March 2, 2023

Last Week's New Yorker Review: March 6, 2023

Last Week’s New Yorker, week of March 6

Must-Read:

“The Price of Belief” - Ben Taub unravels the tale of Wirecard, the German company running a fraud, and the Financial Times’ Alphaville blogger who cracked the case. A rollicking stunner of a piece.1 A highly complicated story (so complicated the initial FT article apparently left commenters baffled) is broken down by Taub into its component parts with the skill of a sushi chef. Every supporting character is memorable, from the wrecked binger Nick Gold (“You don’t want to be seen fucking with white socks up at my age”) to the shambolic journo Paul Murphy (“Unfortunately, I did it at about eleven o’clock at night, and I’d had a couple of drinks,”) and that’s just on the nominally law-abiding side of things. Everywhere else is enough cascading crime to fuel two Scorsese movies. The actual fraud is interesting enough, but when Marsalek starts sending Russian mercenaries to Libya the piece kicks into overdrive. Beyond how fun it is, the piece has much to say about the ability of the state security apparatus to ignore signs of wrongdoing when the criminals are seen as loyal to their country. (The parlimentary postmortem blamed, in part, “the longing for a digital national champion.”) I do wonder about the journalistic process that resulted in this piece, which is presented as, and contains, original reporting, but also references and cites heavily from a recently published book (which has already been turned into a Netflix documentary feature.) But when the product is this exquisite, I can’t complain. A piece best read while jotting down names so you don’t get mixed up.

Window-Shop:

“Elemental Need” - Elizabeth Kolbert probes our phosphorous problem. Kolbert is exacting enough to make it very clear that “the world’s phosphorous problem resembles its carbon-dioxide problem, its plastics problem,” et cetera, long before her ending makes the point explicit. Yet the piece is most engaging in its first half, when it makes the case for phosphorous’ uniqueness, from the fascinating history of guano as a catalyst of colonialism, to the vast and politically crucial phosphorous mines in Western Sahara. A piece this brief could afford more detail on the latter, and perhaps less on peecycling, which feels, structurally, like a play for cheeriness, a “solution” arriving in the third act, more than a genuinely major breakthrough.

“Marvelous Things” - Merve Emre surveys the fiction of Italo Calvino. The lengthy pastiche at the beginning mimics “If on a Winter’s Night a Traveler,” and it’s the book Emre has the most to say on and the most interesting analysis of. Everything else is a bit rushed; perhaps the focus ought to be on that work alone. The analysis there, in the final two sections, is stellar: “The inability to see the object” (that is, the novel/s) “whole and entire drives the love story. The magic book lends itself to frantic, inexhaustible conversations… and those conversations lead straight to bed.” Wonderful lines that mirror the trajectory of the book - you hardly need the more obvious beginning if you can write like that.

“Shocking the Consciousness” - Amanda Petrusich enters a trance to the music of radical New Age pioneer and Autoharpologist Laraaji. Laraaji’s music is so joyous and transcendent that just as a letter of recommendation this is worth reading. The sounds are so ineffably spacey it’s best when the prose is grounded in reality (“For the past few weeks, I have tuned in to the meditation with my one-year-old daughter in my lap. She finds the broadcast strange and hysterical… She removes her tiny socks and tosses them in the air.”) and weaker, even spell-breaking, when Petrusich tries to decode the magic (“It is as though Laraaji is trying to teach us that, with help and focus, it is possible to exhale and unclench.” Sure, help and focus, and more importantly Autoharp and Kalimba and effects pedals.)

Skip Without Guilt:

“The End of the English Major” - Nathan Heller tours Arizona State and some school in Cambridge, looking for The Vanishing Humanities Major: A beast which once thundered across the American scene in mighty herds, recently hunted to near extinction.2 This is a fun piece; it’s also a huge mess! Heller is good for one of those about life on campus every few years; his previous effort, on identity politics at Oberlin, was so controversial the Tilly Minute gave it a special section called “Problem Piece,” which makes criticisms that may apply even better to the new article: To hold onto the critique at its core, “I had to set aside my impressions of the overwrought first section. I had to read the sections where Heller summarizes the demands of students quickly, and the sections where they talk to him about their demands very slowly… [I had to give] deliberate weight to the places, often brief, where his object of inquiry is the institution and the students are his co-subjects, rather than the other way round.” Here, the critique is basically that universities are increasingly focused on a “market mentality” in which scientific research is commercialized relentlessly, statistics and the quantifiable are venerated, and everything else is strip-mined, and that this system is exploiting a generation of students of unprecedented diversity but one that therefore is “the likeliest to require immediate conversion of their degrees into life change.” But to reach this conclusion you have to wade through a lot of muck! So much muck I have to pull out the ranked list of Muckiest Muck:

4. This one isn’t Heller’s fault, and in fact if you read the piece really charitably as skewering professors’ and academics’ inability to perceive the obvious truth that the market is behind the decline in the humanities, these quotes accomplish their goal of making the professors look like idiots. But man do these professors seem dumb; as @Liamjsm said on twitter, the article “contains more pedestrian observations from harvard students and faculty than i’ve ever seen in one place. remarkable document, a sort of mid codex.” Most notable is Stephen Greenblatt calling long-form prestige television a “remarkable invention” while playing with Silly Putty, but it’s truly a cornucopia, featuring classics like “My students can’t understand ‘The Scarlet Letter’” and “People these days peek at their iPhones in the theater!”

3. The unbelievable amount of time Heller spends venerating Harvard’s campus, including a three-paragraph-long, highly gratuitous, even lustful description of their new science and engineering complex. I get the point, but come on. Besides, there’s no reason you couldn’t choose literally any other college in the country.

2. The second line, which asserts “the number of English majors on campus at Arizona State University fell from nine hundred and fifty-three to five hundred and seventy-eight.” Yet we much later find out that “on paper, the number of English major at A.S.U. has grown,” due to remote-learning, and that these digital students “are people in their thirties and forties” who are “committed to the humanities — they have an idea about the value of liberal-arts education,” according to an English professor at Arizona. So perhaps a different framing could simply be that even before Covid, many humanities majors were moving online. But this, of course, wouldn’t allow for the tone of panic that takes hold of Heller throughout most of the piece.

1. The ridiculous statements about analysis (the example given is a colonial analysis of landscape in Mansfield Park) not being how most humans read, whereas “looking closely at its form, references, style, and special marks of authorial genius” is apparently how most humans read. As @uncanny_eli said on Twitter, “Literally all of us read both specifically, through certain axes and lenses, and generally. If your history is one of colonisation it is impossible to read Mansfield Park without certain asides making your jaw drop. The idea that this is somehow inauthentic reading is insulting. [As Heller repeatedly emphasizes,] discarding something as problematic rather than engaging with its problems is, in general, bad. So you’re going to denigrate engaging with its problems as somehow arty-farty and woke? Eat my Entire ass.”

“The After-Party” - Inkoo Kang watches the new revival of Party Down. I’ve never seen the original, so I’m not sure how accurate this is, but the critique that this broad comedy needs to lean further into the gloomy rumination and away from psychedelic trips and gross-out humor seems distinctly like the result of a critic watching something well-made that just… isn’t made for them.

“Talking to Ourselves” - Dhruv Khullar gives the physician’s point of view on AI therapy. This piece is well-intentioned, but it ends up revealing the weaknesses of the medical mindset when dealing with new technologies; namely, the focus on what can be measured and quantified and a certain lack of interest in the feelings involved. Ironic that that’s much the same issue that can make these AI tools so harmful when misused. I liked the anecdote about a doctor giving a cancer patient a beer, “something he could savor in a process otherwise devoid of pleasure.” But an even broader conclusion could be reached regarding how non-human medical technologies will end up furthering the alienation of their users. And Khullar’s prose is unfortunately flat, especially compared to the meticulous craft of the magazine’s prior physician-writer Atul Gawande.

“Making Tracks” - Anthony Lane chases Cocaine Bear with The Quiet Girl. A mismatched pair, and Lane has no real point-of-view on either film. He gets his jabs in at Bear; while expected, they’re funny. But the Girl review is plotty and confusing.

“Writer’s Bloc” - Thomas Mallon reads everything by novelist Vesna Goldsworthy, who is forever split between Balkan and English society. Fundamentally mis-structured: Early on, repeatedly tells us how great Goldsworthy’s new book is before we’ve gotten any sense of it, let alone our bearings (“The emotions of this well-conjured novel are raw, its observations acute,” it’s “splendidly paced,”) a surfeit of telling which leaves the reader uneasy. Worse, all Goldsworthy’s past work is then considered in contrast to the new novel, which we’ve hardly heard a thing about. Finally, in the last four (rather scant) paragraphs, the new book is considered, and unfortunately the quotes Mallon uses aren’t especially convincing as to its merit or style (the line about “a whole United Nations of prostitutes” is a clunker.) Goldsworthy’s work is thematically compelling, and line by line, Mallon’s prose is decent. As a whole, though, this piece is hollow.

Letters

Nothing in the box but some cobwebs! What did you think of this week’s issue? Inquiring minds want to know.