Last Week's New Yorker Review: End-of-Year Edition
Last Week’s New Yorker: End-of-Year Edition
Howdy y'all! Thanks for continuing to bear with the Buttondown transition. If you tried to upgrade to a paid subscription and were turned off by the confusing interface, it now reads much cleaner, with the 5 a month and 40 a year options simply labeled. So far just 1 new paid subscriber since last week, so please consider pitching in if you like what I do. If you want to pay more than this amount, shoot me an email! I wish there were an easy way to do "sponsor" tiers as Substack does; there isn't yet. But the couple of you who were previously paying at the sponsor level will continue to do so. And – sorry to clutter up the intro with this stuff every week.
Here's a link to read this on the web.
Below you'll find the Top 25 Pieces Review, a special Letters Section, and at the bottom my 10 Favorite Pieces of the Year.
Year In Review: The Top 25 Pieces Review
Hugo Lindgren writes in to say: "Looking at the [magazine's] list of the most popular stories, I thought it might be interesting to line it up with your recommendations – how many rated Must Read, Window-Shop & Skip Without Guilt."
Who am I to turn down such a solid request?
“The Swamp” - James Lasdun sinks into the Alex Murdaugh murders, and the muck surrounding them. This was a high window-shop; it's an odd piece for the magazine but a fun one. Review here.
Ben Taub on the Titan Submersible. This fantastic piece is perhaps the most egregious case this year of something from the website not making the magazine for no clear reason. It's vivid, detailed, a bit bizarre, schadenfreude-stimulating, and yes... explosive. (Implosive?)
“Elon Musk’s Shadow Rule” - Ronan Farrow surveys the many pies Elon Musk has a finger in. This was a high skip; I found it to be a rehash but perhaps I was following the story closer than many. Review here.
“The End of the English Major” - Nathan Heller tours Arizona State and some school in Cambridge, looking for The Vanishing Humanities Major: A beast which once thundered across the American scene in mighty herds, recently hunted to near extinction. This was a high skip; certainly entertaining but Heller makes so many mistakes. The review is one of my better efforts, I'd say.
The best books of the year. This is a cool thingy but not an article as such.
“The Fugitive Princesses” - Heidi Blake tracks Sheikha Latifa and her sister’s torture, abuse, and multiple escape attempts, as they try to slip the tight grasp of their father, the emir of Dubai. This was a must-read. Powerful and propulsive; the kind of reporting that wins awards. Review here.
“The Ghostwriter” - J.R. Moehringer chronicles a life spent writing others’ stories. A low-ish skip. The closest thing to clickbait on this list, since it's only briefly about the Prince, really. I wasn't charmed. Review here.
“Marriage of the Minds” - Rachel Aviv visits the philosopher Agnes Callard, her ex-husband Ben, and her new husband and former student Arnold, as they raise children and explore What Marriage Is together. This was a must-read. What a delicious, hilarious, dramatic piece. My review got quoted in Today in Tabs, which lead to a welcome influx of readers.
Clare Malone blowing up Hasan Minhaj's spot. I loved this one, which was also online-only; Malone was among the best writers at 538 (rest in pieces, my problematic-fave website) and this was a great chance for her to sink her teeth into a complex story without too-high stakes. Super fun... though Minhaj's smearing of Malone has received a shockingly credulous audience at the Times and elsewhere. Even the media doesn't always demonstrate media literacy. Gross!
Agnes Callard tells us why we shouldn't travel. This was fun bait; not the world's greatest argument but good blogging nonetheless. Honestly happy I didn't have to think of something smart to say about it & could thus enjoy it purely on a lizard-brain level.
David Remnick interviews an historian about Ukraine. I listed to this as an audio interview; it was compelling but got lost in my mind's swirl with various other similar coverage, to be honest.
“Behind a Locked Door” - Margaret Talbot goes to Austria with a woman who was held in a kinderbeobachtungsstation, where children were treated with cruelty under the guise of suppressing misbehavior and sexual urges. This was a must-read. An intimate yet sweeping narrative with cleverly subsumed political points. Review here.
“No City Limits” - Lawrence Wright remembers the Old Austin, Texas, while searching for the heart of the New Austin, Texas. A high skip. Fun to read but (deliberately) shapeless, with some really troublesome material around homelessness. Review here.
“Spectacular Fall” - Nathan Heller doom loop-di-loops around San Francisco, a city allegedly in crisis. A low skip. Annoying centrist pols talk at you till you're bleary. Review here (Coincidentally, I compared it unfavorably to the Wright piece directly above.)
“Magic Realism” - D.T. Max unmasks the Black writer and academic Herman Carroll, who reinvented himself as Hache Carrillo, an Afro-Cuban. A low window-shop. An interesting story, but I had some issues with what details were emphasized, and preferred this earlier coverage in Rolling Stone. Review here.
“The Royal Me” - Rebecca Mead is among the last to review Prince Harry’s “Spare.” High skip. A positive review with quotes that make the book sound terrible (I guess I just don't like Moeringer's style.) Review here.
"The Ozempic Era" - Jia Tolentino gets a scrip for the new weight-loss drugs which are slimming down the celebrity class. This was a must-read. Some of my readers found its criticism too implicit, but I found it pretty biting, and bracing. Also I share Tolentino's fixation on solidarity as the political force. Review here.
"Defiance" - David Remnick profiles Salman Rushdie, focusing especially on his stabbing last August. A low window-shop. Wanted more literary analysis, less on the stabbing, frankly, but I think this way gets more clicks. Review here.
“Money on the Wall” - Patrick Radden Keefe looks deep into the eyes of Larry Gagosian, art dealer extraordinaire. Probably the funniest piece of the year for me. Works for it, too. I wrote plenty, to try and match its length.
Ted Chiang calls ChatGPT a blurry JPEG. One of the best pieces of writing on these chatbots so far, and the highlight of the magazine's voluminous coverage, easily.
"One of a Kind" - Beverly Gage travels to the National Institutes of Health campus, in hopes of a cure to her unique genetic disorder. Middle window-shop. I hardly criticized it in my review, I think it just didn't make a huge impact on me. Review here.
“Underworld” - Luke Mogelson takes cover in Ukraine, where “the burden of sacrifice has fallen increasingly on the underprivileged,” including the 28th Battalion of infantrymen, at the frontline of the war. Top of window-shop. Meticulous reporting, so brutal I could barely stomach it. Review here.
“Front Man” - Jia Tolentino tries to win Matty Healy’s “persona games.” Middling skip. He's a dickhead! Review here. (One of my better paragraphs, I think.)
“Big Little Lies” - Gideon Lewis-Kraus fudges the numbers with the behavioral economists whose work on deceit was deceitful. A must-read. Delicious, smart... Review here, or see below.
“The Price of Belief” - Ben Taub unravels the tale of Wirecard, the German company running a fraud, and the Financial Times’ Alphaville blogger who cracked the case. Another must-read. A fun and twisty tale. Review here.
Year In Review: Special Letters Section
This week I received two of the best and most in-depth letters I've gotten since I began this project. They deserve a special section of their own.
First, regular correspondent Michael writes: "I appreciated Singh's article on the Mongols but don't agree with his general thesis that global history is overly reliant on the relevance to how we live today... [That] is decidedly not the thesis of a number of global histories I've read, such as Linda Colley's The Gun, the Ship and the Pen. (Reviewed [by Jill Lepore] in the magazine.)
"I do think that in any work of history it's easy to overestimate the topic's importance. This is as true in biography as in commodity focused global histories ("how salt changed the world"). I enjoyed Singh's counter-argument to... the book's building up of how impressive Mongol cities were. But I think he oversteps in his generalization."
In subsequent correspondence, he continues, "[I] thought he was at least trying to generalize by implication. Global history has had its share of critics, including within the field. I'm interested in reading this debate I just stumbled on from historians working in it."
Second, Meave Gallagher wrote in to kvetch about the Franzen: "I'm about as irritated as I assumed I'd be when I saw the hed/dek... Why does Franzen focus only on LA? ...as a longtime volunteer for a TNR organization in Flatbush, which acknowledges (and does its best to resolve) many of the issues Franzen points to re: TNR, it is not the same project everywhere, and results vary wildly. ...My TNR group recently opened a community vet clinic with lower rates than private vets, and does as much education about TNR, spay/neuter, keeping domestic cats indoors, &c. &c., as it does actually trapping.
"Speaking of, it'd be a better article if he'd cited any more recent literature on feral cat population/control" – here Meave includes six academic papers and responses discussing the issue from all sides – "[and] I find his attitude about TNR rather cruel. I don't have any insight into how Best Friends works, but I know how NYC does/n't deal with our feral cats, and I know how hard Flatbush Cats has worked to embed itself in the community so it's not a bunch of "outgoing and glowingly complected" implied-white, upper-/upper-middle-class people condescending to poor people of color and/or immigrant households who simply don't understand how to deal with/care for feral cats, whether singly or in colonies. Franzen's classism is also quite prominent (like, he could just as easily be discussing anti-vax private school parents), and whether it's true for the trappers he followed I can't say, but I would challenge the implicit statement that his experience with these women is representative of most LA trappers."
Gallagher then mentions that she's been fostering a pair of tabbies, and if any readers may be interested in adoption, to check out their Instagram.
In subsequent correspondence, Gallagher and I had a back-and-forth about my casual description of cats as "spurn[ing] affection" – she writes, "...a cat more clearly lets you know when it does/n't want to interact, and it's your job to respect its boundaries, by establishing a way of asking for permission (when needed) first and stopping the interaction when the cat indicates it no longer wants to play/be petted/&c. ...They are super-weird, though, in a way unique to cats (seeing as how everyone is super-weird, really). I'd never argue that! But I think it's nice to live with little weirdos who know their own minds."
She cited a few more studies, which relied on subjective human observations of cat behavior, and added that "...It’s notoriously difficult to study housecat behavior bc they change so much when strangers enter the home or when they’re in a foreign environment (read: lab)."
I enjoyed having my cat conceptions challenged by that convo.
Oh, also, Gabe writes: "Damn Sam, tell us how you REALLY feel about The Queen’s Gambit."
Year In Review: My Favorite Pieces of the Year
Well, actually, I'm going to pick my 5 favorite pieces of the second half of the year; I did the first half here and don't care to repeat myself. (I will say that The Fog is my piece of the year.) All writing below is taken from past editions. [Also, the magazine recently laid Carolyn Kormann off – as you'll soon see, I think that was a pretty terrible call!]
“Through the Smoke” - Carolyn Kormann assesses the damage to Maui after massive wildfires. An unassuming triumph which demonstrates that a deep historical analysis of place can be embedded in a present-day narrative with no more than a few paragraphs of debriefing, and that climate coverage can be clear-eyed, gripping, and still provide realistic hope.
The contemporary impulse in disaster reporting is to focus primarily on the first-person narratives of survivors, and Kormann presents a few of those stories, but keeps them spare — the focus here is really on disaster recovery; both the way Hawaiians felt under-served by the systems in place, and their focus on equity in rebuilding. Kormann’s history of Hawaiian water exploitation is quick but punchy, and helped by a horrific, incriminating quote from a land-resource manager, which shows without having to tell us just how much of the colonialist mindset still proliferates. The coverage of official failure avoids the weeds of minutiae, but includes two whoppers of callous politician-speak from the mayor (“There are probably a lot of reasons you can apply to why we do what we do as human beings,”) and the police chief (“There was always a way out, if people were willing to go that way.”) Kormann provides a number of miniature one-section profiles of the lost and their affected families, which give the story scope — the downside could be a lack of depth, but well-picked details, like a child who “loved mixed martial arts” or a local who lived “‘on mangoes, basically, like a friggin’ fruitarian,” give us a snapshot without dwelling in bathos.
The real highlight of this story, though, are the last two sections, which show how climate catastrophe can provide a chance for community organization and rebuilding that does away with the most harmful and colonialist vestiges of the past. Kormann doesn’t overstate the case — this isn’t Annals of Activism — but the final image is beguiling. It will stick with me.
“The Mayor Talks a Good Game” - Ian Parker profiles Eric Adams, a liar’s liar. A madcap romp, possibly too funny for its own good — as with pre-presidency Trump, there is something charming about an open egomaniac that may help them gather more power than they otherwise might. A performer telegraphs the appearance of a lack of shame, and therefore a politician can succeed by genuinely lacking shame, since it somewhat paradoxically creates the appearance of a performance. In other words, they’re always accidentally doing crowd-work, because they actually think the crowd is there to see them; their narcissism looks like acted openness. (Evan Thies appears to be the man in charge of transforming Adam’s cop-grimace into a smile; when he says Adams has become “much more open,” and adds that running for office “can make you reveal things to yourself about yourself,” we’re left mainly with the impression that Adams is playing a character based in the idea of an appealing version of himself — which, I suppose, is just the opposite of what cops do on the job, playing authoritarian versions of themselves.) But if Adams comes across, in a certain sense, as our blowhard, Parker makes it clear that his liabilities are not merely character-based; he comes across as fairly hapless in the realm of policy, and so morally against delegation that fundamental jobs are going undone. Still, the piece isn’t especially interested in a line-item critique; mostly, it takes Eric Adams at face-value that he’s shaping the city in his image, and then asks, so, what image might that be?
This is also a feat of access, with Adams’ brothers giving not just quotes but telling quotes, and Parker finds a wealth of telling detail hidden in the margins: Keep an eye out for the fridge in the apartment listing, for example. It helps that Adams is so crudely theatrical that it’s easy to find moments where he’s acting like himself — that’s sort of his whole thing. But Parker doesn’t blow the hanging slider — he knocks it into Flushing Bay.
“Big Little Lies” - Gideon Lewis-Kraus fudges the numbers with the behavioral economists whose work on deceit was deceitful. You likely don’t need me to tell you to read this one; I’ve seen it linked everywhere, in part because it was up on the magazine’s website a few days before the print issue dropped. (I’m never sure why the occasional piece gets that treatment.) It’s obviously delicious, a fine new specimen in the magazine’s fairly vast and ever-growing collection on the theme of liars unmasked. I don’t have to tell you why the main thrust is so much fun — it’s literally dishonesty researchers being dishonest, and possibly on a vast scale — and if you knew how often I say my catchphrase, “You can never trust a social scientist,” you’d know this piece reaffirmed a few of my own biases to delightful effect. Lewis-Kraus aims at more than the obvious targets, though; he threads a political argument through the piece, which is dense with Obama references, that implicates the neoliberal “emphasis on the individual at the expense of the systemic,” and the desire for easy solutions that reaffirm power relations, in the success of the researchers and their pop-psychology. As far as reportage, the best get is a business-school professor who cheated and confessed to one of the lying economists, who speaks of putting the lie “in a lockbox in your mind where it never gets opened” — without her remarkable testimony, the argument that the deceit research may have lead to deceitful tactics could seem hammy or forced, but with it, it feels powerful. Maybe that’s my fallible human brain falling for a canny anecdote, or maybe it’s the truth, doing its thing — it will out, after all.
“Personal Statement” - Rachel Aviv is Joyce Carol Oates’ secret admirer. Fascinating. On the surface, Oates is a terribly difficult subject, deeply skeptical about the entire enterprise of profile-reporting and criticism (“‘The biographical “science” is a lie.’”), and so relentlessly guarded in her public life and her remarks not only to interviewers but even to close friends that, as she remarks, “‘none of my friends really know me.’” (Even her husbands are kept at arms length — the first remarks “I feel I don’t even know you” after reading a positive book review — from her intense devotion to her writing practice.) Aviv, meanwhile, is perhaps the foremost practitioner of the profile as psychological inquiry, seeking not so much to encapsulate a subject’s work as their psyche. But the tension of this misalignment drives the piece, with Aviv’s searching continually stymied by Oates’ evasions and denials. Aviv grasps toward a truth which is unreachable, even as Oates insists it exists — and, after all, she should know. The secret becomes a kind of metaphor for storytelling itself, with Aviv the student hoping to be inspired and Oates the master insisting that these lessons can come only from within. Oates is also, despite her withholding, a wonderful hang, whose surface-self is in no way rendered dull by its falsity — perhaps she feels this persona is not truly her, but she still exercises it in the manner of a skilled writer manipulating a protagonist, making sure to never be trite or boring. This story is a nice escape, without mortal stakes, and with the dark richness of the gothic tales Oates writes.
“A Land Held Hostage” - Jon Lee Anderson surveys the burning wreck of Haiti, where gangs have grasped power. Anderson’s vivid political portraits of South and Central American countries are often must-reads; here, he shows what happens when politics almost totally break down under the stress and raw violence of a broad societal collapse. (One spurred by the despicable wrongdoing of U.N. “peacekeeping” forces, among other factors.) As the country’s justice minister says, “people are fed up with politics. People want security.” That violence, foregrounded only as much as is necessary, makes for a grim and brutal read, but one that’s grounded in incredible feats of access — Anderson gets direct quotes from nearly every player, including the “bandit” gang-leader Barbecue, whose grotesque swagger makes for an intense centerpiece. In one unforgettable section on the rumors surrounding the assassination of the country’s president, it’s slowly revealed that the likely suspects behind the act include pretty much everyone we’d met so far. It’s kill or be killed — as demonstrated again by the police-backed vigilante movement Bwa Kale, which murders gang members. And as Barbecue says, “if there is any collateral damage, that’s not us.”
Thank you so much for reading this newsletter, whether you've been here since the beginning of the year or just joined last week. I have no plans to go anywhere or change anything. I'll keep this train a-chugging till the wheels come off the track.
Thank you, Sam (?), for writing about “Half Hour to Aberdour” yesterday -- couldn't find your email though I did subscribe.
Little correction for your readers – the Aberdour here is in Scotland. Vis a vis Scottish ballads more than Irish modernism. But, Maybe thee's some of that too.
Look forward to reading your review of the issue. All good wishes, DB