Last Week’s New Yorker Review: June 17, 2024
Last Week’s New Yorker, week of June 17
"scheming generals, poison vials, and Albanians parachuting to certain death."
Must-Read:
“Everything in Hand” - Daniel Immerwahr does some empire state-building with the C.I.A. From its laugh-out-loud first line, this is a pitch-black comedy of errors. Immerwahr’s thesis isn’t wildly novel: The agency destabilized the Global South largely because their reach exceeded their grasp, and they kept on reaching and knocking things onto the floor. (“Superintending global politics is a vast undertaking, requiring both a deep understanding of many places and the sort of hubris that makes that deep understanding difficult.”) The draw here is largely the humor: “The United States took an occasional interest in oil”, “a reformed C.I.A. (slogan: ‘Coup Better’) wouldn’t solve the problem…”. But Immerwahr still states his case with such clarity that even those who know the agency as both dumb and dangerous will come away with a clarified understanding of the psychology behind their blunders. Immerwahr spends about one word (“adroit”) on the book under review; he selects the most jaw-dropping details (those parachuters!) and lets them speak. Coup d’état’s all, folks.
Window-Shop:
“A Semblance of Peace” - Masha Gessen prefigures coexistence on the West Bank border. Gessen’s last piece before they move to the Times is a roving portrait of a town which reveals the near-impossibility of imagining peace in present-day Israel/Palestine. (“The psychic divide between most left-wing Jews and settlers seemed smaller than that between left-wing Jews and Palestinians” for “the first time”, they write.) Whether this is a result of current conditions or whether those conditions have simply revealed the real feelings underneath the facade of peaceability, Gessen leaves as an open question. The piece is deliberately scattershot, and Gessen sometimes takes on the role of explaining the Palestinian viewpoint to Israeli-sympathetic readers – better than the reverse, I suppose, but still presuming too much. The magazine continues to focus on that Israeli (and, sometimes, West Bank) perspective – critically and thoughtfully, but without foregrounding the voices of Gazans. That’s not really Gessen’s fault, though; the piece they’ve written succeeds on its own terms. I wish Gessen would follow their ideas through to their clear endpoint, though, and would state more plainly the conclusion their piece leads to: There is no way to square Zionism with compassion toward Palestinians.
“Screen Grab” - Jia Tolentino will jump in the water and scrub, scrub, scrub. The history of CocoMelon as a program is a bit slow – after all, it’s not like there’s any plot to discuss – and there’s a disjunction between the actual dirt Tolentino digs up – labor issues, mostly – and the dirt she’s more interested in but less able to corroborate – child health concerns. The scenes in which Tolentino is buttered up by their P.R. people only work as a contrast with the shitty working conditions she reveals; it’s hardly worth the slog, and you can summarize the workplace issues in one word: Nonunion. I wanted a bit more on CocoMelon’s “relentless editing”, which may drive kids to “pay attention” but cause overstimulation and reduce retention – sure, there’s a bit of tech hysteria at play there, but it’s still compelling. (If the evidence isn’t there, that’s a story too – but Tolentino only gestures toward this line of inquiry.) Really, the draw here is the final section (and the two paragraphs preceding it), in which Tolentino unpacks the real anxieties: “sublimated disappointment”, our kids turning out “just like us, only worse”. It’s an elegant argument which draws on all that comes before – if you focus your attention, you might even end up learning something.
“‘Pinafore’ On Repeat” (Talk of the Town) - Michael Schulman is a smooth operetta. Tony New Yorkers singing Gilbert and Sullivan for a century? Not quite a story. Those stagings serving as a sort of exclusive, labor-intensive dating pool and child-rearing service? That’s a story. Schulman finds every charming, funny beat – as ably as if they were set to music.
“Electoral Surprises” (Comment) - Isaac Chotiner assesses Modhi’s underperformance. A good survey of a political landscape that is wildly under-covered by the U.S. media, and then often in terms far too sympathetic to the BJP. Chotiner is clear-eyed. Plus, while Modhi’s slight stumble is not great news, it’s at least better-than-expected news, which is rare enough to be notable.
“His Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy” - Ian Parker writes concrete poetry at Ye’s beachside wreck. Quite a tabloid-y story for the magazine, as focused on lightly psychoanalyzing (and diagnosing) Ye as it is on recounting his architectural destructiveness. It’s consistently eyebrow-raising, and if you like a good boondoggle, Parker will provide. I wished for a story that would also focus on Ye’s bizarre experiments with education – a more sensitive realm than luxury renovation, and one where his manic experimentation seems to have been more deeply harmful. Parker grants Ye a surprising amount of leeway to do his James Turrell act, though he hastens to point out ridiculous design details, like the slides that would cause a skateboarder to “shoot off the edge and land some thirty feet below, on the beach.” If you haven’t been following Ye’s extended public breakdown, your jaw will drop; then again, if you only know Ye as a celebrity shoe salesman and not as one of the greatest (and most self-reflexive!) rap artists of his generation, you’re missing what makes the story a tragedy and not just a sick sideshow. By telling this tale in such a narrow way, Parker entertains us with interior detail, but the foundation – those concrete bones – remains unchanged.
“Great Migrations” - Vinson Cunningham knows where the heart is. The last three paragraphs of the first section are Cunningham at his very best, exploring the implications of a staging which focuses on “static images”, like “the ancient pictures of the Stations of the Cross”, and how that tight frame “casts William’s play in self-referential amber.” Before that, there’s a cursory synopsis followed by four consecutive block quotes – a gauntlet! – and after that, there’s a distracted review of another, “vague” show. This might’ve been stronger as a “Goings On”.
Skip Without Guilt:
“Sick, Sad World” - Katy Waldman reads a few COVID table books. The obvious point to make about Corona fiction, that it “can seem to regurgitate the past rather than illuminate it”, is Waldman’s starting place, and it’s a bit tired. The idea that many of these books show symptoms of denial is a more interesting thesis, and when Waldman focuses on it, this piece is quite compelling. I’m just not sure there’s any way to make a cursory summation of six different novels read as a unified whole. The books are only given enough space to serve as examples or counterexamples, not as works of art in and of themselves. The final note, that books on COVID ought to “resist closure,” is itself an unsatisfying ending: If Waldman is arguing against narrative structure itself, she ought to explore other possibilities; if she simply wants narrative to gesture toward the incompleteness of its own conclusion… well, isn’t that a bit half-assed?
“Move In for the Cull” - Elizabeth Kolbert hunts hedgehogs. So brief it essentially states its ethical quandary and then ends. That quandary isn’t unexpected: Killing animals to save environments may give nature lovers the ick, but it’s basically unavoidable. Death comes one way or another. Tom Scott’s video on the New Zealand boxes covers every point in this piece and more, with far less garment rending. Kolbert’s anxious-environmentalist persona, as I’ve pointed out many times, works far better when she’s in the field.
“Trophy Room” - David Sedaris gets a special deal on safari. Doesn’t try for the surprising pathos that Sedaris can sometimes muster. The jokes are smirk-worthy, but one of the best is just copying tour-guide patter (A.L.T. stands for “Animal-looking thing”) – Sedaris often makes a lack of effort work for him, but you’re still left with little. Perhaps I’m forgetting something, but I think this is the magazine’s first feature set in Africa this year – and that’s just grim.
Letters:
Please note that these letters are both a few weeks old; I missed them because they were posted as comments.
Kristina was “quite underwhelmed by Manvir Singh’s book review” on psychiatric labels – she feels it was mis-billed as “Annals of Inquiry” and should’ve been filed as a review. Plus it “felt like a disservice to the books in question, as his position was more relevant… in dialogue with Sarah Fay’s 2022 memoir/history of the DSM Pathological.” She’d been “thrilled” to see Ian Hacking’s work cited – but says it’s “the sort of sociology of scientific knowledge that can easily be used as an attack on the psychiatric field in damaging ways.” As I wrote, I was no fan of Singh’s piece either, though I appreciate how different our angles of attack are.
Heather’s getting a PhD in Creative Writing at UNLV and says that Hannah Goldfield’s piece on Vegas’ Hawaiian cuisine captured the city well, but leaves out how the “‘“Gentrification. Developers. Inflation.”’” that Goldfield says brought Hawaiians to Vegas “has, much more recently, come for Vegas as well… rents are rapidly becoming untenable. People I meet who are from here or have lived here more than ten years describe being priced out of renting in the more centralized, desirable neighborhoods, and none of them see home ownership in these areas as attainable. …Vegas is a city of possibilities, but even in a single year I’ve watched these possibilities shrink rapidly, as they had been before I arrived, and as they will, unfortunately, continue to do if nothing is done to stop it.” She gives some more detail, including some numbers on rent and absurdly high utilities, in her full comment (scroll down).
What did you think of this week’s issue?
Song of the week!
Last week’s edition went out without the top-line quote. For those interested, it was: “‘That’s gauche, maudlin, inaccurate — and uncomplimentary to the Pope.’”
A reader noted that it was difficult to read the bright-orange links on mobile, so I switched their color to a deeper orange – a light brown, really. If you have notes or thoughts, please let me know.
I’m spending a month in Chicago helping my cousin take care of his newborn! I write this from the airport gate. I don’t anticipate my travels delaying this humble venture, but if they do I hope you’ll understand.
Often, I think you're too harsh, especially when reviewing articles that don't interest you, on the flipside, you're often overly kind. Waldman's omnibus book review was a confusing mishmash, which inspired no interest at all in pursuing any of the titles. At the end, as poorly alluded to as the rest of the piece, I think Waldman was suggesting nothing more interesting than that history is yet to be written for our recent pandemic - a true claim - and, possibly, a nod to the fact that COVID hasn't ended. I don't think she was saying anything deep, let alone commenting on narrative structure or narrative conclusions. But then again, after so much drivel, I think she was in search of a way to wrap it up, so she latched onto something stemming from the last of her readings, believing it to be a clever ending.