Last Week’s New Yorker, week of September 21

“She was warmer than I expected a bird to be. I could feel her heartbeat. When I was in elementary school, I briefly shared an elevator with the actor Robert Wagner, whom I recognized from the TV show ‘Hart to Hart.’ He caught my eye and said hello. The encounter was otherworldly and wondrous. Holding A34 felt something like that.”

Must-Read:

“Flight Risk” (Dept. of Science) - Rivka Galchen sings glory be to Godwit. That birds are “lovable, alien, awesome, and alive” is a truth that resists language; it must be held gently, like a small creature with a fast heartbeat. Galchen makes her awe at the “‘technically impossible’” existence of the unprepossessing godwit as clear and accessible as possible, yet the bird’s life is itself unclear and inaccessible; we are still puzzling out its journey, which may involve entering a state of torpor, or shrinking and regrowing its digestive organs – details that seems about as bizarre and unlikely as Aristotle’s idea that birds switch species. (One good bird returns another.) The tie to climate change is slightly thin – two sentences about how, in order to save birds, we have to understand them – and it’s clear that Galchen is interested in conservation as an excuse to talk about the bird, not the other way around. Well, the bird deserves talking about. Its precarious existence keeps sending Galchen’s interviewees to the brink of tears, and no wonder – as with the Japanese concept of Ganbaru, a vulnerable creature pushing on toward its goal is perhaps what us humans feel most deeply for. 頑張って, little bird!

Window-Shop:

“Easy Street” (Books) - John Lanchester says if you had a million dollars (if you had a million dollars) you’d probably lobby for a tax cut (and some deregulation, to boot). Nice to have Lanchester back in these pages for the first time in six years. Anyone who journeys through the American exurbs will notice that there are an incomprehensible number of hideous mansions in our country. I’ve long wondered what sort of person wants a life like that, and a new study has the answer – the “Everywhere Millionaire”, who owns a business (usually just one), works extremely hard to the detriment of “outside interests or hobbies”, and both lives and votes in a self-interested, wealth-obsessed manner. Increased productivity has gone to line their pockets, and they’re aiming to “pull up the drawbridge” behind them. Lanchester ends the piece by quickly noting that the what’s-to-be-done sections of the study give “unlikely to be enacted” “prescriptions” and unconvincing prods to network, but at least knowing what’s happening (“see it and name it”) is a first step. It’s hard not to hear Mark Fisher screaming in pain at the lack of imagination, but a brief essay doesn’t need to turn into a political manifesto, and it’s genuinely enlightening to get a portrait of this segment – those of us Americans who proudly dream of labor.

“Nudge Thyself” (Books) - Meghan O’Gieblyn goes good will hunting. A sly and very clever argument for self-knowledge, beginning with a new book that basically preaches set and setting – put ourselves in the way of growth, and it will come; resisting short-term temptation is a matter of hiding it from ourselves. There’s something to that, but as O’Gieblyn points out, the line between what we want and what is good for us is blurry, and figuring out worthy priorities – or true desires – may be as much of a challenge as sticking to them. O’Gieblyn takes too long unspooling this point; the first two sections of this piece can be skimmed, but eventually she gets going, alternating between ripostes (“For all its bluster about the futility of will power, what “Situated” is actually wary of is thinking”) and deeper criticisms (the framework of self-reinforcing good is “presented with utter authority and an accompanying diagram, and no acknowledgment that it can also work in reverse”). The magazine writes about weightless self-help books far too often, but here O’Gieblyn uses the shallow thinking under review to make a sharp point about longing: If we do not make a practice of “interrogating the motives and assumptions that guide our actions”, we end up in samsara, “an endless cycle of craving and restlessness that is never satisfied”. It is too ingenuous of O’Gieblyn to claim that this “is not a prescription that is likely to sell many books”; frankly, any idea, no matter how good, can be turned into a silly self-help book.

🗣️ “Feet on the Land” (Comeback Dept.) - Rachel Syme makes a pit stop with Paula Cole. There is a surprising amount to say about Cole, with Syme balancing between the absurd nineties misogyny of mocking her unshaven pits and her current hippie-songwriter existence, which seems copacetic. She doesn’t touch on the very successful Daisy Chain Fields, Olivia Rodrigo’s reboot of Cole’s project Lilith Fair, which is very surprising – it seems like the obvious hook for this piece. In any case, Cole comes across well; also, my goodness, one could write a Pictures at a Revolution-style book about those Best New Artist nominees.

🗣️ “New York, Continued” (Closeup Dept.) - Eric Lach zooms and pans across the city with Ric Burns. Burns is not what you would call an interesting person, but I’m glad our country has these documentarian brothers that are, even if vaguely, public figures. One for the city, one for everywhere else – as it should be.

“The Punished Land” (A Critic at Large) - Isaac Chotiner Israeli not sure what to do. Thoroughly misproportioned: Chotiner spends the whole piece demolishing and dismantling Benjamin Moser’s intellectually malnourished history of anti-Zionism, then, at the very end, turns to a fantastic-sounding Omer Bartov book, “Israel: What Went Wrong?” that also condemns contemporary Zionism, and the way the movement “never seriously reckoned with the Arabs already living in Palestine”. Obviously, the piece should lead with this book; is Chotiner so addicted to takedowns he thinks it’s all he’s good for? The Moser takedown is significantly too long, anyway – we get the point quickly, and by spending so long one wonders if Chotiner’s editors, would rather run criticism of anti-Zionist texts, even from a writer whose work on the conflict has largely focused on Israeli hypocrisy. Weird stuff. Despite its strange shape, there’s enough wisdom here to warrant a read.

Skip Without Guilt:

“To Have and to Hold” (Popular Chronicles) - David Owen has something in store. Like many an inherited piece of furniture, this looks great at first but doesn’t go anywhere. The first section is totally fun, an anecdote leading to a witty breakdown of the uses of storage facilities; the rest wastes time on touring the spaces (Guess what: They look like storage facilities), the backstory of Storage Wars (I have never seen the show, yet I already knew everything Owen tells us about it), the increasing use of A.I. (why this applies to storage in ways that differ from any other job is not made clear), and the movement toward Europe (would you believe that a business model that works in the U.S. can probably also work in other places?) – without any sense of forward movement. Finally, the brief last section finds something sort of new – chronicling the rich assholes (presumably Everywhere Millionaires) who fill units with vehicles and spend all day in their unheated man-cave-garages, also known as “car condos”. Seems pretty sad, man!

“Dollar Diplomacy” (Profiles) - Dexter Filkins is smoking that rich-ass Kushner. Newsflash: Man who is by all appearances and all prior evidence a corrupt prick is actually a corrupt prick. This is an awfully late date to get the huge Kushner profile, especially given that he’s one of the few figures who’s stuck around since Trump 1; there wasn’t much Filkins could have done to make me enjoy this. That said, it isn’t terrible; as a summative review of the Trump foreign-policy portfolio with a few anecdotes about his team’s blustery attitude on the side, it’s perfectly alright. What else is there to say? If that’s how you want to spend your subway ride, be my guest.

“She Made Me Do It” (A Reporter at Large) - Ian Parker gives a dressaging down. Everyone has been having a good time with this one, and I seriously did not, which I guess is on me to explain. Mostly, though, it boils down to the unpleasantness of reading about these people, the cluster-B Facebook-feed paranoiacs of the world, clawing at each other. I have a hard time getting outraged over anybody not going to prison, and Barisone is, at this point and with his mental situation, not going to suddenly reform his ways, nor does he seem like much of a public risk. I have a hard time seeing this as a miscarriage of justice, because I’m not sure what justice would look like here. My why-should-I-care reaction is rendered less potent by the fact that plenty of readers obviously do care; still, if Parker is usually at his best writing about the inanities and insanities of the rich and infamous, somehow the balance is totally off here. Or maybe I just wasn’t in the mood for something so sour at such length. It seems that the story has partly been received as primarily about the impunity of men, which makes me wonder if people read the wrong true crime story from the magazine this year. This is more a story about the impunity of assholes, especially in a Trumpy, post-truth world. To really nail that point, it would help to have someone to root for. I guess I’m rooting for the horses… but I wouldn’t bet on them.

Letters:

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More soon. Or as soon as I can. Which should be soon. I guess we’ll see.

well

water