Last Week's New Yorker Review: January 20
Last Week’s New Yorker, week of January 20c
“‘it’s really quite futile to fight fires with the hose at your house.’”
Must-Read:
The best thing in the magazine this week is Han Ong’s short story “Ming”, covered in the weekend special, but in the interest of choosing something nonfictional I’ll go with:
“At Drawdown” (Talk of the Town) - Emily Witt flames out. Non-political breaking-news coverage hardly ever makes the print pages, but this is a worthy exception, and Witt’s on-the-ground, human-centered reporting strikes a good balance between the cockeyed style of its front-pages and the seriousness of the topic.
Window-Shop:
“The Poison Machine” - Ruth Margalit takes off her red MAGAL hat. Kinda funny that Margalit’s online pieces are like “Israel is sobbing today after an astonishing six of its citizens were killed” and her in-the-magazine pieces are like “‘I hate Arabs,’ snickered the evil Netanyahu-worshipper, fascistly.” It’s in line with the viewpoint of the twenty or so remaining left-of-center Israelis, but the cognitive dissonance required is almost inspiring. I can only judge what’s in front of me, and her pieces on the most dastardly of Israel’s fascists are very good reportage. Magal is so odious it’s unpleasant to have to spend even a moment considering him, especially when he’s summed up so easily and accurately as “Israel’s Tucker Carlson” – on the verge of the partial ceasefire, though, it’s probably worth taking a moment to recall just how evil these fuckers are – it’s obvious that if it were up to them, the hostages would die to serve as justification to kill a few more Palestinians.
“Zora Neale Hurston’s Chosen People” - Louis Menand gets a Herod, cut. Hurston’s unpublished Herod novel is obviously unreadable, and while I suppose it’s sort of funny to gape at the ample block quotes Menand provides, it feels pretty pointless. Hurston’s book on Moses sounds more compelling, and her ideas about him are complicated – so it’s a shame that Menand rushes past all that to get to his ending, which predictably brings up Hurston’s troubling cultural conservatism. The magazine discusses Hurston with surprising regularity, and tends to hit similar beats; Casey Cep reviewed the newly published Barracoon, which Menand mentions, and tried to make it a hidden centerpiece of Hurston’s work; Lauren Michele Jackson recently addressed her politics as seen through a collection of essays; a ‘90s piece by Claudia Roth Pierpont touching on all that and more was highlighted in an archival newsletter a few years ago. She’s a productively complicated figure, I suppose; Menand, this time around, hasn’t unveiled much – every writer has weird, failed projects, and the connection between her view of the Jews and her dismissal of civil rights is totally tentative. It’s still compelling, and it’s a story I knew nothing about – so why not read yet more Hurstonallia?
“Fear and Loathing” - Elizabeth Kolbert says all harm, all foul. An excellent opening anecdote, and Kolbert obviously knows it, since it’s over a third of the word count here despite being only tentatively related to the book under review, and despite most of its length consisting of scene-setting and meandering. Eventually Kolbert gets to it; yet another pop-psychological book that blames everything on one thing – here, that morality is ultimately based on harm. It’s less that I think this is false than that I think it’s pretty obvious, and pretty widely understood; do we really need a book to articulate a commonplace? If our morals are ultimately intuitive, perhaps the real question is, so what then? Gray is optimistic, for reasons that Kolbert doesn’t articulate; Kolbert is doomerish, as usual – but about what? Is the goal to change minds, to change policy, to balance how we protect our various ideas of the vulnerable? It seems that half the quandary is going unspoken, and that we won’t get any closer to a solution until we know what exactly the question is.
“Make Him Laugh” - Susan Morrison unmasks the Lorne ranger. A pretty stock-standard profile of Michaels, this prints the legend – and mostly gets that legend from the people who’ve worked for Lorne; the man himself says nothing revelatory, and the drama is all industry, no psychology. What makes him tick? You won’t really find out. But it’s a highly enjoyable read nonetheless, because, as it turns out, if you interview a bunch of comedians, you’ll get a bunch of funny quotes. I chuckled throughout, and I’d certainly rather read this, which spends a long time rehashing the early days of SNL, than watch that misbegotten Jason Reitman flick about much the same thing. But this is itself the Snickers bar it describes SNL as – it goes down easy, but it won’t fill you up.
Skip Without Guilt:
“On a Mission from God” - Alec MacGillis won’t vouch for the movement to fund religious schools by draining public schools. Very dry and very unsurprising; MacGillis found some old notes in which the religious right secretly coordinated to create a twisted system of school vouchers, something that’s pretty obvious from the way they subsequently openly coordinated to create that system. And MacGillis doesn’t miss the chance to shoehorn in some gripes about pandemic school closures, which never seem as pertinent as he thinks. If you need explicit proof that this extended scheme was a scheme and not a series of accidents, MacGillis provides it; at times, though, it feels like he’s outraged that right-wingers are doing politics. Maybe the lesson is more simply that scheming and being cutthroat can get results, and that the good guys should try some of that once in a while. There’s a parallel thread about a heroic Black politician who ultimately couldn’t do much to stop the voucher movement; her outrage is obviously MacGillis’ too, but whether her story is dramatically necessary in the context of the piece, I’m less sure. The reader doesn’t need quite so much nudging to realize how fucked-up the voucher system is. If you want the hard proof, though, MacGillis provides it, and if the facts didn’t surprise me, the raw numbers did, a bit – my god is the state paying out the nose, funding Christian education based around questions like, “‘How should we plan for teaching knowing that humans are inherently corrupt?’” As far as corruption, I suppose it takes one to know one.
“Odd Jobs” - Inkoo Kang shows a lack of per-Severance. If Kang was one of the few who didn’t love season one, finding it “intolerably slow”, it’s odd that she structures this review as a laundry list of things that have gotten worse between the seasons – mainly that the show is more about “ethical” conundrums than “emotional” ones. But it does seem as though Kang’s issue is that it’s not the show she wants to be watching; whether it’s succeeding at what it’s going for is less important than whether it’s going for what Kang wants. That kind of criticism can work, I think, if you’re a writer with a great deal of verve and style. Insert meaning-freighted pause.
“Tabula Rasa” - John McPhee is self-conscious about his great rack. I much prefer McPhee in grumpy old man mode than McPhee in self-satisfied old man mode. This collection, unfortunately, tends toward the latter: McPhee bikes, plays Spelling Bee, looks at trees and smiles. Mostly, it’s fine, if lightweight – but the central story, in which McPhee gives a truly astonishing amount of detail about his fancy swimming pool renovation and how cool it was, truly feels like you’ve been cornered at a party by your parents’ annoying friend who’s had too much to drink. Great to meet you, John, I think my friend needs me…
Letters:
I mean, I didn’t really give you enough time to write in, did I? But Michael B. still slipped a note saying that the Anthony Gottlieb Gottfried Liebnitz piece (say that ten times fast) “really sold it on being a read for me. Right level of interesting details to get me excited for it.”
etaoin
shrdlu