Last Week’s New Yorker, week of February 2

“(In one letter, he told a colleague that he was tired of ‘your mesanthropy and a British version of a foul air baloon,’ and signed off as ‘your appaulled colleagues,’ with a stamp showing the face of a clown.)“

Must-Read:

“A Fatal Error” (A Reporter at Large) - Ben Taub milks it for all it’s worth. An instant classic, but pitched wrong: Starting with pathos and the dead baby does mean that the reveal of Koren’s true nature is a twist, but it makes the story seem like a downer, something to be braced for. Yes, the stakes are real and dreadful, but this is a perfectly fine longread to bring to your spa day, properly shelved with exposé, filed under “the con artist, unspooled”. Taub spends the first half of the piece focused entirely on the purported transmission of codeine through breast milk, but eventually the bottom drops out – after the utter fakery of Koren’s research in that area becomes clear, Taub rewinds to various earlier inept conspiracies and horrifically sloppy schemes Koren was mixed up in. Taub declines to psychoanalyze Koren, which is a refreshing choice; I don’t need a Rachel Avivian complication of this particular story, and Koren, while a remarkably bad actor, is also a sign of a broken system; the disinclination of medical journals to redact his work makes the “‘case against science’” that the Lancet’s editor outlines; he has even catchier coinages in the full article: “‘poor methods get results’”, and “the bad news is that nobody is ready to take the first step to clean up the system.” That includes the very magazine in which his words were published; they come across so terribly that one wonders if this piece is also slyly making the case that popular periodicals can be more reliable than the professional ones.

Window-Shop:

“Moon Shot” (Letter from Japan) - E. Tammy Kim aids and Abes. I appreciate that Kim doesn’t bother moralizing about Abe’s assassination, which was a minor tragedy with a major impact, single-handedly changing the public perception of Moonies in Japan. This won’t be the most surprising piece if you’ve followed the contours of the Abe assassination and are generally familiar with the Moonies (whose brief acquisition of Newsweek doesn’t even get a mention here – sorry to our friends at Last Week’s Newsweek Review) but Kim keeps things moving. The segments on the Church’s use of Japanese historical guilt as a marketing ploy are especially compelling; it’s interesting to find out that the bigotry of the right and the historical guilt of the left are used in conjunction to extort Japanese Moonies; in America we generally think of the two as mutually exclusive, but of course they aren’t: Purity through austerity and ritual self-destruction is the place they meet. This piece is prompted by the assassin’s trial, but the trial barely concerns the state corruption it unveiled, so she relies on journalist Eito Suzuki, whose blogging helped inspire the assassin, to fill in these details; Kim spends too much time on his personal story, though, and never quite manages to make him feel central. More space to unpack the geopolitical consequences would’ve been welcome. It’s too tight a shot on the shot heard ‘round the world.

“Stone Face” (Books) - Margaret Talbot is head of state. Easter Island is a remote speck with an artistic heritage so innately appealing it’s taught to schoolchildren; it is both predictable and unfortunate that the local islanders were dismissed and speculation as to the Aryan giants who must have built the statues ran rampant. I knew about the absurd Kon-Tiki voyage, which takes up too much time here, but a new book carefully documents not only the clear case that the island’s cataclysm was a result of enslavement and disease rather than environmental degredation, but also that we ought to have known this to be the case for quite a while. Instead, pioneering research was lost (due apparently to tragic happenstance) and primary sources were overlooked (probably for more maleficent reasons), while the Kon-Tikis of the world took over the narrative. The corrective is a bit self-evident, but it’s not uninteresting, and the heads have, of course, their own appeal. See, for instance, this poem the magazine published a decade ago; it’s stuck with me. 🗿!

“Empire of Quiet” (Musical Events) - Alex Ross wants no Morton is necessary. The eerie, “monkish” minimalist Feldman gets a neat tribute here, though it’s too bad that, as Ross points out, there aren’t any big celebrations in the city of his birth. Instead Ross eats cake in L.A, focusing a lot on the specifics of performance in ways that are difficult to parse without hearing what’s being referenced. I’d have rather spent longer in suspended motion with Feldman, and less time rushing through the awful present.

🗣️ “Source Material” (The Boards) - Zach Helfand knows how to blow things up. Some of the most genuine engagement I can remember from the subjects of a Talk mini-profile-by-way-of-day-trip. The “surprisingly moving” experience comes across on the page; no small feat.

“Long Story” (Books) - Hermione Hoby has a fantod limn. The backlash to the David Foster Wallace backlash has been brewing for a while, and Hoby is here to pitch in. Her attempts at homage, which mainly involve the use of some eleven-dollar words among this magazine’s usual surfeit of tenners , are not convincing¹, and her indulgence in bemoaning the writer’s apparently trite cancellation before pointing out that, actually, plenty of young and youngish women are huge fans, is tiresome. If you’re looking for a brief yet coherent review of an extremely difficult book to review with coherence yet brevity, though, you could do much worse than the second section. And the examination of Wallace versus a previous generation of white male novelists – whom he hated! – is insightful, even as I have quibbles with it. (Hoby’s been mislead on the subject of gooning; the five long novels by women she cites are all hundreds of thousands of words shorter than IJ, which really doesn’t help her point, though interestingly she does not cite a certain infamous novel by a woman which actually is longer²; she also references the apparent underacnowledgement of Don DeLillo’s influence – how could anyone possibly acnowledge his influence more?!³) She finally suggests that many Wallace haters are probably just people that watched that one insipid graduation speech in high school health class, and she even cites the anecdote’s far subtler and more ambiguous appearance in IJ; the comparison to George Eliot, whose work was given her day’s equivalent of the brainyquote.com treatment, is apt, and as a letter of recommendation for a book that is also a project, this does its job. Come on in, the water’s unnoticeable.

🗣️ “Love Language” (How-To Dept.) - Dan Greene gets a personal loan. The ratio of three somewhat unbearable normies (“a publishing-house tote”, ‘“Spain-late”’!!) followed by a genuine weirdo – someone who, in just a few lines of dialogue, conveys a bracingly strange existence; he is something like a Zoomer R. Crumb – is just right. Fun!

Nussbaum on Kramer (Takes) - Always a compelling subject, but this feels so edited-down it only barely coheres. Nussbaum isn’t just covering the initial, rather long piece on consciousness raising (including unveiling every single pseudonym for no clear reason), but also a follow-up, partly a mea culpa, written by Kramer decades later, and also more recent cultural engagements with women’s groups! Nobody could do all that in six paragraphs without straining a muscle.

Skip Without Guilt:

“Fake News” (American Chronicles) - Jason Zengerle knows bow tie is in the eye of the beholder. Zengerle is a new staff writer at the magazine, and his first piece here is excerpted from his also-new book on Carlson. Not sure why this isn’t labeled a profile, as that’s its form to a T; it paints Carlson as an embittered opportunist, something that will be pretty self-evident to anyone who’s watched the guy for ten seconds. He’s self-evidently repugnant, and his slide toward conspiracy and open fascism is the result of deliberately putting a thin faux-intellectual veneer on whatever stance happens to be winning at the moment, or, even better, looks like it might be winning in a few clicks. Zengerle doesn’t get any big scoops – he’s not able to nail down the reason for Carlson’s firing from Fox – and although he keeps things moving (or, whoever edited this down from book length did), he can tack a bit simplistic in the process; he’s too focused on making Carlson look weak rather than evil. It affirms the alpha/cuck dichotomy that Carlson, Nick Fuentes and his ilk obsess over. We can do better than that.

“Counternarratives” (The Current Cinema) - Richard Brody sees the revision. These movies both sound totally compelling, but I don’t need a confusing Brody plot synopsis of either, which is all he’s brought; evidently his style clashes badly with the needs of a documentary review, since deep analysis doesn’t fit his (laudable!) singular-vision fetish. He ends up giving us neither, barely glancing over the works’ formal qualities but not fully conveying their messages. The latter is probably for the best (I don’t need a point-by-point breakdown) but this hardly serves as more than a thumbs-up stamp.

“Meet the Press” (On Television) - Vinson Cunningham puts a stick in the spokespeople. I generally enjoy Cunningham’s media criticism, but we should at this point stop doing character analyses of Trump. It’s been a decade of this shit; we all understand who the guy is. I guess Cunningham’s point is that Caroline Leavitt is a top-notch spin artist, so if the public is turning against Trump, it’s not a matter of his having inept publicity? But… did anyone think that? Maybe Trump 1, with the Sean Spicer of it all, could claim unfair coverage with a straight face. Post-X, Post-Bezos’ blog, et al, it’s impossible to claim any mass-media bias against the guy without outing yourself as part of his cult. So Cunningham is left arguing a point that’s self-evident.

Shut the Fuck Up:

“One Direction” (Annals of Politics) - Charles Duhigg says shit can get litter than litmus. (His numbers don’t add up on the polls; that was ten years ago, if you know, you know.) Duhigg is a decent tech reporter with a sideline in pop-economics books for dumbass technocrats, and he’s here to tell us what the Democrats are doing wrong. Wouldn’t you know it? He’d like them to copy the MAGA movement, operate more like a business, and, yup, lighten up about all that abortion and gay rights stuff so as to build a “broader” coalition. This is nasty business, as will hopefully be self-evident to the intelligent readers of this newsletter, but man does it come across as especially noxious at the very moment when Minnesotans (and plenty of Americans elsewhere) are demonstrating what actual solidarity looks like. Adam Serwer’s article in The Atlantic is an especially useful corrective; he’s previously lead the charge to accurately label Trumpism as a politics of cruelty and exclusion, whereas Duhigg apparently believes the Democrats are the exclusionary ones. But Serwer’s new piece is different: A superb chronicle of real-world resistance in Minnesota, it shows how diverse and cohesive communities work; that neighbors really can protect neighbors, motivated by shared humanity and not by the MAGA movement’s handy gun clubs and homeschool group.⁴

I don’t think Duhigg gets everything wrong here; his main case history is pertinent-ish, it’s just making a narrower point than he thinks. Yes, the 2008 Obama campaign correctly identified that the presidential election is easier to win when local campaigners aren’t rigidly bound to extremely limited talking points and tactics; the Tea Party subsequently took advantage of these techniques while the more hidebound Democrats squandered them. (There has long been a top-down lack of daylight, kid.) But this is really just a marketing lesson; it has little ideological significance, and almost nothing to do with the public disillusionment with Democrats more broadly. In fact, issues like abortion rights and LGBTQ acceptance – things Duhigg hideously dismisses as ‘litmus tests’ – are (beyond their obviously being core planks of the liberty and justice our country has long claimed to promote) also very popular⁵, even among the much-fetishised independent voters. More importantly, Duhigg’s annoyance that Democrats reject certain stances entirely ignores that the right rejects certain people! Duhigg likes MAGA because they have no ideology except blind faith and unity, but saying that this offers a lesson to Democrats is like saying Jonestown offers a lesson to party planners. Yeah, sure, it worked for them.

I have to admit, this piece makes me furious, and it’s short-circuiting my ability to be concise and precise. Does Duhigg really think pluralism is such a liability it must be abandoned? Does he really think unity can be so easily engineered? Does he really see no hope for solidarity? Is he, maybe, just afraid?

It’s hard for me to read this as other than a piece born of deep cowardice, as Duhigg faces rising fascism and decides we can only beat the bully by joining him. Fuck that and fuck you. I believe that we will win!

Letters:

None this time, and that’s okay because this one is too long already.

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