Last Week’s New Yorker, week of October 26

“The booklet, contrived to shed no particles, said ‘Clean Note: The Highest Clean Level for Clean-Room Use.’”

In theory, this is the Festival Issue, pegged to the magazine’s ever-bigger, ever-more-annoying Q&A series. The Goings On section has thus been replaced by a calendar and two startlingly sucky little columns that recommend you go to such under-the-radar spots as Veniero’s, Chelsea Market, and the High Line. Gee, thanks. In practice, though, the rest of the issue is a better Books Issue than the Fall Books Issue was, so I can’t be too mad at it.

Must-Reads:

“Sand Castles” (Annals of Technology) - Gideon Lewis-Kraus chips in. Do you enjoy extravagant analogies and fevered thought experiments? Well… imagine a tasting menu made up entirely of such things. The chef – Lewis-Kraus – starts with a flourish so grand it nearly blows out your palate (Describing a microchip: “Imagine a perfect replica of a sprawling metropolis, a Tokyo or a São Paulo, engraved at atomic dimensions on a tile the size of a fingernail. The urban details would be faithfully rendered to the last golf ball or egg—each reduced to approximately the bulk of a hemoglobin molecule, or the distance grown by a human fingernail every five seconds”) and doesn’t stop slinging plates, each aiming to awe: “The Apollo mission’s chips were less powerful than those currently inside a digital pregnancy test. We squander moon-landing capability to display a plus sign.” There is something enervatingly Freakonomics-ish about this style¹, but Lewis-Kraus commits to it, making the point that Moore’s Law is not an inevitability but the result of incredible amounts of hard work and honed expertise. The history is good, but once Lewis-Kraus starts recounting the insane individuated craftsmanship of the component-makers, the piece achieves the lunatic liftoff it’s aiming for: “When you dig down to the very bedrock of A.I., you discover that underneath all of its cognitive power is a dude drumming his fingers with occult proficiency.” If this is a bit cutesily counterintuitive, Lewis-Kraus renders it convincing, with details like a “recessed thingamabob” with “hundreds of pinprick holes” that must be “deburred by hand”. The strong and slow burring of hard drives?

“Under the Influence” (Books) - James Wood gets cross-faded. Wood is often circling the traumas of religion; here, he writes of an addiction memoir with such spare tenderness it’s a bit like he’s taking confession. Addressing the writer O’Gieblyn’s “anguished engagement” with theology and philosophy, Wood turns to the concept of “will”, which, he notes, is complicated by the faith that there is an other – a god-seed, a spirit – within us. She wants “to lose herself” in something sensuous and secret; after alcoholism, religion takes its place, and eventually serves as a not-so-pearly “gateway” back to drink. Intoxication does grant “surrender” from the ego; maybe Wood experiences it as a “warm secular blur”, but he should speak for himself. His judgement of O’Gieblyn verges on moralizing (“Shouldn’t we avoid trading in substitutes, in transferences?”) but is riveting to read, because one senses the depth of Wood’s emotion beneath the placid face of his words. (One “alarming” in the very last sentence lands with surprising force.) Whatever you believe or feel, Wood will attune you to his register. He’s not trying to change your mind – “grinding syllogism”, what therapy calls intellectualization, is its own trap – but to probe it. What else is already in there?

Regarding my recent Weekend Special pick of a Woods piece, Dan Kois² sent along Wood’s “long memoir excerpt in the LRB”, “a really superb portrait of a family — the depictions of his mother and father are extraordinary. And then in the middle there's this very bizarre attempt to dance lightly around the obviously molest-y headmaster of his boarding school. The letters page was unsurprisingly appalled. The whole saga is pretty interesting!” I have to be honest, I have not had a chance to read those thirteen thousand words, so I can’t comment. But the essay’s on my to-do list, and I may respond further when I get to it! You can lead a horse to the river, but you can’t make it pray.

Window-Shop:

“Old School” (Books) - B.D. McClay is a full Bright scholar. The Brightness is – as everybody has noticed – a book out of time: A highly perceptive, decades-in-the-making white dude campus novel with somewhat baity politics and metafictional elements (the weirdness of Harbach pretending that his previous book was written by a Black dude is not addressed substantially enough in any of the reviews I’ve seen) whose length and squareness have made it something of an easy target for actual members of the generation (and attendees of the sorts of college) Harbach is writing about. In other words, it’s a reminder of a literary monoculture that’s basically vanished, plus a chance for the students to turn on the professor.³ Emma Alpern gave it the new college try in Vulture, but McClay – one of our best writers on has more room to breathe, and lands plenty of shots.⁴ Especially strong is the paragraph on “thin disguises” (e.g. “a designer label named Jane and Janet”), which sacrifice “social reality” – “it’s unclear whether what you’re encountering is a fictional invention or an inside joke”. McClay is mostly annoyed by Harbach’s needlessly metafictional approach to the good old-fashioned novel; the book succeeds in its base aim to entertain largely in spite of its high-minded conceit, it seems. Who knows whether the masses will want to read a doorstop so out-of-its-era, though. He’s built it; will we come?

🗣️ “Selling It Strait” (Room With a View) - Charles Bethea puts himself in Hormuz way. Maybe the first time a genuine scoop has also been, technically, a piece about a press release. A brilliantly absurd what-were-they-thinking corporate screwup. Bethea underplays his incredulity perfectly.

🗣️ “Hard-Core Clown” (The Boards) - Henry Alford makes an Invalid argument. Bill Irwin is amazing at talking. His quotes are like little poems!

“Double Vision” (The Art World) - Zachary Fine has cracked it wide open. That opening anecdote in this very particular context does make one go a bit wide-eyed, no? Anyway: Fine adored this show, and he’s good at both the broad strokes (“one gets the impression that Pollock was a fascinating passenger whom Krasner picked up, travelled with for fifteen years, and kept talking to even once he was gone”) and the flicky little details that make them up (one Krasner is “like you’re squinting at a Pollock with your eyelashes gating your vision”). Fine’s secret sauce, I think, is his focus on the physical sensations and disorientations of looking, which he conveys exceptionally well (it helps that he pays attention to such things in the first place); there is tons of that material here. Not an especially formally adventurous review – it’s essentially a walk through the show with Fine – which perhaps doesn’t befit the subject; on the other hand, if fragmentation would just be affect, the truest thing is to take these canvases for what they are, and feel their power. Before LSD, there was Krasner and Pollock: Turn on, tune in, dropcloth.

🗣️ “Top Ten-ish” (The Pictures) - Bruce Handy has Safdie best for last. You can’t deny he knows ball.

🗣️ “Artistic Temperament” (Backstage Dept.) - Sarah Larson grabs ass. Donkey opera! Opera donkey! (Also: Shoutout to the snake-handler in Cosí, the gogo icon Zoe Ziegfeld.)

“Party Time” (The Political Scene) - Benjamin Wallace-Wells is making a socialist and checking it twice – he’s gonna find out who’s naughty or Nithya. The DSA has increasingly become the Lefty Electoral Politics Caucus, as its founders intended but failed to realize. The problem facing the DSA – how big should this tent be? – is pretty simple to define, and the best choice Wallace-Wells makes is not belaboring the explanation. A map of the ideological breakdown of YIMBY politics in the organization would be the same size as the organization. He still seems a bit willfully obtuse as to how a political organization could possibly endorse a candidate who doesn’t subscribe to all their ideological principles. It’s true that a focus on electoral politics may smother the protest-and-organize aspects of the DSA, but it’s hard to see that having an effect on protest or organizing in our country. It’s an internal issue, basically, and with the benefit of Blue-nami hindsight, some of this feels like small potatoes (more of that to come with next week’s issue!) because Raman is a mayor-elect with a mandate. Voting red never felt so good.

Skip Without Guilt:

“Books Everlasting” (Popular Chronicles) - Nathan Heller makes a shelf-filling prophecy. A perfectly competent business profile, grafted awkwardly onto a tired and annoying editorial about literacy. Heller finds in James Daunt a competent businessman with a deep, learned understanding of his field; a belief in thoughtful delegation and decentralized decision-making; and a certain stubborn ruthlessness. That combination has been extraordinarily effective, especially compared to the “‘legacy of morons and horrible people’” preceding him in the corporate-bookstore space. The piece cuts away from him twice to allow for Heller’s free-associating on “reading decline”, but Daunt has little to say on the subject, and his success is not due to some ideological focus but instead due to the “welcoming, browsable”, prosocial spaces he’s able to cultivate. The actual story of his success is one of design, and Heller never fully realizes it. The paragraph on the invention of “‘the pyramid’” – a shape for displaying books, basically – is the best thing here; past that point, it turns into a story of private equity doing its thing, which Heller may mean to be foreboding but just comes across depressing and dry. And to wrap up with a bunch of marketing-brained dullards saying things like “authors are finding readers directly” and “people are ravenous for content that isn’t on their laptop or their phone” – plus one reactionary bookseller (Recent college grads “don’t know who wrote ‘The Magic Mountain.’” Man⁵, they’re like twenty-five, have you tried telling them?) – is insulting to the reader. Heller is straining to draw his central connection; to get there, he has to cook the books.

“The Usual” (On and Off the Menu) - Hannah Goldfield eats her words. As a perpetual skipper of the Grub Street Diet, I really don’t care about Louise Glück and Dan Chiasson’s dining habits, much as I love them both as writers. I’d be down with a look into the Glück-inspired restaurant, perhaps one informed by her writing, but this devolves into Goldfield trailing Dan Chiasson around Cambridge as he points out restaurants. It’s undigestibly insidery, and I say that as the writer of this newsletter.

“A New World” (On Television) - Vinson Cunningham is tick-tick-tick-tick-tick-tick-tick-ticked off. I get why it’s theoretically interesting that a bastion of a certain kind of slow-moving centrist reporting has been invaded by ghouls. But ghouls do basically the same thing wherever they go, and Cunningham finds nothing worth talking about in the actual material of the reboot. Ross Douthat jumps across some subway tracks. The brief last paragraph is wonderful, but if we’re asking why certain things deserve “reliable prime-time air” I’d also ask why certain things deserve space in this particular magazine. This isn’t the airport bar; you can just change the channel.

“Meet Frank Capra” (Books) - Anthony Lane travels direct. Lane suggests he will decide which image of Capra is closest to correct, then immediately gets entirely sidetracked by so-so anecdotes of early L.A, and then by an extended comparison to Howard Hawks that’s desperately in need of a video component and will mostly serve as a shibboleth to anyone not extremely familiar with the era’s movies. His eventual conclusion is a strange tautology: What kept Capra “ticking” was “the sheer vigor of his anti-idleness”. What, is he Sonic the Hedgehog? Lane dismisses Capra’s personal politics (“A movie screen is a dream, not a pamphlet”) as though the ideological content of his films were incidental, despite the weirdness of a Republican making obviously lefty movies. He also categorizes Capra’s sidelining of his collaborators as merely, perhaps, ungrateful; of course, the reason to care has nothing to do with Capra’s ethics and everything to do with how recognizing his collaborators’ importance undermines auteurism and begins to explain the political disjunction: After all, he didn’t write these films. Thus the Hawks comparison, while unwieldy, is the best thing here: It engages with the formal qualities of Capra’s films, not just their scripts.

“A Dangerous Friendship” (Personal History) - Bob Woodward has Darman on the inside. An oddly chosen excerpt from Woodward’s upcoming memoir, which is being sold as the confidential-sources guy revealing all his confidential sources. But as Woodward admits, his tightness with Darman was so open it barely qualified as secret, and the political battles of the early ‘90s feel remarkably irrelevant when framed primarily by the personalities of the era’s politicians. All those dudes are gone (or home writing their own memoirs), and while the often cruel policies they enacted are still worth considering, I’m not sure why I should care about how Darman the man(dar) felt about the circumstances leading to his ouster. Even less do I need the ending’s weepy, family-first treatment of one of the main guys that dismantled the public sector. Darman is a scheming vizier and Woodward uses him; they also become friendly, then stop talking to each other after Woodward’s reporting gets Darman fired. This speaks mostly to their being bitchmade self-victimizers, a charge Woodward basically admits to, which is admirable, as far as it goes. There is no evidence of Darman ever considering the actual lives being materially affected by his policies, though, and this renders him impossible to sympathize with. Woodward can mourn the man if he wants to, but writing about it, and framing it as some kind of lesson, is its own kind of poor judgement. Don’t cry over spilled managerialists.

Letters:

Just Dan Kois on Wood, covered above.

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