Last Week’s New Yorker Review: July 1, 2024
Last Week’s New Yorker, week of July 1
"sometimes choir-boy-pure, sometimes huskier in tone."
Must-Read:
“Medieval Longing” - Alex Ross rides the mass transit of Guillame de Machaut. Machaut’s music is startlingly gorgeous, especially the rondeau Ross describes as having “rapturous complexity… the intertwining parts seem to waver between 3/4 time and 6/8 time, and syncopations enliven the texture… voices brushed against one another like roses swaying in a breeze.” Yeah… you said it! The quick bio isn’t surprising, exactly, but revealing Machaut as an early explorer of “ersatz selves” – an autofictionist of sorts – is fascinating. Ross touches on the move toward “considerable freedom of ornamentation and improvisation” which has been sweeping early-music performance, and shows how that can enliven de Machaut; one performance has “hints of classical Indian vocalism”. I appreciated the introduction, and it helps that de Machaut’s music is widely available so you can follow along with the lyrics Ross quotes. Say aah!
Window-Shop:
“The North Star” - Casey Cep shouts “Glory!” for Harriet Tubman. The books under review sound fascinating, one with “a spiritual texture not often encountered in narrative nonfiction” and the other that emphasizes the legacy Tubman was a part of and the help she received from a “long chain of brave individuals”. Strangely, although they both concern the same subject, Cep has trouble segueing from one to the other without some bumpiness; where we are in Tubman’s life is never totally clear, perhaps because neither book is a start-to-finish life story, so Cep declines to use a chronological frame. It might’ve been a good idea to do so anyway; there’s no need to try to capture narrative poeticism in such a short and otherwise straightforward review. Cep’s interest in Tubman’s faith as a motivating factor is novel enough to drive this review, though the “patriotism” she cites could use more unpacking. The history of radical forebears is always worth recounting – may we fly away in their slipstreams.
“Hero Ball” - Vinson Cunningham asks, Who’s the Boston? I appreciate the attempt at something new in the critics’ pages, a sort of sports-as-entertainment column. And I agree with every last one of Cunningham’s takes on the playoffs; he assesses the players’ styles and personas with acuity if not quite ease. (Tatum “rolls his eyes at himself, genially irritated, like a guy in accounting who put a crucial number into the wrong cell of a spreadsheet”, Doncic has “the feet of a dancer and a torso like a bag of wet cement”.) Unfortunately, he allocates his column space poorly and only really has time to run through three characters – the two above, and Kyrie Irving’s whole annoying deal. I was hoping for more on Boston’s role players, who are each fascinating – if your whole point is that Boston has depth but no star, it’s worth a more thorough rundown of that non-star depth. Cunningham’s question about a protagonist is a good one – it’s Doncic in a tragedy, I say, but barely – and I appreciate that Cunningham never stoops to include the analytics that have masticated so much sports commentary to a numerical pulp. (And I like analytics!) Here’s to more coverage of unscripted TV (the best kind) in the magazine.
“From Philly to Venice” (Talk of the Town) - Robert Sullivan is blown away by an efferves-centenarian. Deeply groovy.
“John Fetterman’s War” - Benjamin Wallace-Wells bootlicks Bibi with the be-hoodied, bullheaded bureaucrat. It’s an open question whether it’s worth giving Fetterman such long, indulgent coverage primarily because he’s taken a disgustingly obstinate position that reveals his enmity to progressives. But Wallace-Wells delivers a fairly withering assessment that isn’t afraid to paint Fetterman as profoundly cynical and morally self-serving. There isn’t too much here that a reader wouldn’t have inferred from viral clips of Fetterman’s aggressive pro-genocide posturing, but Wallace-Wells shapes the story like a cresting wave, with Fetterman’s phoniness and cruelty revealing itself bit by bit. I think the story is fair (I’d be interested to know if any readers to my right agree) and it’s not as though there’s an obvious bombshell here that would hurt Fetterman; Wallace-Wells’ main object is to imply that a combination of the sunk-cost fallacy and a desire to posture as centrist to the mythical suburban soccer mom is responsible for Fetterman’s newfound extremism. (Whether it’s a winning issue is less clear.) In either case: I can’t believe I phone-banked for this schmuck.
“The Taiwan Tangle” - Ian Buruma rewrites the island nation’s “bad history”. For once, the text Buruma is addressing is so obviously misguided that we find ourselves on the same side of an issue. The idea that we need to protect Taiwan with weapon stockpiles and Top Gun-esque warrior-ethos propaganda is obviously wrongheaded, without “any sense of politics or history”. So Buruma spends most of this piece just patiently outlining that history, something he does very well, with crisp clarity despite a broad sweep. A reader who’s largely familiar with the country’s politics probably won’t learn much, but I’m not that reader; I appreciated the refresher. There’s no need at all for the last three paragraphs, which strain to tie in the threat of Trump. Other than that, Buruma tells it to you strait.
Skip Without Guilt:
“Best Inbreed” - Alexandra Horowitz enters pupperreality. An examination of dog cloning which gestures toward ethics and philosophy but doesn’t quite have the courage to assert an ethical framework of its own. The cloning process is certainly icky, and Horowitz, a dog scientist, doesn’t shy away from disturbing details – uterus surgeries, birth defects, beagles in tiny cages. But if Horowitz is going to interview Jessica Pierce, she could at least gesture towards Pierce’s broader argument, that the ethical foundations under which we keep pets at all are shakier than we’d prefer to acknowledge. Horowitz says that it’s “possible to see dog cloning as merely an extension of what is already a bizarre and highly unnatural process”, but she only uses this argument to excuse cloning. The objectification that renders cloning permissible saturates many other aspects of pet ownership, and by framing it as just an eerie aberration, Horowitz doesn’t do her story justice. Her clunky conclusion, that “dogs are now the objects of both our salutary and our pernicious impulses”, feels dashed-off and almost meaningless. (How long is that “now”, even?) Horowitz could’ve taken it around the block a few more times.
“Doc Hollywood” - Zach Helfand ties ligaments with celeb surgeon Neil ElAttache. Hits one note again and again. Here’s a celebrity, here’s an injury they suffered, here’s how much they loved ElAttache’s attentiveness and care… and now they’re friends with him. “[Tom] Brady now considers him a close friend.” Ed Ruscha: “‘He’s just been a real friend ever since.’”1 Arnold Schwarzenegger: “‘[ElAttache] is at your house checking in, he is at your first physical-therapy appointments.’” If you’re still amused by the thin novelty that a lot of celebrities hang out in the same circles and rely on the same small group of talented helpers, this might work for you. Other than that, there isn’t much here. ElAttache seems to be a man with no great depths, which is about what you want in a surgeon (the more complex the psyche, the shakier the hands, no?) but certainly not in a profile subject. The speedy Aaron Rogers recovery would be a good hook if the Packers hadn’t been shut out of the playoffs before he could make his return. But is mere acquaintance with fame enough to make a person compelling? I’m tendon to think not.
“Unholy Trinity” - Justin Chang has a three-body problem with Yorgos Lanthimos’ anthology film. I’m inclined to agree with Chang about Lanthimos’ “self-admiring nastiness” being hard to stomach without much reward. I admire his auteurism in theory, but I’m repulsed by his misanthropy in practice. (At least when he’s working with a budget. “Dogtooth” is great.) Still, Chang in a bad mood is having no fun, and his puns are at their most egregious, as if to compensate. Why this review made the magazine over his mixed-to-negative Inside Out 2 review, which was more engaged and, for better or worse, concerned a movie with a larger cultural footprint, I can’t say. Maybe a better question is why his galvanizing rave review of Green Border won’t appear in print. That film could use the press, and Chang’s review is full of detail, conscious of the film’s formal qualities, its politics, and its place in the director’s body of work. It’s a review that only Chang could write. Whereas anyone could pen this pan-thimos.
“Growing Pains” - Rachel Monroe pays a visit to the Gilbert Goons’ quad. Very, very iffy. Monroe wants us to hear the word “gang” and imagine true coordination, but her only evidence comes from, basically, nosy neighbors and the cops. The sense I get is of a crowd of violent white teens of the sort you’d find almost anywhere, who happen to have shared a group chat with a posturing name. That’s probably enough for the government to classify them as a gang, sure, but it doesn’t inherently speak to any broad coordination behind the deadly attack on Preston Lord. So why is this a story? I’d guess it’s because these teens are “mostly but not entirely white and wealthy”, living in gated sprawl instead of an inner city. But does this actually make their story any more telling than the equivalent narrative, written about a Black gang? Monroe tries to split the difference between condemning these teens as suburban superpredators and attributing their violence to their stultifying environment. The equivalent arguments were racist when they were applied to Black urban teens, but they were also ridiculous and wildly oversimplified. Monroe beats the first charge, but not the next two. All this matters: The fear of crime can be an incredible political motivator, one virtually always harnessed by authoritarians. Monroe publishes paragraph-long quotes of moms venting, implicitly or explicitly, about how the police ought to have been more aggressive in their approach to youth crime. She never points to the many issues with hyper-aggressive prevention, a sign of which is staring her in the face: She mentions that a member of the Goons directly involved in Lord’s death had attended an abusive troubled-teen center, a place explicitly marketed as a solution to youth crime. Maybe that’s where this story should begin.
Letters:
Michael responded to my question asking what magazines would publish something like Paige Williams’ eel-fishing longread, giving two suggestions: The Dial and Bloomberg Businessweek, the latter recently home to an Andrew Lewis piece on king-crab fishing. He adds: “It's a shame [that magazine is] going monthly. As a onetime subscriber to what I started calling Entertainment Biweekly I can see where this is heading.”
Heather agrees that Helen Shaw’s review of The Welkin was, as usual, very strong. “Two quintessential Shaw moments in this review: 1. The meditation on the reason for using “welkin” only once. 2. The skin-crawling final line/image.” Regarding my critique that Shaw is vague about a “long-building fear”, she writes, “Maybe it seemed too obvious to her, given everything that’s happened for women and medicine in the last few years, including #metoo, the backlash, and the repeal of Roe — but if it seems obvious, why not push for complexity and nuance?”
Tunes for your scroll.
The words friend, friends, or friendly are used twenty times.
Agree, Doc Hollywood was a waste of words and time. Pointless article.