Last Week’s New Yorker, week of April 20

“If that were true, she scoffed, it would be ‘the largest conspiracy since the JFK assassination.’”

Must-Read:

“Slammers” (Letter from New Orleans) - Patrick Radden Keefe is taking notes on a criminal fuckin’ conspiracy. Delirious true-crime fun, escalating like a Coen Brothers movie and similarly filled to the brim with outré characters.¹ (Burn Rubber After Reading?) Keefe is canny enough to make it clear that there is outrage here, too; the poor people taken advantage of were prosecuted to the fullest extent, the wealthy doctors mostly got away scot-free, who knows what would have happened to the lawyers if they didn’t – spoiler alert – have a guy shot dead for no reason? Still, most of what’s here is Big Easy atmosphere and I-can’t-believe-that-really-happened anecdote; as such, analysis is mostly beside the point and any review risks becoming a list of fun moments. That, to be clear, is very much not a criticism; A broken system isn’t fun, but the story of people taking advantage of it can be. Keefe, ironically, has a firm hand on the wheel. He understands how suspense works, and doesn’t keep the basic mechanism of the con a secret for very long, instead chronologically recounting the machinations of players who, in their own separate ways, took too long to realize the jig was up. Their punishments; legal, extralegal, and blatantly illegal; certainly don’t fit their respective crimes, but that’s just America.

“No Mercy” (Annals of Immigration) - Sarah Stillman is in a holding pattern. I appreciate that Stillman never delivers a longread just for the sake of it. This very slim piece, which shows the deliberate cruelty of the medically neglectful conditions at one of the major child detention centers run by ICE and its associates, doesn’t present any massive surprises; neither does it wallow in pathos. It makes its point with sparing, incisive examples – children given only allergy meds when presenting quite obviously serious symptoms; families detained for five or six times the legal limit. These stories are enraging, and Stillman connects the many vortices of their inhumanity, directly showing the mental and physical harms the children face without ignoring the even broader stakes of a government that feels it has total impunity regarding its treatment of its residents. Reporting like this clarifies the stakes of dismantling what is no longer an “immigration system” but a migrant-abuse routine.

Window-Shop:

“World on a String” (A Critic at Large) - Adam Gopnik Pauls himself together. An excellent, clever, and thorough discussion of recent Pauline scholarship, a subject about which I know very little and care about even less. Gopnik holds my attention – and he doesn’t have to mention Trump or the Pope or whatever to do it! See how easy that is? I’m totally unable to say anything compelling or noteworthy about this subject, though. Asking me whether Paul was real is much like asking me whether I prefer McDreamy or McSteamy: You’d get more insight flipping a coin. (Rest in peace Eric Dane, whoever you are.) It’s not even Gopnik’s anecdotes, exactly, that render this piece readable; it’s mostly his metaphor: The connection to dialectics is fascinating and suggests that liberation theology was right, not just in practice but in theory, all along; the connection to “Indian gurus in nineteen-sixties hippie culture”, which was “perfectly designed to appeal to alienated Roman urbanites”, is revealing and fairly hilarious. The dissection of Paul’s culture and context, and the ways it influences various scholars’ readings of the text, is also clever (perhaps Paul “instinctively combined” the “preoccupations” of both his Jewish and Greek audiences). The last two paragraphs lose me a bit; Gopnik praises Paul’s “universalism” and “conviction” without quite affirming his message, and he seems drawn less to what Paul said than how (Gopnik assumes) he said it. Otherwise this is excellent, and in almost any other issue it’d be a must-read. There are always at most two; I hope Paul would appreciate that I stick to my self-imposed rules. Just don’t let him check my penis!

“How to Lose a War” (Books) - Louis Menand knows we’ve got helipad to pay. It makes sense that Menand, an English-professor-cum-reporter, would like a book by an English professor that’s largely about her reporter father. It’s also about the end of the Vietnam war, and Menand spends the last section recapitulating what is now the conventional wisdom on Vietnam, that it was a humanitarian disaster brought on mainly by the US leadership’s fear of humiliation. And now, Menand strongly suggests, it is happening again! (I’ll see you again in sixty-one years.) This is fine; the rest of the piece, which is the actual book review, is better. The fifth section, a little media-effects essay, is especially good, full of clever close-readings. Menand writes so much about print media it’s easy to miss that he’s barely written about the news media in the last three years. He excels at it, and he might do well with a narrower beat. Papers, please!

“Late Bloomer” (Pop Music) - Doreen St. Felix learns her Larsson. Can we get weekly installments of St. Felix breaking down the persona of a pop star (or honestly any public figure)? She’s one of the only writers that makes this subject matter – the personas of the famous – not just tolerable but positively fascinating; too few of them make the print edition. (If this newsletter’s paid subscriber base were to, say, double overnight, I’d cover the Critic’s Notebook column in the weekend edition. Stretch goals, people.) St. Felix frames Larsson as in many ways a white take on a usually Black female pop archetype – the hyper-polished professional with an unironic commitment to showmanship (“the leg stays flexed”) – although I’d pinpoint her progenitor as more obviously Kylie Minogue than Beyonce – Minogue, too, is a foreigner with early, corny hits that were eventually followed by a personality infusion via club music and a breakthrough smash that’s a sunshine-soaked charmer without a hint of snark. I do see where St. Felix is coming from, but it’s always risky business framing this generation’s pop stars through the lens of the previous generation, and another way to think of Larsson’s breakthrough is that the present pop era found her: PinkPantheress and Olivia Rodrigo, along with late bloomers Chappell Roan and Larsson, are defined by their intricate, effortful pedagogy; they embody a down-to-earth² persona paired with a high-strung performance. An older group – Charli, Dua, Lorde, Harry Styles, Bieber – are more standoffish, more withholding, and don’t make the idea of pop music their central creative constraint in the same way.³ But pop stars compel precisely because their nature is so typological; that I can quibble with Felix at this length is perfect evidence that she’s arguing well.

“The Bard of Bucharest” (Onward and Upward with the Arts) - Rebecca Mead becomes Radu’s good Jude. I don’t mind this being essentially a lightly contextualized interview, because Jude proves intelligent, funny, and surprising enough to keep the story from feeling like a resumé check despite its basically chronological structure. It helps that he’s as much a bard-scholar of Romania as he is a film director; he expresses interest in future productions made elsewhere, and he should certainly chase that ambition, but his ethos feels so tied to his place of origin it’s hard to conceive of what a French Jude film would look like. (“‘For life, it’s terrible, but for cinema it’s a city that reveals itself — that shows what it has behind.’”) A few things feel out-of-whack: Mead obviously feels Jude’s Dracula is a lesser effort, yet for some reason spends twice as long on it as any of his other films; the final section feels mostly like reiteration. But there are far more good scenes than bad: Jude rerecording dialogue (“‘It means, “Fuck your dead relatives of your mother”’”), scrolling TikTok (it has “‘a kind of dumbness that I think is enriching, in a way’”), or watching classics in B&W (“‘I realized only many years later, seeing Scorsese on TV, when he complained about the red color in the print, that [Taxi Driver] was originally in color’”). You might cry so hard you laugh.

“I Did” (Personal History) - David Sedaris like it. Insubstantial and not even especially funny, but never mean-spirited; basically, those with any investment in the Sedarisverse won’t feel sour about this one, but everyone else can safely pass. He recounts his under-the-radar marriage for tax purposes and the no-marriage promise he extracted from his sisters with his customary slightly labored unsentimentality; eventually he lets a bit of heart slip in, which is equally labored. But he’s beloved for a reason, and as long as he isn’t rubbing our noses in his curmudgeonly social conservatism under the guise of harmlessness, I can forgive some predictability.

Skip Without Guilt:

“Seeing and Believing” (Books) - Anthony Lane will take it Vermeer. Immediately put me in a bad mood with the setup’s glib treatment of a Climate Action protest. Come on, man. Lane recovers, but he has exactly one interesting Vermeer take, and he drops it early: Holland was an oasis in an awful Europe; Vermeer’s work does not merely revel in the mundane but in the mundane as compared to the horrific that was everywhere else. After that, a lot of negotiating the battle over the man’s religious leanings (who is he, St. Paul?), quickly devolving into a list of Vermeer paintings, their locations, and a fun fact or two about each. There is a distinct sense that Lane dispensed with his thesis more quickly than he expected to; he hasn’t found much else to fill the space.

Letters:

Elvia Wilk, an excellent critic-about-town, was kind enough to mention this humble operation in their newsletter fast writing.

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