Last Week's New Yorker Review: December 9
Last Week’s New Yorker, week of December 9
“Conan apparently died in 2017, but Milei habitually refers to him in the present tense, saying that he communicates with him telepathically. (I didn’t ask about Conan; I was told there was a taboo around the subject.)”
Must-Reads:
"Enemy of the State" - Jon Lee Anderson sideburns it all down with Javier Milei. An ordinary Anderson piece – which is to say, his usual remarkable feat: a vivid reading of the entire political climate of a given South or Central American country. If it's by now expected, it's still an extraordinary feat. Argentina is currently dominated by their unhinged ersatz Trump (which, don't forget – Hitler was an unhinged ersatz Mussolini, until he was something more) who's determined to bring a semi-coherent, allegedly anarcho-capitalist program of extreme budget cuts to bear on the country. His act is grotesque, expected, and tiresome – he sells a promise of overturning society to a disgruntled and abandoned populace, then merely enacts "the free-market solutions of the nineties" – in other words, cutting all regulation and all social services – with heartless flair. The poverty rate has exploded, and, as Anderson's vivid closing anecdote exemplifies, the social contract will fray along with it. Milei doesn't give a shit – his entire ideology, along with his entire psyche, is founded in not caring about people. There's a thin line between "you're free" and "fuck off".
"No Way Back" - Richard Brody gives the new Schrader a schrave schreview. Brody’s at his best when passionately proclaiming the brilliance of something everyone else has written off as too flawed or too strange. As here: “Low budgets”, “rough textures”, “bold ease”. That sums up his taste, no? (Give or take a Barbie.) He finds “flights of imaginative daring” in the film’s “reflexive” structure, and “sublime spiritual heights” in a late turn. Schrader is a cranky weirdo, but so much the better; he makes stubbornly individual films, and Brody is there to review them in his stubbornly individual way. That’s art, really. If only more people had the guts and the money to make it.
Window-Shop:
"Primordial Sorrow" - Alex Ross makes himself a body with organ. Nice to get a Ross review for (a live performance of) recorded music – listening along as he describes, say, "stepwise descents of E-flat, D-flat, C, and B-flat" in which "the thirds take on an eerie tinge" is much more fun than having to take his word for it. This music is also fascinating, if fairly harsh and bare – her partner's band Sunn O))) may be louder, but at least they have smoke machines and lights. I happened to see a show of organ music this week at Tully Hall, but it wasn't anything nouveau – it was straight-up baroque. Still, there are similarities – just as Malone explores just intonation, Heinrich I.F. Biber used "scordatura" string tuning to fascinating effect, especially when combined with organ, an instrument with such a distorted and electric edge it's strange and miraculous that it's premodern. (His first Rosary Sonata was the highlight of the program for me.) I've given Ross plenty of must-reads already, and he doesn't have any showstopping descriptions this outing ("the estrangement of the ordinary" comes close), but this is a beautiful blast.
"Chopped and Stewed" - Hannah Goldfield tears off fufu in Houston. West African food certainly deserves its moment in the “broadly accessible” spotlight (“more than just jollof rice” is the new “more than just chicken tikka”) and Houston is as good a mecca as any, I suppose. Goldfield’s piece is a little rushed, and increasingly she seems to have no interest in actually describing the way food tastes. The piece is short enough that it goes down easy – you can swallow it whole.
"Bottled-Water Keeper" (Talk of the Town) - Charles Bethea is still wondering why RFK got the tap. Sure, it's basically pointless to do gotcha journalism against people with no sense of shame. But it can still be fun! RFK selling extra-fluoridated water? Come on.
"Touch Wood" - Casey Cep tables the matter. It's interesting to approach a book that's essentially about the careful handcrafting of luxury furniture as though it might suddenly turn into a labor-rights screed. The chances of Robinson connecting things to "the changing labor market" as Cep hopes for were always going to be slim; Robinson loves manual labor in a more fetishistic and less Walter Benjaminian sense, I gather. He's written a whole book about "opening a retail shop" – he's a small-business owner who makes very nice things for very rich people, and yes, a cynic might say he's whittling while Rome burns. But many a craftsman has focused intensely on their tiny world without much considering the political implications; it doesn't make their care any less wondrously intense. Cep can't quite get me to care about carpentry – although I admire the fine detail she quotes, it's from a remove... and I have to strain pretty hard to stop my eyes glazing over. This epitomizes "window-shop" – if you think you'd like it, you probably wood.
"Monastery For Sale" (Talk of the Town) - Bruce Handy walks out of the frying pan and into the Friar's Club. I like that this isn't pegged to anything more notable than an open house. It should be fine for Talks to have low stakes, and in this city, every story is also a real-estate story.
Skip Without Guilt:
"Note to Selves" - Alice Gregory turns ovary new leaf. Structuring this as a profile is an odd choice; there's more time spent unpacking Paul's life than unpacking her ideas – and it's hard not to wonder how much that has to do with her various identities; a straight man may have just gotten a straight book review. (Paul isn't uninteresting, but there's no Agnes Callard-level drama here, either, even if Callard does get a quote.) There's already a hook that feels out of a book review; Gregory is deciding whether to have a child, and she initially wants to use Paul's ideas to help her with the choice – before she eventually abandons that conceit. Amidst all these intersecting stories, we're only ever really given the elevator pitch of Paul's concept of "Transformative" identities and experiences, and I'd have a hard time referring to them in conversation – which feels like a pretty big failure for an ideas piece. Gregory was mostly drawn toward Paul's ideas because they validated the "major and intractable" nature of the problem obsessing her – drawn simply to Paul's subject more than her specific treatment of it, though admittedly in psychology the line between the two is thin and blurry. As usual with Gregory, the prose is propulsive and approachable. (I love the tomato sauce anecdote – "Having a child... did not turn me into a person who would eat that" – though it serves as such a good synecdoche for the rest of Gregory's anxiety narrative that it practically obviates it.) In an issue weirdly full of self-improvement narratives, this is the one where I most believed in the improvement and not just the self.
"Hello, Heartbreak" - Jennifer Wilson returns over a new leave. A veritable compendium of woo, at the end of which Wilson has a mild breakthrough thanks to, wouldn't you know it, good ol' CBT. Believe it or not, people: It works, and the other shit don't! Wilson even asks Orna Guralnik about all the bells and whistles she's trying out, and gets a therapist-voiced dismissal: "'It's not how I work... I'm a psychoanalyst. We address heartbreak like any other thing.'" From the mouths of Jungians! Anyway, I was unamused by Wilson's credulous treatment of gimmicky and variously gender-essentialist workshops; the very light snark is thoroughly outweighed by the personal-growth-mindset of it all. Women will try "calling on celestial beings" instead of going to therapy, as the meme might go. As a grumpy researcher points out, most of these approaches are putting a journalist-friendly gloss of whimsy and magic atop what's essentially regular-degular psychotherapy. Ultimately, the piece's big flaw is simply that I could tell exactly where it was going – maybe Wilson is surprised by her epiphany, but she signposts it enough that anyone familiar with CBT's one weird repetition-compulsion-scented trick will see it coming. That means the piece ends where it should begin – with the first step forward after a lot of spinning wheels.
Eesh:
"The Choosing Ones" - Jeannie Suk Gersen turns over a Jew leaf. Sure, there are three namby-pamby paragraphs about a converted Jew who’s also an anti-Zionist; the Nakba is mentioned, et cetera. But even those end with the assertion that “anti-Zionism exists necessarily in relation to mainstream Jewish identity – as a form of dissent.” Well, no… it exists in relation to Israeli identity, two things this piece seems determined to deliberately conflate; the presumption that any mainstream Jew must be a Zionist is just wildly wrongheaded and offensive. Also such: The entire rest of this piece, which takes as a given the idea that an outside observer would be so horrified by the October 7 killings (and so, I guess, unperturbed by the Israeli response) that they’d want to join the tribe. Even the section about the anti-Zionist ends with a paragraph about the launch of “a center for Israel studies” that, once again, deliberately conflates Israeli and Jewish identity – the exact tactic Israelis use to try to frame any criticism of their actions as antisemitic, even though Zionism was and is, quite explicitly, a secular nationalist movement. Disregarding all that – and how can you? – this is a stale, boring article about the most shallow kind of self-searching. Sure, everyone needs affinity groups – but finding them won’t make you whole, especially if your tie seems founded mostly in a sense of shared victimhood. (A “‘life of liability’” might turn off some people, but certainly not this lawyer!) Anyway, the most interesting part of this story is entirely extratextual – her ex-husband, who seems to have disappointed Gersen by not asking her to convert and instead writing repeatedly about his sense of grievance at getting treated differently for his interfaith marriage, got quickly hitched to that Julia Allison. Please note also that his new book, To Be a Jew Today: A New Guide to God, Israel, and the Jewish People, is not mentioned, although someone else’s new book, For Such a Time as This: On Being Jewish Today, is. Make of that what you will.
Letters:
Kristina writes: “I had to respectfully disagree to ‘skip without guilt’ as the verdict about the linguistic versus Hindutva piece [written by Samanth Subramanian.] I don’t think Modi’s… push against diversity in India is well known enough… I hope a lot of people read it… People in power, after all, know how dangerous linguists and linguistics can be. I hope that more learn (and support them).”
Michael writes: “I liked the Lake Tahoe piece [by Paige Williams] more than you did but maybe I've consumed less bear media. Good combination of local color, tech (bear mats), and politics even if it was a little long. I really couldn't stand the obvious baby metaphor in the robot feature [by James Somers].”
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