Last Week’s New Yorker, week of May 25

“all this could be experienced as a noise within — the groaning of an overloaded psychic infrastructure.”

Must-Read:

“Crisis Mode” (Musical Events) - Alex Ross sounds sirens. The “agonies of the day” may mostly make their way into atonal new-music idioms by way of the “program notes”, but Ross finds in Chaya Czernowin’s work the kind of “beauty and terror intermingled” that both transcends its message and also grants it space. The “intensely fraught” and the “abstract” can exist side by side; or the “cataclysmic grandeur” of art can be stripped away all at once, revealing “the real”, and its pain. Ross testifies.

Window-Shop:

“Spirited Away” (On and Off the Menu) - Hannah Goldfield misses shots. Opens with a charming little anecdote from Goldfield’s past, then briefly explores the new culture of drinking less – a genuine trend, even if I think it makes more sense to add weaker drinks to the menu (as Superiority Burger does with its selection of “Lightweights”) than to serve tiny ‘tinis, which feel more like a gimmick; plus, they’re far harder to stretch across the length of a meal. Goldfield doesn’t double down (a single is strong enough) – the second half of the piece suggests that drinking more, or drinking more honestly, or something, might be more on-trend – and Goldfield almost approaches the event horizon of the trends piece: The point at which the writer admits that checking vibes at large is an inevitably doomed effort. Thankfully, Goldfield avoids that particular predictably postmodern pothole, pivoting toward a plea for the personal preference. Perfect! It may have rained all weekend, but who needs to stay dry?

“In Plain Sight” (Letter from Texas) - Yudhijit Bhattacharjee gets caught in trafficking. A gutting story, told strangely. The usual method would be to concentrate on the ties between this particular indentured servant and the powerful political families in Guinea that controlled her fate; but Bhattacharjee almost entirely ignores this context – a skimmer can easily miss the connection to Guinea’s former dictator Ahmed Touré; the protests in Guinea upon the family’s arrests lose their import entirely.¹ (In a very odd case of synchronicity, the profile of Hakeem Jeffries elsewhere in the issue mentions that his middle name is Sekou in honor of Touré, which is some choice.) Instead, the focus here is entirely on the human story of Djena, focusing in micro-detail on her friendships and her escape. To the extent Bhattacharjee has a bigger story to tell, it’s one about the shifting response to human trafficking concerns among American police, who increasingly recognize that it extends beyond sex trafficking. It’s a less novel story than the one about Guinean politics, and I think a less interesting one. But I suppose it allows Bhattacharjee to ground Djena’s brutal tale of innocence and experience, and allow us to understand the enclosed nature of her world.

“Marx Brother” (Onward and Upward with the Arts) - Emily Nussbaum dismantles the master’s house down Boots. A perfectly charming profile that doesn’t develop into anything more. Unfortunately, though the piece is set before Riley had picture lock, one senses that Nussbaum isn’t enamored with the film from the way she writes those scenes up; indeed, she calls it “a little incoherent” in the last paragraph, a summation that’s hard to spin as utopian, though she tries. Riley seems impossible not to like; some of the best scenes here just feature him walking around Oakland chatting folks up, or hanging out with his wife in the kitchen. (I am pretty shocked she calls herself “‘apolitical’”, though, even if she’s being cheeky. Does she know who she married?) I can’t say I get an especially deep sense of the man; Nussbaum isn’t the right person to examine his messy-left politics in much depth, her take on his art mostly consists of long lists of influences (there is so much more to be said about ‘jank’ and Marxist leftism), and his pre-Coup backstory could use some breathing room – how did his parents’ complicated radicalism affect his own view of things? (All we hear is that he “embraced a radical-left viewpoint on his own”.) All these loose threads render the garment of the piece messy, if colorful. I assume Riley wouldn’t have it any other way.

Skip Without Guilt:

“A Woman Scorned” (Books) - Thomas Mallon says this widow’s peak. Is Mallon correct that there’s some sort of widely held public understanding of Mary Todd Lincoln as self-obsessed and “‘a bad wife’”? I didn’t really know about that, and Mallon cites only an opening quote from Elizabeth Hardwick, not exactly an historian, plus the deliberate insanity of ‘Oh, Mary’, which is about as related to Mary Todd as Greta Gerwig’s Lady Bird is to Mrs. Johnson. The first two seconds are a perfectly good biography of the notorious M.T.L, about whom I knew as little as Cole Escola does. But the idea that Romano is fighting a battle against a popular image of “a mad, out-of-control Mary” which has been won “on facts but not yet in legend” is just weird; for the most part I’m fairly sure nobody thinks of Mary Todd much at all. She did go insane, but as Sufjan said, she had very good reasons.

“Guessing Game” (The Sporting Scene) - Dan Greene roughs a draft. It baffles me that Louisa Thomas, the superb weekly sports columnist, hasn’t been in the magazine in over a year, yet this piece by Greene, which is apparently written for an audience that doesn’t understand the basic rules of American football, much less its popular appeal, makes print. It’s not that Greene’s writing is bad; it’s frequently witty, and he builds a scene well. It’s just that this very brief piece spends so long on backstory, most of it reiterating terms like ‘sleeper’ and ‘bust’ which are already (for better or worse) so firmly entrenched in our increasingly gambling-based culture they’ve nearly transcended their sports origins, that Greene’s snapshots of two prospects don’t land. Both prospects have the likeable, mildly tragic backstories of Survivor contestants; otherwise, though, they just seem like two kids, chosen at random. I guess that’s the point?

“Getting Lost” (Pop Music) - Amanda Petrusich checks in to Rostam’s heartbreak hotel. I still don’t at all understand the purpose of these really-just-an-interview pop music pieces, especially when they provide uncritical coverage of mediocre product like this new Rostam album. He seems afraid to say anything substantive here, either lyrically or musically (Petrusich says he “seems to address” the Columbia encampments, an unintentionally revealing phrase); the album is clunky and corny, the Persian instrumentation is unintegrated, and the general vibe is very OneRepublic: it’s music for a fast-casual kebab concept. How, exactly, does this ‘push the form’? Why does Petrusich spend the second half of the article talking about Vampire Weekend (for no clear reason), mentioning that Rostam is ready “‘to revisit some of those old stories’”, but offers us none of them? What a pointless piece!

“Robot Lit” (A Critic at Large) - Jill Lepore loses the plot robot. If I’m going to be harsh on the magazine’s credulous A.I. boosterism, I also need to be harsh on thin teardowns predicated on aesthetic disgust and shallow technological understanding. Lepore asserts the mediocrity of A.I. writing, then uses this to claim that it is philosophically meaningless. That’s dangerous, because it ties the two together such that a sufficiently good piece of A.I. writing could claim philosophical meaning for Lepore – without meaning to, she thus props up the message of the tech boosters. There is so much better writing out there about the practical and moral problems with A.I. that there’s simply no reason to bother with Lepore on this topic. Lepore builds the whole piece up to a snide refusal to engage with Leif Weatherby’s work. Her caricature of his argument is an obvious sidestep, as ugly as any A.I. strawberry. And are we really reclaiming Chomsky at a time like this? The rest of the piece is yet another history of machine text that focuses on the gimmicks that broke through the noise, and the writing (which is repeatedly declared interesting but not art, as if Lepore gets to be the judge) but never the design, mechanical and architectural, of the systems generating it. That would be fine if this were a review of that work as writing, and not a flimsy pretext for an anti-A.I. rant. Lepore’s false equivalencies muddy the water almost as much as a data center.

“Majority Rules” (Profiles) - Jason Zengerle leads a moral minority with Hakeem Jeffries. A transparent puff piece, picking and choosing amongst House Democrats to paint a picture of Jeffries as a competent manager who’s been misunderstood – probably maliciously – by the left. Zengerle exclusively interviews right-of-center House Dems (Jared Moskowitz, Josh Gottheimer, Joyce Beatty) as apparently nobody progressive deigned to speak on the record with Zengerle, presumably because they have nothing nice to say and Jeffries is obviously vindictive toward his naysayers. Gottheimer says “‘everybody feels like they’re in the inner circle’” of Jeffries, which is a telling thing for the fourth-most-conservative House member to assert. A random IG reel with less than 50k likes² becomes the opener, and Jeffries’ self-satisfaction over it is obvious; it’s largely irrelevant to the piece, but I guess it’s the best example of Jeffries’ courage Zengerle could find. He writes in an incredibly defensive style, pointing out each criticism of Jeffries and then quickly refuting it, often in a snarky tone that forecloses nuance. Did Jeffries mishandle the Charlie Kirk bill? Maybe, but the complainers were “‘toxic, volatile, and emotional’”, and in the end everyone felt he “had understood their concerns” anyway. Jeffries didn’t get a war-powers resolution through, but “only four” Democrats voted against it, so that’s a “success”, I guess. Maybe Jeffries’ don’t-keep-information-when-you-frisk law in the Bloomberg era didn’t go especially far, but here’s Al Sharpton to self-aggrandize and call Jeffries “‘the guy to legislate our moment’”. Barbara Lee is presented not as a progressive opposite number to Jeffries’ tired centrism, but as some woman who was too old for the job. Jeffries’ hatred for the DSA gets blamed on some caricature of them as gentrifiers who are “‘critical of those who stayed’” in their neighborhoods “‘when no one else would’”; this transparently petty, bad-faith argument (critical of what?!) gets no pushback. I could go on – and I’m not even going to relitigate the Israel stuff. Like generations of Democrats, Zengerle obfuscates where he claims to explain. Enough already.

Letters:

Nerp.

fam

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