June 21, 2024

Last Week’s New Yorker Review: June 24, 2024

Last Week’s New Yorker, week of June 24

"Surprised Eel Historian, PhD"

Must-Read:

“Ghosts on the Water” - Paige Williams respects her elvers.¹ Those with "Keep Longform Print Journalism Weird" bumper stickers ² will love this piece, which is, on both a macro and micro level, the sort of thing you can only find in this magazine.³ Macro in the sense that it's about ethics in eel fishing, of all things – not even the uncanny but Rachel Carson-esque nature piece the illustration sets you up for, something Brooke Jarvis basically covered a few years back, but a far more administration-minded group portrait of a community of Downeasters roiled by the sudden demand for their slimy wares; micro in the sense that Williams strikes a tone of amiable distractability that a newsier publication would surely quash. Nearly every paragraph here represents a shift in subject matter from the previous one; Williams jumps from eel recipes to eel tweets to eel sex (“contemporary biologists know more about the eel’s reproductive system than Freud did”) to eel mystery to eel dam danger to eel trapping, never taking her foot off the gas (or her hands off the eel.) Williams’ prose is quite goofy (“As I crossed the bridge on foot, it was so dark that I could have walked into an elephant”) – you almost expect her to break into light verse a la Ogden Nash. (“I don't mind eels / Except as meals. / And the way they feels.”) But her distractability can also have a humanity to it, as when she devotes a line to one subject’s daughter, who died by suicide: “…a mother of two, a registered nurse, a Steelers fan who refused to shit-talk the Patriots, a smoker who was trying to quit, an alcoholic who already had.” It doesn’t serve a narrative purpose, it’s just a humanistic gesture. This piece doesn’t have much of a narrative throughline, but its roving quality is delightfully slippery – remind you of anyone?

Window-Shop:

“Labor Pains” - Helen Shaw looks to the stars at The Welkin. Plenty of the usual wonderful little moments: “Kirkwood can write with a gunslinger’s ease”, “future years… will drift into the play’s weird gravity.” There’s enough space for Shaw to let the eerie encroach gradually, as it does in the play at hand. The “long-building fear” she points to as a trend could stand a deeper analysis; is this a political fear or a more internal one? I can hear the thump; I want to know where Shaw thinks it’s coming from.

“The Crackdown” - Jon Lee Anderson tries the Quito diet with Ecuador’s centrist president Daniel Noboa. Anderson sells this as a feat of access early on, proclaiming that Noboa “spoke in an unfiltered way about most things”. It’s a bit of an oversell; with the possible exception of the opening anecdote, it’s not as though he’s revealing state secrets, he’s just giving slightly bitchy reads of other South American leaders. (“‘He seems full of himself — which is very Argentine, actually.’”) I wished that Anderson would focus a bit less tightly on Noboa and his battle with narcos; would give us a portrait of the country’s politics writ large, something he usually makes time for in these sorts of pieces. Anderson’s writing, at its best, has a glowing, clear-eyed poeticism; this piece is more muted, but still high-quality. Noboa’s not the most complex character – a spoiled-rich product of the “ambitious foreigner… trained Stateside” crew Daniel Immerwahr wrote about last week (Noboa even admits to “intelligence and security coöperation from the C.I.A.”), whose politics are, despite or perhaps because of that, largely ideology-free and contingent. Anderson is subtly withering –verging on un-subtly withering. It’s an “only the names have changed” kind of story – who better to rule over a small South American country than a literal banana baron?

“Middle-Age Fantasies” (Shouts & Murmurs) - Yoni Brenner writes perimenopausal porno. The last two sections go overboard and spoil the joke. The first three are pretty brilliant, though, with a funny concept and spot-on references.

“The Space Between” - Justin Chang is a galaxy, girl. This film sounds absolutely fantastic, and Chang does a very good job selling it. A lot of his pulls are reaches, though; I’m not sure why the subtle Van Morrison allusion is even worth pointing out, and surely not every cinematic puppet show references Fanny and Alexander. He doesn’t quite find a point of view on the film beyond thinking that it’s awesome and of a piece with Baker’s earlier theatrical work. I’d like a stronger center of gravity.

Skip Without Guilt:

“Heat Rising” - Hannah Goldfield asks, what’s my line cook? I’ve liked Goldfield’s food-scene columns well enough, but I do prefer when her pieces at least gesture toward a more traditional restaurant review by briefly critiquing some of the vittles on offer. (These are still the critics’ pages, after all.) Here, despite describing a few dishes, she doesn’t spend a single word on her experience tasting them. I appreciate the focus on back-of-house workers, but by treating their food as a novelty to be lauded, not dishes as worthy of analysis and critique as any other, she does the workers a disservice. Also, Goldfield just profiled Kwame Onwuachi, to return to him so soon feels uncreative.

“Unshattered” - Adam Gopnik is unenchanted by Charles Taylor. You have to be a bit of a freak to devote your life to incredibly complicated political philosophy and yet have your politics boil down to sensible center-left reformism with an emphasis on community bonds and religious practices. Taylor fits the bill. I can’t match the intellectual level of Gopnik or Taylor, but I can still sense a gap between the two when it comes to philosophy; Gopnik sometimes seems to be boiling down Taylor as much for his own benefit as for ours. That doesn’t mean, though, that Taylor’s conclusions are more likely to be correct. Gopnik’s most persuasive criticism is that Taylor is reading the wrong poetry to make his point that mystery enchants, Romantic poetry with “a lot of argument” instead of a later era’s more beauty-of-the-mundane stuff. Still, that’s just a nitpick. Whether “enchanted and enlightened sensibilities” are always interacting, as Gopnik claims, or whether Shakespeare was just an early indicator of the “one-way plot” Taylor and Hegel point to is up for debate. Gopnik’s first point is his weakest, relying on an old, annoying “improvements in healthcare are the only thing that matter” line of thinking – it’s simply bizarre not to mention climate change, for instance, when asking whether industrial-liberal “progress” has raised or reduced levels of “enchantment”. Taylor’s argument (as presented by Gopnik) is silly too, invested completely in the worthiness of a school of art without successfully showing that it’s even a good example of transcendent art, let alone the best possible example. If I have to pick between Gopnik and Taylor, I choose Adorno.⁴

“In Search of Lost Time” - Jay Fielden imagines all the Pateks. Fielden is the man who launched Men’s Vogue and recently left Esquire, and this piece largely reads as his pandemic research hobby, summarized on the page. The story Fielden found isn’t nearly good enough to warrant an article about one particular celebrity’s watch, and anyone hoping for a shred of insight into Lennon or Ono will leave disappointed. Still, while I can’t recommend this, it’s sort of fun to see a men’s-magazine topic translated (somewhat awkwardly) to these more highfalutin pages. It feels like a piece from the Tina Brown years. All’s Vanity Fair in love and war.

“Offline” - Amanda Petrusich is Tik’d off with folk singer-songwriter Lizzy McAlpine. Turning a review into a fulmination on the way TikTok makes artists famous too suddenly is disrespectful to McAlpine, who didn’t ask for that narrative and seems at most mildly put-off. Her music is beautiful; she’s also 24, so obviously her previous artistic product would now feel wildly inauthentic to her, and her new shit would feel like a breakthrough. That has nothing to do with social media fatigue. Besides, we’ve been thrusting stars at random into a fame they are unprepared for since at least Jackie Coogan. It’s Balk’s Law: “everything you hate about the internet is actually everything you hate about people”.

“Small Wonder” - Dhruv Khullar can know machines that are nano. Fails on a very basic level: If someone at a party asked me to explain nanomachines to them, I still couldn’t do it. Why does it matter that we are on the verge of manipulating cells “mechanically, rather than chemically”? Khullar tries to explain – there’s a repeated metaphor about jackhammers and another about fire ants – but I was too dense to really grasp many of his points. Apparently it may help with bacterial infections? If Khullar’s interest in the subject is moreso how cool it is than how useful it might be, he doesn’t do a very good job selling that coolness – "nanomachine” is great branding, but apparently they’re just salts swirled in reagent? The stakes aren’t clear, so there’s no drama. This piece is short and breezy enough not to bother me much, but it’s never a good sign when a piece of explanatory journalism has me Wikipedia-searching its subject matter after reading.

“The Plague Doctor” - Jerome Groopman won’t needle Anthony Fauci. Groopman has remarkably little insight into Fauci the man; his book offers none and Groopman doesn’t want to speculate. Michael Specter’s long profile from early in the pandemic covers virtually everything Groopman addresses – what’s the point of waiting to look back when you aren’t going to see anything new? I’m sure Groopman was assigned the book, it’s not his fault this piece is as disposable as a used sharp.

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Letters:

Michael thought Jia Tolentino on Cocomelon was the must-read last week. “I thought it was her best since her book came out. Great author + subject pairing.”

Michael also points us to “a great article on fire's unique role in American History” in an academic journal, written by Daniel Immerwahr, of last week’s must-read.

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A song to play you out.

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1. Line I rejected for being just way too much: Paige Williams discovers the protocols of the elvers off islands.

2. I just mocked that up in VistaPrint but I sort of want to make them now... except that I don't have a car to stick one on.

3. Maybe Harper’s?

4. Though I’d like to make totally clear that I do not have a very sophisticated understanding of what the hell he’s talking about in that piece, or ever.