Last Week's New Yorker Review: March 24
Last Week’s New Yorker, week of March 24
“an extended live-work situation in newly-besieged-by-digital-nomads Portugal”
Allegedly, this is the Spring Style & Design issue, but there’s only one straightforward fashion feature. Otherwise you have to squint: Is gardening design? Is Graydon Carter style? Still plenty of good stuff as ever.
Must-Read:
“Interiors” (Books) - Alice Gregory signifies nothing. A fairly perfect little book review, and while, yes, Bookforum publishes some forty of those a year, and this magazine’s usual remit is more fleshed-out takes, a small book called Perfection is served well by the finely honed. Because this is a sort of cover-book, or transposition, Gregory has the challenge of summing up both the old book and the new one, plus telling us what they mean and how they do their work. She pulls it all off, and although I’m a bit skeptical of the Latronico book– its block-quoted internet-scroll litany feels less like a clever update of its inspiration and more like half-baked Patricia Lockwood – I understand completely why Gregory loved it, especially when she explains how a second reading revealed its beating heart. She expertly identifies the critique embedded in Latronico’s project – that our social media anomie might really “be more enduring than we imagine”, and less novel, and that “one’s frustrations and thwarted fantasies are, in the end, proof of private agency, however outwardly constructed it may seem.” It’s hard to reveal a book’s “magic trick” without killing the magic, but Gregory manages it. Now watch me pull a houseplant out of my hat!
“The Book of Ruth” (American Chronicles) - Jill Lepore has a Red thumb. It’s always fun to learn about an interesting figure with whom you weren’t previously familiar. Of course, Stout had the good fortune to have a late career doing something populist and popular, which means that her early career as a leftist is perpetually rediscovered and discussed. (A good portion of American leftist heroes have some other thing they’re more famous for.) Believe it or not, the only thing I like more than periodical gossip is leftist periodical gossip, so I ate up the sections on the New Masses and its various dramas and complications. The Rex Stout stuff feels equally tangential, but it’s equally delightful (the connection to the Pumpkin Papers either will or will not feel like a reach to you, but it will interest you regardless). Whether or not Stout’s gardening method, which involves a compost-bin-style layering of ingredients, works for you… will, as with a compost bin, probably have to do with how well you’re able to follow those instructions. It may be “no work”, but I’d bet it’s still easy to fuck up. That Stout learned the method in Russia is a decent punchline; she smuggled politics in at the bottom of a hay bale.
Window-Shop:
“Speechless” (Comment) - Benjamin Wallace-Wells reports deports. A forthright assessment of the horrific Mahmoud Khalil deportation and its implications in the broader free speech battle, whose true contours have suddenly become very clear.
Fry on McInerney (Takes) - A kind of capsule personal history that serves, more than anything, as an argument for occasionally profiling people under twenty (or, as may be the more ethical option, covering the things they’re interested in.) Their New York is as real as anyone’s, possibly realer.
“Leave with Dessert” (Books) - Nathan Heller thinks all’s Vanity Fair in love and expense accounts. A defense of Carter that widens into a defense of the entire exorbitant late magazine age. There’s something obsequious about arguing that your boss should work less and be paid more, and Heller is never at all convincing that the era’s glossy magazines were actually very good; he highlights Christopher Hitchens’ columns, which is, uh, telling. (His supposition that this era’s magazines were “invitations to a full, interesting life” raises the question: For whom?) He also says that email seemed “retrograde and uncool” in 2019, which, as a newsletter fanatic since at least 2014, I take personal offense to. But Heller’s take on Carter’s whole deal – he’s a “normal sort of chap” who “is constantly trying to suggest that he is just a little odd” – is exactly right, and the piece is generally snappy, if a bit gape-mouthed. (“I Hate Myself Because I Don’t Work For Vanity Fair In 1995.”) The idea that things are “lustreless and diminished” when capital has no use for them, though, seems central to the problem; your average zine has more lustre than most of the Condé catalogue, because it’s made for the sake of it – something true of many of the better, more lustrous newsletters, as well. Carter hosted dinners for the sake of it; he edited because it was his job. It’s also true, obviously, that people ought to be paid well for their labor. But the question Heller ought to answer is: Where, exactly, is the money for those martinis supposed to come from?
Skip Without Guilt:
“Just Between Us” (Books) - Alexandra Schwartz gives the gloss on goss. An extremely lightweight pan; Schwartz’s criticism is basically that McKinney has fudged the definition of gossip to strain towards depth, but Schwartz is content to leave her analysis so shallow it feels trivial. McKinney is a blogger nonpareil, and despite Schwartz and Marisa Meltzer at the Times panning this book, I’ll reserve judgement a bit. After all, you shouldn’t believe everything you hear.
“You Mad, Bro?” (The Political Scene) - Andrew Marantz spams the coalition building emote. If you like Marantz’s arch style and don’t mind the occasional baffling comparison (surely John Fetterman’s seemingly brain-damaged Israel obsession is not anything like Bernie Sanders’ economic populism) this is a pleasant way to pass the time, I guess; I’m just not sure any of his conclusions are apt. Is Piker actually appealing mostly to disaffected young men? If there’s anyone being converted, it’s those who are shown a model of how politics can be fun drama (so much of Pikers’ streams are spent rehashing and joking about his outré feuds with random internet fascists). They ought to be invested in politics, Piker says, not because they’re going to suddenly wake up rich (essentially the promise of the online right wing) but because intelligent snark is simply more interesting than aggrieved cruelty. Connecting this to “‘deaths of despair’” and “‘male dislocation’” is a reach; it’s good advertising for Piker, but it’s actually playing exactly the identity-instead-of-politics game that Marantz is supposedly criticising. I don’t think the real secret is unedited authenticity or a willingness to say cusses, as the incredibly obnoxious comedian Marantz interviews suggests, I think it’s a willingness to fixate on details because they are compelling and not because they are important – it’s the precise opposite of the annoying refrain that everything Trump is doing is a distraction from some other, more important thing he’s doing. People, it turns out, want distraction; they want stupid, strange details; they certainly don’t care about ideological coherence. Marantz does make this point, but he also muddles it, mixing it up with a point about the “‘performance of masculinity’” that mistakes the trappings for the central thing. Hasan lifts weights, Contrapoints swipes on Baltimore Tinder, Stavros chugs thousand island dressing. Jon Lovett could do all three at once and it wouldn’t make him any more likeable. The tribe has spoken.
“Steal, Adapt, Borrow” (Profiles) - Rebecca Mead thinks Jonathan Anderson is playing the game of part-time Loewe. Mead’s been given an impossible assignment: Assessing the future of a man who isn’t inclined or, probably, allowed to tell her a single thing about his future plans. Way too much time is spent implying that Anderson will soon move to Dior, but why we should care about this is less clear. It’s obvious that Mead got just one fairly rushed interview with Anderson, and that we’re given a substantial chunk of that material; this means the piece alternates between feeling remote, when the information is secondhand, and scattered, when Mead is stretching to include whatever Anderson actually said to her. Mead is possibly too accommodating of this; one often-delayed meeting “somehow made [her] think of Anderson’s Fall/Winter 2023 collection” – an unintentionally funny stretch. (“He didn’t talk to me! Doesn’t that remind you so much of his work?”) And while the quotes she gets from Anderson, which mostly concern art history and childhood memories, are compelling enough, everyone else speaks in fashion-industry commonplaces, from Daniel Craig (“‘...the fingers of what he does in his own world go everywhere…’”) to curator Andrew Bonacina. (“‘...he discovered some form of kinship with how artists think and make and was able to appreciate how equally radical fashion can be.’”) Mead herself fails to land a point about industrial manufacturing when, near the end, she tells us that the work of bag-makers is “not entirely romantic” because they have to rotate tasks to avoid “repetitive strain injuries”, something that is surely less the “hidden price” of luxury goods and more the reality of literally any assembly-line process. Is Mead trying to reinvent the Marxist theory of alienation from first principles, or is she just writing without thinking? Elsewhere, there are a few photographs, shot in front of dusty cityscapes that make the clothes feel rather dystopian, but some of the most compelling looks mentioned require a thorough Googling to find, like the “cashmere sweater that exploded just below the rib cage into a flurry of pilling”, even cooler than it sounds. Anderson surely has vision, but Mead barely had time to get a look at him.
“Betting on the Future” (Onward and Upward with the Arts) - Amanda Petrusich decloisters with Lucy Dacus. Dacus is my Goldilocks pick of the three boygeniuses; Bridgers’ writing is too arty, Baker’s is not arty enough, Dacus’ is just right. Or was, at least; the new singles from this record, plus Petrusich’s coverage of it, suggest to me that she’s veered toward Baker’s unadorned confessionalism in ways that fit her voice even worse. That’s not my issue with this piece, though, which fails because Petrusich is weepy and awestruck, abandoning critical perspective on Dacus, and allowing Dacus’ voice to fill the piece to such an extent it could be included as liner notes for the album – although in that case Dacus would probably edit her thoughts into something more poetic; they have the vague and chatty tone of a kind person on an awkward first date. As with Mead’s piece above, Petrusich makes the indie-pop industry seem mighty shallow, as they praise Dacus in the most formulaic terms imaginable. Clairo: “‘No decision is made without meaning… She’s someone who really listens…” Hozier: “I’ve always loved the eye through which her lyrical voice finds the world.” (Block that metaphor!) Things end with a bizarre misunderstanding of what a “transmasc” is – corrected after publication – that makes one wish boygenius, whose project clearly operates in the liminal space between the WLW and trans male worlds, would receive some more incisive coverage from some actual trans men. (Lex McMenamin’s work is a good start.) Petrusich is, I’m sorry to say, a bit of a girldumbass on the topic.
Letters:
Michael B. is dismayed by the recent column that’s been filling the page opposite the Goings On listings: “I absolutely hate the new Book Currents feature. …you can really tell they're off the cuff spoken dialogue rather than the more measured written reviews, even in capsule format. I'd rather have two more Pick Threes from their critics than this waste of space.” The feature’s been appearing online for a while now, but I do sort of like the hard line between the website, where interviews are common, and the magazine, where the written word is supreme. It does feel a bit like polluting the latter to allow these columns which are very obviously edited directly from spoken interviews. I haven’t hated them quite as much as Michael, but I agree there are better uses for the space.
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