Last Week's New Yorker Review: February 17 & 24
Last Week’s New Yorker, week of February 17 & 24
“‘I want more money I want more money I want more money I want more money I want more money I want more money I want more money I want more money I want more money I want more money I want more money’”
Must-Reads:
“War of Words” - Jill Lepore gets in over her editor. The signature piece of this Anniversary Issue and the only one that takes full advantage of the rare allowance to write about the magazine in the magazine. (“A lousy excuse”, Lepore calls it.) This piece isn’t really driven by a thesis, just a broad theme – writers and editors, hashing it out – that gives Lepore an excuse to load up on anecdote. Self-aggrandizing? Well, certainly – but have you seen what newsletter you’re reading? I have a critical eye, but this is still fundamentally an exercise in legacy-publication aggrandizement. (Coming soon, though not really: The Paris Review Review and Harpin’ On Harpers.) Regardless of whether one is charmed, one still must be impressed by the ocean of ephemera Lepore surely waded through (“welcome to my foxhole!” she parenthesizes) to find notes fit to print (“‘...we fear an oyster is not a crustacean. Is he? Perhaps you can make us a little clearer on this point’”) and even, in one instance, a note about noting notes (Ross says they “would be interesting, I believe, and also entertaining, and doubtless many of them are around.”) There are also some characteristically elegant gripes from James Thurber (“I have put wheels under, and given wings to, a hell of a lot of heavy, dull stories”) and E.B. White (“I feel like an overcoat with a velvet collar.”) The section on rejection is maybe a mite less peppy than the rest, but things recover with the section on “pump and go” Tina Brown, certainly a complicated woman. (I wonder if someone nixed a similar section on Remnick? All we find out here is that he likes to text.) This could so easily have been a survey of the usual landscape, the handful of moments the magazine frames on the wall instead of tossing into its infinite archive; Lepore understood that the assignment demanded not a storyteller but a researcher, and she got digging.
Tolentino on Didion (Takes) - Framing Didion’s image of Martha Stewart as something of a Freudian projection is a masterstroke. This is the only Take of these four to go beyond a letter of appreciation, and the only one to fully analyze how the girlboss-conscious present moment changes the way we understand both author and subject. And nobody but Tolentino can look at the Venn diagram of these two women and pull from the middle “the teleological inclination toward the steely pristine” – come on!
Window-Shop:
“Stepping Out” - Burkhard Bilger gives marching band orders. An incredibly vivid journey into a world I knew nothing about, helped immensely by Brian Finke’s wonderful, almost psychedelic full-color photographs (extremely well-edited in the print edition) – and if Bilger is ultimately so enthusiastic that the last section tips over into celebration, there’s at least enough consideration of the physical and spiritual toll that things don’t quite feel promotional. I think the question of whether marching band is a sport, an art, neither, or both is a fairly open one, and despite its silliness, one worth pondering. (Is any subjectively-judged contest measuring an art, by virtue of the fact that aesthetics are being considered? Is synchronized diving an art? Or is the opposite true, that anything made primarily to score points is no longer art? Is art made on assignment still art?) Whether or not marching band is art, it’s certainly kitsch, and indoctrinating kids into the massed production of kitsch is a somewhat dubious goal, but then again I’m not sure it’s any worse than slotting them into another visionless production of Our Town, and plenty an ingenue has still benefited from that kind of thing. If White midwestern American culture is kind of sick and malignant, well… that’s not really the band director’s fault. And a little Stravinsky never hurt nobody. Bilger is ultimately so swept up in the supposed magic that one does start to question his taste; the phrase “rah-rah” may never have been more apt. But the pleasures of conforming have always eluded this coastal elite; I should probably shut up and eat my fried bologna sandwich.
“Tangled Web” - Kathryn Schulz swallows a spider in her sleep. A few months ago, Katherine Rundell told us not to fear sharks, now Schulz adds that spiders, too, deserve less shrieks and more cheers. (Which, sure, you won’t die from a spider bite, but those that have been bitten and poisoned by spiders might interject that the experience still isn’t worth seeking out.) It helps that Schulz is not a natural fan of arachnids, her respect is properly begrudging. And her wonderful voice, here in full flower, could probably get me rooting for even less photogenic crawlers. (Though I still won’t like having them as roomies.) I wasn’t especially convinced by Schulz’s answer as to why we’re afraid of spiders – it boils down to “because they’re weird!” – and, as with sharks, the pro-spider counternarrative is, at this point, about as loud as the repugnance narrative, as anyone who’s shrieked at a spider around their gardener friends will quickly find out. I won’t step on them – but I’m not quite ready to follow their noble eight-foot path.
“The L.A. Chefs Keeping Their Neighbors Fed” - Hannah Goldfield is gonna ride it till she just can’t ride it no more. Heartfelt and touching – Goldfield’s emotional journey toward her new home in its time of loss could come across as hackneyed, but she threads the needle by keeping things journalistic – the woman “carting dozens of steak-and-bean burritos into the parking lot”, the woman who lost “the only copy of a cookbook she’d written, by hand, in honor of her late father.” Goldfield knows her story is just one among many, and the best way to commemorate L.A. is to look around.
“Subject and Object” - Adam Gopnik keeps a low profile. I don’t really need to hear about Gopnik’s personal relationship with Lillian Ross; I’m sure he was truly “slightly intimidated” then, but to still be so now is to be fawning. Unless you truly know nothing about Ross, skip to the paragraph beginning “Or, indeed”, as that’s where the story Gopnik is telling begins – and it’s a blast. In summary, Ross profiled Ernest Hemingway in savage fashion, making him look pretty much like a bloviating drunk; Hemingway refused to be offended by this portrayal. Gopnik circles the psychiatry of both figures, giving a lengthy Freudian analysis that’s good fun, even if Gopnik doesn’t actually seem to quite buy it; mostly, the delight is in Gopnik’s patient guide to a fascinating piece. If you really want a gonzo take on Hemingway’s psychiatry, try Hilton Als basically calling him trans – it would be interesting to get even a sliver of that here; perhaps Hemingway had a hard time rejecting Ross’ view of him because he wanted so badly to be Lillian Ross, looking askance at a wrinkled old man, instead of trapped in the body of one.
“Trouble in Paradise” - Kelefa Sanneh signs up for the open Mike White. I’m a longtime Mike White appreciator, a pre-Lotus fan – as a child who thought that the most valuable thing in the world was an A.V. Club comment with a lot of likes, Enlightened was my favorite scripted television show, and when White subsequently went on my favorite unscripted television show (then and now) and was instantly iconic, my love was cemented. I made a weird presentation about White for a COVID-era virtual powerpoint party. So I knew all of the information in this article, minus a few of the new facts about Lotus. And while White does come across to some extent on the page, without his unique intonation something is lost. But this is still a good time, and Sanneh finds the thread running through White’s work, a focus on ambivalent characters and ambivalent tones. (“Not wholly convincing and not wholly inane.”) Sanneh doesn’t quite draw out the ambivalence in White himself, the mix of goofy dweeb and high-powered Goliath that makes him so compelling. (It is very telling that White thinks the White Lotus character he most resembles is a neurodivergent child who realizes that video games can’t compare to real-life adventure.) He could also do far more with White’s reality appearances; he does point out, glancingly, that those experiences have informed White’s work, but I see White Lotus season one as intensely and directly informed by White’s experience on Survivor, and I think Sanneh could underline that connection. I also like the “pervert test” Sanneh outlines, although it tells me more about Sanneh’s sensibilities than White’s. The Hawaii stuff is a bit icky, but at least Sanneh goes there, a bit – he brings up Zuckerberg, and it’s not as though he has time to educate viewers on the complex history of Kaua’i. (If you’re interested, though, watch Cane Fire. It’s fantastic.) White is that rare thing, a popular artist with a genuinely distinct sensibility; he’s the perfect subject for a magazine profile, and this one is perfectly serviceable.
“Helicopter Parents” - Nick Paumgarten wouldn’t hurt a Fly Away Home. A weird-science story that feels torn between its theoretically whimsical subject and some fairly bleak realities – that these desperate measures are prompted by some pretty desperate times. Many of Paumgarten’s longer pieces feel like expanded Talk of the Towns; that style mostly works here, but the deeper questions around conservation methods don’t get addressed in as much depth as they might. There are certainly others using microlight aircraft to shepard birds, and some of those efforts may beat this one in quixotic absurdity – in Maryland, they’re wearing full-body whooping crane costumes – but I’m glad Paumgarten focuses on Fritz’s efforts, especially because the countervailing needs of the documentary crew provide an interesting contrast. (He does make it sound like Fritz is the flying-with-birds person, though, which just isn’t accurate.) As tensions boil over toward the end, the piece finally finds its gravitas; the last three sections take flight.
“The Roaring Twenties” (On and Off the Avenue) - Rachel Syme looks for a good vintage. I just covered a ‘60s Lois Long piece in the Weekend Special, so seeing her name pop up here was a treat, and Syme does excellent work spotting vintage pieces around town, with details one can visualize and enough history to keep things from feeling like a shopping list. More of this!
“Senior Superlatives” (Talk of the Town) - Emma Allen turns back the yearbooks. Often the best Talk of the Towns are just chronicles of one guy’s strange special interest. Allen finds some choice nuggets – that Madonna inscription is pretty amazing – but is restrained enough to keep the focus mostly on Poppel and not random celebrities.
Aviv on Malcolm (Takes) - More about the epistolary relationship between Malcolm and her subject than about the resulting Malcolm piece. That’s compelling, and telling, especially from Aviv, whose writing clearly demonstrates her concern with such issues. But this feels more like a special feature designed to accompany and deepen the Malcolm piece than like a mini-essay that can truly stand on its own.
Skip Without Guilt:
“The Uneven Cross-Cultural Comedy…” - Justin Chang doesn’t let the Peru flick be the enemy of the good. It’s difficult to give a comedy a mixed-to-negative review and not end up sounding sour, as though resentful that a film has made you laugh. Two in a row emphasizes the problem; the cheeriness of Paddington In Peru and the referential dryness of Universal Language both feel integral to their respective projects, so casting each as an issue – …In Peru is perhaps not “entirely to be trusted” and Language may “traffic in laundered goods” – feels like spoilsport stuff. Chang can still write, and frankly if I’d seen either film I’d probably agree with him (the Paddington trailer is indeed full of received whimsy – which would be a good title for this review if it had one; it just has the horrible online title since it was left out of the print magazine and the contents page only lists titles for feature articles) but being as I can only judge the vibes secondhand, I’m turned off.
Young on Baldwin (Takes) - Rather dry, and mostly interesting as Young’s chance to embark in some very mild institutional critique of this paper-white periodical. (“The gap in the archive remains palpable.” Not exactly fiery, but I suppose it’s meant to stir by following the removed house style.) He gives a brief summation of Baldwin’s Letter, but he doesn’t actually have much to say about it.
Chast on Booth (Takes) - Chast doesn’t exactly explain Booth’s jokes – one really couldn’t if they tried – but even just telling us how much she laughs at them is enough to kill them, mostly.
“Sisterhood” - Lawrence Wright chronicles the crossed paths of nuns with Texans on death row. I enjoyed this while reading it, and reading it, and reading it… but the more I thought about it, the more it irked me. Part of that is just its ungodly length, which it only justifies insofar as it’s not repetitive – but which is mostly used to tell, in detail, the stories of various incarcerated women. A worthy task, but one Wright treats a bit like he’s the first person ever to care about. He may not have read many prison abolitionists, but… Has he read this magazine? Miscarriage of justice stories are what they do, and writers like K.Y. Taylor and Jennifer Gonnerman have published a slew of pieces for the magazine that trace the same arc Wright gapes at. Wright’s wide-eyed tone at the everyday injustice of incarceration (“I now saw ‘justice’ as a board game in which risk and randomness were dominant factors”) suggests that he thinks it might be the first time the reader has considered how fundamentally broken the system is. Beyond that, while Wright is a nonbeliever, he casts this almost as a religious parable, bringing in (well into the piece) the strange and troubling story of his own brush with a possibly murderous pastor, whose innocence “shattered” Wright’s “confidence in Texas’s justice system” – but this story never takes on the weight Wright clearly hopes it will; it doesn’t deepen his tale, just adds another macabre scene. The death row prisoners’ stories are variously affecting; Melissa Lucio’s could easily have been its own article (though the media has already picked up her case, which is perhaps why Wright didn’t want to center things entirely around her) but each has its own power, and each is fairly outré – suggesting that one reason women are sentenced to death and not mere life imprisonment is that their crimes are surprising (and perhaps therefore more likely to be miscarriages of justice – an unlikely story is more likely to be false than a common story, after all.) In the end, there’s really quite little about the nuns at all; they’re more a framing device that lets Wright draw close to the prisoners, and an excuse for him to interrogate his faithlessness. There’s something rather straightforward, a bit expected, about this article; it never takes on the grand force that would merit its length. There’s no build, just a slow push forward.
“Being There” - Joshua Rothman finds a hard problem man to come by. Easy to sum up: The tools of academic study can’t always convey philosophy, and journalism gave Rothman a fuller sense of the ideas of one thinker, which eventually convinced him to change his mind and value journalism more. Unfortunately, the piece isn’t much more full on the page than that synopsis; there’s a remove to it, and even a bit of self-seriousness, as though Rothman wanted to respect a “high watermark” in his “intellectual life” by considering it again, but after doing so and finding nothing newly revelatory, compensated by encasing the old revelations in amber. It’s a quick piece, and readable in its simplicity, but to some degree it’s a “how I spent my summer vacation” essay – Rothman had an awesome day out in the field, and now he’s going to tell you about it. Why? Because that’s the assignment, that’s why.
“Company Town” - Paige Williams has just one place that can light her face. Troublesome stuff, as Williams gives the political and industrial perspectives on a problem caused by industry and politics. I don’t need some saccharine human face of poverty, and I know the politicians now in charge of Gary weren’t responsible for its decline, but Williams’ tone is strangely lighthearted, as though real estate matters more to her than real lives. Williams is properly skeptical of U.S. Steel, but her piece could focus more on their responsibility for Gary’s plight; she too often casts them as helpless victims of changing economic winds, when really they had a moral obligation to have taken ownership of the city they essentially owned, instead of sucking it dry for every last cent. (There’s one line, late in the piece, pointing out that “in the sixties and seventies, U.S. Steel had been known to actively oppose community upgrades, for fear of improvements leading to higher property taxes.” That ought to be part of the lede!) It’s also strange how little Williams mentions Chicago, whose fortunes are surely closely twined to its neighbor’s, and who therefore must have some political interest in its revitalization. (And if not – that’s a story, too!) Despite its flaws, this story is still propulsive and compelling, and what happened in Gary holds lessons to the rest of our crumbling country – steel yourself.
“A Visit to Madam Bedi” - Tara Westover takes a passage to India. Written in a voice I’d call “yoga instructor”, which is moderately more tolerable when Westover is describing her world than when she’s trying to describe the rest of the world. Her feminist politics are iffy – I’m not sure the image of a “woman king” is exactly what we’re looking for – but mostly any politics are subsumed by the personal-essay voice, which is only intermittently stirring (and the strongest material repeats the images of her earlier memoir.) I’m also not sure the “self-rule” through vulnerability she eventually finds revelatory is all that different from the “discipline and self-sovereignty” she presents, at the beginning, as an uncomfortable college-era posture; the lesson may be that power comes from weakness, but if the goal is still to attain power, then isn’t the weakness a kind of delusion or projection, too? Surely it’s that inner power comes from weakness, and not that external or political power can be attained by tapping into weakness. Maybe that’s the lesson Madam Vedi was trying to convey to Westover; if so, she may have more to learn.
“Onward and Upward” (Comment) - David Remnick sets the course. I feel as though I ought to comment on this comment, given its meta aspect, but it lacks a real perspective on the magazine’s early years – surely there’s something meaningful about a magazine established “‘in contempt of what was being published’” lying at the top of the heap a century later? Instead Remnick basically points to the sixties as the magazine’s golden years, which is iffy – in this same issue Kevin Young points out the magazine’s spotty record with Black voices, so pointing to that James Baldwin piece as a signpost feels slightly disingenuous. And then things turn inevitably and annoyingly toward Trump, and then they fizzle out.
“Starry-Eyed” - Dhruv Khullar might be marred by Mars. The question of whether space travel causes health issues is a fascinating one, and the early sections, where Khullar is basically just telling us the answer (yep!), are perfectly fine, though Khullar can’t hide his space-travel optimism. (“We’ll never find out until we try” is about as convincing a reason to go to Mars as to dig into a long-term nuclear waste storage facility.) But the back half of the piece gets entirely sidetracked into the theoretical possibilities of a manned mission to Mars, justifying this by citing its status as an obsession of the technofascist class. Counterpoint: Who gives a shit? It’s never going to happen, and acting as if it might is like the A.I. boom/doom delusion – projecting what a bang might sound like, and ignoring the omnipresent whimpering. It’s corny – would you believe The Martian gets mentioned? – confusing – what exactly is being simulated in the M.D.R.S. if press can visit, the atmosphere is Earth’s, and “medical help” is a phone call away? – and just boring – Khullar seems more interested in the cosplay aspect than the science; the “organoids” scene is interesting, but the eventual conclusion that being “fortified with supplements” might help just feels like handwaving (I don’t know what that means) and the projection that this could have massive implications for medical science as a whole prompts the question: Why aren’t we reading about that, then? If Bezos wants to die on Mars, he’s welcome to strap himself to a rocket ship and leave us here; ideally with a free press and paid shipping.
“Live from New York” - Vinson Cunningham will be alright on the night. Opens with a hilariously bad dream cast – six talented comedians whose styles would, in my estimation, clash horribly – although the sound of S.N.L. is the wonderful sound of horrible clashing, so perhaps that’s fitting. (Also, alright, here’s my six, with the allowance that good impersonators and people that can bring life but not distraction to the small parts in a sketch are favored over obvious all-stars: Maya Rudolph, Molly Shannon, Gilda Radner, Andrew Dismukes, James Austin Johnson, and, sure, Eddie Murphy.) Cunningham on the Weird Year episode of the SNL series is not awful, but after reading Jason Frank’s standout recent article in Vulture on Terry Sweeny’s inside perspective of that year, it becomes clear that Cunningham is sorta printing the corporate legend here. I don’t need another piece where the writer interviews seemingly everyone that has ever worked for the program, but it does feel like Cunningham did basically no research. And a critic doesn’t have to – but because Cunningham is reviewing the institution at least as much as what’s basically state propaganda about the institution, it would have served the piece.
“Royal Flush” - Jackson Arn has scarlet fever. Thoroughly unconvinced by each and every one of Arn’s suppositions here, which rely on evidence so cherry-picked his hands are stained. “Red” is not synonymous with “red paint”, and certainly not “red paint as used in the specific context of Western 2D artmaking in the last five hundred years.” And even then his ideas are gratingly pop-psychological, and weirdly divorced from the actual act of looking – he’s spent lots of time “thinking about” one Joan Mitchell painting, apparently, but the closest he’s gotten is that the two main colors are “having some kind of fight or chat or dance”, which could fairly be said about a good quarter of the abex canon, and that the red is like a deposed queen, something I simply disagree with – to me, the painting’s red is obviously in front of the backdrop blue; sure, there’s less of it, but it’s no shrinking, um, dianthus. And the last section spirals into actual incoherence – surely red has not been “offed” in this brightly LCD-lit world; if any color has been offed, it’s the faded yellow of candlelight. Red is everywhere – the whole global village has been painted red, it’s the morning after, and we’re all hungover.
Letters:
Kristina liked Elisa Gonzalez’s poetry review more than I did, but more for the content than the style: “I hit the first block quote and saw the line-internal enjambment and was sold and will be ordering the book from a local independent on my next acquisition run. Gonzalez seems to have seen it as well, since she mentions it. What she said though? Don’t remember. Looking forward to hashing out this hellscape with others amongst my fellow religious studies nerds.”
Michael B. says the trend piece on the rise of weird animals which I wanted out of Gary Shteyngart’s capybara article has been done by Slate’s Decoder Ring podcast. A good link!