Last Week's New Yorker Review: June 9
Last Week’s New Yorker, week of June 9
“pigs that had been trained as watchdogs”
Must-Reads:
“Turbulence” (Annals of Aviation) - Laurie Gwen Shapiro charts Amelia Earhart’s imperfect circle. This is excerpted from Gwen Shapiro’s new book about Earhart and her husband Putnam, but it’s hard to imagine what could be gained by 400-plus extra pages of material that one doesn’t get the gist of from this dynamic and dread-inducing account of Earhart’s fatal last flight. One should perhaps have expected that, like many a renowned figure, Earhart’s fame had less to do with her impact and more to do with consistent, committed publicity that framed her as heroic, when in reality she took indefensible risks, often spurred by a husband who her social circle disliked and who Gwen Shapiro obviously hates even more; that he viewed her as a “meal ticket” is not just implied but directly stated. The Earhart disappearance is practically a folk story, but I’d never realized it was less a weird mystery than an avoidable tragedy, full of hubris and partially prompted by then-nascent celebrity culture. This is also a story about regulation and the risks of cutting through red tape to achieve progress. Earhart’s death was an avoidable, Aaliyah-like tragedy, and there’s something very odd and very American in realizing that this hero to small children everywhere is not just a symbol of women’s strength but also a symbol of sacrificing your life for media attention and making needlessly risky decisions out of fear that backing down would look like failure. Earhart’s death is a real-life (astonishingly literal) Icarus myth; we polish her statue at our peril. And as usual, the real conspiracy is capitalism: No secret lives and Bermuda triangles, just product to be pushed and a personal brand to be burnished. Put your goggles on.
“Schmear Campaign” (Letter from France) - Lauren Collins goes hazelnuts. Expertly balanced between smooth fun and crunchy (“rocher”) politics, and a worthy successor to Collins’ all-timer about the French tacos. The viral Algerian hazelnut spread that threatens Nutella’s supremacy is a foreign-relations synecdoche so neat it’s amazing it’s real (“‘This spread affirms a freedom,’” pronounces a journalist) and Collins takes full advantage – the fight, she says, “was about nostalgia, memory, injustice, nationalism, globalization, decolonization, protectionism, racism, identity, immigration, invasion – the same things that all arguments are about nowadays, transposed to the realm of spreadable snacks.” This piece should definitely not serve as your introduction to French-Algerian relations (though Collins certainly doesn’t intend it to). Without a few vague references to “torture” one could come away with the impression that France’s greatest sin as a colonizer was being tetchy; the attempt to trace the countries’ relationship through food is both amazing writing and perhaps a bit cute, under the circumstances. Collins’ gray-market acquisition of the spread is gonzo fun, and the brief final section achieves a poetic depth which one doesn’t expect or require from a viral-food article, but which is exactly the kind of thing that makes this magazine’s best writing so special. The knife hits the bottom of the jar.
Window-Shop:
“Brothers of the Cloth” (The Art World) - Hilton Als gets stylized. Less a review than a reverie, prompted by the Met’s show, put down on the page. That’s hugely successful for as long as it still feels related to the exhibit at hand – relating the exhibition design, black mannequins “floating, like well-dressed apparitions”, to Louise Nevelson – they “can throw off your perception of the horizontal, which is to say the earth that they and you are standing on” – is dynamite; articulating that “the dandy lives, always, in the drama of the now,” and finding the “wrenching pathos” in that thought, is vintage Als. (It’s bizarre that he didn’t previously know about William and Ellen Craft, though.) Elsewhere, Als drifts too far away. The extended anecdotes about André Leon Talley are obviously heartfelt, but they don’t feel especially pertinent; I also don’t totally get what he’s saying about Michael Roberts – where it feels like he’s trying to meditate on the contemporary dandy as a type, but extrapolating from so few examples he may as well just be telling a few of his friends they’re similar to one another. Superfine – if you insist.
Batuman on Nabokov (Takes) - The most poetic of the Takes yet published, and the one requiring the closest read (and benefiting the most from prior knowledge of the piece at hand.) Elegant, gestural, strange; one should always read Batuman.
“Still Life” (U.S. Journal) - Paige Williams knows the grass in Green-Wood holds the other side. A breezy, stakes-free summer read, the perfect accompaniment to a day amongst the graves. The hook is, vaguely, the cemetery’s investment into becoming a cultural venue, but this is only moderately compelling in a city in which every church hosts a concert stage, every basement apartment a gallery. Mostly it serves as a pretext for a history of the cemetery and a few very fun litanies of notable residents. Williams wisely leaves any philosophizing on the nature of death to the experts; less wisely, she gives so much detail on the economics of the cemetery (“Green-Wood recently received nearly $2.5 million in grants for a stormwater-management program”) that the story turns into a business piece.1 Green-Wood comes across as extremely well-managed; Williams doesn’t find any conflict – or unearth any dirty secrets. I guess it’s pretty obvious where the bodies are buried.
“Artificial Intelligence” (Talk of the Town) - Ben McGrath eggs on a vandal. Chicken police? What more do you need?
“Awakenings” (A Critic at Large) - James Marcus gives us a Fuller picture. Judith Thurman reviewed the (Pulitzer-winning) Marshall biography in the magazine when it came out, and although it’s been over a decade, it does seem like Marcus relies quite heavily on that book, perhaps more than any of the three volumes he reviews. Marcus admits that Fuller is probably more notable for her life, and her thoughts, than her prose style; he barely quotes from the new Library of America edition. He pans the fictionalization, and while Randall Fuller’s book on five transcendentalist women sounds interesting, it would be nice to hear a single word from Marcus on the four other less famous women. Neither does Marcus go into much philosophical depth regarding Fuller’s ideas; he’s mostly concerned with the biographical narrative. He nails that: For those who aren’t planning on reading the Marshall book, this is a suitable alternative, moving quickly and clearly through Fuller’s story. She wouldn’t even live to see Seneca Falls, but she still helps us rise.
“Autocracy Now!” (Profiles) - Ava Kofman breaks the moldbug. Very long and relentlessly annoying, but also undeniably pertinent, finely crafted, and exactly serious enough. Kofman doesn’t give too much credit to Yarvin’s insipid blathering, and she doesn’t overstate his closeness to the levers of power – but she does show how much he’s helped set the terms of the fascist conversation. This piece isn’t quite as much of a character assassination as Andrew Marantz’s 2016 profile of Mike Cernovitch, an equivalent sort of figure for Trump pt. 1, and also awful to those around him. Yarvin is less a bully than a morally vacuous debate nerd – a familiar type, and learning that Yarvin was an It’s Academic kid, in particular, fills in the picture for this Baltimorean. (As does Yarvin’s double assertion that he has “seen ‘The Wire’ and lived in Baltimore” – a very telling order of operations, and a suburban-Baltimore-specific racist dogwhistle I’m personally hypersensitive to.) JCO, as usual, clocked the tea; this went viral, but I like this one even more. Max Read’s insistence that politics is now forums drama is also justified by this piece, which suggests that in our current ideological setup, the crankiest cranks prevail. You certainly do not have to spend an hour-plus of your life learning that an authoritarian ethno-nationalist is also, who’d’ve guessed, a racist with daddy issues; then again, what else were you going to do with that hour? Bake bread, talk to your friends, look at a tree? Well, alright – as long as you don’t forget to take your pills. You wouldn’t want to experience your own mind, now would you?
“Tusks Up” (Talk of the Town) - Sarah Larson logos extinct. Enough polite jock charm to make a maple leaf blush.
Skip Without Guilt:
“The Lost Tycoon” (The Current Cinema) - Richard Brody takes another taste of Wes Anderson. Brody, given an “antic, densely plotted story,” immediately starts sweating; the synopsis is largely incoherent (“When Zsa-zsa’s spirit of opposition gets this cautionary reboot, it turns him against himself and the milieu in which he prospers.” What reboot, why is it cautionary, how does this result in turning against oneself…?), but what matters far more is Brody’s take on the film and Anderson: “...his onscreen ideal of beauty embodies the spirit of opposition and revolt.” I’m not sure I find this totally convincing; plenty of people revolt in Anderson’s films, sure, but pretty much everything, good and bad, is expressed with meticulous beauty. And were the ‘50s really a “harder world” with more “clangorous capitalism” than ours? Brody, liking the movie, seems to strain to mark it as progressive.
“The Heat of the Moment” (Books) - Malcolm Gladwell tries to express a wound. Gladwell (a noted “bad attributor” if you don’t want to use the P word) is generally not to be trusted, but especially not on this issue; he helped popularize broken-windows theory and expanded its influence to the corporate and especially – as I would know – charter-school worlds. So this is, in theory, sort of an aliquis culpa, complete with hot-dog suit. But Gladwell doesn’t even mention the theory by name, just pointing out that “New York got safer even though the police stopped doing the things that we thought were making the city safer.” (Maybe a first-person pronoun would be more appropriate.) And, in fact, the “new” theory Gladwell promotes, reviewing a book by Jens Ludwig, is a weird laundering of the old theory, asserting that we really do need to fix the windows – but only so that neighborhoods look more “middle-class” (yowch!) which will cause the neighborhood to become more “stable” and create informal social control. The fundamental idea about crime being mostly in-the-moment and irrational is already common wisdom; that Gladwell frames it as clever and novel can only suggest repetition compulsion. Ludwig, horrifically, suggests that pushing for gun-control measures is a “lost cause” (Gladwell’s phrase) – Gladwell stops short of endorsing this but he certainly doesn’t push back. I’d have more patience with all this if the eventual solution to needless mass incarceration was, you know, the really fucking obvious one. Instead, of course, Gladwell has to find some weird centrist tricks that merely look like they’re accomplishing something: Add more lights to public-housing projects! (You know, that idea that the city already tried and that some magazine made an op-doc about because it created such inhumane conditions?) And: Put teenagers “from Chicago” (read: you know!) in weird, gendered afterschool programs where they do gimmicky exercises from the mandatory-assembly-on-inclusion playbook! (Famously, everyone loves and has no issues with the mandatory inclusion assembly.) Gladwell is too insipid for me to be truly outraged by this piece, but that same insipid, lowest-common-denominator-smart-person routine has made his career. He’s now a big thing – but that’s made little difference.
Letters:
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With far smaller amounts of money involved than I’d have assumed, though that’s always the way with Brooklyn: Prospect is about ¾ as big as Central but makes do with something like ⅛ of the budget; the Brooklyn Museum spends about half the dollars-per-square-foot of The Met. ↩
Compelling reviews