Last Week’s New Yorker, week of June 15

“the sturgeon dauphin”

Must-Reads:

🗣️ “In on the Fun” (Legacy Dept.) - David Remnick names that Neptune. Remnick stooping to write a Talk and outdoing all the usual suspects is definitely a daddy’s-home move. But he’s having so much fun – stopping by Barney Greengrass to sample wares and quiz the entrepreneurial heir apparent – one can’t begrudge the move. My bagels Jewish, indeed.

“Happy Campers” (The Theatre) - Emily Nussbaum never meta man she didn’t like. Very happy to see more positive coverage for the remount of one of my favorite shows of last year; happier still that Nussbaum manages to nail down its very particular performance-art-comedy melange: “a clinging vine of commentary wrapped around Maya’s act, concealing as much as it exposes”. (She spoils some big moments in the process, but you can’t win them all.) The David Drake one-man show is an apt comparison, not totally obscure but obscure enough to not seem obvious. Nussbaum’s many, many gestures toward queer allyship lately have been a mixed bag, but the final paragraph on Frank is heartfelt and lovely. And then she has a blast at the Heated Rivalry musical, of all things, and that’s just fun to know and to hear about. Nussbaum, I hope you and Clive Thompson (yup) have a very happy Pride.

Window-Shop:

“A Web of Abuse” (A Reporter at Large) - Heidi Blake enters a fugue Tate. Before anything else, this is so very, very long. A piece like this makes me wonder if the magazine lost something important as it moved away from the old practice of carving up pieces and placing them across issues; while I mostly find that annoying, it would help this seem less like a monolith of horror. Tate is so unnerving in his casual inhumanity that his methods start to pulse like a drumbeat as they repeat again and again; I’m not sure I’ll ever look at a tattooed name the same way. This is a bravura feat of reporting and a total dismantling of any claim to innocence Tate has; it’s also stylishly written, empathetic, and coherently structured even across its gargantuan proportions. There’s just a lot of really visceral scenes of sexual abuse and violence here, none of it gratuitous, but still, from the first this is a grueling read. Tate’s impunity is understandably harder to explain, but it’s the most interesting question here; I’m surprised there’s not a sidetrack into any Epstein-esque suspicions that Tate was an asset of some government. The abuse and control pipeline Tate operated is more interesting to Blake than the logic (such as it was) behind his right-wing contacts, probably because the former is an easier research topic and just a more visceral thing to write about. It’s not as though the bigger picture gets lost, exactly; still, spend too long on the disgusting and we’re liable to forget about the inhumane.

“Blood from a Stone” (The Art World) - Zachary Fine carves out a place for Edmonia Lewis. First of all, Fine finally covered another NYC gallery show… and it didn’t make print. (The show is superb, Fine’s review is just okay; Walker Mimms captured the vibe a bit better for the Times.) Between cutting down Goings On and this, one must ask: Does David Remnick hate gallery hopping? As for the piece at hand, it’s quite compelling, though I’m still annoyed that readers not planning on boarding a midnight train to Georgia or a 2PM bus to Massachusetts will miss it. (I don’t see GA or MA¹ on my map!) Fine takes the interesting approach of unpacking Lewis’ politics by close-reading her art; he successfully finds evidence of some Sirkian ironies – Columbus’ obscured penis in one sculpture gets an entire paragraph, as it “slyly punctures the heroic myth: now it’s a frisson of sexual excitement motivating this civilizing encounter”. But he can’t push that too far: “her work could also play handily into the status quo” where that would help it sell, as in some other depictions of brutal Indian violence. Thankfully, Fine eventually addresses the ways in which Lewis’ identities have always been read into, and placed before, her art; expected to be “proof of her humanity”. That he is in a sense doing the same thing by probing her beliefs instead of sticking strictly to her forms is, I’m fairly sure, a deliberate irony itself.

Skip Without Guilt:

“Surf and Turf” (On and Off the Menu) - Hannah Goldfield tries an Omaha-makase. Doesn’t get especially far beyond the novelty of good sushi in Nebraska. Does it need to? Maybe not, it’s a fairly fun story. I wish Utterback showed a bit more personality, though. He just seems like, well… some guy from Omaha. I guess that makes sense.

“Silence, Please” (Dispatches) - Sloane Crosley is heard out. I’m suspicious of any effort to group a disability into the deeply-affected and the less-deeply-affected. This use of labels inevitably reifies a certain conception of the normal, and inevitably deprives people of support based on a false idea that only the most seriously impacted need or deserve help. I’m sure Crosley means well when she speaks of “severe” versus “manageable” misophonia, but of course all misophonia can be managed, and no one can actually know how severely someone else’s sensorium is impacted. (And indeed, post-diagnosis I’d expect many individuals become more aware of the impact of misophonia on other parts of their lives.) Pervasive annoyance is a sensory emotion I’ve dealt with myself, and while it doesn’t usually result from noise in my case, I expect similar fight-or-flight mechanisms are at play. SSRIs have given me an immense amount of control over and relief from my own annoyance, and therapy helped relieve the accompanying guilt Crosley describes; I’m sorry those treatments didn’t help Elizabeth Levine, but I wish Crosley would describe that range of treatments in a more positive context. I also wonder whether misophonia might be thought of as less a disorder unto itself and more one manifestation of a larger sensory condition – perhaps this is one argument against giving misophonia its own ICD entry, beyond its being “challenging to classify”. (My broader feelings on the medicalization of difference would probably require their own newsletter to express.) Crosley could have taken a slightly broader view of this topic, and might have found a broader empathy as a result – she lands in a rather dark place, which is relatable enough, but sad. Lend her an ear.

“No Vacancy” (Letter from Maienfeld) - Jessi Jezewska Stevens tips a cap. Stevens’ assignment is not to agitate against this perverse Swiss bill, which creates a so-called population cap, but I just wish she showed a bit more anger toward the obviously bad-faith politesse of the Swiss far right. She falls for the idea that they’re less extreme and less Nazi-ish than the equivalent parties in the rest of Europe, even if they encompass those elements, and she doesn’t push back hard enough at their framing – that the bill is not actually racist because the immigrants who’re already Swiss citizens can stay. (Their families, well, maybe not.) Besides which, the execution of this symbolic idea, much like Brexit or The Wall, will of course become an unenforceable mess when turned into a literal set of rules. Strangely, the most direct and incisive statement to this effect is made by… a random man at a farmer’s market. That suggests either that the Swiss left is running scared or that Stevens didn’t talk to enough of them. I’d also like a deeper explanation of why there is apparently so much Swiss support for the referendum (though of course such tenuous things as ‘popular support’ are notoriously tricky to report out without the benefit of hindsight – or the blitheness of punditry). The Swiss far right would like to make this seem like a uniquely Swiss solution to a uniquely Swiss problem, but hard borders are key to contemporary fascism. This measure deserves a less measured response.

“Disorderly Duke” (Books) - Adam Gopnik says if he were a Richmond, yabbadibbadibbadibbadibbadibbadibbadum, he would push for re-vol-u-ti-on, if he were a British man. I mean, sure, maybe this guy is a big part of the reason for the American Revolution. Just not sure why I should care. I don’t agree with Gopnik’s very first assertion that there’s some sort of popular push to keep the Revolution entirely homegrown (and he doesn’t provide any evidence to persuade me), and without that conceit, Richmond is just some guy – the same kind of extremely privileged person that usually serves as executive producer of the radical, whether cultural products or revolutions. Gopnik wants us to praise these people; he’s not entirely wrong that they serve an important purpose, but putting them on a pedestal above those whose ideas they adopt and support is still troublesome. Mostly, though, this is just sort of dull, lacking the antic spark of the best Gopnik. Better luck next country.

Letters:

Serena also loved the Peter Hessler piece on his childhood as a paperboy: “[You and I] may be coming from different planes (I totally related to what it was like physically and spiritually growing up in Middle America in the late 1970s and early 1980s where even mid-sized cities felt small town), but I am grateful for our shared sentiments on the piece.”

we all

get lost