October 19, 2023

Last Week's New Yorker Review: October 23, 2023

Last Week’s New Yorker, week of October 23

Must-Read:

“Hot Air” - Heidi Blake speaks for the trees that carbon-offset credits allegedly help preserve. I was familiar, going into this piece, with the general issues clouding carbon offsets, especially those focused on tree preservation. (Credit to this excellent YouTube documentary, still well worth watching as there’s not too much overlap with this piece.) Blake gives us that story, but also slowly builds a psychological portrait of offset executive Renat Heuberger, who is a case study in the way a well-intentioned individual can come undone chasing after markers of success defined by the same capitalistic system that’s destroying the environment. It’s remarkable the amount of access Blake gets, not just to Heuberger but also to gleefully immoral “white Zimbabwean tycoon” Steve Wentzel, who at one point gives the incredible quote, “I don’t know what you’re going to report on this, and I hope to God it’s not all of it, because I probably will go to jail.” It’s not entirely clear if the Kariba project was uniquely shady or if Blake just got lucky with access and projects this shady are everywhere in the carbon-offset world, but Blake shows that it might as well be the latter case, because the real issue is the laxity of private regulators like Verra, who may be given alarming power over the upcoming governmental carbon-trading framework, “by virtue of sheer convenience.” Blake has less access to the inner workings of Verra, so these sections are less meaty and more explanatory, but they’re still incredibly clear and they help to frame the problem as bigger than just a few bad actors. Climate stories can often get stuck in the same few tones — pestilential doom, wary optimism — but Blake manages to escape these ruts by writing what’s really a business story with climate trappings. Corruption has much in common with pollution, and both are specialties of our fallible species.1

Window-Shop:

“Fierce Attachments” - Eli Hager judges like Solomon between a child’s birth parents and the couple hoping to foster-to-adopt. Tender and wrenching in its careful navigation of this extremely loaded topic. Mostly focuses on the specific case at hand, skimming past the late-breaking development of official “improprieties in the handling of” the child’s case, not merely the unofficial improprieties that were obvious before then. The system comes off terribly here; both couples are generally sympathetic, but the social worker Diane Baird’s corrupt villainy is emphasized, her quotes on the child’s potential “sociopathy” and such are quite vile. A broader view of the system’s brokenness might focus not just on its mismanagement but on the troubling underlying societal assumptions that allow the mismanagers to believe themselves in the moral right — read in tandem with Larissa MacFarquhar’s brilliant piece on adoption, this takes on a greater depth.

“The Pitchfork of History” - Daniel Immerwahr puts a fork in the mythical conception of rural America. Starts very strong, with a dissection of the construction of “real America” as, actually, “relatively new” — and reliant on “uprooting one rural people and implanting another.” Who knew homesteading was still going on into the ‘80s — and who knew many Alaskan farmers were Midwesterners relocated by the New Deal? Immerwahr, a historian, is at his best delving into these obscured histories; he’s more adrift wading into contemporary politics, and the piece spends a long time presenting an image of poverty-stricken rurality (“a laid-off veteran buying Rice-A-Roni at Dollar General”) that feels almost as mythical as what it’s meant to replace. The claims of Trump’s appeal to the impoverished are undercut by polling showing he fared better with wealthier voters, and the voice of the “low-paid immigrant” working in a chicken-processing plant gets shouted over by those whose real values lie in racial resentment and a fantastical image of return to a nonexistent past. Immerwahr gets a lot of clever mileage out of Grant Wood’s famous painting, returning to it again and again and finding new angles each time. (The distinctive window? “Mail-ordered from Sears.”) If the piece can feel split between book review (it could easily pass for one), art-criticism, and political analysis, its slightly scattershot approach does still keep things novel.

“Possession” - Kristen Roupenian moves into a haunted-house novel haunted by its predecessor. The first section is fairly bland setup about the history of revision and resurrection in writing — too much listing of examples. Once Roupenian gets into specifics about the book at hand, the piece sparks to life, and she captures the way its indebtedness to Shirley Jackson is both a weakness (“The reader realizes that the situation is a compulsory feature of the author’s authorized project… and so a dead hand on her narrative imagination”) and a strength (“The competition between older and younger women, and the high stakes of the battle for control of one’s artistic territory, is a recurring theme… Every time it arises, the story takes on a pleasurable metafictional richness.”) And on the “brief, bizarre, and electric” scene that “almost seems torn from a different book,” you can sense Roupenian’s deep pleasure at having been shocked — her writing grows more vivid, as if her prose, along with her hair, is standing on end.

“Epic Proportions” - Helen Shaw probes the past with two epic plays. I try to keep abreast of theatre reviews in the major publications, though I usually only read them in advance if they’re mixed enough that I decide not to see the show. That was the case with The Refuge Plays, so Shaw’s is the third take I’ve seen, and it’s always interesting to compare notes. Shaw says the first act is “the most diffuse.” Naveen Kumar at the Times says the second is “heavy-handed.” Jackson McHenry at New York says the third is “the best and simplest of the three.” Between the three of them, they would make some cuts. Yet Shaw also praises the show’s length, with the compelling point that “attention molds itself to the container it’s offered, and these generation-spanning, epic shows — big containers — give our pressured minds time to relax.” I never thought of it that way. Meanwhile, Shaw is clearly thrilled by the “tartly funny, hugely romantic” Zoetrope, and of course she’s well within her rights to cover plays that have already closed, when they warrant it. I’ll continue to find it slightly enervating.

“The French Connection” - Jackson Arn gazes at Manet and Degas at the Met. When Arn says the artists “were only in their twenties, but they already knew what kind of artists they wanted to be,” it’s hard not to think of the youngish Arn himself, so hyperconfident in his tastes and takes. In this outing, I was mostly convinced, especially by his read of Olympia — “His painting is about going through the motions: half obeying the rules of your profession… until they start to seem ridiculous. …Long before it was a masterpiece, it was a gamble.” In the last paragraph, on the artists’ personal relationship, his guesswork is ahistorical in a way that’s allowed of a critic, but perhaps shouldn’t be encouraged.

“The Verdict” - Ian Buruma asks what the Allied tribunal accomplished in Japan. There’s plenty to criticize here — Buruma’s prose has a crumbly, meandering quality; his politics can be iffy; the piece heavily relies on the “exhaustive and fascinating” book it’s reviewing without ever actually critiquing that book; if you’re trying to have a normal person’s idea of a fun time, you won’t find it here. Despite all that, ultimately I come to the magazine hoping to learn novel information about important topics, and I knew absolutely nothing about the postwar Japanese tribunal — I’m not sure I even knew there was one. Asian politics and political histories are wildly under-covered in the American press, and I can forgive a lot in service of edification. I feel smarter for having read this piece, with a clearer idea of the roots of the contemporary Japanese political landscape. Not everything needs to be “vivid” and “sparkling” — two words I try and fail not to massively overuse around here.

Skip Without Guilt:

“Get Happy” - Anthony Lane chases all his cares away. Look, it’s Lane at his goofiest, covering a dumb pop-psychology book. You don’t need me to tell you whether you’ll like that kind of thing. I prefer Lane hitting slightly harder targets, with a bit less giggle. I get annoyed when, two paragraphs from the end, he’s still saying things like “Where to begin with this?” and I roll my eyes when he shoehorns in a reference to a classic ‘40s comedy (“Mr. Blandings Builds His Dream House” — a good one, to be fair.) But if you’re Lane’s ideal customer, you’ll feel catered to, and I was not un-charmed. Still, he does work best in small doses — his movie reviews are usually tight, but this is fairly saggy.

“Horny on Main” - Amanda Petrusich takes Troye Sivan’s shirt off. Takes forever to get through the setup, familiar from literally any coverage of Sivan, then wastes valuable space on annoying trend-piece parentheticals: “(A vague longing for a semi-recent past, in which we were not quite so attached to our devices, seems endemic to a generation that has never known the freedom of being unaware of what everyone else is doing.)” When Petrusich is describing songs, she’s a pro — her favorite has “a wiggly, nineteen-seventies feel, with a skronky keyboard line and unexpected bits of saxophone.” But this ultra-traditional coverage does Sivan a disservice — there’s not enough goss in it. Compare to the wonderful Socratic dialogue Vulture released on whether his lead single “Rush” is a Bop or a Flop.

“Spectacular Fall” - Nathan Heller doom loop-di-loops around San Francisco, a city allegedly in crisis. I appreciate the intent of writing a story in which, in order to show the mostly false, often political construction of the SF-is-doomed narrative, one interviews many of the people working to shape the city in their vision. Where Heller goes wrong is in selecting, almost exclusively, centrists with a great deal of power — as the online subhed lists, “tech bro, city official, billionaire investor, grassroots activist… Michelin-starred restauranteur.” Heller simplifies the city’s politics into center-left and far-left, and then interviews almost exclusively the center-lefties, who worship police, loathe regulation, and crave tech business at the expense of everything else. I could forgive all this — Heller does poke holes in their assertions a few times, and while I took away an overall positive feeling, Heller is always very subtle about asserting his perspective, to the point where what you glean often depends on what you bring — but the piece is also surprisingly dull, with little of Heller’s usual squinty verve. I was fairly critical of Lawrence Wright’s piece on Austin (both that piece and this share troublesome coverage of homelessness which has no time for the voices of the unhoused but spends plenty of time presenting viewpoints dehumanizing them) but at least there the city’s distinct color, and Wright’s affection for it, shone through. All I know after reading this is that SF is populated by annoying centrist pols who want technocracy. Get those people off the streets!

Letters:

Regular correspondent Michael enjoyed both Gideon Lewis-Kraus’ take on Michael Lewis’ SBF book and Inkoo Kang’s take on Reservation Dogs: “It's probably in part the contrarian in me who likes a strong opinion diverging the from the received consensus (even if I don't always agree). [The Lewis-Kraus] review was the first one that made me actually think of reading Lewis's SBF book. And Kang's review of Reservation Dogs helped me put a finger on what sometimes seems like homework about this show.”