Last Week’s New Yorker Review: February 5, 2024
Last Week’s New Yorker, week of February 5
"It's like if you take a fifty-year-old car, in pristine condition, out of the garage and start using it on your long daily commute."
Huzzah! Last week we gained more paid subscribers than any prior week in the newsletter's history – We're up to 26 new paid subscribers, which means Fiction reviews will begin running next week! To celebrate, I bought the custom URL lastweeksnewyorker.com, which now redirects to the main sign-up page. Tell your friends! Just for fun: If I get three or more new paid subscribers this week, I will also register lastweeksnewyorker.review!
It's ambitious, but if we can add 14 more paid subscribers by the end of Feb, I'll also start reviewing the online-only "Weekend Essay." (If we get really close, I still might.) Want to help? You can subscribe at this link! If we don't get there, I'll still consider this pledge drive a smashing success. Thanks for helping me weather the storm of replatforming.
Oh and BTW: Buttondown has comments now! You can click through and post down there or reply to this email directly, either way is great.
Must-Read:
"Democracy in Darkness" - Masha Gessen can't imagine an end to the war in Ukraine. This is primarily just an update on the situation in Ukraine, which feels increasingly strained as it becomes clear there is no path to substantive victory. But Gessen focuses less on military strategy or individual drama than on a higher-level political view of the country as it wrestles between its Democratic principles and their occasional practical inefficiency in times of war. Gessen explores this all clearly, with nuance and proper, but not indulgent, historical background. An anecdote about a pre-war political dinner serves as an elegant demonstration of, first, the Euro airs Ukraine put on (the "lavish, performatively progressive affair" in the main room) and later, the behind-the-scenes "patronal network" with its own set of rules for the "wealthy and the well connected" ("a separate room" with steak, wine, and no "'vegan shit.'") The piece is newsy, so Gessen's tight thematic focus is necessary to keep things engaging, but there's still room for more than just politician voices. Ordinary citizens certainly have their own stances on the war and their country, and Gessen finds the points of conflict – "Those who have stayed in the country often have little patience for Ukrainians abroad," but a central character's brother, an injured veteran and child refugee, is "'grateful to the people who left Ukraine and took their kids... as I am grateful to my father, who brought me here at the age of five so that I didn't see as much war as I could have.'" That packs a punch.
Window-Shop:
"A Slippery Slope" - Sheelah Kolhatkar goes adrift at a lavish ski complex in can't-get-there-from-here Vermont. I was hooked by the EB-5 visa investigation – the Kushner high-rise next door here in scenic Jersey City was going to be funded by those until the impolitic pitch referenced here made them think better of it. That background flowers into a fun crime story, one without too-tidy lessons. Stenger's (possibly put-on) obliviousness is compelling; his ignorance reveals something about the highly contingent nature of attention: Truly, we don't see what we don't want to see. I could live without the strained connection to political polarization; there are plenty of other hooks and that one's neither revealing nor pertinent. Perhaps it's an attempt to raise the stakes, which do feel low – the wealthy conning the wealthy, sometimes to the temporary benefit of regular folk – but I'm not convinced low stakes are a bad thing here. Light and fluffy snow is exactly what we're after.
"Post-Apocalypse Now" - Alex Ross finds discord and discordance in contemporary Ukrainian music. Impossible not to read this as an artsy addendum to the Gessen piece; it revolves around an identical theme, that the war's bleakness has fully absorbed Ukrainian life. Ross expresses optimism ("All this music suggests a will to create that may outlast the will to destroy") that only heightens the tragic stakes of the earlier piece; they're best read back-to-back. And props for covering an opera not at The Met. This isn't Ross' flashiest piece stylistically, but he surveys a lot of work without anything feeling like it's gotten short shrift.
"Depth of Field" - Helen Shaw gets festy. I so wish the magazine would create a space for Shaw to blurb shows as soon as she sees them. (Especially since X is no longer a hospitable home for such things.) What's the point of sending her to nineteen festival productions if it just results in a montage that mentions only four? Compare to Sara Holdren at Shaw's old home, who filed lengthy and fantastic weekly reports. I was too put off by that to really enjoy the second section; the first, though, is a sparkling recommendation for the fantastic-sounding Public Obscenities. Shaw's untangling of Chowdhury the writer from Chowdhury the director is especially skillful. But I must admit, reader – I'm seeing the show on Saturday and didn't want to be too spoiled, so I skimmed. Gasp!
"The Mail" - Three spot-on letters.
"Mad, Conceited, Ridiculous" - Merve Emre sees what makes Margaret Cavendish romantick. Your enjoyment will be directly proportional to your ability to tolerate lots of seventeenth-century spelling and grammar – surely it wasn't twee at the time, but it does read as such now. That doesn't benefit Cavendish's work, which already smacks of whimsy – though Emre's case for it is serious, and thoughtful. Which doesn't mean it's quite convincing; when Emre claimed that a passage about how microscopes must be distorting knives and needles "cast a spell," I scoffed – I get the same illicit thrill from rejecting science as anyone else, but the magic didn't resonate. Emre can write, but this piece never took off for me – while the Duchess is quite a character, I wanted more exploration of her lineage, not just proclamations that she was often the first. How did what followed proceed from the trails she blazed?
Skip Without Guilt:
"Burn Notice" - Elizabeth Kolbert attends Earth's fire sale. Largely redundant with M.R. O'Connor's gripping piece on firefighting from only a year and a half ago – even the spot art is nearly identical. Kolbert's book survey essentially acts as a heady addendum to the more visceral reported coverage in O'Connor's piece, and if you read it as such, it serves a decent purpose, filling in gaps – though there wasn't much new information for me. Read on its own, in any case, it's paltry, more interested in what Earth's current era will be called (Pyrocene or Petrocene – same difference) than in elucidating the human stakes of the issue at hand. I maintain that Kolbert's strength is dynamic first-person reportage; her recent string of literature surveys (confusingly filed as features) is seriously misbegotten.
"Prometheus Bound" - Akash Kapur keeps pressing Control. A really odd exploration of internet regulation, this piece seems in retrospect to be primarily invested in a late-breaking apologia for a really troubling Indian policy. Before that, there's a lot of fairly slow-moving background on the eternal fight between government and private industry over control of the web – Kapur mostly advocates for everyone to slow down and take lots of deep breaths, which squares with his general anti-utopian political perspective. I don't find his perspective convincing, but his history is mostly fine, and I like the inclusion of Cory Doctorow's instantly iconic term "enshittification." But he then delves into a long discussion of a China-supported "New I.P." policy that would apparently do something bad – Kapur doesn't really explain what, I guess we're just meant to be spooked by seeing China and Iran in the same sentence – followed by an even longer section lavishing praise on the Indian "digital stack," a national I.D. system which links a citizen's "iris scans and fingerprints" to their ability to "make online payments, receive welfare, conduct banking, and certify official documents." This is meant to be a "possibly less toxic" foundation on which to build web services. It sounds to me like dangerous authoritarian bullshit; whether Kapur likes it because he's a capitalist or because he's a Modhi Bhakt is unclear, but his waving away of "perceptions of an erosion in the country's civil liberties" is pretty horrifying either way. Kapur has a taste for insidious phrases like that; see also a Euro-regulated internet that's "perhaps less innovative" or a warning against the never-articulated "costs of reflexive statism." Everything has that sheen of plausible deniability, but the closer you read the grosser it all gets.
"The Next Scene" - John Seabrook tunes into music exec Lucian Grange. I'm not sure which is worse: The ultra-soft-focus profile of a totally ordinary bigwig or the ultra-credulous coverage of his A.I. swing. Neither section works, and the latter feels sweatily grafted onto the former – it's clear Grange is more excited by the potential of Afrobeat (rightfully so! I'd rather read that article. [^1])
My criticisms of the A.I. stuff are starting to get repetitive, though I will highlight one spectacularly false dichotomy Seabrook presents: "Is a new era of musical invention at hand, or will A.I. cripple human creativity?" This is just more boom-or-doom stupidity that feeds into a hype machine with fascistic components – and yes, I linked to the same three things a few months ago in my review of Stephen Witt's Nvidia piece. Everything else is in the same vein, and no better.
In theory, the Grainge profile could still succeed, but it's awfully hard to make a record executive come across as a likeable figure, though Seabrook strains a few muscles trying. There's a reason they've been B-movie villains from Phantom of the Paradise to The Chipmunks – their whole job is taking one of our purest forms of art and repackaging it as diet soda. (If you think that analogy is strained, wait until you hear a few of Grainge's.) This all becomes especially egregious when Seabrook lets Grainge make the case that, actually, the policies he's supported under which Spotify will just not pay most of the musicians on their platform (anyone with under a thousand streams) and instead will funnel that money to major labels... make sense, and are fair. He never manages it; it's just too transparent that the real motive is feeding his behemoth at the expense of the little fellow. That's generally a theme here; I'm sure Grainge has good taste in much the same way I'm sure The Blob digests only the nicest people.
Letters:
Heidi writes in regarding a convoluted turn of phrase in Rachel Syme's article on Sofia Coppola, which said Paris Hilton's mansion had "a 'night-club room' equipped with a dancer’s pole": "I was struck by the use of 'dancer's pole' instead of the more common 'stripper pole.' [The magazine] doesn't avoid 'stripper pole' – for example, in [Carrie Battan's review of Lil Nas X's Montero.] Truly no idea about this choice of phrasing, particularly in the context of Paris Hilton's party room. This wasn't a gym! It was an intentionally louche and tacky environment! Even so, I believe the more common alternative term is 'dance pole.' All this did was make me question reality.
"But then! We have the insane addition of the quoted and hyphenated 'night-club room' – why are quotation marks needed here?! Who are we quoting? This is not an allegation. Anyone can Google 'Paris Hilton house stripper pole' and see plenty of listings."
Regarding Leslie Jamison's personal history, Susan writes: "...Wow, am I glad she’s not my mother/spouse/teacher/person speaking at my wedding – on the topic of marriage, no less. So she had a baby, and has to nurse it and change diapers. Big deal. This piece left me angry and dispirited."
She continues: "It’s worth seeking out the online version of [Alexandra Schwartz's] tribute to Joan Acocella, because of the wonderful photographs. I will miss her. I know nothing much about dance, but could listen to her think about dance with such pleasure. And I was always amazed at her erudition and insight when writing about so many other subjects - a rare gem." I couldn't agree more.
Michael "found it interesting contrasting the personal details" from Neima Jahromi's Acocella postscript (also excellent) and the Leslie Jamison piece. "Especially in context of the recent Conde Nast and New Yorker layoffs, a world where a critic might live 'in a big, woody loft north of Union Square' is long gone." Speaking from my small, bricky non-loft well west of Manhattan... he's got a point there.
He also presents a complement to D.T. Max's cave-woman piece; another cave survival piece on Chilean miners by Héctor Tobar. "Maybe I'm just a sucker for long form cave articles."
Meave Gallagher pointed out that many outlets outside the U.S. have been covering the ongoing Israeli murder of journalists, including Al Jazeera, Novara Media, and Owen Jones at The Guardian and elsewhere. Still: "It’s shameful that US-based outlets aren’t saying much, considering how enormously they all kicked off over Jamal Kashoggi — Deserved! Still mad at Biden for getting all palsy-walsy with MBS! — But where was that industrywide energy for US citizen Shireen Abu Akleh’s murder, or the fact that the IDF bulldozed her memorial in Jenin in late October last year? It’s pretty vile."
Regarding Sedaris' latest personal history, she says he's "been absolutely pickling in his own juices for years; let’s not forget his 'bonbon' for Bari Weiss['s outlet The Free Press]... about how coddled Kids These Days are. My mother was a huge fan of his like 20 years ago; she’s long since given up reading him because 'he’s not wistful anymore, just bitter, like he regrets his own success or something. It’s ugly.'"
Our prior platform would auto-generate a call-to-action subscribe button at the bottom of each newsletter; in the absence of that, I keep forgetting to include one. But forget no more: You can click here to subscribe! (BTW – if you're having any technical issues subscribing, shoot me an email; I don't mind, and may be able to help!)
[^1] This is my favorite pop song in quite a while.