April 14, 2025

Last Week's New Yorker Review: April 7

Last Week’s New Yorker, week of April 7

“‘(yes, I’m talking/to your hundreds of pages smeared with bullshit.)’”

I’m on spring break this week, so barring disaster the emails will bucket down! (April showers may bring newsletters.)

Must-Reads:

“Latin Lover” (The Ancient World) - Daniel Mendelsohn says Lesbia-nest about Catullus. Mendelsohn is the magazine’s occasional reviewer of ancient texts in translation; he’s reliably good, finding the shock of the new in these past texts while carefully adjudicating how much spin the translator has added.¹ This is an especially strong effort, in part because Catallus is new to me, and his poems, in both more faithful and more radical translation, are hilarious and gripping in that way the far past can be – so different as to be unimaginable, yet still totally human; in this case achingly, sometimes leeringly sexual. Mendelsohn is not exactly the professor shuddering at facefucking (though he does call it “gutterspeak”), but he seems more bemused than entranced by Catallus’ louche side; for that entrancement, though, he calls upon Isobel Williams, whose boffo-sounding translation hits on the kinky, shibarified side of the poet, the “electric” twentysomething, “brash newcomer from the boondocks determined to conquer the big city” – I know that type, and I can see Catullus in their eyes. He’s not all Greek, to me.

“Fighting the System” (Books) - Louis Menand thinks resegregation isn’t bussin’. Whether or not you think it’s valuable to point out exactly why the present Administration’s policies are “risible”, it’s a good way of learning your history – just as it’s repeated avec doom. It’s sort of embarrassing that Menand has to re-explain structural racism and housing rights; one can probably skip that first section. The bulk of the piece covers a book chronicling a single Supreme Court case across five hundred pages. (It is for books like this that the book-review-cum-synopsis was invented.) There is certainly drama to this closely-fought battle, which largely killed cross-district school integration; it helps inaugurate the horrific repeating theme of American politics over the past fifty-odd years, in which liberal tentativeness and conservative disingenuousness (and plain old segregationism) combine to make things worse for the disempowered and disenfranchised. Finally, the narrative is rewritten so that the failure of a policy which was quickly suffocated – here, not just busing but any attempt to enshrine Civil Rights in law – is proof of its ineffectiveness. Even if you already know that story (and you do) it’s worth hearing it one more time. And Menand can sing it.

Window-Shop:

“What We Knew Without Knowing” (Life and Letters) - Joan Didion tells herself life in order to story. These diary entries chronicle Didion’s sessions of analysis with extreme detail and a minimum of art, and are addressed directly to her husband. So their appeal is almost entirely voyeurist, albeit in a nominally high-minded way: Since Didion wrote memoir about these same people, these entries can be taken as embryonic versions of those later, lauded works. I’m not sure that justification really holds up, but whatever; Didion was a public intellectual, so I guess this is all fair game. It’s certainly enjoyable, though not because Didion is an especially bizarre patient; indeed, her issues are precisely what a reader would expect them to be: Defensive remoteness, obsession, fear of loss. (Only the “childhood divorce fantasy” is genuinely outré.) But sitting in on therapy with any reasonably forthright and intelligent person will prove interesting, especially when one is getting a batch of moments selected for their interest. Still, the moments where non-psychological life spills through are highlights, especially Didion’s agony over Anthony Kennedy’s decision in Bush v. Gore, her inability to square it with their family friendship and her read of his character. Her analyst even reflects this judgement back on Didion, a type who “‘can’t accept other people’s mistakes, because they can’t accept their own’” – “‘threatened by a world you can’t control.’” This Didion, without her already thin mask of form, will be relatable to any high-strung intellectual type – ahem. The last section is the least strong; I suppose the material on gender is sort of interesting, but it’s mostly repetitive. You may stop one entry earlier, unless you’re entranced.

Kolbert on McPhee (Takes) - Very nice. Kolbert finds inspiration in McPhee’s close observation. 

“‘Do Bron’” (Talk of the Town) - Charles Bethea finds his hoopelganger. A genuinely remarkable talent, assessed wittily. 

Briefly Noted – Sick précises, bro.

“Duelling Instincts” (The Theatre) - Helen Shaw says Othello? She must be going. Reading the pans of this phenomenally misbegotten production has been a treat, although really you don’t need to know much more than that the show isn’t sure what country it takes place in, that it ends with a Kanye song, and that somebody at Vulture convincingly argued that that is the best part of the show. Shaw’s pan is too disappointed to be very funny, and I’d rather she gave more time to the synthpop “rara avis” she’s found at a random downtown venue, which sounds like a goofy delight.

“The Marriage Plot” (American Chronicles) - Adam Iscoe unties The Knot. Never quite finds the second gear that would render it seriously fun; it seems pretty clear that the website has a major fraud problem which it profits from and therefore is happy to ignore, but that it is probably not actually running that fraud. Nobody wants their wedding to be enshittified, sure, but the level of evil here is about what one can expect to find at any startup, and it’s strange that Iscoe never really addresses the ways that GrubHub has much the same con going, and Yelp did before that. Anyway, I’m still here for this article, but mainly just because a featured character, Sergio Guadarrama, is also one of the more iconically delusional reality-competition contestants in recent memory, and the sketch we get of his life after that show – that he fled upstate to get a fresh start, was trapped there by the pandemic, and then got extorted by a wedding startup – is an absolutely delicious plotline which I’m optioning for a sitcom starring Ken Marino. 

Skip Without Guilt:

“Downfall” (On Television) - Inkoo Kang is royally screwed. I tried to read those Wolf Hall books and found them exactly the slog everyone who loves them claims they aren’t. So I don’t really trust Kang’s rave of the new show, and I do wish she’d talk about the show’s formal qualities (which Mike Hale at the Times says are lacking.) Serviceable, nothing more.

“Dirty Minds” (A Critic at Large) - Nikhil Krishnan is brainwashed up. Winds itself into a corner, trying to disprove the crux of Rebecca Lemov’s book by way of what is essentially a procedural point, that her argument rests on believing that trauma is everywhere, but Lemov says she doesn’t “‘see trauma everywhere.’” It’s not unfair, it’s just uninteresting; it has basically nothing to do with the question of whether brainwashing is a compelling frame through which to view contemporary politics. Just because the scale on which TikTok may “traumatize” its users is vastly different from the actual torture inflicted on Patty Hearst, doesn’t mean it isn’t the same mechanism at work. Horrors benumb, small or large. I’m not convinced Krishnan even gives a fair account of Lemov’s argument; he never recounts how she thinks trauma informs brainwashing, perhaps because doing so might make the weaknesses in his counterargument too clear. I’m not sure brainwashing is that useful as a category or a rhetorical device – it’s certainly true that people are still responsible for their patterns of delusional thought, but just because truth is not manifest, that doesn’t mean every delusion owes entirely to a benignly chosen set of divergent paths. Krishnan speaks of an imaginary cousin who “may simply have wandered down intellectual rabbit holes where evidence matters less than belonging.” But did he wander? Or was he pushed?

Shut The Fuck Up:

“The Invisible Man” (The Political Scene) - David D. Kirkpatrick hears a loony Thune say that’s all for democracy, folks. The thing about not taking sides is that if you define a story as having exactly two sides, you’re still taking sides by setting the terms of what is and is not a reasonable opinion. That’s the furthest thing from an original thought – shoutout everyone’s favorite Dow Chemical quality specialist – but I need a frame to cling on to while Kirkpatrick, in this astonishingly enervating article, makes the case that either Thune will finally stand up to Trump when it counts, or he’ll be betraying his values and past statements. This despite an overwhelming amount of evidence that Thune is happy to work with Trump, and annoyed by being sidelined not because he’s morally tortured but because he’s sidelined. He’s not allowed in the MAGA club for essentially aesthetic reasons, but while they may hate each other as people, he and Trump love each other as fascists. Boy is there a lot of irrelevant garbage about how everyone gets along with Thune, how “his morning workouts at the Senate gym are legendary”, how people call him Hot Grandpa, and even how he was good at sports as a kid. Augh! His first race was tight-fought (“The parallels to the 2020 Presidential campaign are uncanny,” according to Kirkpatrick, by which he apparently just means that… the race was close? I guess?) and while he’s allegedly “telegenic” this seemingly means he is a white man without charisma and not an orange man with charisma. (Fitting the part is counterproductive when the part you fit is “career politician”!) Kirkpatrick gives no sense that Thune has any principles or ideas beyond staying in power. Indeed, it looks as though the defining trait of his Senate leadership will be that he keeps out of Trump’s way as much as possible, so as not to catch any shrapnel. His alleged depression at this arrangement would be hilarious if it weren’t so dark – even our Albert Speer is kitschy! This article limps along for an unaccountable stretch, rehashing a lot of recent news you can no longer use because new horrors have rushed in so immediately. If Kirkpatrick is trying to condemn Thune, he’s chosen an awfully reputation-rescuing way to do it; he hints that the man isn’t happy with Trump, but gives us only evasions as evidence. Why write this article? If Thune is unimportant, then he’s unimportant; if he’s secretly important, then Kirkpatrick hasn’t proven it. My wild guess is that Thune was chosen because he’s still willing to at least entertain reporters. But if he isn’t saying anything, then you should tell him to shut the fuck up!

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Letters:

Nada.

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Oona, Yma; Oona, Ava; Oona, Abba;

Ugo, Yma; Ugo, Ava; Ugo, Oona; Ugo, Abba.