Last Week's New Yorker Review: October 6
Last Week’s New Yorker, week of October 6
“Mary, a believer in ‘watchful negligence,’ would let him and his three younger siblings wrap themselves in extra perforated tape.”
Must-Read:
“Pandora’s Patch” (Annals of Technology) - Julian Lucas gives Tim Berners-Lee his hypertexttrophy. I think of Lucas as mostly an arts writer, so I was surprised to see his byline on a tech profile. Maybe he should rethink his focus, because this is just wonderful, a searching, loving-but-skeptical portrayal of Berners-Lee that is refreshingly sophisticated in terms of its discussion of tech. The magazine can really frustrate with its insistence that its supposed ‘general audience’ has obviously heard of Ligeti but needs an explanation of Linux. The person writing this newsletter is a digital native who could type before they could write legibly; computers aren’t just for kids anymore. Lucas doesn’t need to pump the Tangerine Dream like Halt and Catch Fire to make his brief history of the early web entertaining, and he humanizes things with a sliver of his personal history. (“I built a proxy server to let classmates access banned Flash games.”) The discussion of Berners-Lee’s new idea, which appears to be, in terms of user experience, SameSite cookies with some extra permission boxes to click, is a bit less compelling. As Lucas implies, nobody wants to click those boxes, and while it’s forgivable, I think, to invent the hammer and then decide everything is a nail, that doesn’t mean we still have to listen to Berners-Lee. He’s fully bought-in on the premise of agentic AI1 and thinks that users will want a version that keeps their data client-side. I think users care pretty much exclusively about three things – does it feel cheap, fast, and good? The corporate centralized web has given up on “good” and the decentralized web seems obsessed with disallowing “fast”. Chatbots are only “cheap” as long as they’re heavily subsidized. The question is no longer how to work together to build a more compassionate web. The question is: How do we get the technofascists to blink first?
Window-Shop:
“The War at Home” (The Current Cinema) - Justin Chang picks One Battle After Another. I know I link to Adorno every week but I’m seeing this on VistaVision on Friday and I’ve been less excited for relatives’ weddings. If PTA is kulturindustrial, then dominate my psyche and call me Sadean. Thus I did sort of skim the plot synopsis once it became clear that Chang, like everyone else, was raving. I still felt the snap of his language, which is dialed toward pure appreciative salivation.
🗣️ “Big Pink” (Down East Postcard) - Nick Paumgarten chases a quarry. Who knew granite sourcing could, like just about everything else, be a metaphor for the cultural decline that comes with mass-produced modernity? (There it is.)
“Glowworms” (Personal History) - Ann Patchett goes down under. Patchett’s cleanly written, consistently witty and surprisingly moving essays are always worth reading. For this one, perhaps because the subject matter is, on its face, so elevated – three deaths in rapid succession – Patchett’s usual wry understatement feels just slightly affected. Patchett continually owns her luck and privilege, which avoids late-David-Sedaris obnoxiousness, but the anecdote here about paying loads to reschedule a flight still skirts the edge. The climax, two back-to-back breakdowns only vaguely related to the preceding losses, is generally compelling and certainly funny, if not even in the top three bad-boat-vacation stories I’ve heard. (This, I think, is the best.) It’s only Patchett’s storytelling that gets you through, to an ending that hints at the compassion behind the human tendency not to talk about death and disaster. When you’re going through it, what’s better than a friend to whisper fancies and trivialities in your ear?
Blitzer on Angell (Takes) - Really just a précis of an Angell piece on Steve Blass and the yips – a subject which always makes me think of the excellent novel The Art of Fielding2. Not uninteresting!
“Deserted Island” (A Reporter at Large) - Jon Lee Anderson is in dire Straits of Florida. Despite the title and lead photo, this is primarily a piece about Miami and the local political reactions to the Trump crackdown on immigration, which has inevitably included Cuban immigration. Surprisingly (or not), the right-wing Cubans Anderson finds still aren’t convinced they’re in the Leopards Eating People’s Faces Party. Anderson’s piece grows repetitive as he finds more and more people to tell him this same thing. Usually, Anderson neatly unpacks politics in various somewhat distant countries in the Americas, but Cuba is so close and its fate so linked to the US’ that he gets a bit lost untangling things. Who shot first – the Communists or the Batistans or the people funding the Batistans – is never going to be anything other than a matter of perspective, and isn’t really worth litigating. Meanwhile, that the Cuban military is hoarding resources is both likely true and also one more piece of State Department “electoral gamesmanship” to win Cuban-American votes for the right.3 Anderson is a pro at getting people to tell on themselves (“‘“What I want is revenge with the regime. Not justice. Revenge.’”) – but both the facts and the reasons the fascists are lying are quite obvious here. The principle of solidarity among immigrants rests on the very ethical groundwork that the Republican Party brands itself on destroying. Looking at the three Republican congresspeople from Cuba that Anderson focuses on, one doesn’t need a paper bag to understand why they don’t see themselves in Cuban deportees.
Skip Without Guilt:
“The Player” (Profiles) - Rachel Syme lends an earlobe. Simply too lengthy by any metric. Carol Burnett reveals very little about herself here; she pulls quips from her uncannily deep Rolodex until Syme gives up. That’s her prerogative, and her career is legendary – though it’s not actually that hard to understand why some find its picture of zany domesticity a little shallow or square. (Lorne Michaels ably serves the role of asshole here, but the piece is so relentlessly adulatory it grows wearing, and a brief mention of Elaine May – a less compromising genius by any metric – has one wondering why her comeback isn’t getting profiled4.) Syme is reluctant to leave a single witty quip on the cutting-room floor, much less any slight turn in Burnett’s career fortunes. It’s not that the quips aren’t witty, it’s just a whole lot of a good-but-trivial thing. At one point, Syme calls an almost-twenty-minute-long Burnett sketch “past the point of comfort”, which is true… and also it takes four times that long to read this piece. It’s so loaded down its levity starts to get lost.
“Sticks and Stones” (A Critic at Large) - Louis Menand gets his money for nothing and his rhetorics for free speech. Menand’s analysis is right on the money, which doesn’t mean I especially want to read it. Did you know fascists are hypocrites? Can you believe the president of Princeton misses the point about free speech on campuses because he’s so determined to side with administrators? Don’t you think abandoning free speech because it’s been used to entrench existing power relations is mistaking cause and effect? Well… those three points are really the only things Menand has to say here. He’s free to speak, but I’ve heard this all before.
“Say It Again” (Books) - Judith Thurman says Gertrude Stein got her money for nothing and her chick for free verse. As a somewhat casual member of the cult of Stein, I don’t plan on cracking open The Making of Americans, but my appreciation of Three Lives (decidedly not “unremarkable”), Tender Buttons, and especially the Four Saints and Doctor Faustus Lights the Lights libretti, is fully lived and in no sense “an article of faith”, and like any good avant gardeian I bristle at the implication that structural or non-narrative works can only be appreciated in theory. Certainly there is more reason to criticize Stein as a bit of an art monster; on the other hand, there are plenty of those in line for lashes and it’s not as though Stein, by embodying a patriarchal ideal, is somehow more guilty than the average man… and the average man couldn’t write Tender Buttons, so. Otherwise, Thurman’s review of a book recounting Stein’s “afterlife”, contra Toklas’ rigid devotion to Stein’s legacy, is so detailed in its minor tawdriness (Toklas, in a fit of jealousy, scratched words out of a diary – gasp!) one starts to understand that protectiveness. The pair’s blasé-at-first attitude toward fascist antisemitism is harder to excuse, but her apolitical complacency as a Jew doesn’t even mark her as one of the more fascist modernists. Thurman damns Stein with her ending’s faint praise, and that’s a shame. To gain faith in Stein, all you have to do, as Helen Shaw once wrote, is Recommit!
Letters:
Nah.
sea
The Money for Nothing links will continue until morale improves.
Now that the magician has pulled a rabbit out of their hat, we can all live off rabbit meat forever, just as soon as they give us the hat! ↩
His new novel The Brightness, which clocks in at 832 pages, has been ‘coming soon’ for at least two years… ↩
Anderson’s attempt to tie Alligator Alcatraz to Cuban-American politics for any reason other than the strictly geographical is about as heavily shoehorned, though. ↩
Honestly it probably will, and at such time I will rescind these sour grapes. ↩