Last Week's New Yorker Review

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Heather W Peterson
Jul. 5, 2024, evening

I actually didn’t mind the Emily Witt piece as I read it, but afterwards was left feeling oddly emptied, as though she had snuck in and stolen the point as I was reading.

There were interesting themes introduced, each of which I would have liked to see developed, but none were (e.g. the language of activism pervading a manic episode, having a relationship clearly centered on drugs & dancing sour in isolation so that drugs become a source of conflict/avoidance, etc). There were moments, too, that felt underexplored—her choice to put on her press pass at the protest, for instance, felt like it deserved more rumination.

I wasn’t surprised to learn that it was excerpted from a memoir, though learning this didn’t feel like an excuse for what the piece lacked so much as an explanation. The prose is the prose, after all, and if a piece is going to be published in isolation it needs to hold up on its own.

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