April 20, 2023

Last Week's New Yorker Review: April 24 & May 1, 2023

Last Week’s New Yorker, week of April 24 & May 1, Innovation & Tech Issue

Must-Read:

“The Language Game” - Carina Chocano talks to Luis von Ahn, the Guatemalan man behind Duolingo and CAPTCHA, who’s hoping to use deep computer learning to change language teaching. A weird one — somewhat odd, structurally (probably because machine learning, the subject that occupies the final few sections, wasn’t a big part of Duolingo’s story when the initial interviews for the piece were conducted) yet compelling throughout. I had no idea CAPTCHA, ReCAPTCHA, and DuoLingo all shared a founder, and I didn’t expect him to be such a charming and complex character, the rare genuine-seeming tech leader. Early on, Chocano brilliantly hones in on his “fundamental innocence” as core to his character; this interpretation crops back up a few times, but never in an obvious or signposted way. I was worried when the piece started addressing so-called A.I, but while von Ahn is a booster, Chocano does an excellent job deflating his promises without derailing the piece. (There’s a surprising amount of humor in her failed attempt to engage with the A.I. teacher, but she doesn’t let the roughness of the technology keep her from pointing out the broader issues: “…the inequalities that von Ahn wants to address are structural in nature and not the sort of thing that exposure to the basics of math or literacy, through an app, can fix.”) The focus on Guatemala is similarly well-handled; von Ahn seems genuinely well-meaning but Chocano doesn’t spare him scrutiny. Indeed, the ending is fairly damning, yet even portrayed as oblivious, von Ahn is charming, too. I was also impressed by Chocano’s prose, which is snappy but not showy, a hard balance in a piece so dense with quotes. It’s just her second time in the magazine;1 I hope to read more of her.

Window-Shop:

“High Achievers” - Clare Bucknell goes out of her mind with the proto-trippers of the early 1800s. A fascinating journey; sure, it seems heavily reliant on its source material, Psychonauts: Drugs and the Making of the Modern Mind, by Mike Jay; even the spot art is the same photograph used on the cover of Jay’s book. So it would be nice to get more of a review; but when the material is this illuminating that’s a quibble. I hadn’t realized the historical lineage of drug-taking, and it’s always fascinating to realize a movement you assumed to be sui generis (the self-described “first generation to discover drugs” of the ‘50s and ‘60s) was drawing on an earlier movement. In fact, the entire “objectivist” scientific process may have been in part a reaction to the “subjective” self-experimentation these “richly metaphorical” druggies advocated for. And seeing the ways in which tripping involved “narratives of self-actualization” before it was recontextualized by the invention of “drug addiction” helps make strange a construct which is too rarely probed. But beyond the theoretical, what really makes the piece shine are the great anecdotes, well-recounted by Bucknell; best is Bayard Taylor’s “état mixte, a strange commingling of waking life and dream,” which he theorizes could be used therapeutically, so that “hallucinations could be understood in the light of reason.” It’s to this piece’s credit that it doesn’t waste too much effort drawing the line between those ideas and contemporary innovations like ketamine therapy; those connections are obvious enough without underlining.

“Security Breach” - Ed Caesar dives into a European criminal underworld disrupted by massive police phone-decryption schemes. Charmingly amoral and exclusively interested in the nuts and bolts of criminality, the schemes and plots that help cocaine move from South America to Europe, and money circulate among criminals. While the implicit perspective is certainly always that of the police, there’s at least a memorable attempt to hear directly from the other side. The extreme bird’s-eye-view on the material — there’s no framing anecdote, and we don’t settle into specific, present-day details until midway through the second section — can feel dry, especially at first, but once you’re engrossed in “hawala” and “Rip On/Rip Off” schemes, the spareness becomes an asset, and even takes on a romantic cast, like a good spy novel.

“The Crunch Bunch” - Antonia Hitchens chows down at Taco Bell’s food-innovation lab. Resolutely unserious and entirely content to take Taco Bell’s food engineering essentially at face value; there are no worries about cultural appropriation or the obesity crisis here, just one choice Michael Pollan quote on processed foods appearing “as pure products of culture rather than nature.” Those resistant to the bong of what I often spooneristically call Bach Hotel won’t find much of interest here, but for the rest of us there’s a great deal of delight, especially concerning the Crunchwrap and the lone woman who “always wanted to find a new way to fold a tortilla” but whose idea “languished for thirteen years” before it finally proved successful. You have to wade through a lot of marketing speak (apparently, the company’s mission is to “build content for cultural rebels” but also to “introduce things to the masses”) but are rewarded with flavor, if not substance. (Sound familiar?) I was happy to see a (too-brief) appearance from the brilliant Taco Bell Quarterly, a lit magazine that takes a stupid idea very seriously — I feel a certain esprit de corps with them. Ultimately, the piece’s best joke is metatextual: It’s just funny to see Christopher Hitchens’ daughter writing five thousand words on the Naked Chicken Chalupa, Beefy Crunch Burrito, et al.

“Decorative” (Talk of the Town) - Lauren Collins tours French museums with a parched Owen Wilson. Collins finds the narrative thread to follow through Wilson’s haplessness (“Impossible à boire”), and Wilson’s voice remains delightful to imagine in your head — key to a good Talk profile.

“Guiding Light” - Helen Shaw sees two overstuffed, soap-opera-aping new shows. Itself a bit overstuffed, and awkwardly structured, with the shorter review up front for no obvious reason. And I wonder if it doesn’t give too much of White Girl in Danger’s second act away. But Shaw’s prose is vivid and present as ever, from Regretfully’s “furious crocuses, vivid and already pissed off at spring,” to how White Girl’s Jackson “thrillingly metabolizes the spectrum of eighties and nineties sounds into a pastiche-a-palooza.”

“Fertile Ground” - Emily Witt pipettes with the biotech entrepreneurs working to make mouse babies without reproductive cells, and those skeptical the technology will ever be practical for humans. Scattered, with fantastic moments but a major flaw: The research being done by the biggest skeptics of the technology under review seems far more compelling and novel than the I.V.G. work the piece centers. I want a profile of Jennifer Garrison, who skewers for-profit eggheads (“If even a tiny bit of [I.V.F. & I.V.G. funding] had gone into answering some of these basic questions that we’re talking about, we wouldn’t be having this conversation”) and promotes a pathway that seems more rational and humane (“What if we didn’t move the age of menopause, but right up until the age of menopause your eggs were healthy and there wasn’t this fifteen- year window where your risk of miscarriage, aneuploidy, birth defects, and infertility just goes up?”) in the four or five paragraphs before she’s whisked offstage to allow for more techie self-promotion. I’m somewhat skeptical of the big-picture arguments about the trouble with an aging population — the reliance on the phrase “economists say” is telling, and these points rhyme with those advanced by pronatalists, nicely debunked by Dave Karpf here. But there are plenty of other reasons why extending reproductive longevity can be, as Nicole Shanahan says, “the natural and necessary progression of the women’s-rights movement.” Reproductive autonomy is an obvious good, but it’s found strange bedfellows in people like Sam Altman, who seem more interested in gene patents and monetizability. The researchers halfheartedly dispute this, but so did the people behind Altman’s main joint OpenAI, back when it was a nonprofit. I wish this piece were structured to promote even more skepticism toward people like the student who says there will “definitely” be a “stem-cell-derived [human] egg in a dish” grown in the future. I have a self-driving jetpack to sell him.

“Walk the Line” - Laura Miller reads a new crime mystery novel by Dennis Lehane, which explores Bostonian racism. A concise and well-written review which gives a good sense of the book’s tone. Unfortunately, despite the review’s positivity, the quotes make it sound pretty corny (“‘I’m not a person anymore,’ she tells Coyne. ‘I’m a testament.’”) and only politically conscious in terms of setting; it’s not clear whether Lehane actually has much to say about White defensiveness. Readable, in other words, but not totally convincing.

Skip Without Guilt:

“The Great Interruption” - Adam Gopnik reads The Blazing World, Jonathan Healey’s new history of the English Revolution. Gopnik agrees with Healey that “what seventeenth-century people seemed to be arguing about is what they were arguing about,” in other words, that class relations or any other superimposed set of delineations are insufficient to explain the motivations of the past. This is persuasive, and even better is the late paragraph on John Donne’s concerns about transubstantiation, which “echo in our own quarrels about identity and transformation.” Unfortunately, as Gopnik says early on, the English revolution is “a mess, exhausting to untangle and not always edifying once you have done so,” and while he makes a few compelling points, Gopnik clearly gets a bit lost in the attempt at summarizing motives and movements which consumes much of the piece. At one point early on, a single “for Hill” prompts the reader to search backward three and a half paragraphs, past the names of four other men, to finally find the “great Marxist historian… Christopher Hill” as the referent. Gopnik provides the story only somewhat pre-untangled, in other words. There isn’t time for many of his trademark digressions and bizarre lateral connections here. Your mileage may vary on those, but they’re what I come to Gopnik for.

“Parent Traps” - Anthony Lane sees two familial flicks. Criticizing a surreal horror film as “too punishing” seems an odd critique, and at times it seems Lane’s too freaked out by Beau to register particularly incisive critiques. Despite his negativity, he’s clearly preoccupied by the film; he brings it up three more times in rapid succession in the subsequent capsule review of Everything Went Fine. Distracting!

“Inspiration, Inc.” - Louis Menand muses on ‘creativity’ as word and subject. Begins with a hopelessly irrelevant framing device, and dawdles from there. I’m not sure if the thesis of The Cult of Creativity is confused, or if Menand just presents it confusingly; is it that “creativity,” the term, stands in for, or encourages, various capitalist impulses, or is it actually that the concept of creativity is capitalist? Menand is mostly interested in gesturing toward his pet topics: The “creative nonfiction” digression is there because he teaches creative nonfiction; his most recent book was subtitled “Art and Thought in the Cold War,” so of course we hear that “Cold War” as an “all-purpose descriptor of the period” has “a load of ideological baggage that is never unpacked.” There’s also just some sloppy writing: At one point, he says that “creativity, the concept, popped up after the Second World War in two contexts. One was the field of psychology.” For the life of me, after rereading multiple times, I can’t figure out what the hell the other context is.

Letters:

Caz and I had a chat about Beef, reviewed last week, which she recommends. She adds, “I thought the review missed, or chose to ignore, that one of the main characters’ attendance at marriage counseling was knowingly performative, artful, not genuine; psychological insights being another thing she had to get exactly right to keep the shit show from becoming visible.”

What’s your favorite Taco Bell menu item? I’m pretty obsessed with the Fiesta Veggie Burrito. It sounds like a weak concession to veg sensibilities, but it’s a fully formed idea, and at two bucks you can hardly afford not to buy it.

Introducing The Cartoon Supplement

For a while I’ve been thinking about what additional content I could provide to paid subscribers of this newsletter. Prompted by a few people noting that they’d like to see my takes on the cartoons, I figured such a thing would be so obviously useless as to essentially function as a sort of token of appreciation for my grantors — nothing of real meaning would be paywalled. I’ll make this week’s takes free, below, to give you a sense of what to expect, and in two weeks (the magazine, and thus this newsletter, is off next week) the paid supplement will begin.

Pg. 16: 🙄

Pg. 17 (Sketchpad): I love a good “crazy sports rule proposal,” but these are neither quite wild enough to be silly, quite droll enough to be funny, or quite practical enough to be compelling. This genre has probably been exhausted by the great mass of sports podcasters.

Pg. 20: I support all public-transit humor.

Pg. 23: Prime Finck art. Great curlers.

Pg. 28: Drawing looks super “off” in print.

Pg. 31: Clever — not sure the “honestly” adds anything.

Pg. 34: Winningly confusing at first glance, but not ultimately delightful enough to really pack a punch.

Pg. 37: I dislike when the second character in a cartoon is simply there to receive the punchline.

Pg. 41 (Sketchbook): “Planes as a microcosm of life” as a premise has definitely been done. The “Oh, boy! Mealtime!” panel feels like filler, while prompting the question: What flight has meals that good-looking these days? But I have to love that fantastic horrified-baby drawing, with a duck on its onesie. Really, all the “costume design” here is superb.

Pg. 42: Water bottle should be bigger. Not comically large, but more juggish.

Pg. 47: A fantastic drawing, really sells the joke. Even the milk puddles are similar but not too similar. Best of the week.

Pg. 48: Speaker should be addressing the coach — or more than one other player.

Pg. 49: Can’t tell if it’s intentional or just a distracting coincidence that the two people being introduced are vaguely Black-coded.

Pg. 50: Strong!

Pg. 54: Martini or backseat; pick one. And, what face is the dad supposed to be pulling? He looks like Zoolander.

Pg. 59: Successfully plays with the format.

Pg. 61: Prompted a smile.

Pg. 69: Sure.

Pg. 73: Ehh, I guess.

So, yes, this is an obviously silly, fairly cumbersome idea. But have you seen what newsletter you’re reading? If obviously silly and fairly cumbersome is your thing, pitch in a few bucks.