My 5 Favorite Articles of the Year So Far!
Hey there!
If you’re new to this newsletter (quite a few newcomers here from a recent “note”) or just never quite sure what’s going on, here’s the short version. In 2015-17, an excellent newsletter called the Tilly Minute posted brief reviews of each week’s New Yorker. I came along at the beginning of this year and, judging that their hiatus was eternal, nabbed their general format and headers, and then I threw brevity to the wind. (I still aim for something you can read in ten minutes total.) I’ve been chugging along, and since the magazine is off this week, what better than a CLIP SHOW? Without further ado, here are my favs. (All writing below is taken from past editions.)
“The Fog” - Larissa MacFarquhar paints a triple portrait of American adopted people: Deanna, who is white and represents ‘plausibly invisible’ or same-race adoption; Angela, who is Black and represents transracial adoption; and Joy, who is Korean and represents international adoption. A resonant, sensitive, intelligent, and substantive piece. The structure is perfectly chosen and keeps the very long narrative from ever dragging, as each chapter both reflects and contrasts the story which came before, thereby revealing the similarities among adoptees and the distinctions between different types — and between individuals. Deanna’s story peaks early, with her reunion narrative, which artfully foregrounds the threat of rejection; Joy’s peaks late, with her activism and the story of her mother’s residence. Angela’s story, though, is the highlight here, and wrestles with racial questions of selfhood with a depth remarkable for its seemingly secondary nature to the piece — until you remember that the self is, of course, the topic being discussed; the thing obscured in the titular Fog. MacFarquhar’s sense of balance, not just between the narratives but also in terms of when the political questions need to be examined from afar and when they should be placed more directly in the context of the stories at hand, is exquisite.
"Not Fooling Anyone" - Leslie Jamison disambiguates 'Impostor Syndrome.' The rare piece that functions perfectly both as a somewhat clickbaity headline ("Impostor syndrome DESTROYED!! These third-wave feminists from [local city] have found something your boss will HATE!") and as a resonant and truthful piece itself, one that unpacks its arguments and beliefs with care, tenacity, and fine detail. The pathologization of experience under capitalism ends up alienating us from the truth and beauty of our existence, and causes us to view ourselves as shelves in need of compartmentalization and straightening. The piece's thesis could really be expanded even more broadly; it applies to the way most behavior patterns are treated, and the way medical diagnosis inevitably flattens our view of life and convinces us that both distress and joy, two ways of acting and moving which are contrary to the extraction of our labor as quickly and easily as possible, are deviant behavior. To its credit, the piece gestures at a lot of this while also providing thoughtful biographies of the original coiners of what they more accurately term "the impostor phenomenon," as well as the duo that critiqued the idea in a contemporary article. The structure of the piece, which operates not in a straight line but as an inward-turning loop, in which the same idea is dissected and critiqued in more and more depth, ought to be a model for all popular coverage of psychology. And the language, especially toward the end, approaches poetry, and demands extensive quotation: Impostership is "not diluted but defined by its ubiquity. It names the gap that persists between the internal experiences of selfhood — multiple, contradictory, incoherent, striated with shame and desire — and the imperative to present a more coherent , composted, continuous self to the world."
“Soul Survivors” - Burkhard Bilger spins Stax records, on the occasion of a seven-disk release of demos, painstakingly restored from a scattered archive. It is physically painful to read this without being able to listen to the demos Bilger references. (The relevant material is all included on Written In Their Soul: The Stax Songwriter Demos, which comes out on the date above.) The published recordings he notes, even the rare ones by Deanie Parker, are on YouTube, and they’re simply glorious. (That’s two links — click both, if you know what’s good for you.) I don’t really understand why this piece came out so far in advance of the album — building hype for a pop drop is one thing, but major sections of this piece, especially toward the end, would clearly benefit from the demos’ availability as reference. Maybe the piece was pushed forward for the Music Issue — if so, that alone makes the concept a failure in my book. (As you’ll see below, I didn’t enjoy most of the other music features, regardless.)
Even without access to that key material, though, this piece is a stunner. Its success stems from Bilger’s brilliant structural choice to begin with the story of Deanie Parker as a historical A-plot and music historian Cheryl Pawelski’s professional history and quest to restore the Stax demos as a nerdy musical B-plot, before merging their worlds two-thirds of the way through. (The lead photo could almost count as a spoiler — though somehow I was still surprised by the Stax reunion, or, at least, its timing and purpose in the narrative.) Bilger manages to stuff this story to the brim with quotes, all full of personality. (Chosen nearly at random: “Here’s the thing you must understand. Jim Stewart would have volunteered to be in a fight with a bear to get the best song for Carla.”) Yet the piece never feels merely like an oral history, because Bilger isn’t content with straightforward chronology. Instead, he manages to build both toward the present, in which Pawelski and the Stax writers are listening to recordings, and toward specific moments in the past, moments where “the dream of music as a refuge from racism and violence” were shattered. Bilger writes, “The Stax demos traced the full arc of that history — from hope and denial to disillusion and protest.” But history is just a scatter plot of moments, a dusty stack of tapes in non-chronological order. It takes a storyteller like Bilger to build an arc. Just wait three weeks — then listen.
“Lives in the Balance” - Manvir Singh asks why the effort to “establish the social worth” of India’s women — and to save their lives — has moved slowly, and maybe backward. Precise, vivid, and grounded in personal testimony without being consumed by it. Presents its sprawling and multifaceted argument concisely — that the Indian “perception that women are burdens” has complicated roots that can’t be easily simplified into English-language “patriarchy” or “sexism,” that patterns of “socialization” and “norms with deep roots,” including some tied to “plow agriculture,” are implicated in women’s poor lives and deaths (“according to a U.N. study, forty to fifty per cent of female homicides in India result from dowry disputes,”) and that the idea “affluence would dissolve oppressive norms and practices” was, in fact, backward, with solid evidence showing that “India seems to value women less than when it outlawed dowry, sixty years ago.” It’s to Singh’s credit that he’s able to suggest solutions (reduce the “stigma against divorce” and fight “resistance to female independence”) without the common compulsion to insist that those solutions be easily achievable through legislation — as he says, “legislative action without social transformation has proved strikingly impotent.” Singh’s previous writing in the magazine has been intellectually engaging, but this piece is the first in which his prose fully, darkly blooms, from Pawan, “quick to greet people with prayer hands and to bow at the feet of the elderly,” (note the performative edge implied in the phrasing) to Preeti, “eyes swollen and plum-colored.”
“Back From the Dead” - Merve Emre reads Susan Taubes, whose darkly philosophical, Beckett-inflected works have recently been reconsidered and reissued. From the start, Emre’s prose is stunning, suggesting a book review when viewed from afar, but each line deepening into a poetic strangeness when reread or recontextualized. Like this section opener: “Her name was not Susan Taubes, not at first.” Or: “Here, one wants to insist, was a woman whose thoughts sprang from no one’s head but her own. Here was a woman who, when faced with the scorn and the judgement of the patriarchs, laughed the laugh of the Medusa, and turned these stony-faced men into even stonier stones.” The strange mirrored depth of this is then undercut by: “But this is too simple a revision.” By the end, you’re laughing not only at the horrific beauty of Taubes, but at Emre’s quicksand styling, which traps you in repetition and spins you around until you’ve lost your place, until what seemed the most straightforward sense is instead a dark infinity. “The homeland she could discover was in exile,” Emre quotes Elliot Wolfson, speaking on Taubes’ philosophical work. “But in such a homeland, one finds one’s place only by being displaced.” Then Emre says: “Her fictions are unhomely works, tales of bewildered, wild, and estranged women…” and home and place seem to dissolve, you’re wandering backward, like how the severed head, in Taubes’ novel Divorcing, “is free to wander backward through her life in a series of surreal images.” Then you’re at the start again, with the weird Greco-Freudian parable, and suddenly cast forward to Julia, the speaker in Taubes’ Lament for Julia, and maybe a speaker for Taubes, what Emre calls “a paradoxically singular and divided creature,” “made to reappear by an unnamed voice.” You think: Maybe the voice is Emre; you think: Why is the piece arranged like this? Why not some other way? You read Sontag, whose friend Julia, in a story, is “‘wondering about the relation of that leaf… to that one…’ also yellowing, its frayed tip almost perpendicular to the first one’s spine. ‘Why are they lying there just like that? Why not some other way?’” And then you’re back.
Bonus!
My 3 favorite Talk of the Towns of the year so far:
“Jumper” (Talk of the Town) - Adam Iscoe jumps Citi bikes with Jerome Peel and the Citi Bike Boyz. Really funny; great dialogue. [ed: Early on I was trying harder to keep myself brief!]
“Mudang Chile” (Talk of the Town) - Julian Lucas wanders SoHo with ADG7, a “folk-pop band” inspired by “ritual songs from present-day North Korea.” The genuine exuberance of the bandmates pops off the page. (At the Washington Square Diner: “I think I saw this type of restaurant in soap operas.” After an airline loses their costumes: “Oh, this is the beginning of our journey!”) That marks a refreshing change from the many jaded strummers to feature in band-profile Talk of the Towns. Lucas is a great tour guide, picking out some great minor details (one member was enlisted “while she was in the bathroom of a Domino’s Pizza in Seoul,”) and finds an excellent and unexpected button. Plus, ADG7’s music positively slaps.
“Paper Trail” (Talk of the Town) - Adam Iscoe makes paper with Reginald Dwayne Betts, using recycled prison clothing and other materials “with meaning” in them. Great prose, which introduces lots of jargon (“deckle box,” “couching,”) without overwhelming. Iscoe has a stellar eye for quotes with subtle personality (“that’s, like, nerd layer,” Betts said. “You gotta know typeface to even get it.”) The pathos of the last two paragraphs feels earned; that’s the result of a careful process of boiling-down, just as the “sweatshirt cut into small squares” is distilled into paper. [ed: Props to Iscoe, who gets a gold and a bronze.]
Double Bonus!
My favorite poem of the last ten weeks (that’s when I started writing the Cartoon and Poem Supplement, available now only to paying subscribers!) was actually in the most recent issue. Here’s the review, unpaywalled for your pleasure:
“Creation Story” by Tayi Tibble: This is how you incorporate “slam rhythm” into a poem that works on the page. The rhythm is at the heart of what makes this poem work, what makes its dance bubble up through every crack in its images. Approaching one’s lineage with a touch of therapy-speak is… very well-trod ground. (Though this is apparently the first poem by a Māori writer in the magazine.) But that’s not actually a problem unless you make it one — you just have to know how to dance that dance in a way that’s yours, to make that body your body in a way that doesn’t feel forced. Damn does Tibble pull it off here: their “hips rock” and so do their long couplets, tipping between times and embodiments, fleshing out the “I” then swerving back to the “you” — and you’re there; even on the page, this one feels read aloud.