Last Week’s New Yorker, week of December 15

“‘To watch life with the eyes of a homosexual is the greatest thing in the world’”

Must-Read:

“Mind Over Matter” (Life and Letters) - Rachel Aviv says physician, tell on thyself. Manages the traditional Aviv pairing: a heartfelt and psychologically probing deep dive into a troubled person, and an investigative revelation. I was already somewhat familiar with the murmurings about Sacks, particularly regarding Hat’s “Twins”, whose savant skills Sacks misrepresented in ways that probably hurt the popular understanding of Autism more than Aviv lets on.¹ If the piece is fairly soft on Sacks, that’s because his diaries are both a smoking gun of fabrication and also a portrait of a man incredibly tortured by his own stretching of the truth; given how many journalists of Sacks’ era made shit up, one is tempted to give him credit for his guilty conscience, as Aviv repeatedly does here. But she also reminds us that Sacks’ work was taken seriously by professionals in the field being covered; he failed the doctor’s basic task of doing no harm. Running alongside these revelations, and eventually dominating the story, is a searching biography of Sacks, whose compartmentalization of his closeted sexuality, along with other mental consolidations, certainly seem to have contributed to his desire to stretch the truth in order to find his own story in his patients’. The end of the story concerns his very-late-in-life breakthrough into openness; that this occurred immediately alongside his cancer does prompt one to wonder, especially given that reuniting the body and the mind was a large part of Sacks’ life work, if somehow his body, aware that it was under siege, finally gave up a central tension. Aviv’s empathy is, of course, welcome; still, I wish she’d touched more on the medical “cost” of Sacks’ lies and misrepresentations, and not merely the personal cost he bore. But it’s fitting that even in death, Sacks found a way to make the story about himself.

“Prison Breaks” (Books) - Adam Gopnik knows we aren’t single-cell organisms. My personal favorite Gopnik pieces are when he uses his unreconstructed undeconstructed humanism to advocate for fundamental cornerstones of progressive thought. Again and again, he shows that even if one’s whole ideology is basically devoted to upholding neocolonial power structures, one will still end up supporting prison abolition (or diversity of protest tactics or reliance on community organizing instead of hyperpolicing) if one thinks through the basics of its history and consequences. It helps that he’s a tidy and persuasive writer, covering a ton of ground in four brief sections; it also helps that he’s sufficiently invested in this subject to not bother littering his essay with random digressions. That there have always been prisons in roughly the modern sense is still not nearly as much of a strike against Foucault as Gopnik thinks, though his subsequent attempt to claim Foucault for the universalists is so ballsy it’s almost convincing. And the history here is worth puzzling over, not because of some supposed “moral urgency” that Gopnik tries to rescue, but because our repetitions define us far more than our lineages. The struggle with power is ageless, but to call it “unwinnable” is to think of it as a game, with winners and losers. But ensuring there is more justice, peace, consciousness, and freedom for others to partake in – no matter how little you may secure for them – is its own reward; it transcends the aims of the ego.

Window-Shop:

“Bright Lights, Big City” (The Art World) - Hilton Als goes to showtime beyond the Apollo. Als on his childhood is always touching. The middle of the piece verges on hagiographic with regards to director Thelma Golden; she deserves it, but still. I appreciate, though, that Als, instead of running through the newly installed permanent stuff, chooses instead to focus largely on a specific exhibit of light artist Tom Lloyd; his defense of abstraction over explicit treatment of identity is predictable but still heartfelt, but the more detailed descriptions of what he sees in these pieces are the real heart of the piece: “…the wonderful playfulness of neon, the glamorous flashing colors of Times Square that I saw on those walks with my father, and the lights of the city’s great noisemakers, telegraphing danger or, for people of color, possible disaster: fire trucks, police cars, ambulances.” Enlightening.

🗣️ “Ornamental” (Deep Breath Dept.) - Emilia Petrarca gets glassy-eyed. Absolutely nothing beats genuine handicraft.

“Killing Borrowed Time” (Pop Music) - Amanda Petrusich has Geese bumps. My new conversational gambit is asking people if they “like Geese” and seeing if they think I’m talking about the animal or the band. I’ve had Au Pays du Cocaine stuck in my head for weeks straight. So I’m happy for any coverage, and while it’s easy to enjoy Geese I’m glad Petrusich is obviously swept up. (If you know her personal history, it’s movingly on-the-nose that her favorite song from the album is ‘Husbands’.) She maybe overstates the belligerence of the music, which is much closer to post-punk than to punk. But she nails the “raw and unprotected” magic of these very young troubadours.

🗣️ “Walking Tour” (The Boards) - Sarah Larson shows up for Cynthia Nixon. A pro with a great eye for detail.

“The Mail” - That Dylan Mulvaney contributing a sober-minded letter about architecture is an enjoyable curveball.

“All Rise” (On and Off the Menu) - Hannah Goldfield gets that bread. Always good to have Goldfield back in the city, and this is a charming chat with a post-colonial baker. I wanted Goldfield to dig a bit deeper on the radical politics of such a thing, instead of stopping at “being a Muslim is cool again in Zohran’s city!” But the food descriptions are delectable, and this certainly serves as a enticement to visit Diljān.

“And Your Little Dog, Too” (Personal History) - David Sedaris gets ankled, and rankled. Despite some of the usual mean-spirited late-era Sedarisisms – mocking drug addicts, mostly; only slightly more forgivable as Sedaris is himself an ex-addict – because this foregrounds Sedaris’ self-centeredness without actually glorifying it, the comedy of his wry narcissism survives. Picking a joke and sticking to it helps a lot. Also, just the right length for the subject.

Skip Without Guilt:

“Trading Places” (Annals of Television) - Rebecca Mead says if at first you don’t succeed, Industry, Industry again. Two ferociously unlikable upper-class Brit strivers have made a television show about ferociously unlikable upper-class Brit strivers; who’d’ve thunk? There’s not much more here than that, as Mead defends the politics of a product that declines to satirize the evil it depicts; I’m willing to go along with that (I haven’t seen the show) but her repetitive protestation of the point starts to make me disbelieve it. Everything showrunners Kay and Down say is somewhere between grimy and despicable; the shallow reading of Mark Fisher is especially infuriating, and the related focus on personal growth; what made Succession so great was Jesse Armstrong’s total aversion to character development. The two aren’t pleasant company and there’s a lot of them here; this doesn’t necessarily mean that their product is bad, but it makes the profile a slog. (It is bizarre that Mead frames them as just the “writers” of the show and thus nontraditional celebrities; plenty of showrunners are celebrities, and that’s decidedly Kay and Down’s role.) Fans of the show might enjoy this; everyone else should put in a market order.

“How to Leave the U.S.A.” (Letter from the Netherlands) - Atossa Araxia Abrahamian sprongen schip. Nearly impossible to determine what Abrahamian’s angle is supposed to be. I expected the article’s framing to be about how, despite the similarities between people leaving the U.S. and actual refugees, there’s really no comparison; oddly, the article is really about how, despite the obvious differences between refugees and U.S. expats, there are a surprising host of similarities. At least, that was what I thought – but my reading partner had the exact opposite take, expecting a piece about similarities and finding a piece about differences! So regardless of whether you think Abrahamian’s framing is weird, you must agree it’s muddled and hard to parse. Abrahamian’s prior work is mostly lefty-positioned and anti-rich, and it’s odd that she hasn’t brought very much of that energy to a portrait of people with enough resources to buy their way out of a floundering state and into supposed Euro heaven. The blend of irony and empathy is awkward, and ends up emphasizing weird details – how should we feel about a couple pulling six figures who are still selling their blood plasma? Is it an indictment of America, or an indictment of the sort of off-the-charts anxiety and planning-obsession that might also cause a couple to flee the country without first taking some smaller steps? One can agree broadly with the wisdom of fleeing a country descending into fascism and still view it as a pretty selfish thing to do, especially if you’re fairly comfortable and not a member of one of the groups the fascists are directly targeting. Fleeing a battle is a kind of self-preservation, but it’s a stretch to call it anti-war activism. Running scared won’t help our side win.

Letters:

No notes, but since a few people have gotten confused, this newsletter will be on your bills as “lwnysubstack” – none of your money goes to Substack anymore, I promise, but this is not an easy thing to change. Please don’t contest the charge with your bank, there’s a crazy fee on my end.

Did you hear? Helen Shaw, the magazine’s theater critic, took the head job at the Times, and her replacement will be former T.V. critic and Pulitzer winner Emily Nussbaum. I had no idea Nussbaum was even into theater, but she’s a good prose stylist and I’m totally interested to see what sort of energy she brings.

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