Last Week’s New Yorker, week of June 22

“Generations of readers rejected his snobbery, his prejudice, his tendency to write sentences such as ‘The same babies grin endlessly from magazines, the jazz machine endlessly pounds.’”

Must-Reads:

“The Dream of Reason” (Annals of Inquiry) - Alex Ross lives Habermás. Possibly the clearest beginner’s guide to the Frankfurt School and its personages I’ve ever read; such a thing will prove very useful to me in particular, and also to scores of confused undergrads and tired media-studies teachers. Beyond which, Ross finds plenty of intrigue to entice the General Audience. He patiently sets up the battle of ideas between Habermas and Adorno, before defusing it by pointing to the dialectic between the two as their real legacy. The ending section on their contemporary relevance isn’t bad, but it’s a good move by Ross to condense that and focus the piece on both the history and the history of ideas. So we get Habermas with a “family name going back to sixteenth-century Thuringian cobblers” and Adorno in L.A, “under the ironic glare of a perpetual sun”; we also get the Habermas with “a flair for folding masses of literature into fluid narratives” and the Adorno who “sees mass culture as a pivotal component of the capitalist scheme to mollify the populace with calculated compensations”. (It’s interesting that this is billed as a Habermas piece; it’s actually almost evenly divided between him and Adorno, though I suppose its central argument is that Habermas deserves more credit, despite his foibles.) What a privilege, to have such perspicacious guides to our systems of thought; if they’re at odds, well, so are we.

“Misery Loves Company” (Dispatches) - Patricia Marx runs parallel. Marx at her funniest and most fully enjoyable; this presumably reflects my stubborn Zoomer mindset, but it’s much easier to enjoy her describing the time and money spent on frivolous experiences than her normal gig of describing the time and money spent on frivolous objects. I question how many readers are entirely unfamiliar with the idea of parallel processing and need her explanation of the practicalities of work parties to zoom out quite so far; on the other hand, while others might be bugged by how explicitly Marx ties ADHD and neurodiversity to the benefits of the more serious Admin Parties (as opposed to the ones that are mainly a chance to socialize without feeling guilty), I found it mostly refreshing. It’s true that the seeming explosion of bureaucratic busywork bullshit is a sad thing to diagnose into normalcy; still, couldn’t we all use a Mental Awareness Day?

Window-Shop:

🗣️ “ICE Prison Watch” (Newark Dispatch) - Ian Frazier gets goosed. I’ll take whatever coverage of these protests I can get, and Frazier’s focus on sensory details – truck horns, geese – helps him more fully construe the outrage and horror that monumentalizes the scene.

🗣️ “U.F.O.-Inspired” (Dept. of Idiosyncrasy) - Bruce Handy shouts with Gleason. Totally unexpected and very funny; Handy picks the perfect quotes.

“Bad Romance” (Books) - Molly Fischer is moving on yup. Scattered bordering on incoherent, but immensely entertaining nonetheless. The loose connection between a variety of dissimilar books is their connection to labor: A Times journalist (from the era when that was a white-collar job) offering clueless, dated, subservient advice to youngsters; an historian surveying the yuppie era as one of “driven outsiders” who were exploited even while exploiting; another Times reporter surveying the next generation, who can’t even find work in the fields they’ve trained for, and instead push for unionization at their working-class jobs; finally, the ‘90s research that popularized the work-life balance. The slipping between generations and types of jobs is hard to ignore, and it makes some of Fischer’s conclusions questionable; does the workplace still offer a “sense of control” for the millennials whose jobs are unrelated to their training? The segment on yuppies is fascinating (and could probably have been the subject of a whole piece) but its only connection to what follows is, loosely, one of worker dissatisfaction; were yuppies really seeking “fulfillment” or “agency”, though? Fischer states this and never backs it up, instead finding, mostly, desperation, “‘permeated with a sense of downward mobility’”, as Michael Kinsley writes. A little less data journalism, a little more ideology, would really help here. But Fischer’s point is taken: It’s always tough to be a cog and still exercise cognition.

“Allies on Ice” (A Reporter at Large) - Ben Taub sees Trump go Greenland with envy. Exceptionally strong reporting that doesn’t remotely justify its length. Taub, overqualified to write a newsy piece about the insiders and outsiders who’ve shaped Trump’s machinations, and with personal investment in Greenland, goes for a sprawling satire of our failing country and falls short, ending up with a repetitious catalogue of obnoxious idiots. Taub is relentlessly chronological, which means that the back-and-forth tug of Trumpland, where every decision is reversed and re-reversed, each switch instantly propagandized, is chronicled with detail bordering on delirium. I don’t have much patience left for this sort of thing; I’ll happily take the blurb version even if it means losing the color. Otherwise I’ll go blind staring at the snow.

Skip Without Guilt:

“Up to No Good” (Pop Music) - Kelefa Sanneh has Wetzel dreams. I remain massively skeptical of Sanneh’s periodical weird-ass justifications of the very worst of country-pop and radio rock. However, this is his most convincing such effort to date; Wetzel is a compelling lyricist with some amount of authenticity even if his music still basically sounds like boiled ass. The line Sanneh draws between radio country music and the country-pop that listeners naturally seek out really does exist, and even if the difference between the two sides of that coin is hard for me to hear, it’s not as though I could justify the radio-play difference between Tate McRae and Sabrina Carpenter, but I get it instinctively. This still doesn’t need to be in print, and this format doesn’t bear the mark of this magazine.

“Farewell, My Lovely” (Musical Events) - Alex Ross faces a loss Angeles. Three vague little profiles with hardly a note of music between them. The Gehry tribute is sweet enough, if self-admittedly a makeup call. The Dudamel section is a shrugging goodbye card; as Ross notes, it’s not even really goodbye, since Dudamel will be flying cross-coast plenty. James Conlon, who Ross clearly admires, is also moving on. (It seems that he’s actually semi-retiring, but Ross keeps things cloudy, and Google is no help.) Any of these could be expanded to a nice piece, or even turned into a Talk of the Town, but together they’re clunky.

“Contact Solutions” (The Current Cinema) - Justin Chang grows alienated. It makes sense that Chang is a bit nervous to really bare his teeth at a late Spielberg project, and that he wants to credit its craft even as he obviously didn’t have a good time. But the weird, halfhearted recapitulation of the marketing campaign, which has positioned this film as somehow related to government UFO disclosure, leads Chang astray – since, as he subsequently points out, the film has nothing to do with it. Three section breaks in a review of one film should maybe be warning enough – Chang isn’t probing deeply.

“Soul-Searching” (Books) - Michael Luo is at cross purposes. The book under review apparently argues that the so-called ‘separation’ of church and state has mostly acted to make churches fight for adherents, becoming more populist and nationalistic. I’m fairly skeptical of that argument, but Luo’s insipid ending, in which he asserts that maybe if we just give Christianity another chance it will not do that anymore (he wants “charismatic religious entrepreneurs championing a countercultural, supernatural faith that encourages its followers to love their neighbors and grow in grace”, which honestly just sounds like the first day of cult indoctrination before they pull out the child cane), retroactively makes the rest of the piece entirely disposable anyway. Luo is weirdly uninterested in digging for the roots of religious fundamentalism, vaguely pointing to the “turbulence” of an era when “racial, gender, and sexual norms were upended anew”, as if Evangelicism was the inevitable form such backlash would take. What was it about religion that made it such a fertile breeding ground for reactionary ideas? Luo ignores the most interesting questions as stubbornly as a Sunday School teacher.

“Billions and Billions” (Profiles) - Gary Sernovitz feels the Kenergy. Whose bright idea was it to commission a profile of a repugnant finance ogre from a guy who’s been written up as “n+1’s Favorite Fracker”? Whose past work runs to arguing against any moral oversight in college-endowment investing, be it over fossil fuels or Israel? What this isn’t is Griffin hagiography; what it is, though, is a piece far more interested in the details of the man’s investment strategy than his life in politics, even though the latter is the piece’s hook and its frame. It’s largely the usual masturbatory “this guy is cold-blooded but he gets results” fantasy that most money men get off to, spread thickly over an agonizing number of paragraphs. Sernovitz is by no means bad at Money Stuff-style explication, but he’s not a tenth as funny as Matt Levine, and he’s a lot more convinced of our interest. The very idea of this guy actually going into politics, meanwhile, is so brazenly doomed to failure that Sernovitz’s fairly straight face when discussing it is a dereliction of duty. He’s making my brown eyes blue.

Letters:

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