October 5, 2024

Last Week's New Yorker Review: October 7, 2024

Last Week’s New Yorker, week of October 7

"There’s something to be said for having to wait for an octet of sheep to move grudgingly out of your way as you drive to hear a Haydn quartet."

Must-Reads:

“Illuminations” - Hilton Als lets there be light with Suzanne Jackson. A wonderful appreciation of Jackson’s work, though one I’m deliberately keeping myself from fully appreciating until I can visit Ortuzar and see the two “masterpieces” Als references (neither of which is reproduced here) in person. Squinting at a gallery website just doesn’t seem right. Als appreciates Jackson’s formal play and narrowly stops himself from getting sidetracked with a kids-these-days rant about the lack of appreciation for formal play that many young artists demonstrate. It helps that Jackson has always been fighting that fight – I’d like to get a poster made of the poem she writes to the Black Panthers, who criticize Jackson on the grounds that, as she puts it to them, “people should / not be allowed / to delve / into fantasies / which might relate / to their own / reality, more / than to yours.” I wish Als had a bit more time to discuss the current show; he really only gets to it in the last two paragraphs, with nothing on its staging or progression. But his appreciation is infectious – when he says “you marvel at the solidity of this exquisite, multicolored work”, I want to prove him right; I’ll go, I’ll marvel.

“Quartet Island” - Alex Ross Mulls over Mendelssohn. Traveling all the way to Scottish islands to hear chamber music seems a somewhat ridiculous luxury, but I suppose such are the hazards of classical music criticism in this day and age. The Maxwells, who counterpose classical repertory with adapted Irish folk music, are a fascinating act; thankfully, many of the tunes Ross writes about are streamable (though unfortunately not their “tour-de-force” rendition of the Dvořák). And it’s hard to beat Ross for the raw formal beauty of descriptive language: “Scobie brought off the contrasting triplet-powered theme with a spontaneous lilt”, “Bryant led with confidence, his cadenzas as breezy as the air coming off the Sound of Iona.” I can feel that breeze in my hair; it wafts through this brief travelogue.

Window-Shop:

“The Chit-Chatbot” - Jill Lepore is sorry, but as a large language model, she can’t fulfill that request. If everything has already been written about today’s talking robots, well, how about yesterday’s? Lepore finds some seriously fascinating history, from a fake shitting robot duck to a church-organ-like speech machine run by retrained female telephone operators. (You must watch the video.) Especially incredible is the capsule biography of Alexander Graham Bell, who was apparently the biggest freak to ever live: As a child he made a machine out of “a human skull” and “parts of a dead cat” that could produce a speechlike product (Lepore memorably terms it a “Owahoogamama” – you’ll have to read the piece to find out why); he later taught Deaf people to speak using his father’s “phonetic notation system” while campaigning against sign language; he also rigged a contraption using “the bones of a dead man’s ear” and “a stalk of hay” to capture sound from air – what proved to be a precursor to his most famous invention. He was evidently a Macgyver of the macabre, an Addams character with a special interest in speech. The stuff Lepore presents on today’s speaking bots isn’t anything new, but it’s reasonably funny, and there’s not too much of it – the focus remains on what she’s dug up. With these bots, the general picture seems correct, but when you look closely it’s all blurry. (“CAN YOU THINK OF A SPECIFIC EXAMPLE”, asks Eliza, and I’d pose ChatGPT the same question.) If her conversation partner keeps slipping into vagaries, well, Lepore knows how to pick up the slack.

“Newark State of Mind” - Kelefa Sanneh finds out what happened to the guy who was the worst part of that Lauryn Hill record. I was inherently interested in this since Newark abuts my place of residence, but Sanneh doesn’t do a great job making it clear why Baraka is important beyond his city – well, except for the obvious, which is that he’s running for Governor. Running this fairly soft-focus profile at this time has a ring of endorsement. Baraka mostly comes across as someone whose soaring rhetoric paints a significantly more radical picture than his governance supports. (No wonder Obama likes him.) It’s especially interesting reading this piece alongside the Ta-Nehisi Coates piece in the other local weekly; two Howard men trying to serve their communities in different ways. Whether Coates would condemn Baraka as another leader pursuing “narrow Black interest”, or whether, in the local politics of a Black city, that narrow Black interest is just more in need of pursuing, I’m not sure. Sanneh gets quite mealy-mouthed around the issue of cops, which is exactly where he ought to push and dig – or at least, if he’s going to talk about Defund the Police, interview anyone involved in it. The history of the Barakas in Newark is where the piece is most compelling, and Sanneh doesn’t rush through things, thankfully. Once we’re in the present day, the view is decidedly that from inside the mayor’s office. That’s only one way to look at things.

“Rat Pack” - Elizabeth Kolbert throws in every-rat and the behavior sink. I was already pretty familiar with Calhoun’s story from Theo Anthony’s brilliant Rat Film, but it’s certainly a doozy of a tale, and Kolbert’s telling is rollicking. The trouble is that Kolbert is obviously torn between treating it just as an eccentric’s project, at the expense of having an article, or deriving meaning from Calhoun’s results, against the advice of pretty much every expert she consults. Bringing up population-explosion fears without touching on the strains of racism and imperialism running beneath them is always ill-advised (and is a trap Kolbert has fallen into enough times to know better by now.) The ending is also iffy – Kolbert has to assume such a sweeping view to make her idea work that it ends up pretty meaningless. (Is she suggesting that Twitter and Facebook’s demise had more to do with some human urge toward ruin than with the counterproductive actions of the corporations running things?) And if Calhoun’s late ‘40s experiments really were augurs of alienation, well, not to put too fine a point on it, but couldn’t one see the same omen in other events just a few years earlier? As Dubya’s people knew, you can’t spell bureaucrats without RATS.

Skip Without Guilt:

“Well, Well, Well” - Hannah Goldfield moves across the country, but knows there’s Erewhon ekil emoh. I may not have parasocial relationships with celebrities like a normal person, but I did get sorta mad when I found out that Goldfield is leaving the city, so… I cede the moral high ground. All Goldfield’s missives from away, and her place-trading with Helen Rosner, make a new kind of sense now – she was preparing to depart the locale. I do hope the magazine makes room for coverage of the city’s food scene outside Tables’ edited-down columns; plenty of Rosner’s extended pieces have been good enough to run in the pages proper. Anyhow, the piece at hand pairs a long, not especially interesting “what’s the deal with that?” story about fancy grocery spot Erewhon with a shorter gonzo-journalism journey to a juice-cleanse spa, which is silly fun. It has the same appeal as the podcast Oh No Ross and Carrie (they also did a juice-cleanse episode)¹ – it’s not so much about “will this work?” as “is this torture?”. Still, it would probably be wise for Goldfield to at least touch on the fact that these “treatments” are literally just prescribed eating disorders. Almond Moms are still flourishing, they’ve just been dyed millennial pink.

“Doom Scrolling” - Andrew Solomon tries to close Pandora’s Box. Dramatically misproportioned and mis-structured at the cost of the piece’s coherence. The vast majority of the piece is a parade of bereaved families recounting the tragic deaths by suicide of their children, all of whom viewed suicide-related content on their phones. All the families, as Solomon admits, are represented by the same group of activist lawyers, and for most of this piece I was shouting certain fairly obvious questions at the page. Then, all of a sudden, in the next-to-last section, Solomon begins shouting those same questions himself. Social media “is surely a factor in many of these deaths, [but] research has failed to demonstrate any definite causal link,” with many scientists “underscoring the absence of a clear link.” One psychologist found that unhappy kids used social media more, but kids that used social media more weren’t necessarily less happy; another found that “lower life satisfaction correlates slightly more strongly with wearing glasses than with digital-technology use.” Also, as a political theorist notes, young people face “‘a toxic combination: permissionless access to information, and relative powerlessness over the topics to which that information pertains.’” In other words, everything these kids hate about the internet is actually everything they hate about people. Young survivors of suicide attempts rarely cite social media as a factor. Meanwhile, Solomon writes that, for parents, “...activism provided a way to reëstablish meaning in a world that now seemed to have none” – and especially given that three of the four families lived with guns and seem unwilling to face that aspect of their culpability, social media may serve as a replacement enemy.²

If Solomon’s counterpoints are this strong, why doesn’t he make some of these arguments sooner, in the context of the long, often emotionally manipulative piece that we’ve just been reading? It’s hard to explain. I think Solomon’s intentions were to honor the voices of these bereaved parents, to hold space for them; he’s picked a thesis, though, that doesn’t quite allow for that – the very structure of the piece is providing a reason for the inexplicable; the legal force connecting Solomon to these parents is structuring an entire case around that link. These kids died because of the algorithm – that’s the whole idea. The subjects’ quotes reflect this – they start meandering toward, say, the impossibility of loss, then quickly pivot back to the subject at hand, which isn’t actually their kids, it’s the case they’re making about their kids. Somehow, Solomon’s empathy seems to blind him to this. His heart is so open it’s kept him from doing his job.

“Royal Treatment” - Rebecca Mead walks backward while staring at the Queen. She seems like a nice lady but I’m not sure why I should care. I’m tempted to just leave this review at that. Brown’s book seems like a moderately witty riff on the usual forehead – sorry, format of such things; a series of brief chapters, some of which are simply lists. If there’s anything more to say about this one random press-shy woman who did her all-consuming job propping up empire with remarkable grace for a remarkably long amount of time, well, you won’t find it here. 

“The Worker Revolt” - Eyal Press votes blue-collar, no matter who hollers. A sleepy and cliché-ridden journey into the mind of the mythical working-class voter, who is not always White, but who is always supposed to be reactionary on social issues, disinterested in anything other than the economy, and deeply alienated. I do wonder if anyone’s considered whether the reason voters always say they care most about the economy is because they’re told so often that that’s supposed to be what they base their votes on. It’s at the front of the debates, it leads every poll – so when the lady on the telephone asks what you care most about, you imagine yourself to be a Regular Guy and answer, “the economy”. Anyway, this is largely pro forma – yes, labor rights are a profoundly important issue, and the demise of unions has badly wounded Democrats among these voters. Press gets there, about ¾ of the way through the piece; far too late to say anything that substantive. Before that, Press keeps bringing us to Union events and then getting distracted by topics like “are poor white men too sexist and racist and anti-California to vote for Kamala?” and “What’s going on with the Latino Vote (which is definitely a single interest group and not a loose agglomeration of multiple interest groups with wildly different political perspectives)?” and of course “What Happened with Hillary?!” Press doesn’t give any answers he can’t hedge; often, the piece seems written so that whatever happens in a month it can’t be said to have gotten the story of the election totally wrong. But running scared is no way to get the story right – and no way to win an election, for that matter. If your best answer is “We’ll see”, you should think about what your vision is.

“Fix You” - Amanda Petrusich won’t give Chris Martin the Coldplay shoulder. Christ, what an asshole! It is actually nuts that the dude that made Music of the Spheres, one of the worst albums in recent memory, still thinks about his art in these terms. Brother: You are not some yogi, these days you’re reverby OneRepublic with – somehow! – worse lyrics. And Martin assigning the blame for his band’s thematic shift toward saccharine positivity to Brian Eno’s “purity and sense of wonder” begs the question – why are you working with fucking Max Martin, then? Do you want to “‘completely abandon the concept of being cool’” or do you want to hit me, baby, one more time? I don’t get the sense Petrusich is that won over by his music (and frankly I have no idea what the hook for this piece was meant to be – “shitty pop band does more of the same”?) but she’s clearly charmed by him as a person, which is, I’m sorry, gross. If you fall for this act, you might fall for anything.

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Letters:

Zoë Beery liked Tolentino on Sophie (and contrasted her with Petrusich, but since I was literally just ragging on Petrusich, I’m editing that bit out.) “Tolentino manages to communicate how unusual Sophie's music sounds, and how exciting it is both sonically and because of its uniqueness, without leaning on any cliches (‘bouncy,’ a ubiquitous adjective in Sophie coverage, doesn't appear at all). I have listened to ‘Bipp,’ the track in the opening paragraph, over a hundred times but had never considered that the synths sound like ‘a laser coated in latex,’ but that is exactly what they sound like, and I now can't imagine a better way to articulate it. In our stream-anything era, there is little utility in music writing that attempts to describe how music sounds, which has also always been the hardest kind of music writing to pull off. Tolentino, however, deserves to keep doing it. I don't think the album is very good, but that's...immaterial.”

What did you think of this week’s issue?

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Due to an editing error, the Weekend Special went out with the same song two weeks in a row. To make it up to you, here are five songs.

Stay groovy!