Last Week’s New Yorker Review: Best of the Year So Far
Last Week’s New Yorker, Best of the Year So Far
Okay, that cartoons-through-time thing was a big hit, so there will be more of that coming at some point soon, along with other archival content. I have so much fun with archival content. Most of that will be for paying subscribers, so get while the getting’s good!
Prospect of the Periodical
A reader suggested that I begin by taking a broad view of the magazine’s work this year. I’ll progress through the magazine. Comment, the “in-the-news” editorial blurb, has the same issues as always: It’s overly concerned with contextualization, and mostly takes the same stances as, like, MSNBC. Who needs that? Jelani Cobb was probably the best Comment writer; he’s been gone since the beginning of the year, and beyond some good coverage of abortion rights, the section has been skippable. “Talk of the Town” was in a rut at the beginning of the year, but by mid-March was back in form. Michael Schulman on the theatre scene is reliably fantastic, whether covering pedicabs, blue-blood troupes, or nuns. Other pieces from the regulars that have stuck with me: Zach Helfand (always having fun) on see-through uniforms and the Challengers tennis coach, Henry Alford on a wedding-gown library, Naomi Fry on videotapes, Alex Barasch on cast recordings. I’d like Talk to make more room for freelance writers, who might broaden its perspective; they turned in a few excellent pieces, like Meg Bernhard on disappearing lakes and Sophia Hollander on string art.
The magazine’s feature pieces were generally quite strong, though their most intense reportage continues to be where the most compelling work is being done – the ongoing coverage of Ukraine, in particular, has been excellent… which makes the relative lack of Gaza reporting more noticeable. (There have been some very good pieces on the Israeli reaction, which isn’t the same thing.) there were perhaps a few too many philosophical/analytical feature pieces (e.g. Alex Ross asking “What Is Noise?”, although I liked that one), a niche which is already covered plenty well by the magazine’s book reviews. With the partial exception of Ronan Farrow’s RuPaul piece, there weren’t any hugely revelatory profiles, historically perhaps the magazine’s greatest strength, but there were some beautiful ones: Parul Sehgal’s snapshot of Judith Butler was generous and William Finnegan’s portrait of Jock Sutherland was positively pono.
The Critics’ section is loosely split into a longer-format Books section and shorter review pieces. I wish the magazine would play with this layout a bit more, and I appreciated that they let Justin Chang write a longer-than-usual review of Furiosa – more like that, please. Anthony Lane finally transitioning out of the film critics’ seat paid double dividends: Chang’s been excellent in the role, and Lane’s been renewed – his Lord Byron piece was good fun. Claudia Roth Pierpont on books in wartime was excellent as well. For the most part, though, it’s been an off cycle for this section, especially given how brilliant some of the competition, especially the revitalized Bookforum, has been lately. Sometimes these pieces feel like the writer is straining to find a frame that will accommodate the books they’ve been assigned. There may be too many reviews of multiple books at once – often, a more focused approach yields better results.
That’s evident in Chang’s reviews, for instance, as well as Richard Brody’s, newly elevated to the magazine. Because the film reviews no longer focus on two movies at once, they have much more space to breathe. Regular readers pretty much know my takes on the magazine’s reviewers, I won’t rehash them. I’ll just point out some of my favorite pieces1: Alex Ross, who’s been on something of a hot streak, on trombones, rage, and chambers, Helen Shaw on sunsets, pregnancies, and imps, Justin Chang on grasses, balls, and cities, Hannah Goldfield, whose new beat has mostly been quite fun, on vinegar and spam, Jackson Arn on abstractions and circles, Amanda Petrusich on kisses, and Jennifer Homans on isolations.
I’ve noticed no change in cartoon quality over the past six months; they’ve been holding at around a B-plus average for two or three years. It hasn’t been the strongest cycle for poetry (and there have been too many ‘big names’ for my liking), but there were some gems: At these links you’ll find my top eight. (Favorite last.) If you want my commentary, you’ll have to subscribe.
So: Here are my five favorite pieces of the year so far. (The blurbs are all recycled.) To be honest, I’m a bit taken aback by the fact that four out of five of these stories are written by men, set mostly in the MSK time zone, and concerned with the brutality of conflict. I’m not sure exactly what that says – it’s certainly not in line with how I’d describe my general taste in writing, and I fear that the list is, in aggregate, too gloomy, perhaps falling into the trap that tonal seriousness is equal to merit. At the end of the day, though, I’d rather be honest about my five favorite pieces than strain to produce a representative sample. Counting down…
5. “Everything in Hand” - Daniel Immerwahr does some empire state-building with the C.I.A. From its laugh-out-loud first line, this is a pitch-black comedy of errors. Immerwahr’s thesis isn’t wildly novel: The agency destabilized the Global South largely because their reach exceeded their grasp, and they kept on reaching and knocking things onto the floor. (“Superintending global politics is a vast undertaking, requiring both a deep understanding of many places and the sort of hubris that makes that deep understanding difficult.”) The draw here is largely the humor: “The United States took an occasional interest in oil”, “a reformed C.I.A. (slogan: ‘Coup Better’) wouldn’t solve the problem…”. But Immerwahr still states his case with such clarity that even those who know the agency as both dumb and dangerous will come away with a clarified understanding of the psychology behind their blunders. Immerwahr spends about one word (“adroit”) on the book under review; he selects the most jaw-dropping details (those parachuters!) and lets them speak. Coup d’état’s all, folks.
4. "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.
3. "The Assault" - Luke Mogelson waits for snow with the 1st Separate Assault Battalion. A fantastically gripping narrative of strategy and loss on the frontlines. Mogelson, embedded with the group, waits until the final section to inject any context; before that, this is just a beat-by-beat narrative of a single fight for a couple squares on a map. Yet by remaining so tightly focused, the story reveals far more about the conflict than a higher-level approach could hope to do. Mogelson isn't afraid to focus on tiny details of personality and strategy, but he manages not to let them slow things down, either – the piece doesn't feel long, though it is. It's hard to highlight any single line because the grueling sequential quality is so key to making the piece work – we have to feel like we've been up for two days straight with these soldiers. Mogelson eventually asserts his position, that the "American debate" – and even the debate in cities like Kyiv – is disconnected from the discussion on the ground, where the impossibility of triumph is clear. It's incredibly convincing, because we've seen what he's discussing before we've been told. Even those who don't like war stories should make time for this – its bleak horror soaks into your bones. All's quiet on the eastern front.
2. “Get Real” - Anna Wiener scans a redwood with the software developers shaping the digital world. Basically the platonic ideal of a tech story. I knew Wiener was thoughtful; I didn’t realize she was quite this funny. Inspired by the scan-and-catalogue obsessiveness of the teams she profiles, Wiener fills the piece with a cornucopia of perfectly described weird objects (“an aggressively roasted turnip”, “a digital asset of her orthodontic retainer”, “a humongous doll wearing a kicky bathing suit”, “a kind of anthropoid slurry”, “a plastic fiddle-leaf fig”, “a dial labelled ‘SCORCHING CAR SCALE’”, “fat chocolate-chip cookies,” “the drainage pipe at the edge of a clearing”) each of which I pictured rotating in a digital void. What makes this topic difficult is the blurry line between the micro-subject, texture-scanning for a very specific piece of software, and the macro-subject, the virtual world and its implications in general. Wiener is careful not to lose the former in the latter, but neither does she pretend not to have other things on her mind: The climate crisis keeps cropping up, which could feel distracting but instead feels like a reminder of the stakes of physical life; the “military-entertainment crisis” comes in for a mostly implied but still cogent critique; and Wiener’s main argument, that this stuff isn’t confined to videogames but has already saturated our whole social landscape, is made ably and with neutrality (but still pep and a point of view.)
It helps that the subject matter doesn’t require any speculation to look important – this is already happening, it’s a genuine shift, and it’s not widely understood. Wiener finds a vein of deep absurdity in the topic: A “debris box” must be scanned instead of a “branded Dumpster, which might not pass legal review”; there’s a subculture around “texture archaeology” which involves inspecting and admiring the “illusion of shininess” on Mario’s hat… those are just from the first section. Yet she always maintains a certain respect for the work; the humor doesn’t mock. A late reference to an “edible” clicked it into place: Wiener writes like a hyper-intelligent stoned person, breaking into joyful giggles at her own close observations. Call it high-resolution.
1. "Invisible City" - Anand Gopal visits Al-Hol, the impossibly massive prison camp where ISIS holds sway. A masterpiece of sweeping and brutal intensity. This is Gopal's third in a series of astonishing journeys across the Middle East – they drop once every four years, perhaps the slowest drip rate of any regularly contributing writer, but they're always worth it. Don't be turned off by the first paragraph's horrific violence – yes, the rest of the piece is brutal, with an impossible body count, but it's not bloody. Gopal's style could be described as novelistic – things do unspool according to laws of narrative and catharsis – but it's never at all showy; Gopal balances the instincts of a journalist and a storyteller so elegantly it obscures just how tricky an act this is.
The story centers around Jihan Omar, a character whose story encompasses so much of what Gopal wants to say it's a wonder she's not a composite – but who, at the same time, feels vivid and alive. We don't merely feel her pain, we wrestle with the same questions she does: How to deal with her husband joining ISIS, the abandonment of her family, so much sudden death... and this is merely the first third of her story, as told here. Gopal knows what he's found in Jihan and never tries to use her story as a deliberate example while he's telling it (by interlacing didactic paragraphs, for example), he first focuses on the telling, full of patience and detail, and only in the end uses her story to make dual, deeply profound points about acceptance and rage. By that time we've also met Abu Hassan, a figure so many writers would paint as flatly monstrous; it's truly remarkable how much of his curdled humanity Gopal reveals. And we've spent time with the children of Al-Hol, whose unknowing acceptance of their imprisonment prompts an emotion in me that I cannot name. When all these characters meet at the climactic clown show (which Gopal trusts us to understand his reasons for staging) it feels like the swell at the end of an epic tale. This story is forceful, stunning, yes, sure – but this metaphorically violent language isn't fitting. Gopal writes with a power that transcends muscle: the pen is mighty.
Letters is pushed to the next regular issue.
Sound…
(thereby subtly ranking the critics in order of how good a six month span they’ve had, without having to call out those going through rough patches. Sorry Vinson, but congrats on the novel.)