Last Week's New Yorker Review: November 25, 2024
Last Week’s New Yorker, week of November 25
“‘What Every Girl Should Know: NOTHING! By Order of the Post Office Department.’”
Must-Read:
“Gaining Control” - Margaret Talbot puts the contra in contraception with Margaret Sanger and Mary Dennett. Just a really compelling history, served straight up. Dennett and Sanger get separate biographies; their issues with each other, strategic and personal, are unpacked; the eugenics issue that’s so often used to paint Sanger in an ill light is negotiated with. (Though you could really insert a similar section in the biography of any leftist public figure active in the twenties; the truly remarkable thing is that Dennett wasn’t sympathetic to that cause.) Talbot’s conclusion is that the two figures represent the opposite relationship of tactics to social vision: Sanger was a revolutionary moderate, Dennett was a reformist radical. Talbot also makes her admiration of Dennett quite explicit, highlighting the influential obscenity decision that resulted from her fight to distribute sex-ed pamphlets; the piece is as much a primer in Dennett as it is anything else. The “connection to now” goes without saying; I suppose the magazine will resume its annoying Trump-era habit of explicitly stating the current stance of MAGA toward the issue at hand. It keeps the conclusion of pieces like this from roaming to potentially more interesting places – for instance, what might contemporary leftists learn from the "valuable takeaway" that ideological and tactical transgression don't have to go hand in hand? (Tactical diversity: It gets results!) It's true, of course, that misogyny remains uneradicated. But that's not happening anytime soon; we have to learn how to fight in the world we've got. I’ll admit, that can be a bitter pill to swallow.
Window-Shop:
“Against the Current” - Helen Shaw Gives a little, Gatz a little. I saw Give Me… already, and Shaw nails it, with verve – Troyano is a “pugnacious bantam” (wow!) while Chukwu as Jacobs-Jenkins is “snug in a checkered cardigan and an air of wry self-regard.” Shaw conveys the not-always-cohesive ramshackle nature of the show while giving it credit for its “ecstatic” beauty. The Gatz section (I’m seeing that on Sunday) isn’t a “review” so much as an appreciation of a really important work of art (“the defining nonmusical production of the twenty-tens”); if anything’s changed from the original staging to now, Shaw doesn’t note it. Giving away the ending of a six-hour-long show is… a choice, but I suppose the journey is the real destination.
“The Big Spin” - Jennifer Gonnerman selects a Jewry of peers. A slight twist on the magazine’s favorite genre, “Miscarriages of Justice” – here, there’s no innocent punished unjustly, just some staggering unlawfulness on the part of prosecutors, who acted with the astonishing impunity of the oblivious. It could only have been incompetence behind the paper trail they left: They were taking notes on a criminal fucking conspiracy, basically, but not even a deliberate conspiracy, just an idiotic “unwritten rule” that happened to blatantly violate all sorts of written rules. The story is ultimately pretty simple, and Gonnerman doesn’t find in Dykes or Quatman a character vivid enough to fully center a piece around, so she focuses more on the past than the present. That means the obvious implications of Gonnerman’s story, in which the progressive prosecutor that was actually willing to look into the racist miscarriages of the past has been swiftly recalled by a public more interested in blood and vengeance at any cost, can too easily be drowned out by the patient recounting of the specific ways the 1980s and 90s were disgusting. (Anderson is still disgusting in exactly those same ways, when Gonnerman finds him; of course, he’s also long retired.) That’s not to say that ogling women and viewing other races as essentially tribal (in the sense that they stick together above all else, something that doesn’t apply, in this imaginary, to whites) isn’t still prevalent – but it can’t be reasonably viewed as a foundational problem anymore; all the rounds of political correction aimed at rendering the mindset shameful has instead increased resentment and done nothing to change the underlying savagery of the system. Write that on your index card and catalog it.
“Clean Your Pipes” (Talk of the Town) - Ben McGrath saves a vital organ. Preservation of a giant, fragile, aging instrument: Inherently fascinating. Political reference at the end: Certainly not needed, but not egregious. Hey, speaking of giant, fragile, aging instruments: American democracy!
“This Election Just Proves What I Already Believed” (Shouts & Murmurs) - River Clegg wants a party that’s for us, confirmation by us. Already not the most original gag, but the execution is very strong. The political Shouts is something of a lost art; there aren’t many of them anymore and they’ve tended to feel Twitterish. Well… at least that might not be a problem anymore.
“Rebels With a Cause” - Inkoo Kang says it isn’t needless to Say Nothing. Pretty funny that the most unreservedly positive TV review in the magazine in recent memory is of… the adaptation of Patrick Radden Keefe’s book. What is this, the New York Review of Each Other’s TV Shows? (I’d read that, actually.) My usual issues with Kang apply (clunky prose styling – not too bad here; lack of thesis – really bad here) but her enjoyment of the product does show; she seems engaged. Excellent spot art by Nada Hayek.
“Metamorphosis” - Emily Nussbaum raises Heller. Awkwardly timed – usually these things drop right before the project they chronicle, and because Nightbitch is already out, Nussbaum’s “will it be a success?” framing actually has to get an answer, complete with excerpts from the reviews, which are mixed; Nussbaum quotes from a few before quite awkwardly concluding that the “divided reception felt like its own kind of success: ‘Nightbitch’ would generate debate rather than slip through the cracks.” That’s quite a stretch – plenty of films get mixed reviews and wither away, and if Nussbaum is prophesying a sort of Saltburnification, well… you don’t make money based on Letterboxd logs. This piece also has an awful opening paragraph; comparing the surreality of climate collapse to that of a middlebrow horror comedy is incredibly distasteful, and it’s not a point Nussbaum ever deepens or returns to. Heller doesn’t have the world’s most compelling story, although I suppose that’s kind of the point of her film (which I haven’t seen) – bourgeois white motherhood has its own special wildness and surreality, even if from the outside it just looks like you’re “the wife of the Dick In A Box guy.” You contain multitudes. That those “multitudes” basically boil down to “lots of creative ambition” in this case makes the whole story spectacularly Los Angeles – it’s incredibly career-oriented, which is not to say inherently false or hollow; it’s certainly healthier than being, you know, incredibly drug-use-oriented. (I highly recommend reading this piece and that Juliano-Villani piece in tandem; they deepen one another, and they both double as portraits of writers smitten with sources who have extreme versions of their own more mild ego fixations.) Nussbaum’s prosecraft remains stellar, snappy, inimitable; even when this piece is annoying, it’s annoying in a pretty fun way. And if you want to see how much farther Heller can climb – well, wait just a dog-gone minute.
Skip Without Guilt:
“Hold Your Tongue” - Samanth Subramanian says India can’t keep boli alone. Waits an inexplicably long time before considering the political implications of the story it’s telling. So much detail about Ganesh Devy as a scholar and as a person, the difficulty and all-encompassing nature of his project, and the resistance from some linguists… all of which feels pretty weightless, since we’re missing the very thing that makes the project so important: The country is ruled by a top-down Hindu nationalist movement with a vested interest in the pursuit of a monolingual India. When we finally get there, midway through the next to last section, the story opens up just in time for it to end. Devy’s project is easily as much an activist provocation as an academic research initiative. (Though certainly it is both.) Subramanian lands on a quote implying that the B.J.P’s fascisto-supremacist project is doomed to failure because India is too deeply diverse; that’s a nice thought, though certainly a complicated one; if the piece got there sooner there’d be time to unpack it in detail, instead of dropping it right before wrapping things up. I can’t understand why Subramanian waits so long to be explicit about the stakes of his story.
“A Long Way Home” - David Sedaris has a Maine man. The best of the recent crop of Sedaris pieces, which isn’t saying very much – they’ve been sour and wearisome, and this one is only better on account of its relative banality; there’s no excitement but there’s nothing too offensive, either. (Some slightly iffy stuff about the Chinese in America, but not even on the level of a certain bit of Calvin Trillin doggerel, for instance.) If you aren’t tired of the guy, there are worse ways to spend fifteen minutes. Still, I can’t find much reason to recommend it.
“Get It Together” - Adam Gopnik plays the mob doctor. Gopnik dismisses the past thirty or so years of medieval studies with three words and a scoff, and things stay in roughly that tone throughout a piece which is, even by Gopnik’s standards, enervatingly cocksure – but also, ultimately, noncommittal. He literally starts the last section with the phrase “The eternal truth… is that…” and if there’s irony there I don’t see it. This tack is probably warranted when it comes to the Dan Hancox book, which sounds like the kind of popular nonfiction that overstates its case to keep the reader’s attention and gets many things wrong in the process. Elsewhere, it’s needless; I don’t need to hear Gopnik’s extremely confident take on the French Revolution. Despite all this, though, in the end Gopnik shrugs that no firm position can really be taken on mobs and their efficacy and democraticness. This is true enough – it’s also true enough of essentially everything in the world. There’s always a counterargument; that doesn’t make a shrug a good enough answer.
Letters:
A few nice notes on last week’s issue but mostly just in the vein of “thanks for reading all that so I didn’t have to.”
What did you think of this week’s issue?
“this week people are taking the lyrics of defying gravity and really holding space with that and feeling power in that.”
“i didn’t know that that was happening. that’s really powerful. that’s what i wanted. i didn’t know that was happening.”
“i’ve seen it on a couple posts i don’t know how widespread but you know i am in queer media so that’s my you know yeah but yeah it’s happening.”
I really appreciate you highlighting the Sanger/Dennett piece, that's exactly the type that I would miss without this fine, fine review. The table of contents description gives you nothing, I would have just glossed over it as "oh, in-depth book review."
Tactical diversity (and personality diversity) makes a lot of sense as an organizing tactic. I suppose one other interesting parallel I got from the piece is the way Sanger and Dennett hated each other and tore each other down. I admire both (and find both flawed) in almost equal measure and while it's good to give Dennett her shine I think one really salient lesson to learn is: let's not tear each other down. Working on progressive causes is hard enough in this reactionary moment, the tendency on the left (true on the right too I suppose but the left always seems more prone to fragmenting) is something to be all the more aware of in this particularly socially atomized age.
Really appreciate your 'sletter for highlighting this piece which is so much interesting food for thought.