Last Week’s New Yorker, week of April 6

“summarizing Nietzsche’s position as follows: ‘There is no essence to life, so the secret is to have fun and not worry too much about it.’”

Must-Reads:

“By the Numbers” (Books) - Becca Rothfeld Brooks compromises. I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: Never trust a social scientist! I can be critical when the magazine wastes time reviewing ultra-soft targets, but I can’t really gripe when the result is this much fun. Rothfeld, late of the Post (RIP), demolishes both the latest book from, and the entire career of, Arthur C. Brooks, whose pivot from explicit conservatism to dilettante-bro philosophy she correctly clocks as cowardly. Brooks misinterprets iffy science (I maintain that brain scans will one day be viewed as catastrophically misleading to nearly the same extent as polygraph tests) to provide thin justification for reactionary social politics. Rothfeld takes some combination of surgical strikes (“Brooks has no interest in the broader sweep of history and, indeed, no apparent knowledge of the philosophical accounts of encroaching meaninglessness which have been on offer for centuries”) and hilarious potshots (“How do his children feel knowing they command a mere eight out of ten importance points, but his faith and his marriage both rate a nine?”) and points out that the whole book serves to justify the same arguments that explicit white nationalists are making by using “the old tone” of the “think-tank brigade”. Of course, a noncommittal fascist is still a fascist (and Rothfeld might have pointed out that supposedly left-of-center think tankers like Ezra Klein are taking similar turns). The “all-encompassing blandness” of Brooks’ project will likely prove self-defeating, but that doesn’t make him harmless. Incuriosity may give this cat a long, long life.

🗣️ “Chai Anxiety” (New Delhi Postcard) - Nathan Heller won’t spill the tea unless you gas him up. Rarely does a Talk take place in another country, and rarely does one tie a unique individual story to a news hook this convincingly. Heller chats with a roadside chaiwala, Mohammad Meraj, whose gas costs have more than tripled due to the Strait of Hormuz blockade; he blends his usual style of borderline-insulting physical description (“a gentle scruff of beard around wide, affably set teeth, like Freddie Mercury’s”) with resigned quotes from Meraj. It’s world-widening, casual and clever – a model that the magazine could emulate more often.

Window-Shop:

“Screened Out” (A Critic at Large) - Richard Brody catches another new wave. Let Brody cook! He functions best as an enthusiast of obscurities, a film-festival fellow traveler with a ken for an archive. Having him sub in for Chang on some wide-release trifle is a misuse of his talents; this is the sort of thing I want more of, a piece on an Iranian filmmaker that expertly summarizes that country’s New Wave, then uses that background to show how Mani Haghighi both fits into and subverts the expectations of that movement. His starting point couldn’t be further from Kierostami’s – professional actor representing wealthy social sophisticates – yet, in ways Brody could probably stand to more explicitly point out, he bends the social drama until it breaks, and uses documentary techniques in pursuit of his narrative; exactly like Kierostami. (“…the present day is brought to life by way of documentary-style interviews with real-life people telling ostensibly true stories.”) Brody is interested in the ways the film mirrors legendary short The House is Black, sharing something of its “freedom — of the gaze, of emotion, and of expression". Brody ends with a citation of Haghighi’s anti-authoritarian plea, which focuses on a minor, almost bureaucratic matter – the Oscars’ reliance on state boards to submit foreign films – to make a broader point: That support requires making change. It can only be read as an endorsement. Is the Academy listening?

“The Divide” (Annals of Religion) - Eyal Press blames the sin, not the synagogue. Jews with a working moral compass will find this unbelievably frustrating and depressing; that our people – of all people! – have been so successfully captured by a fascist disinformation campaign that six in ten of us can’t even call a genocide a genocide means it ought not to be a surprise that the Zionist project is now facing internal resistance whether or not it continues to be led by the same fascists that have killed so many in our name. Do we need this piece, which is so relentless in its focus on American stories that the occasional reminder that some of these people knew Israeli victims of the first attacks is actually jarring? (Do any of them know Palestinian victims? It seems unlikely, and we don’t hear about it.) Look, maybe we don’t, but Press still gets credit for a clean, sensitive treatment; it’s subtle, but he shows how much simple refusal to engage the Zionist side is practicing, and how disingenuous their Big Tent Judaism actually is. If this piece sparks just one productive seder-plate conversation, dayenu.

“Good Tape” (Books) - Giles Harvey reads that back. Ben Lerner may be the one thing on this earth I’m closest to being a “fan” of, in the sense that one’d rather soak in a thing than try to approach it from a critical perspective.¹ Doesn’t mean I can’t enjoy a review of his new book, but mostly I’ve scanned the universally exuberant coverage of his latest, determined that it does indeed appear to be good new writing by Ben Lerner, and sort of tuned out everything else. I already know I’m going to eat it; I don’t need to anticipate its taste, just whether I should watch for bones. Harvey adds: An ultimately warranted but fairly belabored A.I. transcription anecdote, a large dollop of Harold Bloom (who I’ve probably had enough of²), some moderately oversimplified gender politics, but also, ultimately, a lovely reading that focuses on “reciprocity” and probably reveals itself even more fully when one has read the text. Want canned task for Demi Moore. Sorry, that’s: One can’t ask for any more!

🗣️ “Special Deliveries” (Here to There Dept.) - Henry Alford drops off the face. Only nominally about environmentally friendly shipping, and so much the better – it’s great fun just to bike around with Alford and Jaime, no conceit needed. Emergency eyelash protocol activated.

“Florida Woman” (On and Off the Menu) - Hannah Goldfield is for Publix consumption. As a secret former Central Floridian³ I don’t exactly relate to Kia Damon’s enthusiasm for local grocery stores – it can’t help that my family lived nearest to what everyone called The Bad Publix – and most everything else about Florida food. Still, it’s fun to hear about the area through someone else’s eyes. Florida is huge, and it’s a little silly uniting its cultural heritage by default – Miami is as far from Jacksonville as NYC is from Portland, Maine, but you can’t get bagels and lobster rolls from the same caterer. Besides which, the state may have some racoon-eaters, but my elementary school PTA practically rioted when my dad brought a possum in a shoebox to the meeting. (He was saving its life! He wasn’t gonna eat it! Alright, bad example.) Goldfield has fun, and I did too. See you later, alligator.

🗣️ “Damn It, Janet” (The Boards) - Rachel Syme helps Stephanie Hsu get to the end in Swedish. That Oh, Mary! anecdote is so perfect it gets past my I-don’t-care-about-your-dream barrier. Hsu is a charmer! I rock with anyone that moves back to NYC because California isn’t weird enough.

🗣️ “As Seen on TV” (House-Hunters) - Emma Allen puts big names on the marquee de façade. A journalist-on-journalist love sesh, basically, but whatever, they’re both smart and the subject is interesting!

Skip Without Guilt:

“Scene One” (Personal History) - Lena Dunham gets the friends and family discount. Uh, sure. I mean, Dunham can write memoir, and I suppose that if every generation gets the Nora Ephron it deserves, the magazine may as well let them each write for it, in turn. But while Ephron wrote about herself, she hardly ever wrote about her professional successes or failures – indeed, she apparently said that the happy last thirty years of her life “had no plot”. Dunham’s new book-length memoir apparently deals with chronic illness, among other things, but this excerpt is entirely concerned with her early years in a communal “utopia” shared with pretty much the entirety of the era’s NYC film scene, and with the production of her breakout feature, Tiny Furniture. The best material concerns Dunham’s relationship with her mother, but that’s also fairly well-trod ground. This never quite turns into the most interesting version of itself, and while it might fare better in the context of a memoir, on its own it feels arbitrary. That’s also true of any given episode of Girls, though; the continuation is the thing.

“The Spy Who Told All” (A Reporter at Large) - David D. Kirkpatrick needs defect checker. Promises a spy thriller and delivers an hour-plus of C.I.A. procedural minutiae, which is simply not the same thing. A spiritual sequel to a Kirkpatrick piece from 2023 which focuses on the U.A.E.-Qatar fight, here the focus is on an ex-CIA guy working for the Qataris. At first it seems like Kirkpatrick will decide he’s being lied to, but ultimately that’s not the story’s thrust; Chalker is an asshole, but Kirkpatrick clearly shows why he’s believable. Basically, Kirkpatrick’s job was to offer Iranian scientists safety in America – or, from another point of view, to blackmail them to defect under threat of death. Maybe I’m jaded, but this was not shocking to me. Dads and spiritual dads may love this – Kirkpatrick adds heaps of procedural detail, both because it’s good journalism and because, presumably, nerds like that shit. Centrally: The C.I.A. may or may not have personally killed anyone, but “former officials with knowledge of the project told me that the C.I.A. sometimes shared intelligence with Mossad which enabled its operatives to locate and kill a scientist.” If a piece centered around that type of detail sounds fun to you, you’ll enjoy this; despite the online headline, though, don’t expect a news hook. As far as I can tell, this is just a story about an asshole bruiser doing questionable-to-awful things for our government and then telling about them not for any moral reason but basically because his life is ruined anyway so why not? Claiming to have found a bombshell but not delivering one: I guess that’s what the C.I.A. does best.

“Reality Check” (On Television) - Inkoo Kang won’t trust fall. I’m not opposed to Kang being grumpy; indeed, I’m increasingly endeared to it. But here her argument just isn’t persuasive; she gives Sasha Baron Cohen credit he doesn’t deserve (he and Fielder emerged contemporaneously, he just got famous first; besides, surely Andy Kaufman is the common ancestor there) and her category of the “prestige prank show” doesn’t really cohere, besides which, is this particular show actually chasing prestige? (Isn’t that sort of at odds with her other argument, that it’s morally simplistic pap?) I appreciate that Kang at least tries for a political reading in the last paragraph, but there’s a lack of attention to the show’s formal qualities; as a result, she makes her argument without enough evidence. A show’s morality can’t be grasped from its logline; Kang needs to give us more.

“Beta Blockers” (American Chronicles) - Charles Bethea says Alpha is back – in slog form. A ton of needless setup about toxic-masculine culture, followed by two lukewarm sections embedded with RISE and one more openly hostile section (which, confusingly, comes between the other two) with the Squire Program, a sort of child-abuse offshoot of the “degradation-as-realization” program. That project is so obviously evil that Bethea’s descriptions of abuse dynamics are more grating than shocking, and he’s far softer on RISE, which pairs genuine wisdom with shock tactics. In that case, at least, they’re consenting adults who will probably gain from the false imposition of a triumph-over-adversity narrative onto their lives; still, I wish Bethea would interview an actual therapist, or any expert in any of the fields these expeditions gesture toward. Evidence-based treatment is not the end-all-be-all, but open denigration of evidence-based treatment is usually a bad sign, too. Even after I hear what Bethea saw, I don’t have any better idea what these programs are actually doing from a mental-health perspective, not least because part of the project involves developing a cultic code language so as to create a tighter in-group. Self-help plus grunting is not a replacement for therapy, it’s a replacement for grunting-free self-help. I’m not saying there’s anything all that uniquely bad about these programs, just that a journalist is probably the wrong person to analyze a project that is built, directly and openly, on the manufacturing of narratives. To quote George Carlin, the people who are motivated are the ones who’re causing all the trouble.

Letters:

noop

something more

pleasant