Last Week's New Yorker Review: End-of-Year Edition
Last Week’s New Yorker: End-of-Year Edition
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
The magazine’s list of its top 25 pieces is always compelling, because they’re ranked in order of total time people spent reading them – which produces a far more surprising list than mere pageviews might. Here are my recycled blurbs (for those taken from the magazine; some are website-only) along with what I thought of the pieces.
"The Oligarch's Son" - Patrick Radden Keefe says forget it, Zac, it's Londontown. This was a high window-shop; I found it slightly overlong. Shows what I know! Review here.
The best books of the year. I’ll quote myself from last year: This is a cool thingy but not an article as such.
“Conviction” - Rachel Aviv prays for better angels with Lucy Letby, the nurse convicted of child murder on very thin grounds. Very high window-shop, kept from must read on the grounds that it made me feel ill. Review here.
Eren Orbey on a postpartum killing. I didn’t read this one as it was online-only and quite long (and looks like it would put me in a bad mood), and unless someone pays me twenty dollars I’m not going to read it just to write a one-line blurb here.
"A New Life" - Leslie Jamison is like, "Baby, baby, baby, oh." Mid-to-low skip. Didn’t work at all for me – but my takedown got linked in Today in Tabs, so that was fun. Review here.
Election results map. Ew! No! Not an article! Boo!
“The Inheritor” - Clare Malone bears down on R.F.K. This was a must-read! It went viral for the adventures in wildlife, but it’s also just a really good piece of writing. Review here.
"Time's Up" - Sam Knight looks back in anger at fourteen years of Tory folly. A (very) high skip. Knight rocks but this didn’t work for me. Review here.
“His Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy” - Ian Parker writes concrete poetry at Ye’s beachside wreck. Middle window-shop – coulda gone deeper – but I’ve thought about this one quite a bit since I read it.
Anna Russell on going no-contact with parents. Been meaning to get around to this one, but haven’t yet. Pay me to!
Jane Meyer on Pete Hegseth’s controversial past. She gets scoops! You cannot deny it!
Jia Tolentino on celebrating Luigi. Some moments call for a longread, others call for a blog post. Tolentino knew that this was the latter, and she delivered the goods.
"The Last Campaign" - Evan Osnos keeps Biden his time. Low skip! Shoulda been lower! I would call my review “prescient” but actually this shit was kinda just obvious. Review here.
“No Time to Die” - Dhruv Khullar goes rucking crazy with life-extension extremist Peter Attia. High window-shop. Not mean enough; still excellent. Review here.
"Cave Woman" - D.T. Max has a hibernation realization with loner par excellence Beatriz Flamini. Must-read. This piece fuckin’ rules. Very narrowly missed my top 5 of the first half of the year. Review here.
“Land of Make-Believe” - Evan Osnos flubs the lines with Hollywood Ponzi-schemer Zach Horwitz. This was in “Give a Glance”, meaning basically very low window-shop. Jeez, true crime does really well by these metrics, doesn’t it? This was unexceptional but a lot of fun. Review here.
“Growing Pains” - Rachel Monroe pays a visit to the Gilbert Goons’ quad. Very low skip. This is a really troubling and, by my lights, misguided piece. Review here.
"Identity Crisis" - Jay Caspian Kang plays Pretendian with semi-cancelled academic Elizabeth Hoover. High skip. The “Fabulists Exposed” genre strikes again. Review here.
Sophie Elmhirst on tradwives – or is it trad wives? This one didn’t even cross my path! I’d love to read it… for the right price! (The right price is twenty dollars.)
Adam Iscoe on not being able to get a reservation. Nope, didn’t get to it. I have a full time job now, people; I can’t be reading tabs all day!
“The Home Front” - Charles Bethea makes the case for prepper stations. Low skip, which shows what I know – I found it glib and uninteresting. Review here.
“Be Her Guest” - Molly Fischer is lead up the Ina Garten path. Must-read. Great fun! AUNT!! Review here.
"Role Play" - Ronan Farrow roller-skates alone with RuPaul. Must-read. I think about this piece so much. It helps that I watch a good amount of Drag Race, so “changing the way I think about RuPaul” actually means something to me. If it means something to you and you haven’t read this… get to it!
"Hostages" - David Remnick tunnels into Benjamin Netanyahu and his opposite number Yahya Sinwar. Mid skip. Better than nothing, but still not quite the thing.
Jessica Winter on J.D. Vance’s elisions. Almost too sad to be scandalous. A solid blog based on good reporting.
Year In Review: My Favorite Pieces of the Year
You know the drill (maybe): I'm going to pick my 5 favorite pieces of the second half of the year (not including one-page critics’ reviews, just features and longer critics’ pieces); I did the first half here and don't care to repeat myself. (“Invisible City” is my favorite piece of the year.) All writing below is taken from past editions. I’ll be doing a broader Prospect of the Periodical in an upcoming Weekend Special.
Honorable mention that would probably be #1, DQ’d for only being a “new translation” and not new writing: “On Cancer and Desire” - Annie Ernaux finds meaning in the mess. This is basically cheating; it’s not even new Ernaux, just newly-translated. To file this under “Personal History” is a bit like filing Walden under “Letter from Concord” – it’s hard to argue against, but also obviously wrong. Anyway, yes, yes, it’s a masterpiece, chronicling Ernaux’s year of cancer, love, and war in just a few enigmatic gestures. The magazine does deserve significant credit for its excerption, which is so elegant one hardly minds traversing the entire emotional journey of a book-length work in a single segmented section. If any reader checks out the Ernaux book, I’d be interested to know whether this section appears in full or, as I imagine is more likely, has been carefully pieced together. If the latter, the feat is nearly on par with Alison L. Strayer’s translation. Ernaux’s whole project is both formally mirrored and explicated by this excerpt, which builds to a meditation on “visible evidence” followed by more literal “insides” – something Ernaux says “I realize now that I neither saw nor wanted to see.” This story tracks shed skins – piles of clothing, removed for what Strayer translates as “lovemaking” – with bodies absent. Ernaux’s story is a reminiscence on the recent past; memories, absent of bodies but showing their traces. Ernaux herself is present but absent, her visions are imparted changed – as she writes of one photo, “To tell the truth, it is neither alien nor familiar, having simply undergone a distortion of its dimensions and a heightening of all its colors.” Photography and memory are not so distant. I’ll spare you more limp analysis. By the way, don’t go in expecting a trudge; the piece is very funny, and not just in some droll literary sense – the last line is a punchline.
“You Won’t Get Free of It” - Rachel Aviv writes a wrong. First things first – yes, this is the longest thing the magazine has published since I’ve been writing this newsletter, just barely beating out PRK’s Gagosian profile. Aviv could absolutely have gotten a short book out of this material – flesh out the other daughters a bit more, include more expert testimony – but this piece in this venue does serve, inevitably, as a kind of mea culpa on the magazine’s part; Munro was published fifty-five times, after all, and her work was practically synonymous with its best fiction. Aviv even pulls Deborah Treisman aside to avow, in a slightly HR-ish manner, that she didn’t know the full story. But Aviv provides much more than a rehash of the original Toronto Star article with a few additional perspectives. (To refresh your memory: Munro’s daughter was sexually abused by her stepfather; Munro, upon learning of the abuse, ultimately stayed with the man.) For one, her close reading of Munro’s work with the newfound knowledge of these acts is a feat; every quote is relevant and resonant. But Andrea’s voice is centered, and it’s always her story being told, even when Munro’s work is the lens through which it’s viewed. (If Aviv is unfair to anyone, it’s us readers, who “seemed to blithely accept that [Munro’s] stories, with their grisly leitmotifs, were the product of a saintly lady who was making it all up, out of empathy.” Surely this suspension of emotional disbelief is foundational to the practice of reading postmodern fiction.) This piece is a bit discourse-resistant, or at least flattened by the usual stock readings. Sure, it shows that so many people knew and did nothing, but beyond the present-day horrifically incurious Canadian press (and one awful academic), the elisions seem to have more to do with the flow of information than malice – Munro had powerful friends who heard her side of the story, her children did not. Yes, Munro’s cruelty and lack of self-respect are shocking, but it’s a credit to Aviv’s nuanced humanism that the shock is never the point; this is not a piece about cancelling or not cancelling Munroe, thank goodness. What is it a piece about? Cognitive distortions; family systems; what is said and unsaid. How gender roles can enable abuse; how close looking can substitute for true awareness. (“There’s a sense in which her remarkable capacity to describe a woman’s experience is born less from affinity than from observation.”) Even – how art can be positively shaped by lack, void. (The piece has much in common, in this, with Aviv’s profile of Joyce Carol Oates, though there the central art-shaping mystery remains mysterious, and by all appearances un-horrific.) Aviv has written into being a vast open space, all clarity, as if to argue against Munro’s tight, jagged montages, full of false breakthroughs. Things don’t have to be repressed: We have pages and pages to bring it all to light.
“Pivotal, Seminal, Rare” - Tad Friend knows dealer Glenn Horowitz wants everything rare books for the rare. I know the era of the erudite sleazeball is long past – that’s basically what this whole piece is about, that Horowitz’s era is over – but despite or perhaps because of that, Horowitz has an eccentric charm; he’s a Bennington grad who talks like he’s hoping to attract a devoted cadre of murderous collegiates (I’d read his journal). Or perhaps a conveniently vulnerable lineage of Guinness-faced aristocrats: Friend presents him, with a great dollop of irony, as a sort of Mazzini figure – killing off the very thing he represents, the gentleman’s profession of book dealer, by turning it into a capitalistic enterprise focused largely on predicting the swing of the reaper’s scythe. (“‘There were elderly people whom it made sense to befriend, to do the errands for them that young people can do,’” goes his slightly venomous origin story.) All the other booksellers were actually capitalists already, of course, but that Horowitz was pulling tricks faster made him a target. (“There is certainly an argument that other dealers see themselves as hedgehogs outraged by a fox, when they’re actually foxes outraged by a wolf.”) I know antiheroes aren’t en vogue (especially those who give “unprompted… weight-loss targets” to the young women under their employ), but make an exception for Horowitz, whose catty summations are delightfully unfair (Nabokov’s son “‘never achieved that third dimension that befitted someone who bore the name Nabokov’”, “Louise Glück, who wouldn’t let him sell her archive, was ‘a madwoman’”, another unfortunate is ‘an ancient woman who, as it seems, has a brain illness.’”) and whose cockroach joie de vivre is undeniable. It’s his bad luck and our good fortune that a profiler as astute as Friend made his acquaintance; he gets completely trapped on the matter of some Nixon letters he obviously purloined, and he has an egotist’s irrepressible desire to present his side of things, which overrules whatever minimal press training he might have picked up. This is a character assassination, pretty much, yet I come away from it with a lot of love for Horowitz, a New York original, sleaze and all.
“The Tail End” - Sloane Crosley says cat’s all, folks. Truly, there is no reason not to just read this one: It’s really short, it’s highly accessible, it’s funny, it’s moving, it has enough bite not to go down like, well, cat food. A message to the people who read this newsletter without reading the magazine: It’s time to use your complimentary non-subscriber article. The premise – a personal essay about a dying cat – is so simple it seems impossible to execute well: Insisting on its gravity would be blinkered; adding false depth would be contrived. Crosley’s solution, which is revealed in the climactic flourish (it’s effective enough I’m tempted to add a spoiler tag), is to simply insist that one cat gets one story. “Maybe I can leave the jokes in the grass, swim naked in the pool of a hard sell. Your pet dies; it feels like a secret you’ve been keeping might die with her. It feels serious.” I have an elderly rescue dog who, as with Crosley’s cat, “fell into my lap.” Early in my life with her she had a brush with vet-induced death so close that I still think of every day with her as an unearned gift. (I suppose it’s earned in the sense that I’m the one cleaning her perennial liquid shits off the floor.) I suppose that means this is catered toward me – but I’m really highly resistant toward much pet content, as readers of the Cartoon and Poem Supplement to this newsletter can attest. Crosley’s tone stubbornly insists on the personal part of the personal history, never trying to explain her sorrow away but putting it before us without fear of judgement. That helps. I didn’t find any of the humor that amusing, but neither does it cheapen Crosley’s story. That’s vital. But none of that is really what makes the tale purr. That comes from deeper inside.
“Origin Story” - Parul Sehgal doesn’t get The Message. Last week I said that Alexandra Schwartz’s takedown of the new Rachel Kushner novel “certainly isn’t written to go viral and inspire lots of discourse.” Well… this is! Like Schwartz, Sehgal’s beef isn’t with the past work of the author, but solely with their latest effort. And like Schwartz, Sehgal feels that the new book is essentially a betrayal of the writer’s chosen form: For Kushner, realism; for Coates, journalism. But where Schwartz sounded weary, Sehgal is fairly gleeful to unsheathe her daggers. In part that’s because she’s found a smoking gun, an old Atlantic blog where, contrary to the narrative he’s espoused on his press tour, Coates directly admits that Israel is a blind spot he’s well aware of and has intentionally avoided confronting. To be honest, I think it’s pretty important for any social movement to have a moderately narcissistic figurehead who’s willing to do press rounds and speak the truth – when they go Phyllis Schlafly, we go Betty Friedan. As Moira Donegan’s 2023 piece on Friedan says, she was “one of those characters whom history responds to, someone who shapes public opinion through the force of her personality”, but that doesn’t excuse her sometimes insidiously retrograde viewpoint. It’s for history to judge Coates as a public figure, but it’s for Sehgal to judge his book, and in it she finds a “failure to represent other perspectives”, both the perspectives of the people that live in the three places he travels to, and uses largely as “a painted backdrop for his own meditations”, and the perspectives of the “critics on the left” and his own “intellectual heroes”, who might complicate the narrative of “sudden epiphany” he’s selling. I don’t think I’d have lodged this criticism of Coates on my own, but reading Sehgal brought me to a “sudden epiphany” of a different kind – this emperor is, at the very least, not wearing the same kind of clothes I thought he was.
“Alpha Girls” - Jazmine Hughes pledges Alpha Kamala Alpha. Possibly the definitive piece on Harris’ character, which is truly impossible to understand without the context of AKA. Did I need quite so much of that context? Probably not – the organization’s proclaimed politics (they’re scrupulously hush-hush regarding them, but they’re also that way regarding everything else) don’t seem nearly as important as their implied politics, which might rhyme with respectability, but are arguably distinct, since the AKA battle isn’t “for acceptance” by the majority but instead for dignity within a Black identity. (Of course, there’s still a heavy reliance on a majoritarian standard of dignity, which raises the question of who’s setting the terms of the thing they strive for – is white dignity dignity at all?) It strikes me that Harris’ AKA mindset is notable not just for what it says about her relationship to race but also for what it says about her relationship to information – her paranoia is institutional because she’s been trained that way. (Plenty of Republicans have been frat bros, but she’s the first postwar Democrat to really come from Greek life – sorry, Bill Clinton; APO doesn’t count.) Hughes’ piece really comes to life in its last two sections, where things get personal. (“Even before I grew up to be a dreadlocked, braless lesbian with tattoos and hairy armpits, I was always suspicious of sororities… I am the eldest of five daughters, and I never want to wear a matching outfit again.”) The extreme supportiveness of the AKAs does have a win-friends-and-influence-people eeriness – I suppose that’s the result when your cultlike initiation rituals are in service of the message “uplift other Black women at all costs.” Still, those efforts are obviously genuine. “The only people who care enough about us to work consistently for our liberation are us,” goes the Combahee River Collective phrase. AKA presents a twisted version of that vision – take out “liberation,” insert “power.” And in about a week, four hundred low-information white mothers in Pennsylvania will decide once and for all whether that power will be granted or ripped away in favor of fascism. Or so, at least, will go the narrative. If you can smile and skee wee through that, well… I suppose the phrase is, “more power to you.”
I still like what I wrote last year, so here it is again: 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.
Great analysis / summary of the Aviv piece on Munro.
The only thing that really bothered me about her broader “art imitates life / tells on you” is the brief aside about Munro’s ambivalent, dismissive reaction to her own assault. I read the passage as subtly casting a sinister light on that knowledge — an early example of her capacity to dismiss violence out of hand, of her deficient empathy.
I’d read a lot of Charlotte Shane and Vanessa Veselka when I lighted on the Aviv piece. They wrote extremely contested (but imo pretty persuasive) critiques of how victims of sexual violence are expected to adopt an affect and presentation to be constructive about their experience, and write about how deviance from that expectation is pathologized.
I think what Aviv does with the early life anecdote is cavalier and needlessly pathologizing. Shane, eg, wrote of abuse she received as a sex worker and how, while she found it obviously unpleasant, she didn’t feel particularly scarred by it. She was more sick of the psychic strain and fatigue she accrued by putting up with it than degraded by the acts.
Shane explicitly did not prescribe her own reaction to anyone else, but also refused to be written off as in denial, or disbelieved over a lack of evident crisis. In my understanding of her argument, when someone comes to us and discloses a history of violence, we owe that person a reaction of comfort and support; by contrast, the person thus disclosing does not owe us anything, including an affect of crisis or suffering.
There’s a weird dissonance in Aviv’s piece, stemming from how authorities’ over-emphasis of Andrea’s atypical affect (ie, that of a functional adult) is shown to be sloppiness and neglect, while the younger Alice’s atypical affect is portrayed as an ominous portent of her pathology.
Munro’s betrayal of her daughter is unconscionable, but her orientation toward her own experience is basically immaterial, as I see it. It provides no insight.
The grammar in that third para is abominable. Here it is rephrased: “ I’d read a lot of Charlotte Shane and Vanessa Veselka when I lighted on the Aviv piece. They wrote extremely contested (but imo pretty persuasive) critiques of how victims of sexual violence are expected to adopt specific affects and presentations, in order to be supported constructively by others. Deviation from the archetypes gets you pathologized as delusional / in denial, or worse, a traitor and bad influence of one kind or another.
The restaurant reservation piece didn't feel very "New Yorker"-y to me but is worth a read.
I was going to complain that you picked the wrong Tad Friend piece to be in your top five only to realize the motivation speaker one came at the tail end of 2023 (https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2023/12/11/jesse-itzlers-secrets-of-success).
My less scientific top five of features. There's a number of reviews / other articles that would probably edge out one or two of these but that's too much work to go through before I go to bed:
Honorable mention goes to Alexandra Schwartz's profile of Miranda July which pointed me to All Fours, definitely the best novel I read this year (err, um, last year).
And I will keep reading William Finnegan on surfing, Peter Hessler on his Chinese students, and John Lee Anderson on anything in the Western Hemisphere until the end of time.