The Weekend Special

My favorite pieces in each of these categories this year, below. Counting down to the best, in each case! All the writing is copy-pasted from the original editions in which each was reviewed; feel free to skim or skip it. The order is all that’s new.

⏰ My Favorite Fiction

10. “Marseille” by Ayşegül Savaş. Two Boyles. wine, wind, wince. A very simple story; three middle-aged friends have a vacation, which proceeds in the gradually deflating manner moderately familiar from life and excruciatingly familiar from the short story form. Yet Savaş totally pulls it off, mainly by foregrounding the wistful mood from the beginning, and not overdoing the way the scene eventually curdles; I was worried there’d be a hackneyed friend-group-ending blowup of some sort, and was far more satisfied by the resignation we get instead. I also like that this resignation can be read as gloomy or essentially peaceful, depending on how one interprets “slowly”. One comes to Savaş for elegant, closely observed miniatures. They’re a natural fit for this magazine, where three of the stories in her upcoming collection have appeared: They mirror its contemporary humanism and thoughtful detail, and, crucially, they don’t fill too many of its pages. This story would make for an awfully gloomy beach read, but on a winter’s night it’s nice to read about sunshiney disappointment.

9. “Final Boy” by Sam Lipsyte. Two Knapps. fan, fact, facetious. It’s so rare that the magazine publishes funny stories these days, which is too bad – just about every issue pre-Gottlieb, at least, had a funny story in it (often one by Donald Barthelme, an ever-present inspiration for Lipsyte), whereas now it’s really only Shouts and Murmurs, which is… you know. Plus, too often the rare funny story that does make the Fiction section is actually just a slightly longer Shouts. So what a treat to get this from Lipsyte, which is consistently funny, and operates in a reference-heavy satirical mode that feels more and more impossible to get right in this delirious age. (Sophie Kemp is doing it, but she’s twenty-nine, so the degree of difficulty is lower.) In the best of times I am not the biggest fan of arch isn’t-late-modernity-so-random humor, which can feel both easy and sweaty, so my two Knapps are not easily earned; even as I am more than a bit repulsed by the Charles in Charge runner and the silly-named coffee shop and the goofy-evil A.I. therapy job, I admit they all serve the story ably because they show us the speaker’s white-knuckle attempt to retain individuality in a malignantly homogeneous ecosystem. It’s clever, and because there is no ridiculous incident, just ridiculous scenario (in other words, nothing silly happens, everyday things just happen in silly ways) there is none of the usual hamstring soreness that accompanies prolonged suspension of disbelief.

8. “Keuka Lake” by Joseph O’Neill. Two Boyles. pickup, pity, piece. An odd little character study in which a woman’s loss and loneliness manifests as a manic paranoia. O’Neill is an excellent prose stylist, and if he’s very reliant on the sort of repetitious sentence structure that often indicates dry comedy more than actually being funny, each of these moments still works in context. (“She is wearing Yolanda’s coat and Yolanda’s snow boots and Yolanda’s insulated mittens.”) I was surprised how much latitude O’Neill granted his protagonist’s troublesome thoughts about secret murder in the interview about the story; calling her partial break mere “disinhibition” suggests that O’Neill sees something admirable in it – and, read one way, the story can seem almost to glorify a manic episode. If that’s troublesome, at least it’s also interesting, and it’s certainly possible to read the story in a completely different way, as a portrait of how our awful, bloodthirsty, alienated world breaks through even the sensible and self-contained soul and fractures it. (One for the book club: “In Beatriz’s company, there are no other Nadias.” Is this reunification a sign of healing, of identification with Beatriz, of regression away from a more liberated internal self? It’s a central statement, but totally ambiguous.) The final paragraph breaks out into a transcendentalist meditation, all of a sudden; there’s also a parade of made-up names, mirroring a similar list at the start of the story – a really strange device which I suppose is meant to position this as an arbitrary sliver of life; it could just as easily be the story of any of these other people. Things never really coalesce, but I think that’s by design; this is one to puzzle over. 

7. “Hatagaya Lore” by Bryan Washington. Two Boyles. adventure, adjustment, Adonis. A cleverly constructed episodic narrative of queer life and otherness in Japan. It makes sense that this was written as an exercise to deepen a novel, because it has a novelistic sweep. Do I think Washington totally achieves the sense that the protagonist grows and changes throughout this story? (“He becomes more open. Less quick to judge.”) Well, not really. He seems to me like someone who, after pushing past an initial wariness, pretty quickly recovers an innate optimism and ability to acclimate, despite a self-image of wary cynicism. Some people are just sweeties under their masks. It’s at times a self-consciously celebratory story, and Washington probably didn’t need to include scenes like a character becoming enveloped by a pride parade to get that idea across. But his astonishing ear for dialogue is at its sharpest here; despite a lack of punctuation every character has a totally distinguishable voice. Washington’s vision is warm but hardly saccharine, and the optimism of small joys despite huge difficulties which he discusses in the interview is totally expressed by this parade of loves and lovers, each with their own endless battle.

6. “Jubilee” by Jhumpa Lahiri. Three Knapps. mother, move, mourning. Between this and the Hilton Als personal history, the line between autofiction and autobiography is certainly shaky in this edition – Als’ piece has about as many poetic flourishes, and this story closely matches the outline of Lahiri’s early life. It’s also Lahiri’s first time writing directly in the English language in a decade, after a series of stories written in Italian then translated. One senses the energetic charge behind this change; Lahiri’s language arcs and cracks. The story is not a Mavis Gallant riff, and only reflects her inspiration loosely; this allows it to achieve a richness of its own. Lahiri takes from Gallant permission more than structure; permission to probe a personal psychology and allow a story to coalesce around it. (The Gallant story is also quite literally referenced in the first paragraph.) Lahiri achieves a depth of feeling that is quite astonishing, looking through a “lace curtain” fifty years thick but allowing her past self a certain grace; there is deep sadness and a bit of dramatic irony, but there is never a sense that the speaker holds anything over her past self beyond the accumulated weight of time and, perhaps, wisdom. Lahiri’s treatment of the speaker’s mother, and of the speaker’s changing understanding of her mother’s story over time, could easily sharpen into judgement – of the mother or of the self – but instead there is a patient and profoundly ethical insistence on allowing for the partiality of knowledge. The story is a great advertisement for litany; while the talismanic significance of only a few objects is deeply discussed, there is a sense that every object noted must hold similar stories, through which we glimpse the spiraling depth of a full life. Masterful stuff; struck with “dappled light”.

5. “Ming” by Han Ong. Three Boyles. crazing, credibility, chrysanthemum. Ong is always solid, with a world-beating ear for dialogue (and every character distinct – not true for so many that omit quote marks) and a sly way of bending a narrative into unexpected, wabi-sabi shapes. This is an especially successful outing, a character study of what A.A. calls a “dry drunk” who pulls himself back toward something like openness or steadiness. It’s all pretty occluded, despite constant presence and humor (there’s a laugh-out-loud late scene with the appraiser, which nearly derails things, but is worth it) – the present-tense third-person means we’re along for the ride, and Thaddeus’ motivations are obscure, probably even to himself. The treatment of recovery as a sort of manufactured charged communal-theatrical zone makes sense, coming from a recovered playwright; if Ong isn’t writing from experience, he’s still managed the ring of truth. The psychology of el-Masry is even more obscure; the reader can ruminate, but there are only scraps of evidence in any direction. Yet the story never feels spare; there are all sorts of charged details, they’re just more concerned with the exterior stuff of life than with therapizing. Whether these bits come together will depend, probably, on your mood; I felt they did, though I certainly can’t say why. Even if you don’t have a moment of zen, though, the surfaces are so finely observed you’ll enjoy yourself. This cup runneth over.

4. “Safety” by Joan Silber. Three Knapps. legal, lessons, leave. Silber is a legend, and I was totally riveted by this even in its first half, before the from-the-headlines twist comes in. Actually, I was briefly skeptical of the necessity of that twist, which thankfully doesn’t seem retroactively foreordained but is still placed so obviously as a fulcrum that the author’s hand shows; but Silber handles the psychological state of sidelong engagement with injustice quite brilliantly, and the procession of the story had me gasping for breath, not because it evoked such pathos – though it did – but because it accomplished both its high-flung literary aims and its declarative political aims without any disjunction and without raising a sweat. I’ll remember this brief paragraph for many years: “I had gone through law school thinking that our legal system was a hollow structure, a sham, but it turned out that I hadn’t actually thought that. I had thought it was a mess, but real. Now it wasn’t real.” It’s hard to pinpoint what makes Silber one of the greatest prose stylists alive: Her touch is lighter than air, never showy but never cold or clinical; you’d have a hard time calling her a minimalist or a maximalist. Everything has the heartbeat and the life of a fully told story, and although it may not be the most massive leap to write across generations – we were all young once – I’m not sure there’s another eighty-year-old alive who could render a thirty-something protagonist, in first-person, as cannily as Silber does here. I could go through this story and just name every detail, as each one has a chasm beneath it: The retraumatized parent with her literalization of trains as dangerous; the entirely believable mid-level standup world; the role of sex talk and gossip as a shibboleth in both Yasmina’s friendships we see, but in totally different ways… Silber doesn’t have to nod to these directly for them to come back over and again, opening the story into something cavernous and wrenching, the way memory always is.

3. “Fairy Pools” by Patricia Lockwood. Three Boyles. language, landscape, later. Embodies the beginnings of a breakdown of internal communication, sparked by an unreliable gut – a condition I’ve experienced myself – in such an unassuming way one assumes at first it is style, or affect. (Well, and maybe there’s no difference.) This is less likely to make you sob than Lockwood’s astonishing previous effort in the magazine, but this story’s simultaneous restraint and fractal relationship to meaning-making lend it a wide and sonorous quality. The feeling that identity formation is a fragile thing, tipsy on a sandy foundation, is possibly encouraged, or at least rendered hallucinatory, by the conditions of contemporary life. But Lockwood’s ability to render this definitionally incommunicable state by strange proxy, putting together words that don’t say what they do say, makes her one of the very few writers who actually earn the tag postmodern. And it’s very funny, too; not in the self-consciously dry way of so much contemporary writing but instead in a loopy, smiling-at-no-joke way that is far more intriguing. Having just emerged from a silent meditation retreat at which I continually struggled to make meaning from the chaos of internality, rereading this story filled me with breath.

2. “Jenny Annie Fanny Addie” by Adam Levin. Three Boyles. groping, growing, grogginess. A tiny masterpiece, finding a voice that reads somehow both as “a child” and “a Steinian modernist”, and using it to explore the role of narrative in shaping trauma in a revelatory and weirdly moving way. The story is short, and Levin makes the incredibly intelligent choice never to cast it as a future Addie thinking back on a past incident, but neither does he imply that the thoughts we’re getting are accessible to Addie in the moment; there is clearly processing and metacognition that’s been done, but we don’t need to hear that they were done in the future – Levin trusts us to hear the fully unpacked expressions of Addie’s cognition in the past tense and understand the passage of time that every short story contains but that most feel the need to self-consciously rub the reader’s nose in. (The closest he gets: “None of this was speakable. It was barely thinkable.”) The story is quite short, but Levin also makes time for a long digression into Addie’s brother’s discourse on the lyrics to The Band’s The Weight, which reflects the story sidelong, like a parable, while also fleshing out Addie’s family’s dynamics, thereby allowing us to guess at her relationship with her mom, and thus to understand this tiny rupture in that relationship which is also a huge rupture. A highly present and deceptively sophisticated story with something new to say about girlhood. Hasta la vista, baby.

1. “Voyagers!” by Bryan Washington. Three Knapps. family, faces, farther. Not just a return to form for Washington but a story so carefully wrought and deeply moving it is absolutely wild he seemingly just wrote it as an experiment in third-person agency. Washington’s unique hyperreal dialogue style can be hit-or-miss but when he finds characters whose voices it makes sense in, it can be glorious. Usually portioning out information that is already available to the characters adds distance; here Washington achieves his aim – to make it “akin to meeting and learning about a new person”: we are close to Cali and Ronny, we hear them speak, and eventually we learn something of their history. Washington is fairly manipulative, dropping things at just the right moment, but it’s done so skillfully it feels more comforting than overwrought. Then there’s also the uniqueness of the central dynamic here, not just a straight woman and a gay guy but two people wrestling over their degree of parental presence in opposite directions, and fighting through it without naming it. (That’s what I picked up on, at least – there are many currents.) To misquote Sondheim on the subject of old friends: Here’s to them. Who’s like them? Damn few.

⏰ My Favorite Weekend Essays

10. “The Old Man” by Jelani Cobb. Two Harrimans. growing, grappling, graying. A heartfelt personal essay about Cobb’s father. Straightforward and content to leave its broader significance as subtext, probably a wise move; the reader can be trusted to infer the many ways in which the personal is political. Cobb doesn’t try to subvert the form; each beat and pivot arrives on cue, but the genuinely touching material and Cobb’s usual steady, sane intelligence are a good match – they leaven one another, so that the piece is neither sappy nor dry. This doesn’t have the punch or power of, say, Wesley Morris’ landmark mustache essay, which it somewhat resembles. But not everything has to aim for Pulitzers. Cobb does his job with the wisdom of age.

9. “The Mystery of the Cat Mystery” by Rivka Galchen. Two Downeys. fear, fever, feline. Seems charmingly scattered but pulls together with a surprising degree of cohesion. Perhaps, Galchen posits, we read murder mysteries as a sort of exposure therapy to death more generally, and the cats are there because, well, if they fits they sits. Galchen’s literary journey is wide-ranging – from Warriors to Wodehouse, from The Master Cat to The Master and Margarita. (No “The Cat Came Back”, however, an exception to the happy lose-return cat narrative that proves the rule.) The ride is a bit cutesy, sure, and sometimes distractable – why do we hear about the theatre group plotline? – but still good fun; I laughed out loud twice – Howard tearing down the teeth drawing and the ending – and smiled throughout. I did not sneeze, though, so go ahead and mark it “very hypoallergenic”.

8. “The President Who Became a Prophet” by Manvir Singh. Two Harrimans. messiah, media, merge. Some of the best Trump coverage the magazine has produced, because it has a specific and historically informed point of view – Singh has written a book on messiahs, and while I’d be perfectly content to just read an excerpt, this take on Q as part of a long lineage of “mythic structures” that justify various sorts of harm and death-bringing makes much more sense than the often technologically deterministic suppositions that it’s a threat without any precedent. Was I surprised by any of what Singh says here? Not really, no, but given how many wrongheaded or incomplete explanations there are of the conspiratorial thinking surrounding Trump (one of which is a piece I’m seriously dreading having to write about in the soon-to-be-reviewed edition, a deeply misguided effort from the generally reliable Daniel Immerwahr) it’s good to get a thoughtful take on all that thoughtless cruelty.

7. “The Imperialist Philosopher Who Demanded the Ukraine War” by James Verini. Two Harrimans. death, destiny, detonation. More of a weekend graduate thesis – this thing is hefty. You will leave with a fairly intricate understanding of Alexander Dugin’s twisted philosophy, and a decent understanding of the extent to which it’s influenced Putin. There’s a lot to chew on, and it can be intellectually overwhelming, but it’s ultimately rewarding; it’s also pretty classic that America’s death cultists are so much more gauche than Russia’s. Dugin is a nutjob and a despicable character, but he’s also a poet. Call him Ezra пуд.

6. “Putting ChatGPT on the Couch” by Gary Greenberg. Two Downeys. Casper, careful, captive. This is one of the deepest and most well-thought-out AI-skeptic pieces I’ve read, and it gets there using the therapist’s usual trick of presenting as open and welcoming (not just toward the bot, in this case, but toward the reader) while building their aggressively humanistic argument on the sly. Unfortunately for the reader, Greenberg gets there – again, like a therapist – by mostly just paying attention to what the subject is saying, thus requiring that we read reams of the most hideously constructed GPT text in order to grasp his point. Your tolerance for this strategy depends, as GPT might say, not on your fervor but on your forbearance. His ultimate point is not an uncommon or unique one; the corporate control of GPT makes its simulated intimacy suspect, the sociopathic lie of love we can’t help but take from a magic mirror on the wall telling us we’re beautiful is “immensely dangerous” to that very idea of love. Greenberg’s trick is not getting the bot to repeat this back to him – anyone could do that – but articulating the precise differences between LLMs and the human faces they wear, and never condescending to us; Greenberg was perhaps not as sucked in by the bot as he claims to have been, but by posing as fallible, he doesn’t raise the hackles, as many self-righteous A.I. refuseniks have a tendency to do. The Voight-Kampff test, after all, is really a test for us. How does that make you feel?

5. “My Mother’s Memory Loss, and Mine” by Anna Holmes. Two Downeys. mental, medical, menopause. Is it widely known that menopause can cause memory loss? I didn’t know it, and now I feel like the ignorant sucker in some reddit thread. But this is a really heartfelt personal essay, describing a small anxiety without overindulgence or defensiveness, and charting a small journey of understanding without worrying that it’s not big enough. It’s quite lovely, and while I wondered if it would end up feeling slight, I found myself really moved by the ending.

4. “The Making of ‘Adaptation’” by Susan Orlean. Two Downeys. right, rights, ride. Orlean is always delightful, a natural wit; this very slim selection from her upcoming memoir only just whets the appetite, but even if you don’t care about the Kaufman movie, there is enough amiable detail and rib-nudging to get you through. The whole plane, in this case, is made out of the anecdota; some are excellent (Deer Hunter cameo; costume-designer meeting) and only a few are duds (Orlean’s vanity is a charming thread running through all her work, but I still don’t care that she put on purple lipstick at the premiere by mistake. Whatever she says, she still looked like Susan Orlean.) Orlean does not have a profound takeaway, but she definitely doesn’t have to. The story’s good enough.

3. “What Did Men Do to Deserve This?” by Jessica Winter. Three Downeys. profess, provide, procreate. An absolutely surgical dissection of the ridiculous Men-Are-Sad-Now messaging that centrists have hit on as a way to cater to misogynists under the thin guise of social justice. Winter is also seriously funny; the essay suggests a world in which Jezebel had its own Defector equivalent, posting intelligently snarky feminist blogs that are in touch with the present mood. The first two sections give basically the expected counterargument, pointing out cherry-picked statistics, misleading framing, and the obvious bad-faith perspective of the manosphere evangelists. The really special stuff comes toward the end, though, where Winter goes to the source of this stuff – more-obviously patriarchal social scientists pushing openly reactionary narratives. At least, Winter slyly suggests, an identity tied to degradation and care work is an identity, whereas men are so tied to their own supposed helplessness, they slip into alienation. (Even the seeming opposite, the Jordan Peterson ‘Clean Your Room’ thing, ends up reifying self-care as self-worth.) Winter ends by expertly unpacking the implications of some glib quotes from Scott Galloway; you should discover the ending for yourself, but it’s a finishing blow.

2. “How to Save a Dog” by David W. Brown. Three Downeys. relocation, release, relief. Let no one think that just because I criticize the magazine for returning again and again to the well of mid pet jokes, I am immune to the joys and wonders of our furry friends. This is a very simple essay about finding community through a search for a runaway dog, and it made me cry at the end; you ought not need know more. Brown, adrift in a new city after a divorce, finds purpose first in a cat-trapping group and then the dog search. Yet this could so easily feel overdetermined or corny without Brown’s matter-of-fact humility. Scrim eventually becomes a local celebrity, and his rescue has a few twists and turns, but the appeal of the piece is in Brown’s elegant, unpretentious telling. There is no metaphor; sometimes, some dog just needs found.

1. “To Be Young, Gifted, and Black at Fenway” by Michael Thomas. Three Downeys. books, boys, Boston. An excerpt from Thomas’ new memoir – his first book since his debut novel eighteen years ago. I assume the new book will address that gap – the synopsis gestures toward a “breakdown” and recovery – in context of which this piece may mostly be filling in backstory. But you’d never know it, so dynamic is Thomas’ memory piece, in which Fenway both typifies and stands in for the larger racist world which Thomas and his father move through, with different orientations. The sensory-detail-filled personal essay about identity is a timeless and well-worn form, and it’s not one Thomas destabilizes – he just fills it with so much life, light, and thought that it looks new. His extended portrait of his father, who was, “simultaneously, honky-tonk and erudite, quoting Emerson while watching ‘The Munsters’ on TV”, is both comic and tragic. Thomas approaches Black literary culture with a refreshing lack of exposition, trusting us to, say, get the Audre Lorde reference without a namedrop (or, you know… a hyperlink.) As the story crests in a wave of angst, as Thomas reacts to what he sees as his father’s rejection of Blackness with a breakdown, it seems to vibrate with power. If this is the excerpt… don’t miss the book.

⏰ My Favorite Random Picks

Alright, it’s super arbitrary to order these so I’m only doing five, and the first two of those are Pauline Kael. But whatever!

5. “Where We Are Now” by Pauline Kael. (Feb 27, 1977). Three Fords. fate, fewer, failure. Is there anything better than knives-out Kael? I have no idea if any of the misbegotten flicks she eviscerates in the back half of this article are any good; I still chortled as she turned the rotisserie. (Jane Fonda “plays one scene on the commode – probably because that’s the only way anybody could figure out to keep the audience watching the scene”; Thieves “is a turkey that falls over without being shot.”) She also walks out of the new Fellini! I don’t like his late stuff either, Pauline, but you sat through “a nitwit comedy” that’s “a piece of junk”, and walked out of that?! This is all ignoring the star attraction, though, which is the extended rant eviscerating the state of the film business. Kael can’t see the future, so her argument that film is fading would prove wrong on the economics – the tentpole strategy, after Jaws already prominent enough to irk Kael, would, post-Star Wars, become dominant for decades. (And was then replaced by a kind of tentpole-only strategy that she surely wouldn’t prefer.) She’s also cantankerously repulsed by gore and insistent that it hurts sales – good luck with that. Elsewhere, though, she’s prescient: Roots, which “shows how TV could finish off movies”, was an outlier, and TV would take a little while longer to compete for serious critical attention, but it’d get there; the reliance on TV to sell movies would only increase (even post-internet, a lot of people pick movies to see based on TV ads); and certain statements are as true now as then, albeit for slightly different reasons: “There is no longer any vital connection between the people who finance the movies and the people who go to them (or stay at home). [ed: Pauline, if only you knew.] There’s a morass between. And there are no safe subjects… it’s all hit or miss, and if the audience doesn’t respond to a big new picture, the producers say, ‘What do the goddam people want?’”

Of course, Kael wraps things up by saying there are a few upcoming films she’s interested in – you know, like Apocalypse Now, for instance. I can’t say a film like that would never get made today, especially because, uh, you know. But what ambitious, American, auteur-driven movies do we have to look forward to in theaters? Well, I guess there’s One Battle After Another. And Blue Moon. And Die My Love. And The Mastermind. And The Smashing Machine. And Marty Supreme. Hey, you know what? 2025 might just be like 1977.

4. “The Bull Goose Loony” by Pauline Kael. (Dec 1, 1975). Three Fords. psyche, psychedelic, psych-out. Totally nails One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, a “powerful” but frustrating film; Kael is given enough space to get into Kesey’s text (especially its bone-deep misogyny), Forman’s style, and Nicholson’s acting; she’s dead wrong that Antonioni “wiped him out” in The Passenger, but her description of his take on McMurphy is wonderful: He “doesn’t use the glinting, funny-malign eyes this time… McMurphy’s eyes are farther away, muggy, veiled even from himself… He actually looks relaxed at times, punchy, almost helpless.” Louise Fletcher as Nurse Ratched, meanwhile, displays “virginal expectancy – the purity – that has turned into puffy-eyed self-righteousness… the company woman incarnate.” Kael sees “a streak of low, buffoonish peasant callousness running through” Forman’s films (“he likes faces that don’t take the light”) and he “gets laughs by pretending that mental disturbance is the same as ineptitude; this “minor aspect” has grown only more troublesome with time, as popular tastes grow less tolerant of mockery and disdain, even in supposed service of liberation.

3. “The Case for Trappism” by Kenneth Tynan (November 28, 1959). Three Parkers. tutor, throwback, testy. And this time the random gods were beneficent, doling out this teardown of The Sound of Music in its original Broadway run. There’s something inherently compelling about a contemporaneous hater of a now-classic show; anyone can hate a thing after it’s popular, but a real critic gets there early. Tynan is riotous, and it’s no wonder he hates Sound; despite its pleasures, it is, as he says, kiddie stuff, and Tynan is among the most adult adults to ever write. I never noticed that Music is a slightly self-plagiarizing riff on the structure of The King and I – time erases chronology and replaces it with famousness. Sound is “the very kind of musical” that Rogers and Hammerstein “had labored so hard, and so successfully, to abolish” – an oversweet “romantic melodrama.” The show ranges from “overwhelmingly quaint” to “damp and dowdy”, in Tynan’s estimation, and it’s a challenge not to start to see the show through his lens – maybe my enjoyment of it was really just nostalgia. Tynan tears down the curtains.

2. “Letter from Europe” by Jane Kramer. (Oct 5, 1987). Three Fords. memory, measure, meaning. It would probably sell like, um, coldcakes, but a compendium of this magazine’s writing on the trials of Holocaust perpetrators would span every period of its existence and also serve as a compendium of some of its best writing, period. Along with Arendt’s Eichmann in Jerusalem (1963), easily the piece I reference most often in this newsletter, there are of course Rebecca West’s vivid reports (1946); more recently has come an Elizabeth Kolbert piece on memory and justice (2015) and a Timothy Ryback essay on narrative and physical evidence (1993). This superb Jane Kramer piece, landing at perhaps the post-war pre-aughts high water mark for fascio-nationalist revisionism, expertly unpacks the structural hypocrisy of colonial France, and the way its society inevitably leads to groups like the FN. Specifically, the role of history in France is to teach a certain idea/identity of France and French nationalism, not to present the truth. Kramer makes her nuanced and astute defense of universalism sing with an associative style that is, under the surface, formally precise. The opening anecdote, in which Parisians performatively return from vacation, plants the seeds for the later critique of self-representation; Kramer’s worldly irony, though not always the easiest thing to follow, is a prime example of the uses of this magazine’s tone: It makes digestible what might otherwise be a polemic. Quite a fantastic piece of writing.

1. “Union President” (Profiles) by Richard O. Boyer. (July 6, 13, and 20 1946). Three Fords. ship, strike, speech. A few months before Hersey’s infinitely famous Hiroshima, Boyer published this mostly unknown profile, which is, in its own, less showy way, nearly as masterful. Its legacy is mainly that, after being turned into a long-out-of-print book, it got name-dropped by your friend and mine, Roy Cohn, as part of the McCarthy hearings. “Mr. Cohn: ‘In this book, The Dark Ship, didn't you give very high praise to Joseph Curran, president of the National Maritime Union?’ Mr. Boyer: ‘I think the book is the best evidence on that and I am not trying to fence with you on this, but the appraisal of Curran is quite a mixed thing. There is praise and criticism in there.’” That assessment is correct; Curran is inarguably authentic; he’s also a ludicrous roughneck – he happily gets into a fistfight at one point, and favors a murderous metaphor – and it’s not especially surprising to learn, after reading the piece, that he stayed in his position longer than was probably wise, while pulling a somewhat inflated salary. Curran is a hugely compelling character, a late-in-life but natural scholar and an accidental leader (“he moodily ties sailors’ knots in the cord of the Venetian blind”), and the concerns of this piece (political authenticity, identity issues, solidarity-building) usefully recast the labor struggle as an ongoing battle waged, in relatively similar ways, for many decades. (A few past battles are hard to imagine – did you know the Supreme Court once ruled that sailors aren’t covered by the 13th Amendment? – while others are still being waged – a conversation on fighting discrimination is refreshingly practical.) Beyond any contemporary political pertinence, this is an incredibly engaging, fast-moving piece. Its structure is a little strange – the third part, possibly the best, which concerns Curran’s life story, would more naturally come first; the first part, which is mostly day-in-the-life storytelling, might gain something from contextualization – but the heartfelt humanism and wry wit of the piece are enough to suggest that Boyer ought to be rediscovered, and that The Dark Ship certainly ought to be reprinted.

🥐 Something Extra

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Does that render on my laptop? No! But it might on yours! Happy new year.

Sunday Song:

(from the Pitchfork year-end songs list)