Last Week's New Yorker Review: March 27, 2023
Last Week’s New Yorker, week of March 27 (Spring Style & Design)
Must-Read:
"The Ozempic Era" - Jia Tolentino gets a scrip for the new weight-loss drugs which are slimming down the celebrity class. Highly precise and clever in its structure, which moves from an informational introduction (familiar to anyone who read the recent, somewhat shallow New York Magazine cover piece) to discussions of toxic beauty standards and the under-regulated telehealth ecosystem, and finally to a conclusion which points out that Ozempic is an individual solution to a collective problem. That's the ultimate lesson of, really, all leftist thought; that collectivity and solidarity can achieve things unthinkable to unhealthily atomized individuals. But it's a lesson that is always worth considering in new contexts. Through much of the piece, I worried that Tolentino was obscuring the grimness of these medications too much, that despite her best efforts, readers might hear "under-regulated" as "easy to access," and "pervasive" as "inescapable." But those last four paragraphs, which snare the supposed experts with their own quotes ("It would be like trying to treat lung cancer through a smoking-cessation program") make her conclusion unignorable.
Window-Shop:
"Ghosts on the Stage" - Jennifer Homans is untransported by a revival of Pina Bausch's German dance of Brazil. Too concise to spend so much time on background, but the final two paragraphs, when the critique revs to life, are wonderful and brutal — turns out, Homans, whose prose has felt flat to me in the past, is best when disappointed: "The result is smooth, not serrated" is marvelous, and the final statement that "dance, like history, is nontransferrable" has the echo of profundity.
"Georgia On Our Mind" - Helen Shaw has questions about a "strange, serious" new Broadway production of the Leo Frank musical "Parade." It's simple, and even expected, to review a production mainly by judging the quality of its cast, the coherence of its story, and the beauty of its staging. Shaw gives her thoughts, mostly positive, about each of these, but she also goes deeper, listing her many questions about the show's conception, questions which "oddly... didn't move me." It's intense to see Shaw working through her thoughts in real time, and if it leaves the review somewhat unresolved, that's certainly preferable to pat.
"Costume Drama" - Hua Hsu sports J. Crew, the fashion brand "synonymous with preppy apparel." A compelling capsule history of "prep" as a style-idea, quoting "The Official Preppy Handbook," a book I puzzled over as a child, trying to decrypt its ironies and codes. Much of the best material summarizes and takes tidbits from the text under review, Maggie Bullock's "The Kingdom of Prep." Hsu doesn't comment on Bullock's prose, but the quotes speak well of the book's style: "A man who confidently strolled into class or an office in well-scuffed bucks didn't have to worry he'd be held back by some bourgeois triviality. He knew where he stood. So did everyone else." The connections to Black leaders of various stripes are also compelling. The ending anecdote, though, about the "menswear guy" on Twitter, is pointless and confusing; after adopting Bullock's structure, Hsu doesn't convincingly expand her conclusions.
"Pins and Needles" - Lauren Collins profiles Demna, the mononymous artistic director of Balenciaga, as he pivots away from irony-tinged controversy-courting and towards the "darts and notches" of design for design's sake. Collins takes Demna largely at face value, which works well enough when he's discussing the past (the connection of his raucous stagings to his traumatic childhood in Soviet Georgia — his draw to "the protective aspects of fashion" — is surprisingly compelling, and not overdetermined) but less well with the present and future (there are many paragraphs of dull, press-release-ish equivocation over the Teddy Bear photoshoot scandal). A more critical eye toward the way Demna uses the appearance of political engagement as an aesthetic, while being careful not to take any actual positions, which might offend the gentry that keeps the brand in business, would be useful. I also wasn't always sure if the descriptions of the clothing really matched what was on the page: The photographs we're shown, while beautiful, rarely court the ugliness or extreme risk that Collins describes, and when she says Demna "wanted to imbue his clothes with attitudes that he didn't see reflected elsewhere," it can feel as though she's falling for a brand's line.
"Unintended Consequences" - Anthony Lane has mixed feelings on two films. Lane convinces that "Inside" is first enlivening, then agonizing; his review is cogent, but hardly touches on form. And he runs out of time entirely to give his point of view on the "Blood, Sweat & Tears" movie.
Skip Without Guilt:
"Hive Mind" - Inkoo Kang is disoriented by the new horror-thriller series "Swarm." Kang still relies too much on certain critical clichés, and repeats herself — she references both "tonal messiness" and "tonal wobbliness" here. She also lacks a thesis, which means her tone is, itself, a bit wobbly: The show's "unwilling to grapple" with Black female sociopathy, yet "few scenes... gutted" Kang like the central character's "descent into tragic villainy." That contrast demands explanation, which is missing. But I appreciate Kang's probing of the gap between the show's political pretensions and what it's actually saying.
"Drawing Board" - Adam Gopnik worships at the altar of Milton Glaser, the designer behind a certain late-sixties "look," the wavy thick-lined grooviness exemplified by his famous Dylan poster. Gopnik is fixated on proving Glaser's heroism — his "breathtaking empire of imagery" that "helped define two decades" — but never quite articulates Glaser's actual place in the culture. Glaser's "look" may have been broadly popular, but it was still tailored to a certain audience, one Gopnik just calls "intelligent" but is also defined by a certain set of economic and social conditions. Maybe it's not just that the heroic art director has vanished, but that the conditions under which a commercial "vision" could market to its audience's cultural sophistication have changed. Gopnik is mostly uninterested in this, instead expounding on various sidetracks in an especially distractible variant of his usual digressive style. This is fun enough if you have Google at hand and enjoy looking up E. McKnight Kauffer's subway posters or Ben Shahn's covers for S.J. Perelman; too often, though, Gopnik drops the reference and moves on, without the kind of deep connection that would make the lateral thinking worthwhile as more than an exercise. At one point, Gopnik literally pauses for the aside "those were the days!", which basically sums up the piece; Glaser's work is influential and has a refined surface, and for Gopnik, the absence of deeper meaning isn't just acceptable, it's the whole point: All those flourishes indicate the health of society. To me, it mostly indicates the intellectual satisfaction of a certain subculture, the people that read New York Magazine in the '70s. That's hardly representative.
"Seeing Things" - Giles Harvey reads a grim, "vividly skewed" new novel from Irish writer Sebastian Barry. An astute opening section on the question of why there are so many great Irish writers gives way to an unfortunately muddled review. A few small flubs on unrelated subjects are distracting (it's largely a myth that the American public treated returning Vietnam vets with contempt; Einstein by no means came up with the notion that time is illusory, it has a long lineage, including in multiple indigenous communities), and Harvey is overawed by Barry's rejection of genre tropes, despite his book's reliance on tropes of other kinds - the nominally ghostly figures with some real-world presence are not the bold innovation Harvey thinks. ("This aspect of the novel doesn't lend itself to paraphrase," he says, ridiculously.) The cascade of prose samples at the very end are lovely but could use explication.
Letters:
Michael is “glad to see Lepore again writing the type of piece that might have appeared in her Mansion of Happiness collection from 11 years ago.”
Caz on the Carrillo piece: “Throughout his life Carrillo also lied about his qualifications, which proved lucrative for him, and is the greater offense. He's not the first person to invent qualifications or an ethnic identity. Apparently no learnings by employers or his publisher. Does no one do due diligence?”
I (Sam) also read an earlier piece in Rolling Stone about Carrillo, which I preferred to D.T. Max’s take in the magazine. I found its focus on his teaching life more compelling, though admittedly less novel.
What did you think of this week’s issue? Do you think pieces like Tolentino’s are worth the publicity bump they may inevitably give drugs like Ozempic, despite their critique?