Last Week's New Yorker Review: March 17
Last Week’s New Yorker, week of March 17
“a windowless room with a few treadmills labelled ‘Gym.’”
I know I’m crying wolf at this point, but I really do think I’ll be caught up by the end of this week. Also: In response to a reader suggestion, I’m now including all pieces’ sections along with their titles. If you have thoughts, speak ‘em.
Must-Read:
“House Call” (Annals of Real Estate) - Jennifer Wilson renters a judgement. Fair warning, I can’t be an entirely impartial judge of this one because my current inamoratx grew up in Southbridge Towers, the complex whose privatization Wilson chronicles in the second half of this piece. (The apartment is still in their family.) So all the spilled tea about playground maintenance and security escorts and parties at the Irish pub downstairs feels visceral in a way that makes it extra fun. Some of Wilson’s cluelessness in the diaristic sections may be feigned in the usual journalistic way – as she notes, this city’s denizens discuss this topic compulsively, and none of what Wilson finds out is exactly arcane wisdom – but these sections are stronger than the trends piece this threatens to turn into, accurately noting the role of malignant homeownership in many of our modern stories, but still giving probably too many examples. The last three sections steer things in a more interesting direction, delving into the real-estate propaganda that’s woven into the American Dream, and the way that Dream is used, as usual, to oppress and socially control along racial lines. It’s basic leftism, maybe, but Wilson delivers it in entertaining and accessible fashion; your generational-wealth-pilled Lib relatives will be able to make sense of it. You might not find agreement, but maybe you won’t be totally far apartment.
Window-Shop:
“Where’s Elvis?” (Our Local Correspondents) - Zach Helfand hears these knocked out jailbirds sing. Just a charming, low-stakes New York story. Most of the fun is in rendering judgement on the characters involved, and noticing how that judgement changes as each twist comes to light. (We can’t go on together with suspicious minds…) Because one big swerve comes pretty early on but is so much more enjoyable the way Helfand spools it out, I’m disinclined to say much about this piece. (Wise men say only fools rush in…) I appreciate that Helfand doesn’t make the degraders of the Old New York seem like scumbags; they’re just people trying, in a usually misguided way, to cling onto magic. Yes, they’re clinging onto it in order to profit from it, and yes, that’s gross, but you have to admit it’s preferable to killing a thing just to see it die. And there’s a sort of karmic justice to the statue’s fate – not in the hands of a transplant but a stubborn lifer, the type to keep his garage intact amid high-rises. (And if they said he was high class, well, that was just a lie.)
“Indescribable” (Books) - Fintan O’Toole finds no end in blight. O’Toole spends nearly half this piece hammering that title home; there’s something odd about discussing, at such length, why something is hard to discuss. Three different people tell us, back to back, that the horrors of the famine are hard to articulate. Eventually you have to just articulate the thing! Once O’Toole finally decides he’s sufficiently articulated this inarticulatability (midway through the second section, beginning with the phrase “The Great Hunger was excessively real…”) the piece improves immensely, honing a critique of the English that’s all the more biting because O’Toole rejects the idea that the famine was genocide; instead, he says, because monopolization of land was behind “Ireland’s misery”, and because, in England, “many leading politicians were themselves owners of vast estates in Ireland”, the finger was pointed – whether out of malice or ignorance, or the usual bigotry that contains some of each – at the poor themselves, whose lifestyle was, naturally, to blame for their travails. (They wouldn’t “‘starve in an enlightened manner’”.) Pay no attention to the fact that these conditions were forced on laborers. As is usually the case, when a “temporary crisis” is faced with blithe conservatism, things get worse. O’Toole doesn’t overdo the inevitable ending-paragraph connection to the present, and his last line is truly brutal. The rot spreads still.
Thomas on Updike (Takes) - Allow me to extemporize Gopnikally. Every analyzable form first needs a writer able to demonstrate that a “suspicious or cloying bent” isn’t necessary when discussing it. (When this sort of analysis proves impossible – as with, say, VR – it’s a sure sign there’s no there there.) Usually this takes about one generation, post-popularization. I don’t have enough expertise (sorry to break from the Gopnik act) to say whether Updike truly was that figure for baseball, but the timing works out alright – the sport wasn’t all that big until the ‘20s, post-dead-ball – and it’s a neat factoid, in any case. Thomas’ writeup is solid.
“Prayers for Everyday Life” (Shouts & Murmurs) - Ian Frazier prays tell. The first four sections are superb; the premise is satisfyingly simple and the execution is elegant. The rest spoils things with the usual belabored zany nonsense, but whatever – I laughed!
“Rot-Com” (Talk of the Town) - Oren Peleg grills Ed Zitron, who suspects the A.I. industry is playing chicken. I’m a longtime Zitron follower – Scumbag! ≥ Chapo – and I’m largely in agreement with his doomsday prophecies here. Peleg’s hook is gimmicky, but Zitron, in dissecting it, actually clarifies the outlines of his own argument.
“Lip Service” (Letter from Sweden) - Carrie Battan hits snus. There is much to be said about Zyn as a bro status marker (note that the issue after this one features Zyn prominently as a sign that a lefty streamer isn’t a scold.) Max Read, who I swear I link to almost every week, already coined the term Zynternet to refer to the rising squad of revanchist frat-boy types who travel with a pouch in their gums and a Barstool podcast in their AirPods. (Battan calls it a fixture of the “manosphere”, but lumping together Joe Rogan listeners with the incel harassers that term usually refers to is an error of degree, if perhaps not entirely of kind.) I had no idea, though, that the pouches were a Swedish tradition, and the no-stain white variety were developed to appeal to women. That’s fun trivia, though Battan doesn’t quite convince me that it’s anything more; Battan clearly finds it telling, but it’s not clear what, exactly, it tells. (Gender norms contain the seeds of their own subversion? Thank you Judith, very cool.) Battan’s most interesting point concerns the appeal of “light” drugs in general: They provide immediate relief from self-induced discomfort, and that isn’t the gotcha self-help books present it as; it’s something most users are innately, if not always consciously, aware of. “Don’t talk to me until I’ve had my coffee” suggests that coffee sets a boundary in a culturally acceptable way – does anyone want to be talked to in the early morning? – and smoke breaks once provided a similar excuse for leisure. I’ve piecemeal eliminated every drug but a nip of caffeine and my lovely SSRIs (not for moral reasons but just because poison has a tendency to trigger gastrointestinal distress) and the “pleasurable sense of direction” Battan speaks of is a thing I still crave. Surely children, who are – say it with me – disenfranchised citizens, have a right to seek this kind of pleasure; the work is not to forbid the escape but to regulate away the harms. When JUUL use declined after it was properly regulated, teen smoking didn’t rebound; the only reason to panic about Zyn is that this government will probably start handing it out with the chocolate milk. In other words – it’s the same reason to panic about everything.
“Playtime” (The Current Cinema) - Richard Brody says Eephus not broke, don’t fix it. This film was practically made for Brody: A scrappy character-driven baseball drama by a favored filmmaker furthering his project? With Frederick Wiseman in a supporting role?? Come on. It’s remarkable, actually, that Brody isn’t more effusive; he doesn’t say anything bad about the film, but I’d expect him to be salivating, and it may be a bad sign that he isn’t. The film is out of left field, emphasis on the field – but also on the left; as Brody notes, “politics undergird the action”, and to bring up a podcast I haven’t listened to in six years twice in one newsletter, apparently Chapo co-produced the film. Three strikes sounds good, but maybe let’s start with one.
“Testing Their Limits” (Musical Events) - Alex Ross finds dueling pianos. There is something trollish about declaring that a brilliant-in-person performer has been captured at his weakest on a new recording. Fat lot of good that does us! I’m not sure pairing these reviews was the best move, only because they’re so similar things feel repetitive – Re: Cho, “I don’t think that the album will displace classic Ravel surveys by…” a list of names; Lim’s Goldbergs, meanwhile, aren’t “the kind of fully articulated narrative fashioned by such experienced exponents as…” another list of names. Spot the difference!
Skip Without Guilt:
“Texas Roundup” (The Political Scene) - Jonathan Blitzer gets thrown into the bus by Greg Abbott. Two pieces in one, both grim and, together, fairly endless. The first is a profile of Abbott, whose affect suggests a John Kerry/Dubya hybrid creature, but whose ideology puts the bloodthirsty cruelty first – call him pinto bean Pinochet. His background is mostly defined by an obsessive litigiousness – he hasn’t failed upward so much as sued upward. Blitzer gets the point across, but there aren’t many dramatics. The second half is an immigration story, which is Blitzer’s wheelhouse; it’s grim, but there’s no news here – it’s just a recap of Abbott’s tactics, leading up to the famous busing blitz. The next-to-last section, which describes just how hellish these tactics have made life in border towns, is the most compelling thing here; it puts the lie to the argument that any of this is done in service of safety. And forget seceding – if Abbott gets his way, soon it will be Texas everywhere.
“Time and Place” (The Art World) - Jackson Arn is Tatlin on himself. Well… hmm. Arn’s last piece for the magazine is uncharacteristic but unexceptional. The show he’s covering sounds really compelling, but Arn hardly ever wrote letters of recommendation; this is one, pretty much. I liked Annie Armstrong’s blog at artnet discussing the Arn situation and what it might mean for art criticism, which is in a weird place. (The market cools and suddenly it’s less romantic to mainline Adderall and wait in a crowded room trying to spot Alex Katz.) The question is, who’s crazy enough to bulk-buy deli coffee or set off loads of fireworks in the name of art… but still mature enough to control themselves at the office party. I adore gallery hopping, which can only really happen in New York, and I can confirm there’s still plenty of good art scattered across the city, from blue-chip gallery to Chinatown-mini-mall-stall. Arn was a good writer, but I hope the magazine’s next hire is less wedded to the art world, and more devoted to this art town.
“Mourning Becomes Her” (Dancing) - Jennifer Homans is Gigenis, Gigenis, Gigenis, a big big dance. I appreciate that Homans tried something new, but spending the entire review giving us a beat-by-beat summary of a dance is not really fulfilling the critical imperative. I assume Homans liked the dance, because otherwise surely she wouldn’t be lavishing so many words on it. Beyond that, though, I really have no idea what she thought. The title is also not great, especially since there was a riff on the same idea just last week.
“Fear Factor” (Books) - Beverly Gage sees red scare. After an unnecessarily long leadup, Gage doesn’t find much in this new book to add to the stock narrative of the Scare; the most interesting tidbits are from other sources (I’d love to hear more about how the Scare made a generation of federal workers renounce “interest in progressive ideas”, as per Landon Storrs by way of Gage, or what exactly the nineties evidence damning Alger Hiss looked like). I’m not sure who needs to hear the broad-strokes McCarthy story yet again. And Gage’s contemporary conclusions are pretty weak – basically, there are more protections in place, but that doesn’t mean Trump won’t try to dismantle them. Duh. The question of whether Trump will be able to bring back McCarthyism already feels painfully naïve in a post-Mahmoud Khalil landscape. He’ll do whatever he can get away with, in as scammy a way as possible. Welcome to the world of HUAC Tuah!
Letters:
Gabe loved Joshua Yaffa’s piece on a Ukrainian spy, from a few weeks ago now. “Amazing that the reclusive spymaster made the choice to go on TV to air out his enemies within… A wild, seemingly out of character choice. I was honestly reminded of the movie Munich with the audacity of some of the plans. …Good call on saying it was edited like a Melville movie. At least it wasn't as dark and didn't have such a message of the futility of covert actions as Army of Shadows did.”
it’s not the crime
it’s the cover-up