Last Week’s New Yorker Review: February 26, 2024
Last Week’s New Yorker, week of February 26
"'The parchment is hairy,' one disgruntled scribe penned on an offending manuscript."
We're still 8 paid subscribers away from unlocking my reviews of the online-only "Weekend Essay." These'll appear in the new Sunday Edition. Instead of setting the hard limit of Feb's end that I'd mentioned prior, I think I'll just wait till the goal is reached, however long it takes. Once I've reached it, I have a few other add-ons in mind for the Sunday Edition. You can subscribe at this link!
Must-Read:
"Torn Pages" - Claudia Roth Pierpont goes to war for books. A roving, unchronological survey, this starts very strong with a portrait of books' role in the British response to German encroachment that manages to make that history feel visceral and direct, since it comes at it sideways – details like how "small libraries were often installed" in train-station bomb shelters might not appear in a straightforward history, but they make the past present. Pierpont admits up front that "the book in wartime is a vast subject," and she responds mostly by focusing on whatever sparks her interest – an approach which does end up favoring Western cultures and traditions, and one which eventually grows strained, as in the long penultimate section devoted to the Florentine Renaissance, which doesn't feel connected to war in any direct way. But all this can be forgiven if you set your expectations correctly: Come to gather factoids, because Pierpont has fantastic ones. I'd never heard of the "Armed Services Editions" of popular books, nor their responsibility for the fame of "A Tree Grows in Brooklyn." The anecdote about a misapprehended Guantánamo detainee whose reading list helped convince the press of his innocence is just as interesting as the factoid that just "seven plays each by Aeschylus and Sophocles survive" because "storage boxes for papyrus scrolls held five to seven scrolls." And Pierpont is smartly agnostic as to the power of reading, pointing out the beauty of the Florentine bookseller's idea that "'all evil is born from ignorance'" but also reminding us that Stalin and Hitler were both "voracious readers" and "aspiring writers." The final paragraph is just this side of cloying, but ends up quite haunting. The blank page takes on a new, bleak meaning.
Window-Shop:
"Dispossessed" - Parul Sehgal considers the new corpus of media on abuse in residential schools. Add Tommy Orange's latest to the pile of sophomore-slump novels that are covered on the strength of the earlier work. Sehgal makes the piece feel more relevant than a takedown might be by expanding her view, and pointing out what unites these works: A "nervy energy about what it means to handle this material at all, to push one's fingers into the wounds." She quotes from the podcast Stolen, picking a paragraph that, on tape, was one of the more profound things I've heard; it loses a lot on paper but is still compelling. She also covers the documentary Sugarcane, focusing on its use of "ceremony" over "testimony." It's a clever thesis, one that feels resonant with Sehgal's earlier writing on the trauma plot: This could be a different way to move forward, a way to unearth these stories without getting caught in their narrative logic.
As for the novel, it does sound messy, though Sehgal grants it a very generous reading: Perhaps its "flailing" is actually "dancing," a "shelf of books collapsed into one." I would have liked much more exploring the book at the sentence level; Sehgal only really considers structures and themes. But as an entry in Sehgal's ongoing consideration of depictions of the traumatic, it's worth reading.
"Unreal Life" - Helen Shaw gets trolled. A serviceable review without much of a thesis; mostly, Shaw is interested in the way the truth is revealed as a final note, but surely this is a nearly omnipresent device in stories based on reality? It's like those "where are they now" credits sequences with the real people's photos – a cliché. Shaw doesn't make the "strangely glossy" troll-farm show sound like much fun, though the review is mixed-to-positive. The ending blurb of a long-closed show is at least pegged to a streaming release, but the review's so brief it's hard to tell what the show is like – the adjective "rollicking" is too all-purpose to do much work.
"The Chaos Agent" - Dexter Filkins panhandles with Florida Man Matt Gaetz. To be honest, I was so thrown by the revelation that my middle-school chorus teacher's husband was framed for sexual predation by an associate of Gaetz's that focusing on anything else was tough for a while. Anyhow.
I can see the arguments "for" and "against" this piece's approach stacking up – and for me, they ultimately come out roughly equal. Do we really have to devote long profiles to these fascists? Well, yes, if they show us something important about the political scene. But is Gaetz actually unique in any way beyond his corruption, or is he just another shady Trump acolyte? Filkins portrays him as a smart but lazy, spoiled manchild, who's manically driven by hatred (and, seemingly, sex) but uninterested in everything else, including policy. He's not subtle about that characterization, either; this doesn't take the magazine's usual witheringly subtle approach (which is probably the right call with a worm this slimy.) But Filkins does continually emphasize his smarts and the areas where he supposedly strays from the Republican establishment (weed and environmental protection) – giving him credit as a libertarian that he doesn't totally deserve. Really, Trump's term in office should have taught us the lesson that these "populist" [^1] or "libertarian" Republicans vary from the standard model only in terms of tactics and (arguably) extremism; their gestures toward anti-authoritarianism are calculated and duplicitous. (Filkins' weird concluding note that Trump's ability to wriggle out of ethical quandaries has taken him "further than anyone might have imagined when he left office, friendless and defeated," ignores that this very ability was oft-discussed and meme'd to death as early as the Republican primaries.) So: Is it at least fun to read about Gaetz? Well, his extracurricular roguery is darkly entertaining, and Filkins gets some withering quotes from conservatives (one advantage of profiling a figure so unanimously disliked by his colleagues.) But there's a lot of surface-level recapping, too, especially around the McCarthy affair. Gaetz is popular in his district, but so was his friend Ron DeSantis before he tripped. Perhaps the piece should focus more directly on the question of whether Gaetz can continue his Trumpian run of wriggling his way out of jams. Instead, Filkins shrugs. [^2]
"Skin in the Game" - Rebecca Giggs can't put a python love. This is Giggs' first piece in the magazine, and while it's well-written, it does have a "freelance" vibe that's hard to quantify – maybe it feels like it was conceived concept-first, instead of emerging from research or interviews. That concept isn't uninteresting, but it's very limited in scope – Giggs gestures toward broad cultural significance a few times, but it's always a stretch. (Snakes came into the zeitgeist around when Britney wore one; Zoomers like reptiles because they're "an antidote to the anomie of feeling ourselves to be part of a big machine.") Animal breeding for traits brings to mind the hypebeast pitbull posters that go viral from time to time; the aesthetics are different with pythons, but the idea is much the same, and similarly, the desirable "look" is inherently unnatural, if not as uncanny. Giggs probes whether the whole thing is immoral only toward the end, deciding basically that it's hard to know, because "the question of what thriving or discomfort looked like in a snake" is an open one. While the whole thing does feel gross, focusing on it is a bit like blaming messages in a bottle for ocean pollution [^3] – there are bigger semi-aquatic mammals to fry.
Skip Without Guilt:
"In the Weeds" - Jia Tolentino is smoking on that red tape pack. Two laugh-out-loud gags, one involving a misremembered weed store's name and the other the surprising recurrence of the "deeply familiar, almost old-fashioned activity: texting a weed guy to ask his E.T.A." The piece has good intentions, and explores the issue with nuance and care. Unfortunately, there are way too many threads to keep track of – including eight characters and two institutions who all hold equal shares of the spotlight – and Tolentino does a poor job keeping things clear. I read and reread, and I still couldn't understand some details, like how and why the O.C.M. made the decision to waive the waiting period for medical weed companies – apparently it had something to do with the onerous terms of their loan, but the paragraph explaining this begins by discussing an injunction freezing a different part of their program – was that somehow related? There's a heavy reliance on the sources that would talk, which are, of course, mostly those operating or trying to operate legally, but this makes the piece feel one-sided; surely there are arguments for the illegal weed stores, which, after all, are filling a hole in the market more reliably (and, probably, somewhat more safely) than street dealers did. Tolentino needed to choose: Really get to the bottom of that issue, or focus more specifically on legal weed, without so much fretting over the placeholder shops. So in summary the piece makes you laugh while leaving you a bit disoriented. Sound familiar?
"Northern Attitude" - Amanda Petrusich knows what's brown and sticky. I can't decide if Petrusich just has bad taste in music or if there's just a strange editorial insistence on only covering popular music that's on the Billboard charts. Her end-of-year list, which isn't to my taste but is at least cogent, points toward the latter; that baffling rave (online) for the new Green Day thing points toward the former. This, I guess, is somewhere in-between; Kahan is certainly a man-of-the-moment, but Petrusich's enthusiasm for him seems genuine. His music isn't bad – his whiny voice and (deliberately?) terrible breath control are used to deliver some technically precise and genuinely witty pop songs with occasionally lacerating lines. But I certainly don't think he's earned the extended quotations and comparisons to Wallace Stevens that Petrusich grants him. As far as categorization: Petrusich says the genre's called "stomp-clap-hey," I like the Spotify coinage "stomp and holler," but in either case the idea that Kahan is "lumped in with" it and not a practically definitive example – just because he doesn't wear a bowler hat – is silly. Petrusich's in a silly mood in general, as though she's turning into millennial Anthony Lane – to mixed results: The list of New England promotional swag Kahan's endorsed is funny; the forced Ben Affleck parenthetical or the opening-line reach toward the unfunny punchline "PsyOp," less so. There's just too much space granted to Kahan, who seems nice but whose meditations on fame are predictable. Petrusich should stick to the point.
"Border Troubles" - Jonathan Blitzer gets cross with the impeachable Alejandro Mayorkas. Blitzer is generally an excellent immigration reporter and a fair-to-middling political profiler, which makes this piece's failings especially disappointing. To be clear, it's still a major improvement over the last big border piece (written by Sir Also-Appearing-in-this-Magazine.) But it's ultimately a very soft-focus profile of a centrist – two early scenes feature his mom having him shake hands with cops as a kid (telling!) and his responding to left-wing protesters outside his house by reading a Times op-ed about resisting depression. Add "ignoring the working class" to the list of things that are self-care now. There's also a bizarre moment where Mayorkas' prosecution of a sex worker is used to show that he's likeable.
I kept thinking about a recent Hamilton Nolan essay where he points out that the "baseline position" of both parties is "championing the free flow of capital while calling for harsh restrictions on the free flow of labor" – a "pro-inequality combination." This piece tries to sidestep any immigration debate in favor of a focus on the nuts-and-bolts running of things that Mayorkas does, but the two can't be so easily disentangled – Mayorkas' whole job is to restrict the flow of labor – and Blitzer ends up sometimes regurgitating a problematic party line. The next-to-last section, in which Denver's mayor points out that the Ukrainian refugee influx hasn't caused an issue because they're just given work permits, makes this supposedly knotty issue suddenly seem pretty simple. Which is certainly not to say easy. But setting the terms of the fight is the first step to winning it, and as Blitzer points out, the White House's latest messaging on immigration (which calls to "shut down the border") uses "the language of the other side." Biden is beating himself.
"Four Years Later" - Adam Gopnik takes the thirty-thousand-and-six foot view. Even at his most self-satisfied, Gopnik is almost never boring. So what's up with this? A hand-wavey look at the "larger social meanings" of the pandemic, this features zero moments of surprise, progressing through "remember Lysol-wiping your groceries?" to "the Spanish flu got forgotten" to "everywhere that wasn't an island basically had the same infection numbers, eventually" to "Science saves lives!" as if we're scrolling through an archive of banal COVID takes. It's all been said! And Gopnik's rhetorical focus on the importance of 2020 as a year without any mention of the George Floyd protests is inexcusable.
Letters:
Marthine says Alexandra Schwartz's piece on female violence "was very good, and also a good follow up to the devastating review of Mom Rage by Merve Emre last fall. Really thoughtful and meaningful work here."
What did you think of this week's issue?
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[^1] Every demagogue is a populist.
[^2] It's also odd that this piece and the one on Mayorkas are in the same issue, running back to back. The Mayorkas impeachment is directly mentioned in the Gaetz piece, and two heavy chunks of U.S. electoral politics make for an unbalanced diet.
[^3] In undergrad I read a fellow student's class paper that genuinely argued they were a major cause of ocean pollution, with a straight face. Since that encounter my life has not known peace.