July 19, 2023

Last Week's New Yorker Review: July 24, 2023

Last Week’s New Yorker, week of July 24

Must-Read:

“A Land Held Hostage” - Jon Lee Anderson surveys the burning wreck of Haiti, where gangs have grasped power. Anderson’s vivid political portraits of South and Central American countries are often must-reads; here, he shows what happens when politics almost totally break down under the stress and raw violence of a broad societal collapse. (One spurred by the despicable wrongdoing of U.N. “peacekeeping” forces, among other factors.) As the country’s justice minister says, “people are fed up with politics. People want security.” That violence, foregrounded only as much as is necessary, makes for a grim and brutal read, but one that’s grounded in incredible feats of access — Anderson gets direct quotes from nearly every player, including the “bandit” gang-leader Barbecue, whose grotesque swagger makes for an intense centerpiece. In one unforgettable section on the rumors surrounding the assassination of the country’s president, it’s slowly revealed that the likely suspects behind the act include pretty much everyone we’d met so far. It’s kill or be killed — as demonstrated again by the police-backed vigilante movement Bwa Kale, which murders gang members. And as Barbecue says, “if there is any collateral damage, that’s not us.”

Window-Shop:

“This Mortal Coil” - Vinson Cunningham sees a new Hamlet in the park. Cunningham has lately been amping his poeticism up higher and higher with each review; this eventually opens into a weird prose poem in which Ato Blankson-Wood’s Hamlet, whose monologues are “grand but fatuous excuses for his chaotic vigilantism, not language born organically from the parallel pressures of sadness and filial loyalty” —note the dactyls at the end— goes “on the road,” “sowing tears like seeds in lonely hotel rooms all over Europe.” I don’t entirely get the memo, but I’m forgiving — one can always find the actual-factuals in the Times. Vinson’s up to something trickier, a miniature puzzle-box that gives you a sense of the show, but activates fully only after you’ve seen it. (That was, indeed, the case with his review of The Comeuppance.)

“Higher and Higher” (Comment) - Bill McKibben is having a heat wave — a tropical heat wave. The temperature’s rising, it isn’t surprising: Shell certainly can oil-can. The kind of snappy, snippy climate reporting I appreciate, especially when McKibben uses a Shell exec’s corporate-speak against him: “cutting fossil-fuel production would actually be ‘dangerous and irresponsible,’” the exec says, but what’s really dangerous is “the fires and floods,” and “standing by as this warming happened is the most irresponsible thing that humans have ever done.”

“Knuckle to Nostril” (Talk of the Town) - Adam Iscoe harm-reduces with a nonprofit that gives out free Narcan. Packs a lot in: A charming backstory, (“‘We were interviewing each other!’”) vivid scenery, (“Hundreds of people rushed past the Snapchat AR Photo Tower,”) and just a bit of service journalism. (“‘Just stick it up your nostril… then press in the plunger, and that’s it.’”)

“Subtle Revolution” - Rivka Galchen explores the advances in multiple-sclerosis treatment. Galchen seems to have realized that her story had no conflict — that it was essentially the story of smart people coming up with clever solutions to difficult problems — and decided to roll with it. This is among the most nonlinear pieces I’ve read in the magazine, which is funny because it’s not exactly artsy, it simply proceeds according to the logic of connecting various interesting dots in semi-random fashion. It pales in comparison to Gideon Lewis-Kraus’ theoretically similar recent piece on ALS treatment, which was basically all conflict; still, this funky montage of triumph is a nice place to spend half an hour.

“Sniff Test” (Talk of the Town) - Andrew Marantz tours a sewage-treatment plant in Hoboken with John Wilson. This is only decent — as with Wilson’s shoot, there are “no bolt-from-the-blue epiphanies.” But How To is perhaps my favorite new TV show of the decade — every extra second with Wilson is one I spend in bliss.

“The Nashville Underground” - Emily Nussbaum goes searching for Nashville's “new guard” and finds “a messier story” instead. That story being that radio Country is stuck idling in red-state party-bro radio mode, while Americana twiddles its thumbs. Early on, Nussbaum hits on the perfect metaphor for the division, then sidesteps it for a weaker one. When the country-music couple of Jason Isbell and Amanda Shires are discussing Tennessee’s hopeless gerrymandering, Shires asks, “‘How do we get past that?’ ‘Local elections,’ Isbell said. ‘You really don’t think the answer is anarchy?’ Shires remarked, bobbing one of her strappy heels like a lure.” Not only is that image unbeatably vivid, the hopeless party politics of almost everyone Nussbaum interviews — making decent music which might play on country radio, but for the fact of its insurmountable bigotry — ends up feeling like a hopeless fight for an unclear prize. After all, while Nussbaum doesn’t quite delve into this, the truth is that country radio is just about the only radio left standing, propped up by a mostly “white, rural, and older” demographic that still relies on programming to pick hits. The Billboard Hot 100 is full of country these days, because the old way of listening to pop music is dying, partly replaced by fandoms, in which the music exists as a stand-in for a larger brand, mood, or subculture, but mostly just shrinking — young people who aren’t music fans, in one way or another, just aren’t listening to music at all.1

As for the hopelessness of the fight: Nussbaum mostly repeats the idea that “the old generation ran everything and would never change its mind,” but at one point she slyly inserts the fact that iHeartRadio may be largely responsible for the lack of change, since it's “codified old biases into algorithms.” In other words, it’s not just the oldheads, it’s the computerized automation of the oldheads — an apocalyptic ChatGPT bigotry machine, propelling Morgan Wallen2 to the perpetually shrinking role of the Minimum Viable Popstar.3 Now that’s a story.

But Nussbaum doesn’t want to write a piece about country music as the final holdout of radio monoculture; it’s nicer to imagine we might listen our way to a better future — vote our way out of this gerrymander. It’s easier, too, to imagine a battle between a blue team, Americana, that isn’t “pushed by the market to speak more broadly,” and a red team, Music Row, that isn’t “pressured to get smarter.” Note how those conclusions, practically conventional wisdom in the liberal parts of Nashville, also look a lot like the political solutions of centrist technocracy: Democrats should embrace a big tent, Republicans should abandon their caveman phraseology.

Nussbaum also inevitably turns her piece into exactly the celebration of a “new guard” of singers “whose presence challenged [the] industry” that she initially says it won’t be. That means the last two sections are skippable; they’re fine profiles in miniature, but they have little to do with the piece we’ve been reading. There’s no gas left in the pickup.

Still, I don’t want to nitpick too much.4 Nussbaum’s reportage is fantastic even as her diagrams don’t always hold water. Keith Hill’s honest bigotry is especially unforgettable, and his phraseology is both horrifying and undeniably mellifluous. (“Your diversity is the radio dial, from 88 to 108. There’s your fucking diversity.”) And Nussbaum’s accidentally fun journey to the heart of whiteness, Jason Aldean’s bar, is like Hunter S. Thompson on diet soda and nothing else.

Skip Without Guilt:

“The Price is Right” - Louis Menand asks, “What hath neoliberalism wrought?” I’m just not sure I can imagine the reader who needs the first section, in which neoliberalism is carefully disambiguated from mid-century liberalism, but would enjoy, or even be able to parse, the rest of the piece, which has lots of lines like “The Telecommunications Act included a clause, Section 230, immunizing Web operators from liability for third-party content posted on their sites. The consequences are well known.” Are they better-known than the definition of neoliberalism? I enjoyed Menand’s takedowns of Hayek and Friedman, but as he admits, the material isn’t especially fresh; he’s kicking a monument that’s already been pulled off its perch. And the final section is entirely pro forma.

“The Hunt is On” - Anthony Lane leaps toward the new Mission Impossible flick. Lane takes the opportunity of this longer-than-usual review to strew some extra groaners; I had to step away from my magazine after the one about “Frodo Baggins having taken early retirement.” I’ll give him the comparison of Cruise’s mannequin run to Buster Keaton’s breakneck waddle. Other than that, his critique of the new film as “too talky by half” might serve as a note to self.

“The New Blue Wall” - Benjamin Wallace-Wells scouts Gretchen Whitmer. This piece doesn’t bring up Whitmer’s presidential prospects until the very end, but it doesn’t really make any sense without that context. Whitmer’s a sharp and steely pol, but, as Wallace-Wells notes, she’s “highly rehearsed” in person, and there are no odd or surprising moments of personality here. Wallace-Wells gets distracted for a long while by Michigan’s conservatives, who dominate the story’s middle third; he also spends a while on a confusing, euphemistic, and slightly gross anecdote about focus groups. (“The [Republicans] had effectively traded away some of its most reliable voters for, as the official put it, ‘people who had lived rough lives.’”) When he eventually returns to “Big Gretch,” it’s to spout some tired ideas about Democrats’ newfound ability to allign with Big Business. A better piece would be honest about its topic — Whitmer’s national political prospects, as reflected in her local political prospects. This piece acts like it cares about the latter, while being clearly more invested in the former.

“Bear Season” - Jill Lepore gets grisly. Aims for a kind of extended prose-poem on the subject of human-bear relations. Ends up, instead, in an aimless expanse where no given paragraph or sentence has any particular reason to be where it is, and where a fairly sharp insight (“…only people undertake the dark work of torment and imprisonment”) is usually followed by an inexplicable supposition (“Ice is forest to polar bears.”) The grim and vicious tone of the piece would only be worthwhile if building toward a point — in the absence of that, its pitch-black (bear) nihilism is hard to, uh, stand.

Letters:

Regular correspondent Michael said Anthony Lane’s review of the new Indiana Jones flick was his best outing in a while: “I enjoyed the structure of the review and a late film in a franchise like this lends itself well to Lane's humor.” On the topic of the Alex Barasch Mattel piece, he writes that while the “executive statements seem stupid, with comics seemingly running out of steam and nothing else working at the cinema, it's at least possible that non-comic familiar IP ends up being the dominant cinematic force for the next few years. (I hope not, but I also would have preferred a completely different blockbuster trajectory in the 2010s.)”

What did you think of this week’s issue? Comments are open to all, and you can also reply directly to this email (in which case I’ll ask before publishing what you send.)