion” (On Television) - Vinson Cunningham braves the Savannah. Certainly out of the ordinary! Cunningham delivers a weepy, almost preacherly tribute to Savannah Guthrie. There is a painful sincerity to the idea that “the ‘Today’ show’s ethos and sensibility” is worth preservation and celebration, but Cunningham certainly means it! He posits that the show could be the wellspring of an “American public Christianity” that leads with “vibrant colors, kind words, total decent positivity”. I’d like to see that… but, hey, I won’t be watching. And Cunningham will!

“Moment of Truth” (A Reporter at Large) - Ronan Farrow and Andrew Marantz run Altman catch fire. Look, this has clearly had a negative public impact on Altman’s image, and for that we should all be grateful. But this is an extremely long article that examined Altman in very close detail, and paints a picture that will be entirely unsurprising to anyone who’s been paying attention. The boy’s a liar! You don’t need to spend two hours of your day confirming the insidious social skills and lack of technical ability of the polo-shirt-over-a-polo-shirt guy, who we’ve been mocking for those exact qualities for over a decade now.² Farrow and Marantz make a big deal about newly discovered documents, which are less a smoking gun than a Google Doc of panicked receipts collected by Dario Amodei, whose entire career exists of making Google Docs of panicked receipts. They also really press the point that Altman is sort of like an A.I, which is just a corny, tired metaphor. Not every asshole is a robot.

“No Enemies to the Right” (The Political Scene) - Antonia Hitchens shouts Groy vey! If you didn’t already realize that the MAGA movement under Trump 2.0 has been infiltrated by Nazis who will shortly replace its flags with their own, you still won’t have a good time learning about it from Hitchens in this fundamentally correct but deeply unpleasant and moderately reifying account of the Groypers. Their ideology is incredibly simple despite their esoteric lore: They want a White Nationalist fascist takeover of the country; they want hatred and death. That all these things are, at large, wildly unpopular certainly doesn’t mean that they can’t win; Hitchens convincingly portrays their victory over the American far right wing as close to inevitable, if not already secured; she correctly calls this “the most recent expression of a long pattern on the American right”, in which a “radical flank” takes over. It’s convincing, but I was already convinced; I didn’t need all the extended quotes of vile rhetoric to get me there.

Shut the Fuck Up:

“Through the Wire” (Pop Music) - Kelefa Sanneh goes to Ye Old Music Shoppe. Come on, man. The two albums that have been reviewed so far this year are the disappointing Zach Bryan effort and this shit? Was there any reason to expect this to be anything other than mediocre? Why is there no reference to the credible sexual assault allegations here, which Ye didn’t bother to even reference in his apology letter? What are we doing?

“By Her Lights” (Books) - Emma Green tries to traverse the trad-verse. It’s profoundly morally irresponsible to write a story about these women that doesn’t center race. Really: What are we doing here? Emma Waters is an open and explicit White Christian nationalist writing propaganda for the Heritage Foundation; Green points out the violence inherent to her messaging, which is a start, but cosigns the supposed “subversive allure” of her secure-a-future-for-your-white-children messaging. (The skimming of Hatmaker, supposedly as counterpoint, is hardly worth mentioning.) Less morally irresponsible but possibly more misleading is Green’s conflation of Christianity broadly with the Evangelical project specifically. It’s incredibly complicated to verify or disprove this statistically, but my Christian friends³ say that the Evangelical-fundamentalist project has hijacked Christianity. Is it right that “the faith went through something of a sloughing-off period”, as Green says, or is it a more accurate narrative that compassionate Christians feel uncomfortable sharing a name and a home with extremist Evangelicals? (Green might have interviewed her colleague Vinson Cunningham, who makes the slightly bizarro case for Today Show Christianity elsewhere in the issue.) Waters’ “potent subculture” is not Christianity but White Nationalism; Green’s description of her beliefs leaves out their most important, if carefully unspoken, aspect, that she sees herself as the Aryan woman whose beauty must not perish.

Letters:

Neh.

put song

here