Last Week’s New Yorker, week of February 9

“Genet asked one European trainee what kind of revolutionary regime should take over Jordan. ‘One based on the Situationists, for instance’ was the answer.“

Must-Reads:

“The Enemy of my Enemy” (Books) - Thomas Meaney says Palestinian militants were like a Baader from another mother. Cogent, speedy, nuanced, visceral; the magazine’s model of book review at its best. I was only vaguely aware of the connections between Palestine and the R.A.F; to be honest, I mostly think of the German group as the intellectual’s equivalent of the number 23. I appreciate that Meaney doesn’t condescend by moralizing about violent tactics or aiming at too-broad targets; his assessment, in line with that of the book he’s reviewing (by Jason Burke), is that this very moralizing, tied to the now-normalized villainization of terrorist tactics, was the key tactic of the state-sponsored authoritarians. Eventually, Israel defeated these forces in Lebanon, but they’d already undermined their ideology. I think Meaney could stand to be more specific about why Khomeini’s Islamism was ready to fill the gap left by the P.F.L.P. – perhaps just a matter of its pre-existing infrastructure, so often the secret weapon of religious causes? But this is the sort of précis so detail-dense that to unpack it fully would be to write the book it’s reviewing. Yet Meaney keeps things understandable with a minimum of outside research required; you’ll get a lot out of this even if you don’t know hijack-squat.

“The Bad Place” (The Theatre) - Emily Nussbaum sees code red. I worried last time that Nussbaum might pull punches; here, she slices jugulars. To be fair, An Ark is so obviously a bad-faith exercise in thin writing, cut costs, and celebrity that the critics have each been basically auditioning for a Cutco ad; I think Nussbaum takes it, calling the show “blander” than a “D.M.V. express”, its “spiritual co-op boards” providing the “damp spirit of woo” – “a webinar with a staring contest”. She also makes time to shout out my show-of-the-year-so-far, the ecstatic-absurdist movement piece Friday Night Rat Catchers: It gave her “a stronger kick”. There’s a reference to Pluribus, and the shorter Data review references Mountainhead, suggesting Nussbaum still feels like a TV critic training for a new gig; still, while I often find cross-medium equivalences reductive, these are expertly chosen; Nussbaum cleverly uses them to show us what the theater pieces aren’t quite aiming for, not just to provide the popular equivalent of the niche product. Her closing exegesis of an opening game of Ping-Pong – it’s Pong, it’s debate, it’s “the fantasy of a tech job with… a cozy game room” – is itself a serve.

Window-Shop:

“Odd Job” (Books) - Katy Waldman riffs on schedule. Even when writing a largely positive review of a book she can’t convincingly praise, Waldman’s clarity carries the day. I’m not sure if Poppick’s point, which “isn’t that everything matters; it’s that anything might”, is insight or banality, but Waldman convincingly argues that this dichotomy is at the heart of the message; that the diarrhetic-diary form can be a way of resisting the death-cult concision of capital, which barely attends to the music the copywriter – or anyone “plying a bullshit job” – smuggles in; the secret life of trash. (“Mimes in the Afternoon on Friday Night”.) Whether Poppick’s argument is useful or even convincing is besides the point; it sings, and that’s enough.

🗣️ “Mutual Aid” (Minneapolis Postcard) - Emily Witt unloads. Sure, I knew the story from the news – people and schools delivering groceries to families targeted by ICE; communities banding together – but getting the names and details still left me rending cloth.

“The Chapman House” (Personal History) - Jill Lepore finally sees what it means to be living. An extremely heartfelt diary entry from Lepore, not approaching or aiming for the devastation of her previous such outing, but instead providing a brief, soft consideration of the joys of shitty communal living amongst young artists. Despite a good number of lefty name-drops, the piece never turns political; Lepore doesn’t even really consider the radical implications of communality. Instead, this is entirely a study of youth, messy and miraculous, forming itself.

🗣️ “Golden Ticket” (Make a Wish Dept.) - Sarah Grant wins and places a show. Survivor is my favorite cultural product of all time, and Grant, on location, does justice to its inimitable lunatic-humanist gusto.

“Murder Most Wordle” (Shouts & Murmurs) - Anthony Lane cries vowel. SUPER WITTY; GREEN LIGHT.

Remnick on Behrman (Takes) - The capper to Takes is mostly interesting as a David Remnick diary; he struggles to get writers to embark on “comic reported pieces” and advertises the updates to the magazine’s archives. (OCR has come a long way, baby.) There’s too much preamble to declaim a point of view on the piece he picks: A recurring issue for this temporary feature. Still, it’s been fun!

“Under the Leather” (The Current Cinema) - Justin Chang subs in. I’m of two minds on adaptations which take texts full of troublesome, even criminal queer sexuality, and update them to fit the morays of our age, thereby both reclaiming and declawing these formative stories. I’m glad Chang mentions these divergences, even if his usual wry jokes read too much as deflection of discomfort in these circumstances. (The Sister Act bit excepted: Both films include “…the private rituals of a niche subculture, whose devotees perform unquestioning acts of service while dutifully garbed in black”. Props.) Chang says the film “deviates, significantly and generously”, from the novel; of course, that generosity assumes a particular recipient. Which of its loads might be refused?

🗣️ “Teen Titan” (Rookie Dept.) - Sarah Larson rinks true. The rook is charming!! I may have to start watching hockey. Go Islanders.

“The Murdoch Method” (A Critic at Large) - Andrew O’Hagan assesses the suck session. The book under review appears to be a serviceable recap of a story you likely already know: Murdoch strung along his family then sold the rug out from under them. O’Hagan wants to fill in the backstory with lots of British wit: Murdoch’s tabloids, where “his editors proved that sleaze and propaganda were profitable journalistic partners”, helped shape our psychic landscape in the ‘80s just as much as the more obviously omnipresent Fox News did in the aughts. O’Hagan hardly discusses the book’s insights into the more recent past; they get shunted to a final section that’s mostly about the conspiracy-addled son Lachlan. Abandoned by its core constituency for insufficient fealty toward Trump, Fox News now founders, but O’Hagan, in blaming this on its malignancy, is getting the order of operations confused.

“The Long Game” (Profiles) - Nathan Heller wins some with Newsom. It’s a testament to Heller’s gift for prose that he makes this readable and even fun despite it functioning as a gigantic chunk of apologia for Newsom’s brand of no-vision, no-character politics. It’s incredibly difficult to imagine a world in which voters are drawn to Newsom, or even one in which they, en masse, pick him as the best of bad options. (He’s not even the best-positioned of the radical-centrist crew.) And do we really need to be getting these assessing-the-field pieces quite so early in the election cycle? If he’s actually, as the lede asserts, “one of the Democrats’ best hopes for pulling together a shattered country”, you’d think he could do something about it before Trump starts his campaign. Something other than lobbing softballs at an assortment of fascists so as to cement his image as a moderate, that is. Whatever; you don’t need me or Heller to tell you that the screw-top wine mogul, who is somewhere between an authentic yuppie and a man pretending to be a yuppie for social capital, is a slimy character. Heller tries to pitch his punitive replacement of cash welfare with means-tested services as an early attempt at pragmatism; it is obviously the opposite of pragmatic, entirely concerned with appearances over results, but whatever. The piece becomes a litany of minor scandal and ineffective victory; to be fair, there are few ambitious politicians with long careers who don’t have that sort of track record. Newsom is an empty suit, but I’ll give him this: he’s a busy empty suit.

Skip Without Guilt:

“Deepfaking Orson Welles” (Brave New World Dept.) - Michael Schulman gets trapped in Ambersons. Anyone who gives A.I. tools authorial credit for A.I-assisted visual effects is falling for marketing, no matter how critical of the product they may be. Like the Sphere’s Wizard of Oz, this project will necessarily be the result of intense amounts of human labor, so all Saatchi’s prattling about A.I. being the future of narrative is obviously incoherent, and Schulman doesn’t push back nearly hard enough. (Note also that Saatchi was saying exactly the same thing about VR goggles a matter of months ago.) Sinners made superb use of exactly the same technology for its central twin effect, but there was no need to pitch that as an A.I. character, or whatever, because Michael B. Jordan is a star, he agreed to the use of his image, and – most importantly – the film was directed with vision. Now, none of this means that the Ambersons project is creatively bankrupt, only that Saatchi is overselling it so outrageously it’s little wonder that everyone is up in arms. What this really is is a meticulous, high-budget recreation of the Ambersons scenes, using state-of-the-art effects. That’s still a deeply ironic project, as Schulman notes, given that Ambersons (though it’s as much an anti-nostalgia movie as a nostalgia movie) is a film about the cruel destruction of the old at the altar of the new, but the only reason to sell it primarily as an A.I. project is if your interest is actually just in manufacturing consent for A.I. art. I think that’s exactly what Saatchi really cares about; he wants us to accept “‘a world where we’re not the only creative species, and that we will enjoy entertainment created by A.I.s’”, but in fact there is zero demonstration of creativity desired here: Even minor details like the expression on a woman’s face or the way a man picks up a briefcase will be modeled after humans and meticulously tweaked, as is made clear. So the tool is being used correctly but described incorrectly, for what are clearly political reasons, and not only does Schulman not push back, he doesn’t seem to notice. This piece is fun, but that’s just not good journalism.

“To Build a Fire” (A Reporter at Large) - Joshua Yaffa counts Russia’s disposable-agents income. Virtually this entire piece is a very drawn-out anecdote about a minor arson attack at an IKEA in Vilnius. We’re meant to care because it demonstrates a new tactic: Russia finds recent immigrants who are young, broke, and malleable, and recruits them into acts of espionage. Why is Russia doing this? Yaffa waves desperately toward various ominous possibilities before concluding that they’re probably just doing it as a vague diversion from some other, worse thing. It’s like a shaggy-dog joke, but apparently not deliberately enervating. After reams and reams of minor detail, it’s quite a fizzle, especially because a quote from a “European intelligence chief” implies something similar far earlier: “‘The goal is clear… Heighten tensions or cause cracks within society or, at least, create the image of such a thing.’” But is that goal in any way clear?! (Usually, clear goals don’t need to be caveated before the sentence is done.) Isn’t it also possible that Russia is just seeing what they can get away with, regardless of the results? Or producing directionless chaos that they might later be able to take advantage of? Yaffa gets tangled up in unanswerable questions of intent, and never makes the case that this story matters outside of that intent. Pointing out the smoke doesn’t help fight the fire.

Letters:

Does the magazine itself not have a letters page anymore??! Michael B. points out it’s been missing for weeks. Heaven forfend!

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