Last Week’s New Yorker, week of August 17

“‘It’s not scary. It just sucks. It sucks big fat donkey dicks.’”

It’s like I never left, no?

Must-Read:

“End of Story” (Dispatches) - Alexandra Schwartz won’t overrule a doula. This is a very soft must-read – and since they didn’t get full-polish reviews, I’ll point back to the best feature pieces of the past few weeks: David D. Kirkpatrick on Biden’s Israel idiocy, Jonathan Blitzer on ICE prison conditions (compare and contrast with Joshua Yaffa on Russian POW camps, reviewed below), and Burkhard Bilger on tick diseases. This is more minor, at its best when Schwartz is just observing doulas spending time with their dying clients or hobnobbing with one another; the trend-piece portions are a bit silly, pointing toward social-media moments (Nicole Kidman at your deathbed) you’ve either already seen or don’t need to know about. Schwartz might have spent that time exploring why active listening works so well, or how death doulaing agrees with or goes against the transference model of philosophy. Indulging in the woo of it all risks accidentally trivializing a method with proven efficacy. But I appreciate what Schwartz does make time for: Discussion of the labor and economics of the field, including specific numbers. It’s easy to claim a new job is sweeping the world, but in our gig-work age, a field this deregulated might easily become a buzzword. Capitalism is where good ideas go to die.

Window-Shop:

“The New Gulag” (A Reporter at Large) - Joshua Yaffa isn’t Russian to get in. A grueling depiction of the interminable torture faced not only by captured Ukranian soldiers but also by civilian prisoners, who face an even worse situation, as they’re mostly ineligible for prisoner transfers. How many variations on the theme of ill treatment in squalid conditions are really needed to get the point across, I’m not sure; the first five sections are exclusively devoted to that material, and one grows first overwhelmed and then numb. Yaffa might have woven the broader picture of prisoner exchanges into the narrative instead of saving all that information for the very end. Still, his reporting is impeccable; the process of tracking down these women could likely be a story unto itself.

🗣️ “Summer Camp” (The Pictures) - Emma Allen has Einbinders full of costumes. Halloween Adventure is an inspired choice for an unconventional meeting spot, in the usual Talk style. Einbinder is relaxed enough to riff a little.

“Crazy Talk” (The Art World) - Zachary Fine has a catholic taste for Pope.L Focusing on the link between madness, disability, and Blackness is a totally cogent approach to Pope.L’s work, though Fine could do more to point to a few contemporary thinkers whose work is based in exploration of this exact connection, instead of Paul Klee and Baudrillard – those magi aren’t irrelevant, but they can only speak to a certain aspect of Pope.L’s wit and range, one that’s already been put in textbooks. Some of Fine’s language still rankles – when he tells me to “look at the actual data”, by which he means the art on display, I have rage flashbacks to encounters with academic administrators. But his appreciation is obviously genuine; his celebration of the artist’s “incoherence” is a pleasingly radical gesture.

“The Delusions of John Roberts” (Profiles) - Margaret Talbot is putting on a full-court president. Probably won’t make you think differently about Roberts – he’s exactly the private-school prick I’d always seen him as – which is arguably a failing for a profile of this length. Is Roberts secretly all torn up that Trump’s using the extreme executive power Roberts’ court has granted him to cement authoritarianism? I don’t buy it, really – Reagan, the guy around whom Roberts formed his theories of a powerful executive, wasn’t a model of sanity – and I don’t especially care either way. But the deeper into the court’s history Talbot gets, the more the piece improves. The section on Roberts’ destruction of the Voting Rights Act is superb, cleanly dissecting his viewpoint; Talbot doesn’t pull punches, and names his delusions and hypocrisies for what they are. That’s gavel-nizing.

Skip Without Guilt:

“The Uses of Exile” (Books) - David Denby has room for Arendt. I suppose it’s at least unusual to focus not on Arendt’s ideas but instead on her sphere and her lodgings. But Denby doesn’t really find a hook; sure, Arendt was attractive and popular, but why do we care, exactly? The book he’s reviewing posits that Arendt was fundamentally German even when she was American; Denby is skeptical, but ultimately shrugs that it makes some sense. For such a long review, there’s very little about the book here; for one of the magazine’s usual recap-essays, Denby is light on the essay portion. One’s time would be better spent reading Arendt. That’s pretty much always a true statement, but it’s relevant here.

“Bot or Not” (Brave New World Dept.) - Jill Lepore is for real, no CAPTCHA. I can’t believe I still have to hear about Altman’s Orb, his continually failing crypto eye-scan scam which Rusty declared “genuinely the stupidest thing I’ve heard all year” in, uh, 2021. Since then, nothing has been accomplished on the front of whatever it is he’s pretending to do, but because OpenAI is taking over the economy, Altman’s other projects are presumed interesting – see also Musk’s Neuralink, mentioned here as well. Lepore is appropriately skeptical, but she’s still writing it all up as if it’s pertinent, and there’s not a lot else to this piece – just a reCAPTCHA recap that the magazine already did three years ago and an explanation of the first three minutes of Blade Runner. Pretty paltry stuff; Lepore is a good writer and I appreciate her skeptical point of view on the tech world, but she needs to more deeply research the field if she wants to keep writing about it. I’m no insider, and this still feels like kid stuff to me.

“Continental Drift” (Books) - Ian Buruma pans pan-Europe. More boring and confusing than it is malignant. Buruma splits the difference between defending the liberal international order and pointing out the flaws that made it vulnerable to attack, but decides that the root of European demagoguery is simple class resentment, and that therefore, Trump’s failure might cause Europe to decide that internationalist institutions weren’t so bad after all, but that they can do without the specific ones Pax Americana imposed. Buruma basically takes as a given that a small coalition of elites will govern, then points out that the new elites are worse than the old, and that the resentment of the old elites is therefore irrational. This doesn’t hold water, really; the dichotomies Buruma points toward are false. The choice between internationalism and the destruction of hegemony is: Both, thanks.

Letters:

Lots of stuff to catch up on. Let’s start with some quick bites:

Michael B.: “How long do you think the fact check took for the anecdote about the pickle business being the first in the nation with & Daughters in its name” in Emma Allen’s Talk about Russ’ pickles? Good question!

Michael O. says this metaphor from Lauren Oyler’s artist profile struck him as “very odd”: The artist is “messing with her dirty-blond hair, putting it up and taking it down again with the controlled power of a butcher preparing cuts of meat.” Yeah, I mean, not exactly elegant, is it?

Serena says: “I loved ‘Any Younger’ [by Natalie Shapero] and I don’t know anything much about poetry or how to read it.” Agreed.

And then, two of my most negative takes from the Diet weeks got pushback from readers. I was worried those dashed-off reviews would seem blithe, and these two may have missed the mark.

Regarding Kelefa Sanneh’s piece on food deserts, Serena writes: “All Sanneh was saying, in my opinion, is there needs to be an examination of whether anyone is going to buy onions and apples instead of potato chips before we spend any more money trying to get clean and whole foods to every neighborhood. Maybe the money would be better deployed to assist the under-served communities in another way.”

To clarify, I have no problem with Sanneh poking holes in the food-desert model, which has plenty of flaws. The trouble is that he offers nothing in its place. It’s a politics of debunking, indicating why the proposed solutions won’t work, but not thinking through the material inequalities at the root of the issue. His skepticism, in other words, is asymmetrical: He wants empirical proof that progressive interventions will change behaviors, but the idea that accepting people’s preferences and letting the market sort it out will work better is taken as a given. Where’s the proof of that?

Regarding Stephania Taladrid’s forgiving profile of María Corina Machado, Michael O. writes: “I rarely ever strongly disagree with your views, but this one sounds like you're repeating talking points of the Maduro regime. Yes, you can point out that many, many flaws and problems with neo-liberal solutions in South America but compared with the corrupt inept dictatorship that was Maduro's regime any functioning government (even a right-leaning one) would be a welcome change. Might it end badly if Machado led the country? Possibly, but it's doubtful it could be worse than what the country is right now.”

Sure, but that’s an extraordinarily low bar. My issue with the piece is that Taladrid doesn’t substantially scrutinize Machado, and accepts her picture of the political stakes in which she’s synonymous with democracy, without actually interrogating her economic and geopolitical plans. Democratic legitimacy and authoritarian consolidation are not mutually exclusive stages of political history, and I don't need to believe Machado would be worse than Maduro to think this is a bad, even dangerous piece.

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