March 13, 2025

Last Week's New Yorker Review: March 3

Last Week’s New Yorker, week of March 3

“‘You’re never going to believe this, but I work from home. Thank you.’”

Must-Read:

“The Sunken Place” - Julian Lucas wades in the water, children. Could easily settle for the heartfelt poeticism of its early sections, but Lucas continually swerves, introducing enough material for a book. (Each boat could be a chapter.) This does mean that things are rushed past, at times, but the effect is a miniature with a sweeping view. Lucas does well to focus on small details, often landing on a quote (“‘The black stayed on my hands for a long time’”, “The energy of the wreck called all of us’”, “‘I see myself in the artifact’”) that’s used less to sum up what came before than to leave us with an echoing, associative koan. (Perhaps the best of these, which had me near tears, is the one I’ve pulled for the out-of-context quote up above. In context, it mixes poignancy, strange humor, and raw loss.) Neither is Lucas merely boosterish on the subject of these wrecks; the next-to-last section is an excellent consideration of various complications and points of friction in the process of turning the American Clotilda wreck into a touristic spectacle. (I think of Ben Marcus’ unsettling short story about memorial designers, and of the 9/11 Museum’s corporate, tourist-thronged wound. But maybe a diasporic gathering place is distinct from the ordinary monuments to loss.) Lucas stirs up the silt; particles go in many directions, and you may feel the image is less clear than before – but perhaps more honest. 

Special Section:

An excellent batch of Talk of the Towns this week.

“About-Face” (Comment) - Jonathan Blitzer says inmates are running asylum. Of all the horrors enacted by the administration, the one with the most harmful and wide-reaching effects may be their bloodthirsty approach to deportation. Blitzer nails the facts, and takes the time to call out Democrats’ cowardice as well. A model of what “Comment” can be at its very best.

“Lost and Found” - Michael Schulman re-plaque-ates. A charming bit of awards marginalia – I imagine it’s difficult to be the magazine’s awards correspondent, since they don’t go for the sillier prognostication coverage; here, Schulman nails the assignment – a vivid, slightly melancholy human story that gestures toward the beauty in the bizarre ritual of awards.

“Turn, Turn, Turn” - Sarah Larson talks a blue-eyed streak. Collins is the genuine article, and wonderful company.

“Dr. Waterfall” - Charles Bethea finds waterfall, waterfall everywhere. A lovely little escape. And I adore seeing a childhood hobby develop into a mature project. We ought not to let such things go so easily.

Window-Shop:

“Shadow Warrior” - Joshua Yaffa blows up the spy-to-prison pipeline. Basically a real-life spy novel, with Yaffa mostly interested in giving us all the bizarre and thrilling details of Roman Chervinsky’s missions to, for example, hijack and blow up an elevator. That makes the piece really fun, if you like that sort of thing; if you don’t, though, it’s a long way to go for a piece that’s surprisingly disconnected from the politics and strategy of the broader conflict. Yaffa’s motivation for writing the piece seems mainly to be that he scored an interview with Chervinsky, but he has trouble deepening the man’s character, because he’s so evasive (as spies, probably, tend to be.) Is he a loose cannon who gets results, or is he a canny operator who breaks only the rules he’s allowed to break? He’s a cypher, mostly, and Yaffa lets him tell his stories in a removed, moonlit way, edited like a Jean-Pierre Melville movie. They’re good stories, and that’s probably enough; one doesn’t need sap about the human costs of war spoiling the fun. It still makes me uneasy how romantic this piece is, though, and how strangely disconnected from the latest developments in Ukraine. Here’s hoping it doesn’t serve as a valediction to the resistance.

Cunningham on Proulx (Takes) - A tender and heartfelt appreciation. 

“Flirting with Disaster” - Rebecca Mead tastes like Chicken Shop Date. As a longtime Pengest Munch appreciator, I’m glad that delightful series got mentioned here. Date has only vaguely been on my radar, but Dimoldenberg’s humor comes across surprisingly well on the page (“‘We’re going to go to the pub, obviously, and have Diet Cokes’”) and Mead mostly gives the right amount of context to her jokes. But she gives way too much context to every other aspect, to the point where I was convinced she was about to tell us that chicken don’t actually have nuggets. Am I wrong that the essential idea of the chicken shop doesn’t need explaining (“A chicken shop is not what most people would consider an ideal venue for a date”), or comparison to “the corner pizzeria” for Americans to understand it? Well, maybe I’ve just watched too much Pengest Munch. I could also see one making the argument that Dimoldenberg capitalized on Black London rappers to achieve fame, then abandoned them for the world of celebrity; her class consciousness and advocacy for London youth clubs seem sincere, but Mead ought to have been willing to interrogate Dimoldenberg at least as fiercely as Dimoldenberg jabs, in her unique way, at Jack Harlow or whomever. The Cynthia Erivo scene is not as fun as what’s come before – perhaps because Erivo’s ultra-empathetic ‘holding space’ approach feels mostly like a failure to play along, and the scene Mead describes Dimoldenberg cutting sounds leaden in any context, not “the lead anecdote” in a traditional profile. But this is short and fun enough that it’s easily worth reading – it’s snack food itself, a 2pc with fries.

“Tourist Trap” - Inkoo Kang is at an all-time Lotus. For a long time now I’ve been wishing Kang would develop a unique writerly perspective. Well, between this and her take on Severance, she may finally have done so: She’s a spoilsport! Fun, polished television just isn’t good enough if your characters are shallow placeholders. I don’t disagree (though I do think White might be commenting on flat characterization and archetypes as much as producing them) and, surprisingly, I don’t mind Kang in this grumpy, jaded mode. I do wonder what she came to television for if not plotty shows with fairly archetypical characterizations; it’s basically what the medium has always specialized in. But if she wants to tip out her daiquiri, I’m happy to watch.

“The End of Children” - Gideon Lewis-Kraus populations the question. Excellent and frustrating in equal measure. If this was just framed as a “Letter from Korea” about how nobody was having kids there anymore, it’d be excellent; Lewis-Kraus’ anthropological survey is vivid and darkly entertaining, especially the scene in the school with just five students. And I wholeheartedly agree with Lewis-Kraus’ final conclusion that we should “trust” children “to figure out what they mean, or how to mean it.” I wonder if this conclusion is actually supported by the piece he’s written, though. Lewis-Kraus’ case for the importance of population decline never seems that strong, and always seems to turn back toward essentially aesthetic concerns (there is something “discomforting” and maybe hateful about a world with fewer children); I kept wondering whether devoting massive amounts of money, energy, and stress toward this issue might be a convenient way of avoiding the very present issue of climate change in favor of a future problem. Lewis-Kraus’ least convincing argument suggests that the BirthStrike movement, which I do find pretty despicable, is pointless because climate change will happen either way. (“The children who would have traded their own existence for a cooler planet have already been born.”) But surely this is all the more reason to do anything in our power to lessen its effects? If we’re facing the apocalypse either way, who gives a shit whether we face it like Children of Men or like the Pioneer Woman? I’m completely unpersuaded by the idea that we have to flood the earth with people (“lottery tickets”) in the hopes that one of them will be bright enough to solve this crisis; that just smacks of escalation of commitment. My more fervently held point, the one I seem to always return to in these pages, is that children – globally disenfranchised citizens – ought to have a say in the society they will inherit; I wish that Lewis-Kraus quoted a single child who was not his own kin in this piece. Maybe if we work on the problem today of keeping the planet inhabitable, we’ll be able to work on the problem tomorrow of right-sizing the planet in order to let the culture “evolve”. The truth is that the former and the latter problem will likely require us to, as demographer Leslie Root says, “‘reinvent society’”. Perhaps the way to create a society that isn’t dying off is to prefigure a society where children have a say. And the only way to do that is to find some like-minded people and start raisin’ babies. It takes a commune…

“Gilded” - Adam Gopnik knows all that glitters is fair in love and war. Surprisingly obvious stuff from Gopnik; it’s practically a commonplace that modern plutocrats’ rejection of arts and philanthropy makes them far less sympathetic than the Fricks, Morgans, and Rockefellers of the world. There’s much more to say about the political meaning of this shift; it’s not merely aesthetic, as Gopnik sort of makes it out to be (the new plutocrats think the “cultural élite” is part of the “burdensome past”) and that ellison allows Gopnik to claim, later on, that the plutocrats are anarchists. Nah, just because both projects are extremist and utopian, doesn’t mean they actually have anything in common; it does actually matter what you’re fighting for, and just because Kropotkin hoped that technology might support equity, doesn’t suddenly mean he’s indistinguishable from Marinetti; extrapolating that Musk and Mangione are brothers is ridiculous horseshoe-theory bullshit. Gopnik’s history of anarchism, though, in spite of its unfairness – or maybe because it’s so unfair – is riveting; he makes the secular liberal’s counterargument by giving us an extended exegesis of an obscure Henry James novel, which… only in this magazine. Gopnik communicates so clearly that you can sharpen your mind against his points, by thinking through why exactly it’s evasive to say that “those who act practically to improve a system are dismissed as impotent proceduralists” by the public. (Note that his example of successful practical action is the Rotary Club, a group that almost made a Nazi their president one time.) The last two paragraphs seem like two drafts of an ending; they make fairly contradictory points (everyday people should work toward “lunchtime solutions” instead of burning things down, but really we just have to pray that the powerful hold “a higher ideal”) but if you read between the lines, the cynicism that Gopnik doesn’t want to cop to grows clearer and clearer: You can’t trust the powerful, but you certainly can’t trust the masses. 

Skip Without Guilt:

“A Belated Début” - Alex Ross says this is the lost opera on this train, everyone please leave the train. The first section’s dull explanation of D.E.I. in the arts both doesn’t say anything new and barely has anything to do with the opera Ross is covering. Ross clearly didn’t care about the story of Dédé’s opera, so he mostly tells the story of Dédé’s life – but there’s so little information that aspect still feels scant. And his prose is a little flat for once (“The melodies exude charm”) which leaves no particular reason to read this. Oh well!

“Catch Me If You Can” - Maggie Doherty has Frost bite. Doesn’t everyone already know that Frost is defined by the sly divide between his learnedness and his country wisdom? One hopes in vain that this point will deepen, but instead Doherty just repeats it again and again: Frost “was always two incompatible things at once”, she concludes, after telling us nothing else for the entire piece. Very well then he contradicts himself – what else? Is it really a strange or new discovery that Frost was “complex” and remains “difficult to know”, or is it in fact the very thing that still draws us to Frost, the reason we still teach The Road Not Taken – the “mischief” maker in Mending Wall (maybe my favorite poem period) and the “swinger of birches” in Birches – it’s not just the stock wisdom on Frost, it’s what a lot of his poems explicitly concern; the way man, who is both self and outside-self, can be those two things at once.

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Letters:

Nothing in the bag, and the letters might be a bit mixed up until I finally catch up (sooner than you’d think, I’d bet – and sorry to your inbox in advance.)

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