Last Week’s New Yorker, week of September 28

“‘God, Guns, Gravy, and Gobble Gobble’”

It’s the Fall Books issue. Chock full o’Books.

Must-Reads:

“Opposing Views” (Annals of Higher Education) - Benjamin Wofford thinks campus speech censorship is a pain in the neck. Surprisingly enjoyable! The Kirk uproar seems like yesterday’s news, especially given the Streisand-effect-ish way the attempts to stifle celebration of his death turned that celebration into a meme. Still, there’s no controversy too obviously fatuous for fascist culture warriors to wield as a cudgel. Whether the Texas Tech administrators are practicing compliance-in-advance by pushing out a faculty member and investigating a law student, or whether they’re opportunists who just took an excuse to punish their enemy, the consequences are similar for Ellie Fisher, the always sympathetic but productively complicated figure Wofford centers. (“‘What do you want me to do’”, she says at one point, “‘Be a sick bitch and cry?’”) Even if the Kirk-death-celebration incident occurred exactly as Morgeson claimed – and, as Wofford meticulously chronicles, it really seems not to have – it’s hard to think of a more clear-cut incident of retaliation against political speech. (That the state is citing “cursing and volume” as Fisher’s trespass is so obviously racially tinged it’s almost laughable.) Wofford connects this wild story to the broader rollback of academic freedoms, but he’s smart to keep the focus on Fisher and her mentor Metze. I hope her lawsuit succeeds and the school doesn’t get off on a Texas Technicality.

“Writing Home” (Profiles) - Casey Cep knows that in the land of the blind, the hazel-eyed woman is Kingsolver. I managed to read Poisonwood Bible, relatively recently, with no particular sense of its stature or reputation; I was knocked off my feet, and look forward to reading much more Kingsolver. If I knew that the strike against her was a sense of her work as populist or “preachy and sentimental”, I’d have wondered if people read the same book I did; only in the context of the book’s fame and the story’s ties to her family life does such criticism start to make sense as part of a misguided, if not necessarily bad-faith, anti-populist/reactionary wave in literature – one that’s basically died off as the post-’90s political landscape has rendered intellectual conservatism an oxymoron. Kingsolver, then, was sort of perfectly placed to become a standard-bearer for center-left lovers of Dickens, classical piano, and nuanced but never therapized psychological portraits – in other words, for women with book clubs. That this was an accident of fate, and that Kingsolver’s work is far pricklier (and, unrelatedly, a good bit more Marxist) than her Oprah sanctions might suggest, is irrelevant to the commercial picture if not the literary one. Cep names the formal aspect of this – the culture catching up to Kingsolver’s “maximalist approach” – but I actually think changes in politics have mattered far more. Cep’s profile is oddly shaped in other ways; her postcards from Kingsolver’s Virginia are Loverly, but the portrait of a famous writer who is shy and a bit reclusive is not as unexpected as Cep wants it to be. Kingsolver’s work is not biographical but her work returns to her childhood situations; thus, there isn’t a ton left for Cep to flesh out there, either. Instead, the last two-thirds of the piece spend far too long telling us how awesome Kingsolver’s life is: Her sweet husband, her sweet house, her sweet children, their sweet spouses and children, even the “Asian-pear Martinis” at the local Mexican joint. At least it’s not depressing reading! I’ll pass on that martini, though – it sounds a bit sweet.

Window-Shop:

“You Lose Some” (Books) - Jennifer Wilson counts out Touchdown Tom. Wilson is at her funniest here, recounting the travails of Brady, whom generations of NFL fans have enjoyed loathing. His inability to give up, even after getting everything he ever wanted, and the way that led to his personal failure and professional embarrassment, is a brilliant human drama and a perfect little sports story. Extending that anecdote to book length seems misbegotten. It is so obvious why Brady couldn’t quit that to extemporize on it is to spoil the cosmic humor. Wilson finds the best details available from Brady’s history, but she’s mostly here for the Bündchen relationship, and for “seeing a man subjected to the narrative that the end of his marriage is a life-defining moment, his most important story.” Snappy enough that I’d read the regular column on sports books Wilson comes close to proposing. At least go for two!

“Power Broker” (Pop Music) - Hua Hsu thinks monday morning Jay-Z sure looks fine. Genuinely funny and at least a little bit novel to use Jay-Z’s extremely late start to his concert as a hook; while Hsu doesn’t actually find much to do with the idea, he gets points for effort. Can’t decide if those points get lost because Hsu went to what was obviously the recent-hits night (the only night not dedicated to a single, early album) and complains the whole time about not seeing enough of the dudes Jay came up with. It’s honestly a very funny bit, watching Usher and wondering when the hell M.O.P. is gonna come out. And Hsu spins it into a lovely crisis-of-oldhead-conscience finale.

“Baby Steps” (Books) - Margaret Talbot will arise and go now, and go to r/childfree. Talbot does her very best to progress from a literature review to a thoughtful reading of the numbers, but she’s hamstrung by the fact that people can read the numbers as saying basically anything they’d like. People now value career over family in terms of having a “fulfilling life”? Maybe that’s “further evidence of capitalism’s moral failings” – so says Anna Louise Sussman –  or maybe people’s lives are “less constrained by old ideas about virtuous adulthood”. Or maybe the way the question is phrased – it’s “for people to live a fulfilling life”, not “for me” – makes “having a job they enjoy” an inherently less judgmental answer than “having children” – what if they have children they don’t want? Surely the equivalent would just be “having a job”, and I warrant the numbers would then even out. Once Talbot gets beyond Pew polls and the context of no context, she delivers a very sensible closer: Focus on making lives better, not just more fruitful. Operating from a place of empathy, it’s not especially hard to reach this conclusion yourself. But if you think the global Right cares about empathy… you’ve got to be kidding yourself.

“The Qatari Affair” (A Reporter at Large) - Ruth Margalit watches Netanyahu get it done, Likud he split. A fairly regional political drama; just about the only mention of us Americans is when we get lied about as a cover story. Pro-Qatar narratives were planted in the media by Netanyahu insiders, is the quick version; Margalit makes a meal of the details, and while they aren’t outré enough to be much fun, she credibly connects them to Netanyahu’s broader project in ways that are damning and convincing. I knew that Netanyahu had reason to prop up Hamas via Qatar, as a cynical way of suppressing the Muslim Brotherhood; I suppose it makes sense that a genocidal maniac would accomplish his goals by any means necessary, but it’s hard to imagine he couldn’t foresee these fairly obvious maneuvers coming to light. Some may find it a little sick to reject Netanyahu’s inhumanity on procedural grounds – there’ve been similar complaints about impeaching Trump for personal perversions. I see the rhetorical point; I also think it’s okay to try to do two things at once, especially since Margalit at least tries to connect the displacement in Gaza directly to the pro-Qatar manipulation. (Prompted to push a line harder with journalists, their P.R. “foot soldier” replies, “‘Everyone is busy with recovering the bodies’”.) The piece does go on and on; you might need to make a character sheet if you want to retain the details. All we can hope is that Bibi doesn’t end up in Qatar above arrest.

🗣️ “A.I. and Us” (Comment) - Gideon Lewis-Kraus sees them unjust do things. Lewis-Kraus doesn’t tangle with the A.I. skeptics’ claims enough to so quickly dismiss the executives’ expressions of fear as “not a ‘marketing stunt’ to advertise the awesome power of the models” – as Matt Levine, for example, has written, these companies do stand to benefit financially from a frontier-model slowdown, and though I think Amodei’s panic is real¹, I also don’t understand what’s behind the lack of precautions taken during model tests, and don’t think it’s wild to suggest that Anthropic feels that only by demonstrating the manifest unsafeness of these models can they get everyone to slow down together.² (Lewis-Kraus’ whole piece is about the “prisoners’ dilemma” trapping these companies; surely he can see that manufacturing press about the models’ dangers is one of the few levers available to them.) Thus, marketing plus stunt, if not quite a surprise trip to Australia. Anyway, Lewis-Kraus’ main point is far sounder, and genuinely compelling: What’s really behind the anti-A.I. movement is “more general political resentment”, a “sense of stagnation” set into relief by the extremely rapid, “privately underwritten” A.I. build-out. That’s a hugely compelling articulation; sort of a shame that it’s sandwiched into this “Comment”, which I’ve largely named a Window-Shop just because it’s so much better-informed than either Menand or (especially) Lepore, down below. The magazine should really have Lepore and Lewis-Kraus fight this thing out.

Skip Without Guilt:

“Electric Company” (Books) - Kathryn Schulz Plys directly to the forehead. I do not need Zeno’s Paradox explained to me, thanks. And this is, once again, that tired formulation in which the followup to an acclaimed novel gets a review that’s mostly about how much worse it is than that prior book. (In this case, Schulz especially favors the Diaz book before the Pulitzer winner, though that one was a Pulitzer finalist, so no points for obscurity.) Having read and enjoyed both Diaz’s previous novels, I didn’t find Schulz’s quick recaps to especially encapsulate their vibe, though she does nail how different they are from each other: One “mythic and intimate”, the other (which, personally, I liked more) “cool and distant”. I absolutely grasp how this book’s premise sets him up for failure; imagined futures serve as political premises, utopic or dystopic, pretty much regardless of whether their authors intend them to; as much as Diaz would like to write a reserved bit of postmodernism, it’s tough to be clever with an instrument this blunt. Schulz still admires his ambition, or as she puts it, the thing in him “that wants to be reckoned with… startling and powerful and rare.” I admire that same thing in Schulz. There are better uses for it.

“The Last Word” (A Critic at Large) - Louis Menand eats leaves and shoots. The backslash of pieces, starting strong and rapidly de-escalating. Opens with an intriguing Austen anecdote – that pre-edit passage truly does read as Woolfian – and a brief, brutal takedown of the Hazrat book. (Antisemitism? In my pop-history usage manual?) Then Menand gets distracted by, successively, the last line of The Great Gatsby, which he incorrectly interprets³; the reasons newspaper-writing rules aren’t necessary to all good prose, which are obvious; a subsequent swift departure from that seemingly descriptivist approach to rag on the word weaponize⁴, and also on italics, of all things; then, depressingly, a fully limp extended meditation on A.I. and its meanings with regard to authorship. Even a memorial to the em-dash would be better than Menand’s totally off-topic treatise on embodiment, which has nothing at all to do with punctuation. He has to bring in texting to get back on track, and even then he fails to make the obvious connection between its “human” lack of punctuation and the LLM house style of over-punctuating. Not much more to say but…

:\

“Is A.I. Above the Law?” (Brave New World Dept.) - Jill Lepore wonders if we can just sue things. Lepore’s alarmist, under-researched A.I. pieces grow more and more dismaying over time. This one, though, is mostly just boring as hell, a discussion of the legal classifications that might govern A.I. systems which jumps wildly between fictional robot massacres and the actual exigencies of, say, “removing barriers to data-center development”. There is lots of vague supposition like this: “What most people know about robots, which isn’t much, comes from science fiction. This is also true of bots, which may be one reason they keep acting like the robots in science fiction.” It’s far too obvious that Lepore half-understood a piece of writing explaining this phenomenon and, in the process of regurgitating it as a single witticism, lost all its nuance. (Also, the average human probably knows more about robots than they do about, like, case law…) The journey into slavery metaphor, which Lepore recognizes as tricky ground as soon as she brings it up, goes nowhere at all – her only conclusion is that the link is not “irrelevant”. And after some more similarly-scented hand waving, she concludes that this whole thing shows that voters need to give more power to “legal scholars, judges, and legislators”. Her project is thus, from all appearances, one of Recursive Self-Involvement.

Letters:

Re the recent Sarah Anderson story I strongly disliked, Serena says: “I had read one of Anderson’s stories recently and was so looking forward to seeing what this one had to offer. The first thing that occurred to me was Anita Brookner’s quote re one of Martin Amis’s works: “an assault on the reader’s good faith”.

Serena also disagreed with three of my four choices for contemporary American male sex symbols who are models of nouveau-sophistication.⁵ (Trevor Rainbolt, Cameron Winter, Anderson Peskovii.) History will redeem me, but until then you can just watch this.

big can

on mampus