May 11, 2023

Last Week's New Yorker Review: May 15, 2023

Cool!

Last week, Marginal Revolution, Tyler Cowen’s widely read blog, was kind enough to include a link to this scrappy endeavor. That led to a big influx of new subscribers, some of whom were even kind enough to pay. (A reminder: Paid subscribers get access to the fairly silly Cartoon & Poem Supplement, which I’m going to try to push out on Mondays so you can scan it along with the issue.) While I don’t share Cowen’s views on many things — and while I have a feeling certain portions of his readership may be turned off by my fairly far-left political view, not to mention my frequent badmouthing of economists as a category — I appreciate the support. A few reminders of how things are run: The category headings are rather loose, and pieces are ranked roughly from “favorite” to “least-favorite” from top to bottom. Feature pieces and reviews always get covered; everything else, like Talk of the Town and Shouts & Murmurs, I will always read but will only note if excellent or especially noteworthy. (In other words: If I feel like it.) You can and should always write in, whether in the comments or by replying to this email — no remark too mundane! On to the issue.

Last Week’s New Yorker, week of May 15, 2023

Must-Reads:

“The Planned Parenthood Problem” - Eyal Press asks whether the organization has become so centralized and corporatized as to have lost touch with patients’ needs regarding abortion care. A shocker, but one that clarifies things you may have noticed and points out how little sense they make. It’s so easy to take corporatization for granted in America that it takes this kind of detailed reporting to make you realize, no, it really doesn’t make sense that Planned Parenthood often opens new centers in places with functioning independent clinics while rarely moving into underserved areas (and certainly not following Press’ suggestion to use “its enormous muscle to announce that it would be opening clinics in abortion deserts and along the borders of states with bans — and then clamor… for donors to help fund them.”) Multiple times, I worried the piece had run out of points and would become repetitious, but Press finds many angles on the central argument that P.P. has, as reproductive-rights scholar Tracy Weitz says, “turned over this movement to a whole new group of lawyers — not constitutional lawyers but risk managers.” The argument against pieces like this — that punching at your allies is counterproductive — falls short when you remember that, as Press said in a Times guessay at the beginning of the year, it’s precisely a lack of institutional courage — a “failure to embed abortion in mainstream medicine” and the “passivity and silence of the medical establishment” when faced with “terrorism, intimidation and violence” — that’s led us to this point. Press even gestures toward a more broadly radical answer; that meaningful change can only be achieved outside of hierarchical and centralized corporate bureaucracy.

“Gut Feeling” - Alexandra Schwartz takes a very close look at humanity with the “sensory ethnographers” and experimental documentarians Véréna Paravel and Lucien Castaing-Taylor. Experimental documentary with a heavy emphasis on experimentation is literally my business1 so I’m predisposed to enjoy this topic, but it’s to Schwartz’s credit that she doesn’t spend too much time being freaked out by the non-normativity of it all. Instead, the focus is mainly on listening to the two filmmakers, who are reluctant interviewees in a slightly performative, “I couldn’t possibly sing you a song” sort of way: They may come by their reticence honestly, but they each give such vivid, hilarious, reverberative quotes that perhaps the real issue is their reluctance to overwhelm their acontextual work with their own strong personalities. You can tell Schwartz knows this; other than a brief cameo from Frederick Wiseman at the very beginning, her camera is fixed directly at Paravel (“At the same time, we said, ‘Oh, we should make a film about that.’ You know, when you have to do the thing with the pinkie? Jinx.”) and Castaing-Taylor (“One of the profligate things Harvard does is delight in tearing buildings down without any particular reason and putting up other buildings that look like Hilton hotels, with fake wainscoting everywhere.”) I knew about the Sensory Ethnography Lab already, but Schwartz is kind enough to drop a sufficient quantity of relevant movie titles to fill out a week-long film series; the only issue, really, is how to see them on the big screen. As Castaing-Taylor says, watching at home is “like reading a novel where you read one word out of two.” Oddly, though, that’s also a fairly good description of the radical disjunction of his films.

Window-Shop:

“Fractured Land” - Suzy Hansen, in Turkey on the eve of their election, shows how “Erdoğan’s weakening of the state… culminated in the disastrous response to the earthquakes” which hit in February, killing many tens of thousands. This magazine has published a number of fantastic articles on Turkish politics in recent years, but all were by eminent war reporters like Dexter Filkins and Luke Mogelson, which meant they usually focused on a certain kind of conflict. It's a wise move to enlist Hansen for this piece; her book Notes on a Foreign Country chronicled her move to Istanbul after 9/11 and her reflections on the roots of anti-Americanism. This piece relies on her engagement with Turkish culture to show why, despite disaster and mass arrests, the society has so many “people who have continued to do their jobs” resisting authoritarianism “at significant peril.” There are many outrageous details concerning Erdoğan’s dictatorial policies; a “zoning amnesty” which directly contributed to earthquake collapses is especially egregious. But it’s somewhat frontloaded: Ercüment Kimyon, a local architect turned “gadfly” activist, lands the knockout punch halfway through: “We ignored the existence of the seismic fault,” he says, “society's value judgements have disappeared — rent seeks profit. They have destroyed the concept of public interest.” After that, the piece has nowhere in particular to go. Still, this is very nearly a must-read, kept back only by Hansen's lack of flair for physical description.2 (“The windows were like a thousand black holes in the sky” is representatively mundane.) 

“Paper Trail” (Talk of the Town) - Adam Iscoe makes paper with Reginald Dwayne Betts, using recycled prison clothing and other materials “with meaning” in them. Great prose, which introduces lots of jargon (“deckle box,” “couching,”) without overwhelming. Iscoe has a stellar eye for quotes with subtle personality (“that’s, like, nerd layer,” Betts said. “You gotta know typeface to even get it.”) The pathos of the last two paragraphs feels earned; that’s the result of a careful process of boiling-down, just as the “sweatshirt cut into small squares” is distilled into paper.

“Moving On” (Comment) - Dhruv Khullar shows how the end of COVID prevention is partly an excuse to dismantle parts of the threadbare American social safety net. Clear-eyed, even-handed, relevant, and concise, but with a considered point of view. This is everything the magazine-opening Comment column should be, but often isn’t.

“Cave Art” - Alex Ross goes to Louisville to see an oratorio performed in a cave. It’s very smart to begin with a history of Louisville as a commissioner of new classical music. There’s so much to get through — the rise, the fall, the rise-again — that Ross doesn’t really have a chance to let his prose unwind, but his description of feeling “like an outsider at a local rite” is nicely grounding.

Skip Without Guilt:

“Click-Witted” - Nathan Heller rolls his eyes at the state of “today’s atomized and factionalized splinternet,” and looks to Ben Smith’s new book “Traffic” for answers as to how it got this bad. Smith’s book has been covered basically everywhere; Today in Tabs has a comprehensive survey, somewhat similar in style to yours truly. Heller hits the familiar points and leaves room for his basically correct but deeply uninteresting gripes, things that have been covered, earlier and with more wit, elsewhere. (“At the online magazine where I worked3, the measure of success in traffic-seeking kept changing… The line is usually that the last model ‘isn’t how the Web works.’”) He especially fails when aiming for clarifying metaphors: A magazine’s three central tasks “easily rested against one another, like three muskets by the fire,” apparently; then social media snatched two muskets away, meaning “publications were obliged to lean the musket they still carried… against distribution and advertising models run by social media.” I wasn’t aware you could lean a musket against a model.4 Heller’s at his best when poking fun at Smith’s often silly and sloppy language, like the five variously cruel descriptions of Andrew Breitbart; he rightly points out that Smith is driven mostly by “figuring out what gets people going, and providing more of it than they asked for.” But Heller barely has a thesis, meaning this piece feels mostly like a way to get media-industry clicks by commenting on the book of the moment. Cue the Alanis Morissette.

“Get the Message” - Anthony Lane covers a couple dramas concerning communication. Two workaday reviews, sandwiched together. A terrible joke throws the first half off course: Blackberry Storm apparently "sounds like the dessert you don't want on an experimental tasting menu," a weirdly inaccurate punchline for Lane (maybe on "a terrible 1980s executive-lunch menu," or something.) The second half is slightly stronger, but Lane lacks a strong perspective on either film (his perspective on the BlackBerry film is essentially just that it's slightly better than Air) which keeps him from really engaging. There's also no formal analysis to speak of.

“The Ghostwriter” - J.R. Moehringer chronicles a life spent writing others’ stories. It makes sense that this is tagged with the Prince's portrait and presented as a behind-the-scenes look at that particular memoir, which does provide the opening anecdote and a great deal of the drama. But it's not actually the thrust of this piece, which is mainly concerned with Moehringer's career journey. (Thank god — I ran out of anything to say about the royal family three articles ago.) It's much broader in scope than the average "Personal History" column; usually, those don't contain paragraphs about the writer's parental issues or early career unless they're directly relevant to the piece. Moehringer certainly has a distinctive voice; whether it's that this voice has infected many other ghostwriters or merely that it's derivative of the form's usual style, I'm unsure. I'd frame this style as not so much "clear" as "bright," interested in attracting eyes but not always in deeper illumination. That sounds negative, but this style does have something to recommend it: It accurately captures the condition of celebrity in a way a more literary approach can obscure through over-complication.

However, the style doesn't work as well when the subject is a non-celebrity (albeit well-known) writer, like Moehringer. The story about his yelling "say my name" at the T.V. is a good example: While it may have happened exactly as written, the details given are so cursory and inflated (not "perhaps a few guests had heard me" but "clearly every guest had heard me") that the anecdote reads as bullshit, the kind of story that's one-third true and two-thirds ridiculous and that makes you an entertaining party guest but an annoying memoirist, especially when you're as insistent on your accuracy as Moehringer is. (The quote, regarding confession in writing, that "you know you can trust an author... if he’s willing to get raw" feels like a rhetorical overcorrection for some fairly scorched meat.) Elsewhere, it's not so much a lack of credulity as a simple unfunniness: another ghostwriter sounds like "Elon Musk on mushrooms — on Mars," a statement calling Harry a liar gets a facetious "Oh, snap! Gotcha, Prince George Santos!" There's also a pettiness to Moehringer's tone throughout, and a pervasive sense that he's selected every detail to be interesting first, and meaningful only as a byproduct. Still, I have to admit, the ending works very well, with the recurring remark that "ghosts don't speak" paying off beautifully, followed by a surprisingly resonant family anecdote. It's all cheese, but it's cheese with perspective and finesse.

“The Voice” - Kelefa Sanneh asks how M.L.K’s “respectability politics” have aged. Sanneh has certainly written compellingly on racial issues in the past, but it strikes me that, as a Black person who isn’t American and whose parents were both Yale professors, he might not have the most comprehensive “lived experience” of the kinds of racism targeted toward Black people who aren’t adept with the scripts of the white middle-class. So there’s something gross about his writing what amounts to a defense of respectability politics here. Moreover, by tagging King as a representative of respectability, I think Sanneh oversimplifies things: It’s true that King came from that Black Baptist tradition, but it’s worth remembering that when King was arrested in Birmingham, he was wearing overalls, not a suit and tie.5 And considering the right-wing attempts to reframe King as a flat, peace-and-love token character, it's hard to take more nuanced arguments in that direction entirely at face value.

Read purely as a capsule biography of King, this piece adds little to the conventional narrative, and misses much (especially concerning King’s often shifting perspective on White moderation, which is glanced over and might make for a more nuanced hook.) Most telling is one deeply weird parenthetical on recent concepts like "Black excellence," which Sanneh frames as the new face of respectability: "The idea, it sometimes seems, is to do what parents are nowadays taught to do: praise the good behavior and ignore the bad." By framing Black people as both monolithic and childlike, this line reveals the paternalistic undertones of Sanneh's whole line of argument.

Letters:

My review of the Charles III piece in last week’s edition probably wasn’t my finest moment, the piece at hand was simply not good writing and I was worn out by it. Caz and a few others called me out on a couple somewhat bad-faith jabs at the King; while he is literally the King of England and thus can take a few bad-faith jabs, I cede the point. (This is in no way to rescind my view of his eco-politics as sorely lacking in political perspective and thus toeing the line of Fascism, but to say that I didn’t present my take coherently. The obviously joking remark about Nazi bombings is the least of the evidence in that regard, and poor Meghan has nothing to do with it at all.)

Michael had a fascinating question, following up on The National’s new album getting mixed reviews: Are artistic projects that get profiled in ‘this magazine’ more likely to be critical duds? He showcased long reported pieces on Andrew Stanton’s John Carter and Anna Faris’ What’s Your Number, both written by Tad Friend. He says, “This probably makes sense, as a writer is more likely to be interested in a subject once the subject has already made it big. I guess it's a little like the Madden curse. Plus, it may be more entertaining to read about an ambitious failure.” I came up with a few counterexamples, especially Fiona Apple’s triumphant Fetch the Bolt Cutters; just looking at Tad Friend’s semi-recent pieces turns up a mixed bag, from Bill Hader’s well-received Barry (I didn’t like the first season, but that’s still an excellent profile) and Donald Glover’s big-hit Atlanta (A great show, but this profile, while very well-written, approaches a character assassination, from what I remember) to Mike Mills’ 20th Century Women — critically acclaimed but maybe not a smash — and Darren Aronofsky’s Noah — oof. Always worth thinking about who gets a turn in the spotlight, in any case. What do you think: Do you agree with Michael’s thesis, or have one of your own?