May 4, 2023

Last Week's New Yorker Review: May 8, 2023

Last Week’s New Yorker, week of May 8, 2023

Must-Reads:

“The Fugitive Princesses” - Heidi Blake tracks Sheikha Latifa and her sister’s torture, abuse, and multiple escape attempts, as they try to slip the tight grasp of their father, the emir of Dubai. There’s little one could add to this powerful, superlatively paced, and yes, unbelievably long and bleak piece, which manages to balance major political implications with a single, complex, human story. The most sickening and strongest aspects are the moments where the mundane cruelty of everyday bureaucrats is revealed, especially the British lawyer Paul Simon, who repeatedly cites his “lack of competence and expertise” as a good enough reason to not fight obvious and powerful evil. There is so much here, yet it never overwhelms or starts to feel newsy; neither does it come across too obviously as a rote “advocacy” piece. There are no easy answers. Blake comes to the magazine from the recently-destroyed Buzzfeed News; clearly, she brings a sharp voice and keen investigative eye. Side note: If you want to read a piece that will win awards before it wins awards, this is likely such.

“Sad Dads” - Amanda Petrusich shuffles to the gloomy tunes of The National’s new album, First Two Pages of Frankenstein. I was worried about this one; I have mixed feelings on The National, whose High Violet was a high-school favorite record, but who haven’t stood up to recent listening, often appearing a bit juvenile, like the gloomed out frowny-face mirror image of Arcade Fire’s blissed out smiley-face. Petrusich points out the juvenile tendencies, though, and actually reconfigures them into a strength; the Phoebe Bridgers analysis that “something middle-aged men and teen-age girls have in common is the act of finding yourself, and being kind of self-conscious,” is as brutal as a good Phoebe Bridgers lyric. Mostly, I was worried because the band’s last two albums, 2017’s overbearing Sleep Well Beast and 2019’s overorchestrated I Am Easy to Find weren’t just flops but grandiose misfires so major I probably wouldn’t have listened to the new record if not for this piece. In retrospect, knowing that the band spent the period spanning those albums trying fruitlessly to create a gritty cable version of “The Monkees” (?!) says something about how far inside their own image they’d slipped.1 But Berninger’s honesty about his major depressive episode that resulted from Covid and various minor failures is refreshing, and the new album (to which I’ve so far given only a cursory listen) strikes me as the band’s best since their early years, one that is able to capture the wit at the heart of gloom without slipping into performative ennui, choral nihilism, or, worst of all, dad jokes. The airiness of the instrumentals probably won’t be to the taste of amphead Alligator fanatics, which is fair; I mostly focus on songcraft.

Regardless of the album’s success, though, Petrusich makes the journey work very well. At times, her mood-setting is overbearing (“I felt whatever it is a person feels during a National show: happy, sad, weird, alone, cradled, there”) — although that sort of thing works better in retrospect, after the last-minute revelation of her husband’s sudden passing and her grief while “raising a small child alone.” There’s only a glimpse of this, but it reverberates backward through what’s just been read. Petrusich is also excellent at balancing quoted lyrics, quotes from interviews, and analysis, a tough act in a piece that is trying to juggle a factual profile of the band, an emotional profile of Berninger, and an artistic feature on the new album, with brief glimpses of a personal essay. The factual profile struggles slightly; the band’s first three records and the last two don’t warrant a single mention, which can make it seem like the band has suddenly re-emerged from a late ‘00s Brooklyn hibernation, just beginning to shake off their casual hipsterdom. But there’s something sort of wonderful, maybe accidentally quite true, about that impression. And Petrusich excels the most when wading through Berninger’s depressive episode, which could easily seem overdetermined or even like P.R. messaging — as he says, when urged to “think of his pain as creative fodder,” “‘What do you think I’ve been fucking doing for the past twenty years? All I’ve been writing about is depression.’” Instead, by emphasizing the physicality of the disorder (“‘My voice didn’t work,’ he said. ‘I’ve never been a trained singer, but this was like I had no air.’ … ‘The body got taken down.’”) Petrusich enacts the “more intimate, nonperformative sorrow” that she says the band speaks to.

Window-Shop:

“Big City” - Vinson Cunningham sees two music-filled shows that bring New York City to the stage. The Knicks-game framing is incredibly charming, and Cunningham’s thesis that “New York, New York” falls short because it’s too structured toward “upward motion” and “rote ambition,” while the real city has more duality and distraction, is both a canny reading of the shows and a graceful link back to the framing device. I yearned a bit, oddly, for the vicious edge of someone like Hilton Als, who would have had more bite when addressing the shows’ treatment of race. Cunningham is too sweet to be nasty.

“The Man in the Room” - Alex Abramovich watches the prolific Paul Schrader reshoot a scene in his new film Master Gardener. Quite a straightforward profile, with an in-medias-res opening giving way to a chronological biography. Schrader is not exactly “charming” but his distinct voice is certainly quotable, although the really juicy stuff here comes from Scorsese (“For us, the construction of personae was a kind of by-product of the fact that we were filmmakers”) and Springsteen (“Every artist has one story to tell.”) This is sort of the definition of a “Window-Shop” piece, in that it’s exactly as interesting as its pitch, with plenty of anecdotes which will be catnip for Schrader fans, compelling for general film buffs, and mostly irrelevant for everyone else. (My favorite concerns James Coburn reading lines in falsetto.) Whereas Schrader’s work is often transcendent but sometimes incompetent, this piece is highly competent but never transcendent.

“Early Bloomer” - Jackson Arn sees MOMA’s new Georgia O’Keeffe show, which focuses especially on her early drawings and watercolors. Arn is the magazine’s new art critic, an inherently exciting proposition for me personally — I can’t wait to confront his tastes and quirks. He’s already been writing for the website, and it’s been a mixed bag: He was more able to grasp Dan Flavin’s humor than Chris Burden’s. This piece is a bit of a mixed bag in miniature: Arn’s prose is generally excellent, but with a few clunkers (“Imagine a snail crossbred with a fireball” — no thanks!); his analysis mostly illuminating, but perhaps slightly misdirected: It seems to me the experimental viewpoint of O’Keeffe’s more dashed-off work is what makes it function so well, whereas Arn focuses more specifically on the messiness that’s a result of the experimentation — perhaps a meaningless distinction, but I’d argue that experimental work which is a bit overworked will often still succeed, it’s only when technique hardens into style that the joy starts to seep away. In any case, I appreciate an art review which can be read inside the museum, walking from piece to piece as it’s referenced, yet still has enough of a thesis to function outside the museum, for those who can’t access the MOMA (or are trying to get their newsletter out on time.)

“Carlson’s War” (Comment) - Benjamin Wallace-Wells assesses Tucker’s legacy. This is cogent and well-written, but best read in tandem with David Roth’s concurrent postmortem at Defector, to see how a slight shift in the implied point-of-view, despite saying much the same thing, renders Roth’s piece a critique of American political culture writ large and Wallace-Wells’ piece merely a reformist poke at its most “apocalyptic” members.

Skip Without Guilt:

“Home Fires” - Daniel Immerwahr recounts the standoff at Waco, its causes and effects. Giving a positive notice to the new Jeffrey Toobin book in this magazine seems ethically questionable at best, and the quotes Immerwahr draws from it aren’t even especially enlightening. Otherwise, this is alright; the Waco and Oklahoma City Bombing recaps filled in a few novel details — who knew there was another prophet-eering Koresh in the early 1900s? But the basic thesis that militarism invaded American society is well-worn, and the connection to Trump is both too obvious and too surface-level.

“Behind the Lens” - Thomas Mallon reads a new book on the early career of Jackie Kennedy, when she wrote a newspaper column fluffily interviewing notables. I know it’s par for the course for book reviews in this magazine to mostly recap the work under review, but this is quite an extreme case, citing basically no other sources and incorporating little outside context. It doesn’t help that the material is so trivial, noteworthy only to those with a deep interest in political celebrities. The piece is too short to warrant the endless paragraph listing fifties newswomen. And that ending line — gadzooks!

“King Me” - Rebecca Mead wonders what motivates Charles III. Too afraid or confused to ever bother answering its own key question: What, exactly, does King Charles believe in? Why we should care all that much is its own question; the king is an increasingly irrelevant figurehead who is forcibly apolitical and whose point of view influences little, as the piece points out. But taking the subject’s importance for granted and studying the points it never bothers stringing together, it’s fairly easy to assess the future King’s real ideology. He “believes the modern world to have gone to hell,” he calls for a “Sustainability Revolution” in which we return to “harmony,” a “state of balance which is just as vital to the health of the natural world as it is for human society,” which looks like “good land, pristine forests,” and “traditional values of community,” as well as population control. In some respects, this looks like certain pre-industrial societies in which “the peasants don’t question who is in charge,” as historian Jonathan Healey says, “they are fed and they are looked after by the aristocracy, but they don’t criticize them.” Mead calls all this “conservative,” but also says “it might not be entirely fair to describe Charles as feudalism-curious.” I’ll go further — he’s Ecofascism-curious. There are some obvious things which go along with the return to an earlier, unsullied time that Charles wishes for, and you don’t have to look much further than his reaction to his son’s interracial marriage to see them reflected in Charles. The quote literally saying you have to hand it to the Luftwaffe is almost too on the nose. In any case, Mead’s clammy equivocation only takes up about a third of the piece; the rest consists of flavorless recaps of events so heavily covered I already knew their every detail, despite my general attempt to steer clear of the Monarchy.

Letters:

Michael provided some excellent input on last week’s pieces, writing that Ed Caesar’s investigative piece “was definitely the standout feature, …both an interesting subject and had a nice pivot in the middle of Caesar's run-in with the mobster who threatened his life.” I agree — I likely underrated that piece slightly in terms of its placement due to a personal bias against spycraft; it’s really good stuff, though. He also “enjoyed Louis Menand's review of the creativity book,” (we’ll agree to disagree there) and “hadn't realized how much creativity as a concept was a postwar invention.”

Finally, he pointed out the similarity of Chocano’s Duolingo piece to earlier coverage in Businessweek — having read both, while I do prefer Chocano’s structure and styling, there’s a ton of overlap on everything but A.I, and Businessweek scores lots of points for being six months earlier.

Caz had keen thoughts on a few different pieces, correctly remarking that I was rather blithe in implicating Taco Bell in “cultural appropriation”; indeed, while their intellectual property theft probably has elements of racism, it’s not quite the same thing. Meanwhile, regarding Clare Bucknell’s drug history piece, she argues that the concept of addiction “had nothing to do with the change to laws that coincided with the wave of Chinese immigration and thus the importation of their culture practices,” but was a much later change, not really being medicalized until the 1980s. I’m far from an expert — although I do like watching this one particular sweaty bald guy on YouTube talk about psychedelics.

Finally, a minor clerical note: My initial intention was to publish the Cartoon & Poem Supplement as part of these emails, but apparently Substack won’t allow comments to be open to all if part of the ‘sletter is paywalled. I won’t stand for that, so the Cartoon & Poem Supplement will now be a separate email that goes out at roughly the same time as the main email. If you don’t like this for some reason, let me know why and I’ll consider a different policy, but for now, them’s the breaks!