Last Week’s New Yorker, week of January 26

“‘Trust me, Trump is not going to be the President forever. Remember that.’“

Must-Read:

“Show of Force” (A Reporter at Large) - Jonathan Blitzer wonders how she’ll McIver her way out of this one. Remarkably gripping. Ras Baraka’s arrest made the news, and McIver’s prosecution has skirted its edges, but I don’t think there had been reporting on the specifics of the incident as detailed, clear, and emotionally resonant as what Blitzer provides here. I know of McIver; I voted for her when I lived in Jersey City (we were right on the edge of her district; the Dunkin across the street was Menendez territory). It’s a shame that she obviously still feels a measure of guilt at having expressed righteous anger at the injustices of that day; it’s also an expected response to harassment, though. The first half of the piece is mostly a thoroughly contextualized beat-by-beat description of the events of that day, complete with dialogue – one imagines the stage adaptation. The second half delves into the lawyers who picked out McIver; their open corruption and disobedience of the law is more dismaying, but the sheer bitterness and self-interest guiding their every move is what really stuns. The piece’s last two sections cover the horrible conditions in the prisons and McIver’s “heavy-lidded”, “overwhelmed” response to that injustice and her own persecution. It’s a very human reaction to inhuman actions.

Window-Shop:

“War Clouds” (Letter from Caracas) - Armando Ledezma says Happy Xmas, War is Starting. Sort of an extended prose poem in which Ledezma experiences the US bombing of Venezuela; he makes his political point in the last two paragraphs – reactionary diasporans don’t speak for their country – but before that, this is entirely a haunting, searching diary entry. The dynamic between Ledezma and his grandparents is rendered with speed but great depth: “On Christmas Eve, we looked through the car windows with awe at a city that my grandparents had almost forgotten, and that I had never got to know in the first place”. Ledezma’s harassment at the hands of the state lends credence to his discomfited ambivalence at Maduro’s outster; the specificity of his insider-outsider status allows him to see Venezuela not as a symbol but as a state.

“School of Fish” (On and Off the Menu) - Hannah Goldfield gets fresh with us. Neat! I had no idea about this method for killing fish, which is more humane and leads to better product, and it’s fun to learn. Also fun to hear about Goldfield giving fishing a try: “surprisingly intimate, just me and an invisible squirming weight at the other end of the line.” This is very much just a long Talk of the Town, but there are many worse things.

Skip Without Guilt:

“How Should a Mother Be?” (Books) - Rebecca Mead has it all, and has had it. Mead’s writing here is at its best, funny and sharp. Unfortunately, it’s in service of a piece so insubstantial it flakes right off like a baby’s toenail. (It happens.) After some very 101 stuff on Winnicott, a bunch of books on the subject of mothering are flipped through rapidly; Mead’s summary is that not obsessing over mothering is in the air, and that while this trend, too, is a mark of privilege, it’s still welcome compared to the pretend-perfect Pinterest mom. The trouble is that Mead only gets to the negative definitions of mothering, joining in on the creation of an imaginary villain, the mother obsessed with perfection, but messiness is not a tactic, and one starts to wonder if all these writers, begging for help, could find ways to help one another. The alienation and distressing hypervigilance of contemporary child-rearing does not have to be a given, and some of the modes of complaint here reify a false dichotomy between malignant, unachievable standards and an insistence on no standards at all. Indeed, working hard to reduce your anxiety as a parent can be the foundation of a healthier relationship with your child. (The frequent reactionary annoyance with ‘gentle parenting’ ignores that the method ought to be as much about being gentle with yourself as it is about being gentle with the child.) Mead tears down some tactics, but she doesn’t lift up others; yes, the ideal of motherhood is toxic, but that doesn’t mean there ought to be no ideal. The way we create a new world is by teaching the people that will occupy it. It takes a child to raise a village.

“The Ice Curtain” (Our Far-Flung Correspondents) - Ian Frazier goes to a Nome man’s land. A throwback to a time when this magazine would publish travelogue-y pieces without news hooks, except that this one sort of has a news hook – how have changing US-Russia relations impacted the border? – just not one Frazier seems very interested in. He’d rather find interesting local stories on the gold-dusty streets of Nome, and he sort of does, but the sections are so fragmented they can easily be ranked. The fourth section (beginning “My own trip…”), on an oligarch who became governor of the Russian border city for “opaque” reasons, fixed things up, then, just as quickly and randomly, left, is by far the highlight – an excellent seven-paragraph gold nugget on its own, it also elegantly contains all the thematic material that the rest of the piece works much harder to unfold. The culture-clash irony, the disorienting mix of connectedness and isolation, the cruel mix of wealth and poverty – it’s all there. Nothing else is especially bad, it’s just ungainly, and too scattershot to make an impact. This type of piece is fun, and I certainly wouldn’t want to discourage more of this kind of thing; this particular effort, minus one great section, doesn’t withstand a firm chomp.

Cunningham on Blitt (Takes) - I think this cover has been entirely wrung dry of discourse; Cunningham finds nothing new to say, and is weirdly uninterested in considering how the last fifteen years of politics might have changed its meanings. He’s good enough at prose that it’s still oddly fun to read his literal description of what the cover shows, though.

“Breaking News” (Profiles) - Clare Malone knocks down her Weiss-watched fence. Very surprised to have come across screenshots from this on Bluesky, because there’s so little here! Despite anonymity, nobody really bares their teeth (sure, she’s an incompetent boss, but isn’t she also a bloodthirsty monster?), and anyone who’s followed Weiss’ upward-failing awfulness will find the story they knew recounted chronologically, with no surprises. The only seriously un-media-trained pull quote here comes from Weiss’ wife Nellie Bowles, who says she “‘went to bed with this adorable opinion writer and woke up next to Les Moonves’”. Oh, that’s not…

“Cold Comfort” (The Art World) - Zachary Fine is bleach damaged. I have faith that at some point Fine will find his voice, and/or I’ll realize what he was going for all along. But this strikes me as a clunky and overliteral reading of these artworks, praising them for their Finnish chill but scolding us for getting cold; reminding us that the era’s Finnish artwork was largely gold-tinged naturalism, but protesting that in fact the real Finnish lesson is giving state support to artists outside that realm, which he didactically literalizes in the final sentence – come on. (Was this even true of artists further outside the Finnish norm than Schjerfbeck, whose deviation seems to me largely a matter of affect? Unclear.) And in any case, I just think it’s overwritten as all get-out: When Schjerfbeck isn’t “filtering the grammar of naturalism through a fine mesh strainer”¹ she’s “pierc[ing] the viewer with a feeling of antiquity and melancholic potency”. No concept is safe!

“Won’t Back Down” (Pop Music) - Kelefa Sanneh shows us the troubadour. Sanneh’s weird, fake beat as a country-music critic, a special interest he’s never convincing about, is pretty tiresome; here, he sounds tired out by one of the fresher voices in country-pop (which is saying almost nothing). If the music is boring – I listened, it really isn’t up to Bryan’s only so-so standard – then ignore it and move on. One semi-viral song that evasively references ICE without even making an obvious statement does not come close to justifying this.

“The Vermonter” (A Critic at Large) - Jill Lepore opens her Bernie book. Absolutely unconscionable, at this late date, to write a review that stops every paragraph to remind us that Lepore thinks Bernie is a one-note grump. She seems to think Bernie’s message is one of anger and “scolding”, just rants about bankers, as though she’s deaf to the second half of that message, which is about finding community and support with other working people. Covering the new book from Chiasson, the magazine’s poetry critic, is a very New York Review of Each Other’s Books sort of move; I’d have preferred an excerpt, especially since Lepore gives weirdly little sense of Chiasson’s perspective on the man, noting the ways the book doubles as memoir, then finding a single quote to serve for his entire perspective (“Bernie did, in important respects, change; and Vermont, in troubling ways, did not”) and dismissing the part dealing with Sanders in a single annoying phrase. She has more to say in defense of Vermont, where she lives; that she thinks it needs defending from Chiasson, whose people had been there for lifetimes before he moved to the big city, is either proof she’s a real Vermonter (prickly, ranks-closing) or proof that, unlike Bernie, she really isn’t.

Letters Corrections:

In the most recent Weekend Special’s “Something Else” section, I incorrectly referred to Initiative as featuring full-frontal nudity. The intended reference was to Liberation. The two shows share ten-letter titles, but little else, and Initiative is largely chaste. I regret the error.

And Jasmine also points out that Prince Faggot, my second-favorite show of the year, is yet another to feature full-frontal nudity. What’s with that?!

never say

die