Last Week's New Yorker Review: April 28
Last Week’s New Yorker, week of April 28
“lettuce grew in the courtyard of a destroyed building.”
Must-Reads:
“Hospitals in Ruins” (Letter from Gaza) - Clayton Dalton says ICU, IDF. One of the smaller travesties of the Gazan genocide is that the IDF’s deliberate targeting of journalists inside Gaza and total suppression of outside journalism has successfully limited coverage of the war from many traditional outlets. (Obviously, there has been substantial first-person documentation of some of the destruction. ) That’s kept this magazine from having any substantial coverage of the situation; as I’ve noted, everything has been secondhand, which has often hampered the pieces. The brief ceasefire, though, allowed a few outsiders to visit, including Dalton, a medical doctor who, in the absence of a critical need for emergency medicine, decided instead to tour the destroyed hospitals of Gaza. What he found there is perhaps so unsurprising in its sickening barbarity that it’s easy to dismiss the article as unneeded – I can see these pictures on my phone. But fascism relies on warping and hiding the truth, and reportage counters this not just with authority but with a sort of deliberate attention that’s impossible to achieve when the genocide is happening to you. Dalton delivers a very short piece – Hersey’s Hiroshima this is not – that captures a brief glimpse with horrific precision. The detail of deliberately shot medical equipment is somehow more gutting than any quantity of guts – it captures a dry and precise inhumanity, and makes clear that Israel’s desire is not for brutality but extermination.
Window-Shop:
Brownstein on Avedon (Takes) - A wonderful two-paragraph prose poem, praising Power then delivering an exegesis of her portrait. Sharp.
“A Time to Kill” (A Critic at Large) - Adam Gopnik knows no one secedes like, “Success!” Gopnik’s perspicacity only partially compensates for the usual disjunction between his tone (arch bordering on glib) and the content (a plea to not forget the violence and horror of even the most justifiable of armed conflicts.) He deliberately blurs the lines between a number of separate questions (Was the Civil War “worth it”? Was it inevitable? Was it right?) so that he can later point out the separateness of these very questions – a frustrating trick if you’re one step ahead of him, as I was. But I can forgive that, because the core of Gopnik’s argument (“We are far too ready to depict the suffering of others as the price of the history that seemingly rewards us now”) is genuinely profound and far-reaching, and justifies connections to COVID and Canada that could otherwise seem tenuous. If you like your stoned dorm-room theoreticals extremely fraught, it’s interesting to debate just how much additional slavery would have been “worth it” to avoid a war – and even more compelling to think through whether a nonviolent compromise with “gradual emancipation and enfranchisement” built in might have prevented some of the post-Reconstruction vicissitudes for Black Americans. It’s impossible to know, and easy to make ideological assumptions that may not line up with the practical picture. As Gopnik says, because slavery was both “an economic engine” and “a terror-bound cultural institution”, such a compromise was probably never viable. And while Gopnik might see it as bleak that a Union-for-Union’s-sake argument proved more, well, unifying than an abolitionist argument, it’s worth considering when coalition-building: Sometimes the cause is less important than the sense that one is on a team; the key thing is to tie the key causes so tightly to the team that everyone who joins must accept it: A pro-slavery rabbi can support a united America for his own reasons, but not until he stops being pro-slavery. Gopnik could probably lose the jokes about poutine and still get his anti-war point across, but I suppose then he wouldn’t be who he is.
“Make It New” (Talk of the Town) - Jake Offenhartz judges junk with Ser Serpas. Serpas is one of the cooler young artists working, and this could easily take her too seriously (A master at work!) or not seriously enough. (Trash as art? How novel.) Offenhartz finds the balance, getting down and dirty (“‘Bird poop Serpas’”) and focusing on deliberation (“‘Now I need orifices’”), pointing out funny details without chuckling. The dry style is fitting: Wet trash is not gallery-safe.
“Our Commitment to You” (Shouts & Murmurs) - Cora Frazier is well-endowed. Goes to show that this format doesn’t have to be soft and squishy; it can be incisive when the writer picks a single target and hits it hard, instead of branching off in a thousand zany directions.
“Counting the Ways” (Comment) - Jonathan Blitzer gets shown the El Salvador. You already know these details of Trump’s horrific deportation agenda, probably, but they’re worth considering all together – it’s easy to start forgetting, even though it’s all so recent.
“London Bridge” (The Theatre) - Helen Shaw finds her self in London. Definitionally cursory, but Shaw finds a strong thematic throughline in memory and self-reflection. I’m a bit annoyed by every review of The Years focusing more on the fainting than on the show; the other blurbs are okay, but when Shaw goes deep on Eva Morgan as Laura in Glass Menagerie (“nervous, colt-like… tugs like a restless balloon”) it’s a reminder of what’s been cut for time elsewhere.
Skip Without Guilt:
“Screen Time” (Books) - Jessica Winter counts her chicken before it’s hatched. Not really a bad article, just a topic I find frustrating and depressing; I wish nobody would talk to, or about, the loathsome Collins parents, abusers who have turned their lives into an exercise in public relations for a despicable cause. But they’re here, and so are the “neo-Quiverfull” MAHA nutjobs, Musk, Sam Altman, et al. Notably missing? Children, who all these people are allegedly in favor of, yet are conspicuously unwilling to listen to. If you need me to tell you that the contemporary strain of fascism is particularly wedded to a conception of children as a dangerous underclass in need of abusive coercion, well… you haven’t been reading very closely; I gesture toward that shit in almost every single issue. Winter smartly ties in the ableism and eugenicism behind genetic testing; it’s also a short path from there to CRISPR-style gene editing, as Winter notes in a parenthetical – a prospect with even queasier ethics. Still, Winter throws out too many loaded hypothetical questions (“When you close your eyes and imagine your future children, what is it morally permissible to see?”) to end on such a vague, I-believe-that-children-are-our-future note. Here’s looking at your kid.
“Energy Boost” (On and Off the Menu) - Hannah Goldfield won’t starve of David. There’s been a frankly weird amount of coverage of the recent high-protein-foods craze, most of it pitched as a sort of debunking. Goldfield, too, talks a lot more about health than taste, dissecting why protein probably isn’t the miracle its biggest boosters paint it as; the brief history of bars is interesting, but I didn’t get much from the discussion of newish brand David. Anyway, if you’re looking for the best protein bar, here it is.
“Across the Gulf” (Profiles) - Stephania Taladrid calls in the Sheinbaum squad. Taladrid seems determined to treat Sheinbaum even-handedly, but that doesn’t have to mean writing a piece with no thesis. It’s impossible to come away with any hard-and-fast conclusions about Sheinbaum, who variously seems like a committed ideological leftist and a practical pol, truly committed to democracy and kind of an authoritarian. She’s also defined, over and over again, by her relationship to Trump, but even that relationship is hard to pin down: She’s “coöperating with Trump to an extraordinary degree” – which apparently means allowing an already existing army program to continue, and letting the CIA fly some drones. Is that really so extraordinary? At times, it seems as though Taladrid is condemning Sheinbaum for having extraordinary power; at other times condemning her for not using her power to push the country far enough fast enough. In theory, Taladrid could paint Sheinbaum as a cypher, but she doesn’t even really do that – she just gives us lots of seemingly contradictory information, then ends the piece. That information isn’t uninteresting; as a brief political history of Mexico from a present perspective, the piece works. But whatever Taladrid makes of Sheinbaum, you won’t find out – a big flaw for a piece billed as a Profile. More like a Back-of-the-Head.
“Subtitling Your Life” (Onward and Upward with Technology) - David Owen falls on Deaf eyes. Awkward, because Owen would really like to write a wide-eyed tech piece, but knows too much about the Deaf community and the difficulties inherent in any tech that tries to “solve” disability. So he couches his praise in lots and lots of historical context… while still ultimately landing in the same wide-eyed place. I’m glad that Owen has written a piece on transcription, a technology that is less invasive and more useful than implants or most other hearing-impairment tech; putting that live-transcription technology into glasses seems like a fairly trivial and obvious detail, so it’s sort of funny that this is the element he fixates on – it’s a bit like a piece on GPS which focuses on the idea to put a little chip in your phone, and not, you know, the satellites. (Then again, I’m pretty glad this is not another A.I. article.) This technology is exciting, but Owen is maybe too enraptured by it. Knowing exactly what speaking people are saying around you is a big part of life, but it’s not the only thing that makes life whole, as many Deaf people – and those whose auditory processing is iffy for other reasons – will tell you. For Owen, though, the glasses half-full.
“Consuming Passions” (The Current Cinema) - Richard Brody loves Sinners, not the sin. For once I got to the film before reading the review; I wasn’t nearly as high on it as Brody is, and I’m not sure he’s read one plot detail related to Remmick correctly (yes, he wants Sammie’s ability to conjure the past through song, but he’s not trying to conjure the “experience or the history” of Black people, he’s trying to get back the people he’s lost. Coogler devotes lots of time to Irish music and dance – something he wouldn’t do if he were trying to portray it as empty.) That may be Coogler’s fault; the film skims past a few beats that seem crucial. I appreciate that Brody unpacks some bits of history that Coogler is gesturing toward, though a lot of what makes the film so wonderful is how lightly and un-didactically it shows those histories. Really, almost everything Brody brings up happens in the film’s first hour. I suppose I should be thankful there are no spoilers, but given that the rest of the movie is the part that disappointed me, I wish Brody would say what he thought of those bloodier bits. Where are the teeth?
“Follow the Leader” (The Political Scene) - Antonia Hitchens grabs coffee with the MAGAss-kissers. It is the most obnoxious take in politics to look at any of the various brazen things that Trump does and call them a “distraction” from the other, more insidious things he is doing. Some things matter more than other things, sure, but it all matters. Still… focusing this intently on the aesthetics of Trump’s regime, which privileges blank-eyed obsequiousness (obviously!), does feel like the least consequential thing to note about what is explicitly a scheme to undermine democracy and force a host of fascist policies through by executive fiat. That all this is also being done in a tacky manner is mostly besides the point. There’s also a sense that this article was written from the outside looking in, and on the rare occasion when Hitchens does get access, there isn’t much to be made of it – five paragraphs on a visit to Darrell Issa’s office include only two piddly quotes from Issa. That Andrew Beck, a “strategist”, wants to tell Hitchens that the Bukele deportations were, apparently, “‘about being a spiritual king in the eyes of your bros’” is disgusting, sure, but it’s also pretty empty; and when empty provocation is, largely, the strategy… it’s better to not get provoked. (To be clear: Get provoked by the deportation, yes – not by the trolling around the deportation.) Why does Hitchens think we need to hear quite so much of that trolling, verbatim and with limited pushback? Give them enough rope to hang themselves, sure, but Beck is a nobody – this isn’t rope, it’s a platform. (And not one with a trapdoor.)
Letters:
Kristina says no letter last week because they were “still recovering from learning that James C. Scott had died, because the title of a book review in an issue you’d put off reading is a hell of a way to learn.” That’s Nikil Saval’s piece, and… sorry to bear bad news!
good enough
for government work