June 21, 2023

Last Week's New Yorker Review: June 26, 2023

Last Week’s New Yorker, week of June 26, 2023

Must-Read:

“Bitter Pill” - Gideon Lewis-Kraus asks whether A.L.S. patients are being helped or hurt by the FDA’s approval process. A slow-release capsule — I had to carefully edit my one-line summary to avoid revealing some key aspects of Lewis-Kraus’ topic which a close reader will guess from context but which aren’t explicitly revealed until nearly halfway through.1 But it’s not the sort of slow-burn that feels manipulative or over-manufactured. It’s more that Lewis-Kraus knows a newsier reverse-pyramid structure could make this story feel like the sort of purely test-based evidence that patients decry as missing the heart of the situation, while relying on individual profiles could do the opposite, overindexing on anecdotes. It takes a lot of craft and thought to weave the tale so that a reader gets many sides of the issue without feeling bombarded by perspectives, especially when they’re as fiery and as inherently sensitive as those of patients advocating for treatment. In fact, as good as it is, I wonder if this piece won’t suffer from how self-contained it is — it’s almost impossible to come up with a “take” that someone in the story doesn’t already hold. I’ll hold off on quotes, both so I don’t have to try to strain for analysis of my own, and so as to preserve the story’s careful arc. Pop pop, fizz fizz.

Window-Shop:

“Now You See It” - Kathryn Schulz asks: What is it with heists? The tale in The Art Thief, Michael Finkel’s new book on the titular Stéphane Breitwieser, reminded me of the wonderful story in this magazine on Vjeran Tomic, another French art thief with similar quirks. Breitwieser’s mentioned in that piece, and while he only gets a single line it contains a spoiler so massive Schulz elides it in this review, so watch out! Schulz can get away with a lot on the strength of her storytelling — the long section on heist narratives is hardly necessary, but it is fun — but ultimately the twice-removed stance from which she has to regard Breitwieser ends up sapping the actual thievery of most of its pizzazz. But regarding Finkel, in the final section, Schulz ups the élan, and delivers a rapid-fire psychological-deconstruction-cum-bibliographical-survey that leaves the walls spattered with ink.

“London Calling” - Helen Shaw packs a week abroad full of theater. An odd shape — three quick reviews, with one single-paragraph capsule tucked away in the middle. I was hoping the end would be a parade of single bites, which would be better than the overlong final review, which tries three times to characterize Mark Gatiss’ performance as John Gielgud, and strikes an entirely different tone each time. The first two reviews are better — Operation Mincemeat’s “wackadoodle merriment” that hides “emotional artillery,” and the new Guys and Dolls staging’s “fervent atmosphere” generated by a “rapt sea” of theatergoers, “herded this way and that by crew members costumed as New York City cops.”

“Nowheresville” - Anthony Lane dissects two new films’ nesting narratives, including the new Wes Anderson. Anderson’s penchant for “blatant tribute” to classic films is served well by Lane’s penchant for playing spot-the-reference. Unlike the locomotive in “Bad Day at Black Rock,” “Anderson’s train is ferrying avocados and a nice, ripe nuclear warhead.” Scarlett Johansson’s character, “lounging in her bath, one arm flung over the rim,” looks like “a Cold War reboot of ‘The Death of Marat,’ by Jacques-Louis David.” These aren’t the deepest cuts, but Lane renders them charming. It helps that the second film, “Maggie Moore(s),” sounds like a failed attempt at a similar trick — built-in compare-and-contrast.

“Out of Place” - Kamran Javadizadeh takes a journey to ‘here’ with Megan Fernandes. It seems like Dan Chiasson isn’t contributing poetry reviews anymore — I’m not sure if Javadizadeh is a permanent replacement or just a freelance fill-in. (The magazine has a storied history of not always officially announcing such things.) There are certain places where this review has the tentative subjectivity of a newcomer (one group of poems are “what I consider to be the book’s most moving,”) and the selected quotes didn’t activate for me, especially the erasure poem, which felt like an oversimplification, not the “messy swelter of ambivalence” Javadizadeh describes — where’s the mess, exactly? Elsewhere, though, are lovely exegeses, like when Javadizadeh describes how “a belief in ‘being lead’ also leaves behind a trail, and Fernandes studies the map she’s made… she wants to know whether… between the points of its global itinerary there exists something like a constellation.” The review is single-minded — it studies Fernandes’ whole book solely through this lens of place — but that ends up being its greatest strength, taking on a depth that is itself poetical.

“Show of Support” - Patricia Marx tries on the Army’s new bra. Goofy in the usual Marxian (Marxist?) way, with “Gadzooks!” and “(whoops)” throughout. The narrative can be summarized thus: The Army. Bureaucratic now, sexist then! (That could join their “yellow plastic crash barriers plastered with such aphorisms as ‘People First’ and ‘Winning Matters.’”) Many of the gags are whiffs, but it’s among Marx’s better recent efforts, possibly because there’s no room for excess consumerism, because it’s focused on something you couldn’t buy if you wanted to — at least until the military signs a distribution deal with Cuup.

“Role of a Lifetime” - Rachel Syme loves New York with Sarah Jessica Parker. I’ve never seen a second of Sex and the City or any of Jessica Parker’s mature work, so for me she’s still the love interest from LA Story (which she is excellent in.) All I can really do with a piece that presents her as, basically, charming in the manner of a rich actress who is also a friendly person, is shrug and say “seems about right.” From a technical perspective, this is a fine profile, with cute rhyming details and a solid shape. It doesn’t illuminate much about Jessica Parker as a person or as an actress, but I’m probably the problem.

Skip Without Guilt:

“The Pandemic Generation” - Alec MacGillis goes to Richmond, Virginia, where a school district considers lengthening its calendar. MacGillis spent most of the pandemic repeatedly and controversially calling for kids to come back to schools;2 now he turns to loudly and controversially calling for schools to expand their year to make up for so-called "learning loss." I have many criticisms to lodge, but I'll begin here: This piece contains zero quotes from students. Education reporting without student voices will simply never do them justice. Worse, MacGillis centers the voices of administrators and policy-pushers in order to strengthen his case that the school year should be lengthened. (He’s never really able to find teachers who’ll sell his idea.) It's worth noting that MacGillis never makes his viewpoint explicit, which actually bothers me more than if this piece was an editorial. As soon as he gets into facts and data, it's clear that we're getting the slice which best makes his case, ("the data generally show...") which is something he never admits. One of many such examples: At one school, keeping the traditional calendar "received the most votes, with higher support from white families than from Black ones," MacGillis writes. Of course, there are no actual numbers here, so if that "higher support" was a matter of a percentage point, or if the voting pool was tiny, we wouldn't know. The word "families" does almost as much work as the racial tag, in keeping with a system that, at every level, disenfranchises children while using rhetoric that pretends to empower them. 

In general, there's weirdness throughout the piece regarding race: Everyone Black has their race tagged, while the white characters remain raceless. It's a weird choice, and one that seems designed to tie MacGillis' favored policies to the Black neighborhoods they’d effect — to hedge against the obvious criticisms of putting Black students in school for longer than white ones.3

As much as I disagree with MacGillis' views, though, and as much as I think he skews the information he presents so as to make his conclusion obvious, I'll give him this: While he doesn't give as much space to opposing views, he presents them fairly and clearly. A"research professor of education policy" says, "How can you believe that less school is an intervention for learning recovery?" which MacGillis presents as a devastating punchline, but he later quotes teacher Melvin Hostman (the smartest person here) saying "they're taking the weird policymaker position that what we're doing isn't working, so we need to do more of it." That’s a solid counter. And despite repeatedly trying to make school board member Stephanie Rizzi look dumb (her argument that a vote for a year-round calendar was actually just to study a year-round calendar is meant to sound tricksy, but it’s often how local bureaucracies work in practice), MacGillis still allows her a closing monologue of sorts: "Working to standardize our kids at any point in their learning process is an artificial exercise. So we experienced this pandemic, and some of our students aren't performing as well from a standardized perspective. Characterizing it as learning loss looks at it from a deficit perspective. We should be looking at it as where we are now, and go from there." MacGillis chooses to close with a parent making the same point less eloquently and with more accidental irony, but it's Rizzi's words that stick with you.

Letters:

Michael rightly spotlights the Talk of the Town from last week, which concerns various renamings and repronunciations. It “was a great example of the low-stakes, half-serious investigations that sometimes make it into that section.” I agree — it did a good job weaving between various strands without getting lost, and was more interesting than the modern Talk format, which sticks to one plot. It felt like a welcome throwback to an era when Talks could look like pretty much anything.

Kit feels that Lauren Collins’ profile of Pilvi Takala should have done more to explain why Takala’s practice is different from that of “The Rehearsal / Nathan for You, Ziwe, or the Eric Andre Show, whose creators certainly all practice the art of awkwardness,” “works that are also uneasy-making, social norm-violating, not-exactly-pranks in which ‘normal’ people or celebrities are unwitting participants.” Going into this “would have made the article stronger... I don't think it's just the art world context that makes Takala's work high culture instead of the low or middlebrow culture of the televised examples I mentioned, but I'd like to hear what Collins thinks.” I agree! Kit also pointed out that the Disney-princess example, the opening anecdote of the profile, while “a very well-structured bit of comedy that also managed to reflect Takala's themes and approach,” doesn’t make much literal sense: “At least at the American Disney parks, it's very well-known that adults can't dress up in full costume. The hardcore Disney adults even came up with a term for dressing in outfits inspired by specific movies or characters without bending the rules: disneybounding… I just found that specific intervention by Takala to be a weak one to start with, given its obviousness and its predictable outcome.”

Finally, Dara Lind, a longtime immigration reporter at multiple venues, was kind enough to correct a few facts in my takedown of the misguided Dexter Filkins piece. I always appreciate an expert eye. If you read last week’s newsletter directly from the email, I’d recommend clicking through and rereading those paragraphs to see the parenthetical corrections.