Last Week’s New Yorker, week of January 19

“‘SHABBAT or HOLIDAYS, RIDE with SPONGEBOB.’“

The best thing in the issue this week is a pair of superb Talk of the Towns.

Must-Reads:

🗣️ “V.I.P. in Chains” (Here to There Dept.) - Zach Helfand goes a-courting for Maduro. Basically the perfect contemporary Talk – a slantways tie to the news provides an excuse to survey the city landscape afresh. Here, Helfand thinks through possible approaches to transporting Maduro from prison in south Brooklyn to court in downtown Manhattan without causing “traffic Armageddon” by shutting down either the bridge or the tunnel. It’s a genuinely tricky – probably impossible – problem, but it proves mostly an excuse for Helfand to solicit quirky local suggestions (“‘There has to be some kind of way to go through the sewer lines’”) – since there’s nothing a city denizen loves more than insisting they know a fast, semi-secret way from here to there. (My partner and I have an ongoing dispute as to the fastest path from Fulton and Broadway to the Cortlandt Street “R” platform; attempts at timing the options have proved unpersuasive to all parties.) Bus fails Helfand’s tests (Bay Ridge mentioned!) but pedicab proves promising, and the fast-talking driver-slash-Shabbas goy Helfand stumbles upon could probably convince himself of anything. Don’t tell him it’s a bridge too far!

🗣️ “Watch Your Step” (D.C. Postcard) - Charles Bethea is walking there. Manages to encapsulate D.C. vibes, especially read in concert with Helfand; these pedestrians are less colorful, more moralizing; less distracted, more concise. Bethea mostly gets out of the way of their righteous gripes, which concern an outrageously long-lived flagpole hole in front of an IRS building. He does excellent work cataloguing useless trivia, including but not limited to the contents of the hole. It may be a metaphor, but it’s also a real thing, and Bethea doesn’t ignore either presence. Nothing is all, and a hole contains it.

Along with these, I also want to shout out Helen Rosner’s even-more-wonderful-than-usual review of Jamaican patties around town, “All Hail the Jamaican Patty” (The Food Scene). Rosner’s pieces are chopped to bits to fit the paltry column allotted them in the print mag, but if you’re willing to tab over instead, they’re always worth reading. This one is not just a restaurant survey but a cultural history – although I wonder if Rosner knows that NYC public school students have gotten patties for lunch weekly since at least the ‘90s, making them an even more distinctive signifier of our city. Middle schoolers eat pizza everywhere, but patties are ours.

Window-Shop:

“Call of the Wild” (U.S. Journal) - Paige Williams can’t go on hurting this way; she’s somewhere in the Smoky Mountain rain. Takes its sweet time getting going – the rescue group the piece is nominally about is first mentioned at the end of the fourth section – but these earlier, looser sections are the strongest, gesturing toward an era when this magazine would treat non-profile feature pieces as an excuse to cram in as much litany and enigmatic anecdote as possible. (The secret of the “fifty-thousand-word piece about zinc” is that only, like, twenty thousand of those words would actually be about zinc.) Here there is, in just the first section, a lengthy catalogue of “misadventure and bad luck” in the Smokies, a list of all the amusement venues on Gatlinburg’s main street (most of them owned by Ripley’s), and a sentence that serves as the verbal version of Williams’ vacation Instagram post. (Great meal, friendly local, funny sign, wildlife; all the hits.) This is a piece in which the trivial is important and the important is trivial; life-and-death missions are mined for small and strange moments. It’s a smart approach, and it keeps Williams’ past habit of dismissiveness entirely at bay; still, it does make this very long piece verge on insubstantiality. Ultimately this is a tiny crew of extremely competent hobbyists; if their existence says anything about America, it may just be that we’re expert in finding partial, private solutions to public problems. We’re deep in the woods.

“Subway Vigilante” (A Critic at Large) - Adam Gopnik is straphangered up. Gopnik’s history of the Bernie Goetz incident draws heavily on two new books exploring it; there’s nothing here to make you majorly reconsider the incident, and in fact the central point Gopnik makes is that it probably mattered less than either author thinks. It was a one-of-one occurance, was viewed at the time through the lens of crime more than race, and thus was less a beginning than an end of an era, as crime soon dropped below crisis levels. Gopnik’s analysis is a little dismissive, but book-length nonfiction does tend to inflate the importance of the thing it’s about, and I’d be surprised if that weren’t the case here. No event ever cleanly marks the beginning or end of anything. Still, Gopnik finds the incident interesting enough to provide a detailed summation that combines two differently-revisionist histories into one as-best-as-we-can-tell truth. Mostly, this is solid; his legal analysis is overly accommodating of the jury, though, and the verdict was surely more race-tinged than he allows. Ed Koch makes an appearance (and the ongoing legacy of one of the dumbest things to ever win an Oscar continues) so Gopnik can reference the Mamdani moment as a baton-pass from one generation of immigrants to another; whether this really represents the “passing of that world” of the city into a more “genuinely diverse” one, time will tell. It’s a shoehorned point, but Gopnik has essentially written a piece about the unimportance of its own central subject, so he needs a few distractions. Just as long as he doesn’t pull the emergency brake.

🗣️ “Period Correct” (The Pictures) - Victoria Uren shadows boxers with costumer Miyako Bellizzi. Thoroughly charming.

“Contagion” (The Theatre) - Emily Nussbaum has a nervous tick. Nussbaum nails the details, from Smallwood’s “puppyish, confused sweetness” to the end of the first act, which “feels like watching a person jump happily into an empty pool.” Having seen this show, I don’t agree with her broader perspective at all; this is less a show about hollowness than it is a hollow show, and the specific brand of schizoid conspiracy-mindedness it presents is thoroughly retro, totally different in style (if not entirely in content) from present-day strains of chatbot psychosis and fascist delusion. It’s also a known, and not novel, symptom of mental disorder. It is also absolutely not “eerily modern” for a show from ‘96 to do the that-person-is-a-robot thing. But Nussbaum does excellent work justifying her appreciation of the show, centered around its treatment of grief. Jason Zinoman, a perfectly fine comedy critic at the Times, was for some reason assigned this show and delivered a rave that’s shallow, clumsily written, and completely misinterprets the show’s aims as I see them. (Helen Shaw can’t come fast enough.) Nussbaum inadvertently wrote what seems to be the piece Zinoman was trying to write, and the comparative elegance of her delivery made me appreciate this article more than I might have otherwise, given how baffled I am by her conclusions. (Sara Holdren, on the other hand, actually seems to have seen the same show I saw, which naturally makes her review easier to nod along to.) I won’t let it bug me: it’s easy to see things differently.

“Hey There!” (Annals of Technology) - Sam Knight thinks Whatsappyness is a warm phone. This is sort of like a long explainer about bidets or scorched rice: everyone except a few of us ugly Americans has been into this shit for a very long time, and an introduction to the very basics at this late date would be condescending except that it probably is needed. (Personally: WhatsApp doesn’t work right on my beat-up iPhone XS, I cook rice in an Instant Pot¹ so there’s never any scorching to enjoy… but I do use a bidet.) After some history of the creators (not uninteresting but not really pertinent) and that explainer, Knight spends a while on monetization, which WhatsApp delayed pursuing; it’s “increasingly oriented toward the needs of businesses and paying users”, but still maybe the least bad of various social options? In many ways, WhatsApp is less global consciousness than global infrastructure; Knight, by mostly using the former framing, either diminishes or enhances the app’s stature, depending on your view. It may be owned by Facebook, but it is still sort of a random-person-in-Nebraska app, with a tiny team and a focus on accessibility. As the digital world becomes more and more of the whole world, though, thirty random Facebook employees may have the whole world in their hands. Make chat app work on every phone? You go too far! You am play gods!²

Skip Without Guilt:

“Conquests” (The Current Cinema) - Justin Chang is revisionary. A bit rushed, and so reliant on suggesting what these two films have in common that Chang forgets to catalogue what makes them unique (among other things, there’s really no discussion of acting at all here, which I’ll take over the usual critical failure – a lack of interrogation of form – but which is still a shortcoming). The half-and-half segmentation is tricky – there’s a reason Anthony Lane tended to do one “full” review and one capsule, because the four-paragraph take is inevitably just long enough to disappoint in one way or another.

“Under Threat” (Letter from Copenhagen) - Margaret Talbot Danes to respond. Doesn’t extend very far beyond its lede: Denmark used to love America, now, with Trump bullying them over Greenland, the mood has soured. Fair enough, but a vibe check isn’t exactly news, and Talbot, despite a few charming moments of uncut Danish uncool-cool (on drinking Coca Cola: “‘It’s more contraband than reefer!’”), sticks too close to the facts; this is largely another litany of Trump’s outrages, as viewed through the somewhat trivializing lens of their impact on a social-democratic do-gooder paradise. The most compelling material concerns the way Trump’s saber-rattling has caused a wave of pro-Greenland, pro-EU sentiment; this would be a good place to start the piece, but it’s just the brief conclusion to what’s otherwise a re-Copen-tulation.

“It’s Not You, It’s Me” (Books) - Katy Waldman spells it out fawn-ethically. One of those reviews where the material is so bad it just feels far beneath the attention of the reviewer. Surely Waldman has better things to do than tear down hypercapitalist self-help slop. (Writing pop nonfiction is the real trauma response.) And I wish she’d done more to rescue the idea of fawning, which, in the more limited context of articulating one of the central modalities of the ego internalizing caretaker abuse, really is a massive step forward, regardless of its misuse by a couple dumbasses. (Just imagine if the advice these two give was applied to the “fight” response: ‘You should never fight for anything! Silence yourself!’) Worse, though, is Waldman’s capper, which is rushed and, I think, wrong, gesturing toward social media and namedropping Alone Together, one of my least favorite books, as a way to show that fawning is just a response to societal powerlessness and precarity. I’m skeptical of the idea that fawning is something newly prevalent; if anything, a more socially connected world would seem to encourage flight, not obligation. Waldman is right to suggest love as the answer, but that’s also the third-oldest advice-column landing place in the book, only narrowly beaten out by “live” and “laugh”.

Radden Keefe on Capote (Takes) - Just not sure we need another introduction to what must be one of the most widely-read texts in the country.

“Power Trip” (Profiles) - Dexter Filkins won’t shout ‘polo’. An astonishingly long piece, given that its hook is basically that Rubio is a toady who has very little power. He stands by, frowning miserably, meditating on how to justify Trump’s nuttiness and, more importantly, use it to further his own private aims. This, of course, will be obvious to anyone who’s looked at him; he may be worse at disguising his nihilistic venality than any politician since Spiro Agnew. Filkins is distractible, and after a very profile-y first four sections, on Rubio’s pre-Trump life, things pivot from chronology to a one-news-story-at-a-time approach that makes the piece feel narratively aimless. USAID got closed… and Rubio was there! Trump imposed tariffs… and Rubio was there! Filkins’ implied point is that Rubio didn’t really influence these policies, he, at most, enforced them; obviously this should tank his reputation, but if post-Trump 2 we’re still tallying which fascists we can still trust, well, we’re fucked regardless. I don’t need evidence of complicity or powerlessness to think that Rubio should be put out to sea. No raft too small.

Letters:

Michael B. went down a rabbithole sourcing a quote on marital rape from the S.C. Cornell piece on consent. (“A California state senator summed up the prevailing attitude: ‘If you can’t rape your wife, who can you rape?’”) He says: “I'd love to have seen the fact checking records on this one as the deepest I could get is a scholarly article that cites the ‘Women's History Research Center of Berkeley, California’ which seemingly went defunct in 1975. According to one newspaper source, the senator (Bob Wilson) did end up voting for the law. Interestingly, this guy also invented Smack-Its, ‘a table top version of tetherball.’”

roman

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