Last Week's New Yorker Review: April 3, 2023
Last Week’s New Yorker, week of April 3
Must-Read:
“Crossover Artist” - Burkhard Bilger profiles the neuroscientist David Sulzer, who hopes to expand our neurological understanding of sound, and the experimental musician Dave Soldier, who creates elephant orchestras and bluegrass-inflected new-music bands… and by the way, the two are one person. The neuroscience parts are perhaps a bit underexplained — I couldn’t tell you exactly what Sulzer is actually studying — while the music parts are perhaps a bit oversweet (“The world is full of music we can’t hear” and such), and ultimately the former doesn’t prove especially relevant except insofar as it creates an impetus for further art-making. (“What is a song? What distinguishes it from other kinds of sounds? Neuroscience hasn’t been much help.”) But when the piece goes into the nuts and bolts of Sulzer’s musical weirdness, the elephant who hits a dissonant note “like a punk rocker or a modern composer” or the doctorate adviser who gets a phone call from Laurie Anderson and shouts, “‘Dave, you fucking asshole, you’re still making music,’” enchantment reigns. Plus, the elephant music is legitimately gorgeous.
Window-Shop:
“Long Division” - Joanna Biggs reads a new edition of a Socialist-realist novel by East German Brigitte Reimann. Biggs provides just enough literary history to contextualize Reimann’s “keen respect for the artist’s own way of looking at things” as venturesome within her environs, but not insurrectionary. The piece could use more quotes, although Reimann’s strength probably isn’t her line-by-line styling but her structures and stories. Biggs conveys those well, and the task of examining art made under seemingly “compromised” conditions is an important one.
“Blues Men” - Vinson Cunningham sees a short play, Hang Time, which is “a thin tarp thrown over the unsayable.” That phrase is a stunner, and generally Cunningham is in fine form: “The kind of grief that urges you to song is inelegant, a hot devil nearly impossible to wrestle into form,” the men are stuck “between wistful retrospection and wounded involvement in the dailiness of things.” The prose verges on overheated; especially toward the end, it feels very enunciated, like slam poetry. But it certainly conveys the intensity and seriousness of the work under review.
“Paleo” (Talk of the Town) - Dana Goodyear gets stuck in the La Brea Tar Pits with Andy Samberg. Samberg is really funny and this is a lovely, chill stroll. Very L.A. for “this magazine” but I didn’t mind.
“Fooled Again” - Elizabeth Kolbert is duped by trickster animals. (common-rose butterfly… DUPE!) The general topic of this piece is quite similar to a Jerome Groopman book review from less than four months ago; both explore parasitic tomfoolery through a succession of biological case-studies, although there’s not too much overlap in critter choice. Quick looks at weird animal behaviors are Kolbert’s stock-in-trade, and she’s in fine form. The book at hand, though, The Liars of Nature and the Nature of Liars, draws a false equivalence between nature’s “liars” and human con artists which is so obviously flawed that it’s beneath Kolbert to debunk it as patiently as she does here.
“Gentleman’s Game” - Inkoo Kang gets sucked into a “blue-lit, try-hard” Dickens adaptation. Suggests a few interesting points without delving into them (its “feminist revisionism… irks” how?) but manages to convey the series’ tenor, high points, and shortfalls, with a few nice phrases (Miss Havisham joins Olivia Colman’s “bestiary of regal ogresses”) and a bit of formal analysis (London’s “nearly monochrome palette… reflects the series’ Manichean world view of the corrupt rich and the largely kindhearted poor.” Some ill-advised adverbs there, but still.) I feel mean ragging on Kang every week, and I hope she maintains this footing.
Skip Without Guilt:
“The Story Goes” - Kristen Roupenian reads a fairy tale (or is it?) by Kelly Link. Wanted to like this more; a close reading of a single story to “figure out how it works” ought to be a prime chance for precise analysis and detailed prose. But Roupenian is mostly interested in exploring the ways Link plays with the genre distinctions between “literary fiction,” genre fiction, and fairy tales. This is possibly the most obvious and therefore least interesting possible tack to take, and indeed, Roupenian’s conclusion (“What kind of story is this? Somehow, we were misled.”) is exactly what I expected, and therefore, disappointing. The first line says Link’s work is “difficult to explain,” but Roupenian doesn’t even work up a sweat.
“Data Driven” - Jill Lepore delves into the data-driven and their desperate desire to drive the rest of us. I appreciate Lepore’s critique of the overuse of data science, its serving as “in many quarters, the only tool,” “as if only data tells because only data sells.” But I’m not sure her four-quadrant breakdown of knowledge (“‘Mysteries,’ ‘Facts,’ ‘Numbers,’ and ‘Data’) is as comprehensive as she thinks. (Where are adages shelved?) And I wish she’d maintain a focus on that critique, and devote more time to the history of Technocracy, instead of flitting between various tangential points about government classification, digitization of libraries, and approaches to mass shooting control, with the result, in a piece this brief, of leaving the reader both overwhelmed and bored.
“The Smear Factory” - David D. Kirkpatrick extensively chronicles the M.B.Z.-funded Swiss firm that smears the Qatari-connected, relying on leaked documents from the oil shipper whose business they busted. Never really answers the question of why the reader should care about this case in particular; I guess it’s just an example of the broader trend of authoritarian overreach by means of outsourced digital spying, but the particulars are so noxious it’s impossible to sympathize with anyone involved, especially when the aggrieved party starts quoting the verse of Billy Corgan. Mostly, this is just a slog to read, with little color to its details, a hazy, removed view of the region’s politics, and a sense of outrage that feels unearned. The idea that the “use of private intelligence agencies by authoritarian rulers and their cronies” is a tactic so novel it deserves this much dissection, when ultimately what those agencies are doing is just amateur spycraft plus editing Wikipedia pages, doesn’t pass the smell test.
“Under God” - Kelefa Sanneh wonders what motivates radical Christian nationalists. There is something deeply weird, and maybe dangerous, about writing a piece in which proponents of a white Christian ethnostate are quoted at length — no matter how critically — and the conclusion still wonders why “most of today’s Americans are beyond the reach of a message that has reached so many for so long,” before wondering if the “next Christian revival” is “just around the corner.” Gee, I wonder if the white Christian nationalists have affected the public perception of their religion. I think Sanneh is trying to make the point that Christian nationalism isn’t really motivated by Christianity, but he’s oddly tacit about proclaiming its real motivation as whiteness (and he never even mentions patriarchy) which almost makes it sound like he thinks the issue with these radical fascist extremists is simply that they aren’t following the Bible closely enough. Really muddled.
Letters:
Boy oh boy did Tolentino’s Ozempic piece stir up some discourse! Michael expects “a continuing wave of think pieces on this subject, especially if the projections are true that these are going to be the most valuable class of drugs ever.” Nationals Liker says Tolentino’s article “never bothers to center the people taking Ozempic for legitimate medical reasons.” Kit suggests we all read Meg Ellison’s 2020 short story “The Pill,” which basically is for Ozempic what Don’t Create the Torment Nexus is for the Torment Nexus. Kit says it expresses “the casually expressed but intense terror many people feel about becoming fat and the casual disgust, expressed or not, that they have for fat people, and what they're willing to give up to avoid becoming fat as a result.” In their view, Tolentino “achieved the slow burn horror in re: the long-term social & cultural consequences for (esp. fat) people, but she didn't get into the undignified scrabbling fear & vanity of cosmetic users that the NYMag article exposes.”
Heather left a long and very well-written critique worth reading in full (unfortunately I can’t figure out how to link through to comments, but I trust you’ll find it), saying that “the medical establishment’s eagerness to lean on a drug that is clearly bad for people is yet another in a long line of shortcuts towards making people’s bodies fit what is considered acceptable, with no real proof at all that this drug will facilitate better long term health outcomes,” and that Aronne’s quote in the article that helping obesity through policy ‘would be like trying to treat lung cancer through a smoking-cessation program’ “is a nice gotcha, but is still predicated on the idea that smoking & lung cancer are analogous to eating & weight. This is a false equivalence--many people doctors consider “obese” are, by all other metrics, healthy.” I actually think Tolentino is aware of this — I view her phrasing as implicitly critical of Aronne’s quote — but I do think there were places she could have foregrounded the weight-neutral point of view more.
As for the rest of the magazine, Michael says, “Hua Hsu's piece on prep hewed so closely to the story arc in [season three of] the Articles of Interest podcast but didn't drop the reference to that podcast until so late in the piece that I was almost wondering if there was going to be some plagiarism scandal brewing.” Great pull - I loved season one of Articles and need to catch up.
In keeping with the Sulzer piece, this week’s prompt: What’s a weird piece of music you love? (Or hate!) I like pretty much anything experimental, but I always come back to Deerhoof as, I think, one of the all-time great acts at blending experimental impulses with various other sounds. They have a vast catalogue with few low points, but this collaboration with a classical ensemble is particularly gorgeous and out-there.