Last Week’s New Yorker Review: March 4, 2024
Last Week’s New Yorker, week of March 4
"Now we've reached her, lo! the Captain / Gallant Kidd commands the crew / Passengers now their berths are clapt in / Some to grumble, some to spew."
We're only 5 paid subscribers away from unlocking my reviews of the online-only "Weekend Essay"! A very, very strong issue this week, which took me a bit longer to get through, hence the day-lateness; I didn't want to rush things. Thanks for your patience.
Must-Read:
"The Dispossessed" - Shane Bauer travels to the West Bank, where settlers are violently forcing Palestinians off their land, directly abetted by state forces. Bauer is best known for his undercover projects, including working as a prison guard for six months, as well as his two-year imprisonment in Iran. He's cut his teeth while retaining Leftist bona fides, which might be why he's the voice the magazine went to for this dive into the often suppressed and distorted history of Palestinian dispossession – and the continuation and intensification of settler destruction since October 7th. This is a gutting but enlightening story, and Bauer is incredibly skilled at revealing the bloodthirsty hypocrisy millimeters beneath the surface of the Israeli rhetoric. The contestation of these histories and present-day stories is precisely what the profession of reporter exists to untangle, and Bauer's careful revelation of the actual truth may not be much appreciated by the same media that loudly calls for all sides to be heard.
It's worth taking your time with this piece, which is dense with detail (though also vivid and propulsive) – my prior perceptions were challenged, especially regarding settlers' direct use of violence in the West Bank – I think my assumption was that in those areas there was mainly the indirect violence of colonial dispossession, but there are actually a good number of Palestinians being tortured, shot, and killed. And Bauer's careful elucidation of the role religion plays in Zionist self-conception, which is significantly more complicated than is often presented, is worth taking in as well. But mostly the draw is the direct reportage. Perhaps the most powerful scene is Bilal Saleh's death, and its aftermath – the shooter is arrested for a few days then released to serve in the Army, but his brother is arrested for three months without charges for waving a Hamas flag at his funeral. And, of course, the judge directly cites October 7th in releasing the shooter, calling his "vigilance" a "real obligation." This is just one scene of many; the injustices compound. After reading this story, it's worth scanning Bauer's X thread, which has videos of incidents referenced in the piece.
"Lording It" - Anthony Lane bestows a benediction upon the mad – bad – and boisterously bisexual Lord Byron. A romp. Lane, let loose to pen an appreciation, takes full advantage, beginning with Byron's death, then spiraling backward through his letters and poems. He's an ideal guide, because he's disinclined to pay much attention to what he terms Byron's "earnest envoi" mode, instead focusing on the anarchy of Don Juan, and those preceding works, mainly epistolary, that show its "garrulously jocund" voice did not emerge from nowhere. Lane's structure is itself a bit anarchic, he keeps interrupting to remind us that Byron was all over the place ("If you want to track the to-and-fro of Byron's life, you need a map," one section begins) but since the main interest is Byron's work and not his life, this structure makes sense: Give us what we need, from whatever time and place, to get to Don Juan – then give us the main event. And Lane is incredibly convincing as to the blasphemic brilliance of that poem, "the most conversational epic ever penned, and certainly the only one with punch lines." Toward the end he practically mounts the Byron Eras Tour, listing the "philhellene," "the limping boy, the wag with the bear, the cad with the under look, the Londoner, the libertine, the would-be liberator." Poetry! Lane's thrilled – and I'm thrilled to see it. But I still wouldn't rent Byron's Bed & Breakfast.
Window-Shop:
"Unlearned Lessons" - Justin Chang spins About Dry Grasses into gold. Any new critic's first column is a major treat, but a new film critic... well, they ought to throw a parade. Chang enters that storied seat with aplomb, filing a review of a three-and-a-half-hour art film with all the peppy enthusiasm of, well, a guy that just got a sweet new gig. Chang's descriptors are focused but not slight: Chekhov has an "ear for trivial argument and windy introspection," the lead actress' performance shows "laserlike intelligence and bracing warmth." (Chang does seem to favor an adjective – but who doesn't?) Beneath his pen the space of a review suddenly feels generous and unrushed (and it helps that there's just one film at hand, not two; let's make a habit of that, please). He even finds time for one nugget of Laneian wordplay, describing the film's "languid steppe-by-steppe pacing." Ha!
"Starburst" - Kathryn Schulz is shocked by our unpreparedness for the next great solar storm. Feels like a sequel to The Really Big One, Schulz's instant classic about how woefully unprepared we are for a huge Cascadian earthquake. Schulz even provides a term for this kind of thing: "Low-frequency, high-consequence events." This piece spends less time dwelling on the effects of a solar disaster, and more time explaining what space-weather even is, and how it might cause such a calamity. That means things are a bit less visceral than in the earlier piece, but Schulz's pithy and easy-to-read style still keeps things anxiously entertaining. Schulz spins a great metaphor comparing the sun's magnetic field to a line of runners, she makes topics like the difficulty of replacing transformers feel positively, well, electric. The piece is essentially structured from least-to-most cataclysmic; this keeps things suspenseful, although it makes some of the leadup feel like padding in retrospect. And Ken Tegnell is never an especially compelling central figure; as in any disaster movie, the segments with scientists peering at a screen mostly make you anxious to get on with the destruction. When we finally do get to the heart of the matter, Schulz seems a bit uneasy to speculate wildly; she starts relying on vague theoreticals ("an individual system that seems robust in isolation might not respond as expected when other systems to which it is connected simultaneously experience powerful stressors") which prompt the question: Such as? These quibbles don't lessen the piece's galloping readability, and it's always worth re-remembering our systems' jaw-dropping inability to prepare for a crisis that's not in our faces. Sun, sun, sun... here it comes.
"Arrested Development" - Maggie Doherty assumes child's pose with Carson McCullers. A classic genre in the magazine: The explainer of a significant figure I'd heard of but didn't know much about. These pieces are truly invaluable for broadening your cultural horizons; they're still the best first reason to read the magazine. (Well, maybe best second reason, after the cartoons.) Doherty's prose is clean and unassuming, progressing chronologically and drawing extensively from the book under review, by Mary V. Dearborn; she never quite remembers to circle back to the review aspect, once she's done with McCullers' story, and the piece ends, a bit abruptly, some time before McCullers' passing. (Her last novel gets no mention.) There's also the matter of balance between McCullers' life and her work; I wanted slightly more discussion of the latter, though I assume Doherty is roughly following Dearborn's ratio. McCullers is a fascinating character, and it's tempting (though obviously troublesome) to diagnose her with contemporary language [^1]; Doherty shows restraint in this department, and restraint is generally the applicable word here – Doherty lightly criticizes prior appraisals of McCullers for handling her with kid gloves (thereby, perhaps, mirroring her coddling in life) and her portrait manages neutrality without lacking too much color.
"Forgive Me Not" - Helen Shaw burns little-girl blue with Sunset Baby. There's a feeling that to fully understand Shaw's view of playwright Dominique Morisseau's "magisterial status," a reader would need to have seen most everything she's made. Failing that, Shaw does a decent job filling us in: She's a "gifted orchestrator of plots about America's ongoing betrayal of Black workers." That tells us theme, but beat-by-beat tone is trickier; it's unfortunate that the longest quote we get comes from a section of Sunset Baby that Shaw calls "Morisseau's least confidently written." But Shaw's confident hand means the "sense of blues-broken reverie" fills the air.
"Invisible Workers" - Ian Urbina fishes for the story of North Korean laborers in China. Another entry in Urbina's oddly specific remit of fishing-adjacent crime. As ever, his feats of reporting are astonishing. It's shocking how much of the information Urbina draws on is public; he even quotes a number of comments on the videos he discusses ("Aren't you prohibited from filming this?" asks one). But the really gutsy stuff relies on Chinese investigators, necessarily anonymous, who've managed to visit the plants in person.
This piece sticks strictly to a reverse-pyramid style in which the first section outlines the newsworthy parts of the tale and the rest shades in details, beat by beat. Unfortunately, what's interesting here is pretty much just the newsworthy bits; after that first section, there's nothing much to recommend the rest of the piece. It just rehashes what's already been said, only adding a recounting of the pains Urbina's team went through to document these abuses. The last section has a few especially horrific details about forced sex work, but mostly, you're fine to just read the opening. Urbina could easily make a broader point about the horrors of capitalist production, how it's systemically designed so that its greatest abuses rest on the shoulders of the weakest and poorest parties available. He declines: If you're looking for philosophy here, go fish.
"Sword Play" - Inkoo Kang takes a stab at FX's new Throneslike samurai series. I complain sometimes about how the pop-music reviews are forced to find a slant that justifies the importance of the album at hand, but Kang benefits from a bit more of that sort of thing: The comparison to Game of Thrones here helps the piece cohere; Shōgun's failures are properly contextualized as mirroring that show's successes.
Skip Without Guilt:
"Identity Crisis" - Jay Caspian Kang plays Pretendian with semi-cancelled academic Elizabeth Hoover. Oddly muted, as though it were conceived not out of any particular passion for the material on Kang's part, but just because similar pieces in what I've termed the "Fabulists Exposed" subgenre have done very well for the magazine, again and again and again and again and again. That H.G. Carillo piece is an especially direct reference here; Kang basically nabs its rough outline. Nothing wrong with treading a worn path, but you have to do it with some brio, a task Kang isn't up to. Mostly, he relies on rhetorical questions ("If she had never researched her family, as she claimed, where did these names come from?") which sometimes come in strings, and on hand-wavey statements ("The word 'complicated' always hovers in the stories of Pretendians," "This question of harm... is central to debates about racial fraud") that reveal nothing much about the story at hand. That story is not uninteresting, but Kang doesn't use it to tell us more about the pox of fake Indians – Kang could go more specific, and really delve into individual psychology in the manner of a Rachel Aviv, or broader, and comprehensively examine the cultural forces behind Pretendians, bringing in stories like Elizabeth Warren's or Buffy Sainte-Marie's. [^2] He does neither, which can make this narrative read uncomfortably like gossip, especially when Hoover's husband's alleged pattern of sexual predation enters the picture. Are we learning these details because they tell us something more about Hoover's complicity, or just because they're juicy? Kang never bothers to actually articulate his point, let alone his point-of-view.
Letters:
Stephanie pointed out that Adam Gopnik's troublesome covid-era piece didn't completely leave out the George Floyd protests, as I'd written; "it was actually worse than nothing, a 'medical fig leaf.'" She quotes Gopnik: "Right-wingers were quick to decry the medical establishment for stepping away from its own public-health strictures when the George Floyd marches happened. (The protests took place out-of-doors, which provided at least a medical fig leaf for the rearrangement.)" Thanks for the correction, and I agree that this mention was perhaps worse than no mention.
Eagle-eyed readers (my parents) of the subscriber-only Cartoon and Poem Supplement noticed that I forgot to assign my Best of the Week cartoon. Well, it's this one. Here's what I wrote: It's really funny and also totally brilliant, capturing a weird philosophical poetry by twisting the Descartes phrase into the mouth of a jealous other. I could read a term paper on the caption, which subtly suggests that the nature of our consciousness depends on outside observation; that taking Descartes at face value will inevitably piss the Other off: "Why wasn't I consulted about the nature of your being?"
What did you think of this week's issue? (Or last week's. Or any week's! What did you think of the issue published on July 8, 1973? These are the real questions...)
You know how to subscribe to a newsletter, don't you? You just put your lips together and click here!
[^1] No, I'm not going to do it in the footnotes either. If you really want to know what I think... you can initiate correspondence.
[^2] That CBC article on Buffy Sainte-Marie is not only a feat of investigation but one of writing, methodically unspooling the story in ways that elucidate its vast significance. Well worth reading even if you know the facts of the matter.
I’ve enjoyed the many recent McCullers reappraisals, and I’m glad that this one feels truly additive. I was surprised, while reading, to see little commentary on the gendered aspect of the coddling of erratic genius. SO many male “geniuses” have, for decades, been discussed as though their art were worth their own suffering and the suffering they caused others. I think we should be clear-eyed about the truth of it—that no one’s art is improved by addiction or worth the suffering of others—but seeing mentions, for instance, of Reeves having to cook and keep house as though this were a sign of McCullers’ deficiencies, when so many male writers at the time would have had wives to do this for them, felt a little narrow-minded. I’d be interested in a piece viewing her “coddling,” sexual exploits , and how/when/why her community turned on her through this lens. Not because I think it means we should excuse McCullers, but because we can always learn so much about the past and ourselves when we interrogate how gender shapes our perspective.
I wasn't familiar with the BSM story. She has maintained the lie in the face of all evidence. I suppose that's a bold move. The reporting was overly long and repetitive for a straightforward case of fraud. Plus they allowed BSM to close out the piece with her ongoing nonsense and waffle, perpetuating an ambiguity that doesn't exist in the real world. That was poor form. It certainly wasn't a better piece than Identity Crisis, which for me, was nuanced about the supply and demand side of identity appropriation. I also enjoyed reading about Hoover stringing beads in meetings. A comical and literal performative Indian. And yes, also a bit sad that academia provided a stage for the performance.