Last Week’s New Yorker, week of August 24 & 31

“‘BOY DO I NEED HELP VERY MUCH’”

The best thing in the magazine this week is “Hidden Life”, the fiction piece by Madhuri Vijay, which is not to be missed. But there’s plenty of other superb work, too! (Good thing, since the magazine is off next week and some end-of-summer longreads will tide us over.)

Must-Reads:

“The Scientist’s Children” (A Reporter at Large) - Rachel Aviv finds the cure to be worse than the kuru. Aviv’s most ambitious piece in a while; it would have been easier to frame this as an uncovered history – the shocked quote from the guy who revealed the scandal, “‘I realized I’m in the middle of a pedophile operation that has been run out of the N.I.H. by a Nobel laureate for thirty years’”, is quite a hook. But Aviv is more interested in the afterlives of pain radiating from the scientist Gadjusek’s unthinkable practice of sub-legally stealing away dozens of children to raise and molest. That leads her to a trickier thread, following the tortured now-adult who continues to idolize Gadjusek while he pursues justice for those accused of sorcery in Papua New Guinea. Cutting this material out might streamline the story, but it would take away the care and genuine interest that makes it so much more than a lurid true-crime narrative. Yes, there is some of that, especially in the nauseating impunity that goes along with a Nobel, and in Gadjusek’s bizarre self-awareness. But Aviv doesn’t spend long on the molestation, which is only one part of Gadjusek’s misdeed; its harms come not only from perversion but from the colonialist mindset that allowed him to think he could raise ‘savages’ into ‘normal’ children, like an even creepier Henry Higgins. Aviv is brilliantly unwilling to let anything serve only as a metaphor; these past harms are tangible and literal, as are separate present harms. All must be held, but all are held together.

“Taking the Heat” (The Control of Nature) - Eric Klinenberg says no tree, no shade. The second winning entry in what will hopefully be a series of climate-change-design pieces by Klinenberg, who doesn’t fix what isn’t broken, structuring this piece precisely like the last one: One section of background followed by three case studies granted two sections each. Klinenberg manages to highlight the beauty and innovation of each of these projects without sounding like a booster, and without ignoring just how little any one project can do in the face of climate change; here, the final beat considers the “‘hard limit’” of adaptive measures – at some point, we just have to flee. That doesn’t mean it’s not worth taking these measures. Milan has Stefano Boeri’s gorgeous “vertical forests” and reclaimed vegetation zones; Barcelona was early to pursue “green corridors” of urban planting; Paris has been pedestrianizing for decades. Each section is good, but the most fun is in Klinenberg’s attentiveness to the countries’ similarities and differences; his continual struggle to get people to show up on time, usually for heat-related reasons, is both a great running gag and a reinforcement of the stakes. The heat is on.

Window-Shop:

🗣️ “Pin-Striped Promo” (Giveaway Dept.) - Bruce Handy talks with the bobblehead honcho. Balancing the topic’s inherent silliness with a relatively dry, logistics-forward treatment works wonderfully. Like many a good Talk, provides the answer to a question you didn’t know you had.

“Making the Sex Scandal” (Books) - Adam Gopnik runs a Mucker. Gopnik’s framing device is about scandals generally, but it pretty quickly gets overwhelmed by this scandal in particular, which is so sui generis that it’s hard to take seriously Gopnik’s claim that it’s among the “most instructive” scandals. Instead, in an odd connection to the week’s fiction piece, which also concerns Theosophy and hidden erotic natures (but is wildly different in tone and conclusion), Gopnik spins the tale of a pastor who wanted to make sex sanctified, to remove the shame of nakedness and the repression of sex – and the slander he and his followers faced from a town whose men would like to keep their wives repressed, thank you very much. Christopher Clark’s book is surely as “fine and detailed” as Gopnik says, but even in those details, there’s no devil. So maybe the summary is enough.

🗣️ “Where There’s Smoke” (Up in the Air) - Robert Sullivan shops at Hot Topography. I had no idea we used fire towers on the East Coast. All the fun characterization here is gravy.

“Big Dumb Gluttonous Fun” (Dispatches) - Rachel Monroe knows all fairs aren’t lovely and worshipful. Monroe went to the ill-fated D.C. fair and, thankfully, quickly realized there was nothing there and she had nothing new to say about its vacuity. She headed to the Dakotas instead, where she found a bizarre corporate reconstruction of a charming rural town; the Mr. Bubble guy owns every tourist entity, and has turned the town into a Teddy Roosevelt theme park with no rides. This second section is easily the highlight of the piece; Monroe continues to a rodeo and a fireworks show (wait, didn’t we just…) and then on to a powwow, where, too predictably, she finds a vision of real America (“The day felt impossibly wide, broad enough to accommodate all the country’s contradictions”). It doesn’t quite hit, but it’s a fair shot.

“Fall Preview” (Goings On) - Wanted to make note of Sheldon Pierce’s Contemporary Music blurb, which discusses the edges of genre in an uncommonly perceptive way. I’d love to see the magazine’s pop coverage follow this example.

Skip Without Guilt:

“Eyes Up Here” (On and Off the Menu) - Hannah Goldfield gives a hoot. Needs more room to breathe; Hooters has a complicated enough backstory that once Goldfield dispenses with it, plus some cursory defenses of the brand image from a few of the longest-standing Hooters women (what are they supposed to say, exactly?) there are only two paragraphs left, enough for a too-quick mention of Support the Girls (a masterpiece) and the chain’s incidental child-friendliness. Goldfield obviously harbors a more complex mix of emotions than she fully articulates. And some mention of Femboy Hooters would be nice – what, did we live through March 2020 for nothing??

“Fighting Words” (Profiles) - Andrew Marantz is stuck between a suitcase and a suit case with Mahmoud Khalil. Frustrating in its insistence on being merely a profile; Marantz stays so tightly at Khalil’s side that he’s hardly able to articulate the meaning of his travails. Instead, we hear endless variations on the theme of Khalil’s implacable polish; he is, variously, “chivalrous”, “unfailingly polite”, stolid, a “levelheaded mediator”. This grows repetitive, and because the magazine has been the source of such excellent deportation coverage already, the treatment is oddly tentative. Marantz often writes as if Trump is merely about to do something illegal, as though Khalil’s case weren’t happening in the context of hundreds of thousands of other deportees, including many citizens, a number of whom were children. Perhaps Marantz doesn’t consider those deportations to be as obviously politically motivated as Khalil’s, but he doesn’t say so. The most revealing material here comes from Khalil’s visit to D.C, where he’s brushed off or condescended to by most Democrats (“‘I wonder if you’ve reached out to our more pro-Israel members’”, asks a leading House Democrat; “‘So far, we haven’t seen much interest’”, replies Khalil), apparently excepting only the Squad. The anecdote plays into my most cynical preconceptions maybe too neatly. What losers!

Letters:

Michael O. liked Molly Young’s profile of Johnny Knoxville a bit more than I did, and says he’s “okay with a story occasionally not revealing a terrible truth and just being kinda fun”, plus “her sentences are a delight”.

Michael B. recommends John Semley’s feature on mortician artistry in Harper’s, which I heartily second.

mari

nara