Last Week’s New Yorker Review: May 20, 2024
Last Week’s New Yorker, week of May 20
"‘If I call my sister in Miami on FaceTime, I don’t tell her, “Hey, I’m visiting you in Miami!”"
Hey there! This week’s edition is two days late – hopefully not two dollars short – for two reasons: 1. My paper copy of the magazine apparently got lost in the mail, because it never arrived, and 2. I was busy graduating from my M.F.A. program! Thank you, dear readers, for allowing me grace and space to squint at my laptop screen. Things should be normal from here.
Since a few of you are new (thanks, Rusty!) and it’s been a while, I figure it’s worth a refresher of our procedures. When I’m not running late, this newsletter comes out on Thursdays. Pieces are grouped into three sections, but they’re also ranked from top to bottom in order of how much I liked them – so a high Window-Shop is better than a low. I review all the features and critics’ pieces in this main edition, plus my favorite Talk of the Towns (and the occasional Shout and/or Murmur.) Fiction, the online Essay, and your picks from the archive are covered in the Weekend Special. But wait – there’s more! Paying subscribers have exclusive access to Monday’s Cartoon & Poem Supplement, which covers the... well, you get it. Everyone is welcome to write in – just reply to this email – and (unless you ask me not to) I’ll excerpt your note in the Letters section. That should cover it! On with the show.
Must-Read:
“The Right to Hug” - Sarah Stillman makes contact with the families fighting against video-call-only prison communications. Stillman’s previous effort in the magazine won her a Pulitzer and while this piece is short and far more unassuming it’s equally as good. By focusing on something small Stillman makes clear the brutality of the entire system – but this piece is also a sneakily good argument for the necessity of pursuing both reform and revolution – prison abolition is an important aim, but there are a thousand small steps that can make the current system more humane, and to pursue them is not to abandon that project. This piece does so much so quickly. Its portrait of Le’Essa and Addy, the children leading the charge, is dynamic – it helps that Le’Essa is astonishingly quotable, the sort of teenager – like X González or Malala Yousafzai – whose bold insight is a reminder of the specific rhetorical advantages of that age. (“‘I actually remember how, the first time my dad got locked up, when I was about three years old, we were allowed to go see him in person at the jail… That’s how I found out, “Oh, this is what my dad looks like, and this is what he smells like, and this is what he feels like.”’”) Stillman finds incredibly tangible evidence of the mercenary cruelty driving these policies in court-discovered emails, but her best evidence comes from what the county said on the record about their motivations: “There is nothing illegal or unethical about a County seeking other sources of revenue to lessen the burden on taxpayers.” The elision there between what is illegal and what is unethical speaks to the systemic authoritarianism of the system – the ‘just following orders’ of it all. Stillman also makes tangible the effects of the surveillance state that prisoners are “guinea pigs” for – this section proves so galvanizing it almost has a The Jungle effect: Sure, prison conditions are inhumane, but there’s also digital-surveillance feces getting in my society meat! It’s tricky writing about activism without simply repeating and endorsing the activists’ arguments (especially when they’re obviously correct) – Stillman does an excellent job deepening the story. Only the title tips things a bit toward simple endorsement.
Window-Shop:
“Conviction” - Rachel Aviv prays for better angels with Lucy Letby, the nurse convicted of child murder on very thin grounds. This really ought to be a must-read – it’s a feat of journalism and empathy, plus anything too sharp for knife-crime island is doing something right – but I can’t in good conscience insist you read a story this unremittingly grueling and horrific. I feel differently when the grueling horror has broad and distinct political implications; this is a simple miscarriage-of-justice story – far and away the best subgenre of true crime, but still inevitably a bit prurient – which, because of its subject matter, I found deeply upsetting and quite literally nauseating. Those with stronger stomachs may find a shred of pleasure here; I found none. Still: Profoundly admirable. I wish I had more thoughts to share on this very long and somewhat viral piece – but to some extent, this story shut down my critical faculties. Let me put it this way – I have a recurring nightmare in which I am responsible for the death of a baby. Something primal in my psyche is so profoundly unnerved by this scenario that I can’t bring myself to look straight at it. Read – with caution.
“Tabula Rasa” - John McPhee checks his spelling. My favorite of McPhee’s Rasas so far (it’s the fourth in his series) but also the one I’d be most reluctant to recommend. That’s because it takes a certain type of person to get a kick out of cantankerous grammarian nitpickery – a piece which answers the question, “What if they made the whole article out of Block That Metaphor?” [^1] Whereas McPhee’s prior Tabulae tended to consist of anecdotes gathered in the course of reporting and writing, these come mostly from the subsequent phases: Proofing, cover design, editorial submissions. It’s a more specific, and nerdier, vein of material; the resulting piece coheres despite its anecdotal nature (which wasn’t always the case for prior installments.) Still: Is it your idea of fun to listen to a ninety-two-year-old man meticulously outline his Wordle strategy? Or note in gratuitous detail how all of the wordplay in his past work has been intentional and is not to be changed in future editions? How about recount a spelling quiz he assigned that, even from his perspective, sounds a little uncomfortable? (One senses some student eye-rolling behind his back.) If you let yourself be charmed by McPhee, though, there’s something pretty wonderful about it all – a true expert on the art of prosecraft, nerding out with little regard for the reader. And the final anecdote made me LAMP – which, in this case, stands for Laugh At My Periodical.
“Tennis Guy” (Talk of the Town) - Zach Helfand sucks Jolly Ranchers with racket swinger to the stars Brad Gilbert. Sometimes finding a non-movie-star to profile provides a significantly more charming and less press-rehearsed peek at a movie. (Challengers, in this case.) Gilbert is a gem!
“Off the Leash” - Kathryn Schulz is all for show dog. Do we really need an explanation of why dogs are so great? Even before my old-lady rescue poodle-dachsund-yorkie-pointer wormed her way into my heart, I had at least an intellectual understanding of how doggies “give us a way to love the world,” as Schulz says. She’s barking to the choir. That intro and outro are basically irrelevant to the central review, though, a very fun précis of a “very funny” book on the silliness of the Westminster Dog Show. (Thanks to to Schulz for clarifying that the one on Thanksgiving is actually different.) Schulz makes the smart choice to keep what’s funny and discard what’s silly – “unnecessary listicles,” et cetera – and she spends exactly the right amount of time on the “morally suspect” nature of the whole dog-show enterprise: It’s worth saying, but it shouldn’t be the crux of the story. As with your pup, skip the piece’s tip and tail; focus on the soft middle.
“The Instigator” - Alexandra Schwartz explains exactly what Miranda July’s whole thing is. Written in a half-imitation of July’s “simple and accessible” yet quietly bizarre prose – which would perhaps be more successful if Schwartz committed more fully to the conceit. (It’s possible that conceit is just in my head – I do have a tendency to see meta qualities where they might not be – but it’s certainly not quite Schwartz’s usual style.) July, in keeping with her reputation, is quite cagey and evasive when discussing her work; Schwartz, who focuses mainly on July’s new novel All Fours, ought to compensate with lots of quotes, but weirdly, she quotes mostly from July’s diaries and her past short stories – the new work’s presence is a bit transient, which is problematic since Schwartz’s whole hook is that writing the book influenced July’s life choices. That hook lacks conflict, too; it wraps things up before they’ve begun. (The end of the second section, just when a piece should be revving up, feels more like an ending than the actual ending.) Despite all these structural issues, it’s nice to spend time in the intelligent company of July and her friends; paragraph by paragraph, there is much to enjoy here: July’s “important creative conceit” of amateurism, the “icky, moving, and very funny” way she has with sex, and a clever and nuanced strain of genderqueer thought that’s all the better for its restraint. And July’s quirky humanism is always charming. To quote her namesake: O, wonder! How many goodly creatures are there here! How beauteous mankind is!
“Blame Game” - Inkoo Kang gets vulnerable with two dramas. The Baby Reindeer review is perfectly fine, though her focus on the show’s morals makes it sound a bit didactic. The review of Under the Bridge is good too – though it probably benefited from my never having heard of the show before, and thus being less bored than usual by the plot synopsis, which takes up most of the space. Since all the positives about the show are sandwiched into that plot synopsis but the negatives get their own half-paragraph, the review reads more negative than Kang might intend it – a recurring problem. But the description of adolescent girls as “dopey and dangerous” is spot-on, and the focus on an “act of racial othering” at least suggests that Kang is finding her trademark points of focus – a must for most any critic.
Skip Without Guilt:
“Out of the Darkness” - Alex Ross resuscitates two exiled composers. Just way too short for all Ross is trying to do, and the review sections suffer as a result. There’s essentially nothing on the staging of these operas and sung pieces; there’s not much more on the performances or even the quality of the work as presented. Most of that space is taken up by two capsule biographies which still feel rushed; they’re great when directly discussing the composers’ styles, but the broader history, while interesting, might have happened to anyone (and often did.) Why there’s a whole paragraph defending against charges of special pleading I have even less idea. Who we choose to bring forth from history does matter – of course it does! – but to drive a piece you need more than an operating principle; you need a perspective.
“Loaded” - Benjamin Wallace-Wells digests the rich. A very limited look at the present and a very limited look at the past, awkwardly sutured together and presented as if they’re the whole story. When your history claims to start “in the beginning” before placing us in Medieval Europe and never going anywhere else, much is being elided; ditto focusing exclusively on the same five or six rich Americans that get lots of press coverage. Besides that, the book under review is “little interested in political change,” weirdly, and Wallace-Wells can’t find a way to insert that perspective. (He doesn’t really have space.) The uselessness of the rich is the beginning of an argument, not the end of one. In a bizarre concluding paragraph, Wallace-Wells seems to imply that the current situation is one in which the rich theoretically might endanger democracy, but aren’t really doing so right now. That this is the view of one of the magazine’s chief political correspondents is making trigonometric equations pop up beside my head.
“Forget It” - Jerome Groopman takes a walk down memory lane. There is perhaps no critique of an article more annoying to a reader than “Didn’t we know all this already?” If you didn’t know it all, you feel belittled; if you did, you feel like, well, a know-it-all. Unfortunately, that’s most of what I have to say about this piece, which re-presents what I took to be the conventional wisdom about the importance of both remembering and forgetting to living a full life. It’s not merely that Groopman’s general points are obvious; I was familiar with almost all of his specifics, too: Episodic versus semantic memory, the memory “loopholes” of chunking and mind-palace building, the cultural importance of “collective memory”. And while I don’t doubt any of what Groopman says, I’m still turned off by his reliance on cutesy anecdotes about social-science experiments, which he puts much too much stock in. It’s worth being careful with that sort of thing.
Letters:
There was some mail but nothing that actually concerned the previous edition, so I’m saving it for a week when I’m not running horribly behind.
Last time I wrote that my Denver Nuggets had faceplanted horribly and embarrassed themselves. Since then they’ve rebounded terrifically and are playing with thrilling nerve and verve! Ah, sports.
this is the song of the summer. i have already listened to it like twenty times.
[^1]: Which, if you don’t know, is the magazine’s very occasional feature highlighting grotesque mixed metaphors from the assorted press. See for example.
Sorry abt the nugs