Last Week’s New Yorker, week of December 22

“she said it would be very easy for her to convert someone to Catholicism. ‘It has great appeal,’ she said. ‘Not for me, of course – but I can see the appeal.’”

It’s the puzzles and games issue, which is always a chance to stretch my ridiculous format to its breaking point. There are one million ways I could format the comics, which are presented as essentially one feature piece: “Cartoonists On Cartoonists” (Dept. of Hoopla) - Various artists draw on their influences. The comics are separate from one another, though, and seem obviously like riffs on the hundred-anniversary Takes format – even though there is also an excellent, written-word Takes in here. Anyway, a la Takes, they’re just getting a 🗯️ emoji in front and no summative verbiage, while the puzzles get a 🎲 (not a hideous 🧩, the worst emoji) plus the usual treatment.

Must-Read:

“Centenarian” (Journals) - Calvin Tomkins keeps it one hundred. Digressive but never evasive, exactly as journals should be. Tomkins apparently undertook the project because he couldn’t visit artists and needed to keep writing; hilariously, a hundred years on, he discovered a new kind of writing he’s very good at. Even when Tomkins is sobbing over encroaching authoritarianism, he manages not to be too mundane; his takes on Trump and truth are more astute than some I’ve seen in these pages. Everything else is even better, from the hyper-specific details of Tomkins’ life past and present – apparently this diary is also an excuse to, one, pull a few good stories from the mind’s cutting room, and two, gripe about encroaching poor health (fair!) – to the broader project of self-summation, which Tomkins handles admirably lightly. There is still some repetition here; I can’t imagine this was substantially edited, especially because the last entry is tagged just nine days prior to magazine release, and I’m sure Tomkins had enough on his plate ensuring each individual entry had perfect, clean, Tompkins-esque prose without also checking the rather long piece as a whole for redundancy. I like that in the end there is no expected takeaway; on the one hand, you can’t take anything with you; on the other hand, if you wish to be the last living Duchamp scholar that knew the man, you must first befriend Duchamp. Get to it!

🗯️ Pierre on Hokinson - By far the most ambitious of the comics here; a full-on mini biography, complete with framing device. A note-perfect appreciation, with sharp comedy, bizarre tragedy, charming anecdote, pertinent politics, and even a little bit of inside baseball: I didn’t know the staff used to write cartoon punchlines collectively, but now that I do I’ll look at those early cartoons very differently.

Window-Shop:

Allen on Soglow (Takes) - One of the very best installments of this feature because there’s no need to try to summarize anything; Soglow’s incredible work is both recognizable and inherently instantaneous. Instead, Allen finds the pieces that some of the most puzzling spots were drawn for: I had always wondered what that woman was carving (a duck, as Allen apparently guessed!) and it’s amusing to find out the Natural History Museum spot was drawn to illustrate a mere aside in a piece about clothing. The building-with-a-bra, on the other hand… has that gotten much use? I’d like a graph of the most-and-least-reused Soglow spots now. They really are quite perfect.

🎲 “Cryptic Crossword” - Paolo Pasco would rather have a Sondheim aslant of him than a slant rhyme inside of him. You must pair this with Michael Schulman’s excellent piece, immediately below. But it’s a smashing cryptic in its own right, playing fair and proving merely a difficult feat, not a heroic one. That Pasco was able to relate every single clue to Sondheim is simply astonishing. Really, this might be my favorite thing in the issue, but I certainly wasn’t going to require everyone to do a cryptic. I think I’d get complaints.

“The Puzzle Maestro” (Books) - Michael Schulman rolls along the dice. Such a fun choice to ask us to solve a few of Sondheim’s puzzles along the way; I was able to crack the first two, but that anagram of HARMONICAS is pretty devilish. (I did figure out that the word also anagrams into A SONIC HARM, which I greatly enjoy.) Sondheim was not only the creator of New York magazine’s puzzles page, bringing the Cryptic to America, he also invented party games guaranteed to start fights (call him the dudgeon master) and later arranged elaborate puzzle-solving mystery parties. If the very idea doesn’t make you smile, the details still will: that Anthony Perkins was the murderer in one party “by coincidence” nearly beggars belief. Also, in a chain of events so absurd Schulman throws it away a bit too casually, Sondheim’s party inspired a movie (The Last of Sheila), which inspired a real scavenger hunt, which inspired a movie (Midnight Madness), which inspired “another real-life contest”, which inspired a movie (The Game). Plus, as Schulman points out, Rian Johnson’s Glass Onion was inspired by Sheila, while Sondheim’s initial party inspired the play Sleuth, later a classic Joe Mankiewicz flick. One party, five films! The last section here is the least interesting; Schulman repeats too many of the usual Sondheim anecdotes (if I have to hear about coercin’ a bull one more time…) and ends on a thudding Leonard Bernstein acrostic. Some people should stick to melody.

🗯️ Flake on Harvey - Functions as a melancholy duo with Pierre’s effort – Hokinson is a major character here! – and Flake is a master of drawn melancholy. (I honestly wonder why she usually goes for gags.)

🎲 “Rough Copy” - Mollie Cowger would like to buy a towel. Easily the best standalone puzzle of the bunch, a fantastic medium-difficulty crossword even before the clever letter-swapping twist, which is consistently well-executed, and leads to a final-solve pun that had me grinning.

“Split Take” (The Current Cinema) - Justin Chang is a standup guy. A seriously solid review, opening with leads Laura Dern, whose “scowl is one of the great wonders of American movies”, and Will Arnett, “a good enough actor to convince you that he isn’t a skilled comedian”, then unpacking the complicated Bradley Cooper thing; he operates “with the hiss of an airbrush”, but thankfully, this time, he’s “made a conscious effort to scale down and cheer up.” The movie’s shot with “a rough-hewn intimacy that offsets, and sometimes even deepens, the softer, more sitcomy formulations of the script” (what great phrasing!) and finds enough moments of subtle sadness to offset any hint of a missing laugh track. Chang sells it!

“Selective Memory” (The Theatre) - Helen Shaw has brain fog fog fog fog fog fog fog fog fog fog fog fog fog fog fog fog fog fog fog fog fog fog fog fog fog fog. The Marjorie Prime review is perfectly alright if a bit pro forma; the changing-face-of-A.I. stuff is surely the very reason why the show is being restaged, so it doesn’t seem worth detailing. But the Anna Christie review is a vicious pan that suggests, contra what I’ve said again and again, that Shaw actually has plenty of acid in her, when circumstances demand. It’s a delight! From the bizarro physical choices of Tom Sturridge, who plays Mat Burke as “a pallid, twitchy creep, crawling on his haunches like Caliban and wriggling as if he’s got an eel down his trousers”, to the disjunctive chorus of “stevedores from central casting”, to Michelle Williams, “wrong-footed” with a midwestern accent, this misbegotten production seems to have brought Shaw to her breaking point. Bully for us!

🗣️ “On the Line” (Kicks Dept.) - Rachel Syme is a Rockette, she is an… Islandette? Fittingly, has just the right amount of kick! Too little and it’d be sappy or hagiographic, but too much and you’re just being mean about the Rockettes for no reason. They’re an institution!

🗯️ Fitzgerald on Sempé - The way this is drawn really makes it seem like Fitzgerald was so depressed she was unable to make herself happy with Sempé despite her efforts – she mostly looks tired and cold even in the last panel – but the remembrance is heartfelt, especially the gorgeous panel in which a businessman shrinks into a bike-rider.

🗯️ Mahdavian on Thurber - Thudding setup (“I could do that” is played out, and don’t bring up drawing horses in this particular issue or you’ll draw attention to just how high the bar actually is) but the last five panels are a compelling appreciation.

I object to telling anyone to Skip a puzzle or short comic, but needs must:

🗯️ Finck on Steig - Really more of a brief personal essay with illustrations; the visuals do not contribute to the arc, and while they’re lovely in Finck’s usual way, they don’t take full advantage of the form anywhere, which limits how astute or witty they can be. The first half is much better than the second half, which gets oddly repetitious – how do you manage that in a four-page comic? – and less illuminates Steig than simply valorizes him.

🗯️ Chast on Wilson - Why, unlike every other reference to a cartoonist’s work in this section, is Wilson’s work, including the little boy from Nuts, not actually his drawing (or a reasonable imitation) but Chast’s? My guess is it’s because that work wasn’t done for this magazine, but that makes spending so much time on it weirder, kinda, and makes it hard to tell which jokes belong to whom. There are six panels of what I can only assume is Chast getting off topic (coffee candy, dead goldfish), and not actually a direct reference to anything of Wilson’s. Disjointed, but still charmingly Chastian.

🎲 “Shuffalo” - Christoph Niemann calls bull. Niemann’s illustration is absolutely delightful, and may, for some, single-handedly justify this obvious riff on the Times’ Spelling Bee, which is not especially fun to play.

🎲 “In a Flurry” - Patrick Berry flakes out. Berry is a master puzzler, and I have no idea how he managed to make this work. That said, it’s not especially fun to solve, since you must rely heavily, at first, on the top-and-bottom-loop “cheat”, and after that it’s mostly just about fitting the letters in right; the clues are a bit easy. The punchline you’re solving for is also anticlimactic.

🎲 “Going to Press” - Allan Sanders thinks Daedalus is more. The exact same concept as the front cover, but far more overdetermined.

Letters:

Michael B liked Rebecca Mead’s profile of Industry’s showrunners a bit more than I did, “…but suspect this is because it teaches me some things I didn't know about a show I like.” “I don't know if I'd characterize Industry as not satirizing what it depicts,” he says, a characterization that is not mine, but comes from Mead’s piece: “More than one friend or acquaintance of the pair told me it was important to understand that “Industry” is not a satire, and that the characters’ ambition — and their pleasure in material wealth — is shared by the show’s creators, even if Down and Kay no longer have the resilience for the hard-driving social life depicted on the show.” I agree that it forecloses some possibilities for the profile to include this as the company line. Surely there is such thing as a loving – or maybe just covetous – satire? (Not to presume; I haven’t seen the show.)

Michael O brings more Michael news and views: “Aviv's magisterial piece blew a hole in every Oliver Sacks fan out there. Discovering Robert DeNiro's semi-helpless character from Awakenings was a gleeful rapist was unpleasant enough. (Admittedly, I saw the film when I was nine or so, so my recollection might not be that accurate.) Regarding physician's credo of do no harm: alright, I agree he's more fiction writer/fabulist than anything else, but I think his contribution to medicine about increasing empathy and stressing patients' own narrative probably did more good than harm in the long run. 

But then again, I'm not a doctor.”

And Dan Kois points those interested in David McClelland, mentioned in the Weekend Special as one of the new prize eponyms, to another essay, Ian Frazier’s commemorative piece, and especially this line: “He made me feel as if my brain were a bicycle suspended in the center of my skull, and he got on it and pedaled much faster than I could. Then he would jump off and the wheels would keep on spinning when I was alone.” 👏🚲

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