Last Week’s New Yorker, weeks of March 9 AND March 16

“As I made my way awkwardly across, some fifty feet in the air, a pair of security guards down below pointed high-powered flashlights at me and filmed me with their phones, hoping, I assumed, that I would get tangled up and require a humiliating rescue operation.“

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“I helped myself to a pulled-pork sandwich, baked beans, and a creamy ginger-clove sweet-potato mash, beneath a hand-painted sign that gently admonished, ‘Though you may be Feeling Hollow, Don’t take More than you can Swallow.’”

For the first time ever, and for no very good reason, I’m doing two weeks in one XXL newsletter. (Hence two quotes above.) Basically: I read the March 9 issue and enjoyed every single piece in it, and while trying to decide which one to put in Skip Without Guilt (because my arbitrary rule dictates that at least one piece must warrant skipping, else what use is the newsletter?) I entered a terrible procrastination hole. And then the next week’s issue came out! So, whatever – here it all is at once, conveniently meaning that I do get to put an entire issue in Window-Shop after all. (Seriously, that March 9 issue [with the Kadir Nelson cover of two bundled-up folks] is a great choice for a front-to-back road trip read. No misses!)

Must-Reads:

“Out on a Limb” (The Control of Nature) - Robert Moor plays with treehouse money. I’m happy to see some reporting on climate activism that avoids the implicitly distainful remove of the onlooker and instead joins the fray. It certainly helps that Moor is so highly attuned to sensory details, and so good at allowing us in while keeping his thrust descriptive. (Compare to The Overstory, the Powers novel that relentlessly overindicated its animist ethos, or to Redwood, the bizarro folk-rock musical about a bereaved girlboss turned schizotypal Lorax. Each shares some beats with this narrative, but of the three only Moor hangs on to his emotional honesty as it sways in the wind.) Moor doesn’t feel the need to justify his quest – go elsewhere for climate stats – but is instead concerned with tactical efficacy, broadly considered. Does it help anyone or anything to try and fail to save a tree? Moor is unsure, but he doesn’t play up the tortured-by-possible-futility angle; it’s never been so clear that we need all the help – and all the coverage – we can get.

“Doing it Right” (A Critic at Large) - Margaret Talbot sings curtain up, light the lights, we’ve got nothing to clit but the Hite. A charming, pertinent examination of the sort of “bad” social scientist who expands the field by critiquing it.¹ Talbot points out that Hite is easier to appreciate once you set aside her claims of doing science and instead understand her work as something between anthropology, social criticism, and social-practice art; her promotion of “a more egalitarian and empathetic world in and out of the bedroom” focused on practicalities (her most successful media hit concerned popularizing the clitoral orgasm) but was keyed into the politics of the situation and especially to the “cultural scripts” that left people sad and unfulfilled. Her later work focused less on the bedroom and more on social unfulfillment; naturally, it was less popular. (We don’t care about the sad workers, we care about the dirty meat!) Talbot admits that Hite was not a great writer, but perhaps she wasn’t really trying to be; an even closer examination of Hite as a performer is warranted. It seems pretty clear that she cared about performance – giving and getting. Ah – just a little higher…

“Country Buffet” (On and Off the Menu) - Hannah Goldfield gets there from here.² You have to love Goldfield’s take on the scrappy, sap-py (not sappy!) Northeast Kingdom, a swath of Vermont especially attractive to “idealists and iconoclasts” – in other words, grumpy radicals of all sorts. One initiative acts as a middleman vendor for small farmers, mostly cheesemongers; Goldfield hears them “banter and commiserate” and lets us in on their round-voweled gripes. Extra-sharp!

Window-Shop:

“Hate-Shaped Box” (The Theatre) - Emily Nussbaum finds out there’s two stories to every genocide. Nussbaum finds the center of the nauseatingly “pungent” Hate Radio: The disorientation and numbness Milo Rau’s not-quite-actually-verbatim script evokes drives the audience back inside ourselves; Brechtian alienation techniques are used toward not-quite-Brechtian aims. Nussbaum pairs the show with the genuinely verbatim but cod-surreal Kramer/Fauci, and finds a way to use that largely pointless exercise as a contrast with Rau’s: One has us “‘hissing at Nazis’”, the other has us looking around at them.

“The Man who Broke into Jail” (Letter from Tennessee) - James Verini knows a man on the inside. A once-in-a-lifetime story: A haunted ex-prisoner (whose name happens to be Friedmann!), devoted to prison safety, embarks on a darkly Quixotic criminal project with aims somewhere between tragic and ludicrous. Verini knows what he has, and makes us wait for every revelation; the reasons Friedmann gave for his plot are saved for the very end, rendering this a mystery of motive. The solution to that mystery mostly provokes dismay, both in that it reveals the depths of delusion under which Friedmann labored, and in that it reveals Verini to have been telling a story about one very strange man, a story which, despite its vaguely political trappings, has almost nothing to do with anything except the reminder that our society is a horrible place to be an outlier and an outsider. Friedmann made a life as an activist for prison conditions not for any ideological reason but because he was a victim of prison conditions; indeed, Friedmann himself observed that many of the strictures of jail were ideal for his needs, and it seems likely to me that part of his plan was to deliberately end up in the jail he had rendered “safe”. This piece becomes a long, sad, real-life version of the Onion video “Autistic Reporter, Michael Falk, Enchanted By Prison’s Rigid Routine”. Indeed, from a very particular perspective this isn’t a sad story at all: Sheriff Hall gets to feel like he outwitted a master, Friedmann is back in prison and already winning writing awards, and the security state is briefly distracted from their customary heinous activities by having to spend a ton of time and money figuring out what the hell Friedmann even did. Only the wife gets shafted – well, you can’t stack her!³

“Imperial Strains” (Dancing) - Jennifer Homans tells the naked truth. I’m now glad I made it out to the misbegotten Ratmansky farce, if only so I can more fully appreciate Homans’ blistering takedown! (The dance was not great, but still better than the awkward, low-energy Sufjan/Peck thing that finished the night, which Homans doesn’t mention, presumably because it’s a revival.) She’s right that its politics are both trite and overdetermined, “earnestly” turning a “light but pointed farce into a bland American morality tale” that lands somewhere “empty and boring”. The new Peck – not the Sufjan; how the ballet chooses what goes with what is fairly mysterious to me – is “sophisticated” and “propulsive” but doesn’t express the breadths of its music. Do I wish Homans, who makes her first appearance in over four months and delivers her second total pan in a row, could find movement work deserving of her enthusiasm? Certainly, and a more frequent publication schedule couldn’t hurt, regardless. (Dance beyond ballet is crucial – increasingly! – to the city’s performance scene.) Until then, and as long as her writing remains more pointed than a pointe shoe, I’ll take what I get.

“Just One” (Books) - Manvir Singh gets mono. Singh literally wrote the book on shamanism, and I trust what he has to say on any complex tradition. I don’t totally buy that monotheism is as central an idea to our culture as he seems to think; the college student in the opening anecdote is pretty clearly grasping for any rhetorical cover for his xenophobia. It’s still interesting to consider just how many ways there are of being monotheistic⁴, not all of which can align. Singh ends up focusing on the importance of identity-formation to the spread of contemporary religion, which neatly creates an in-group among a massive number of people; this seems exactly correct, though, as with any in-group, the waviness of the dividing line is a feature and not a bug. To get from heretic to there-etic, all you have to do is cross.

“The Seer” (The Art World) - Hilton Als crosses the Atlantic to get to the specific. Als’ miniature memoirs are always fun; this one is at best tangential to the photo show on review, by the cool French modernist Atget. Once he gets to critique, there’s enough heartiness to offset all the whipped cream: His work makes “room for boredom and the unremarkable”, which is “what makes modern art modern”, and tied to Atget’s dismissal of “hierarchies of visual experience, who stood for a long time in front of what others might call nothing, seeing everything.” A superb idea on its own, and even better paired with a close look at Atget’s work, which really does demand a competent interpreter at hand. (It’s not just a staircase? Well, you’d better prove it.) Atget’s biography is so hazy it probably should have been grazed or elided; at least the second section, concerning that material, is short enough. More valuable is Als’ view of photography: It “doesn’t solve anything, certainly not when it comes to people”, yet Atget teaches it how to “look without tears”, to unfold a mirror image of our world so that we might look at its form without distraction from its face.

“Buckle Up” (A Reporter Aloft) - Burkhard Bilger has a cockpit in his stomach. It’s always worth reading Bilger, and he makes the most, here, of what is actually a rather thin assignment. Airplane turbulence is going to get worse because of climate change, and there’s not much we can do about it. Theoretically, that’s the thrust of the piece, but it’s not a complicated statement to confirm! Instead, Bilger finds a number of diversions, which prove entertaining but not always pertinent. He hunts for a turbulent flight, but never quite manages to find one; he talks to scientists about the breakthroughs in flight safety – most of which don’t actually involve turbulence, so… oh well. The theoretical tech breakthroughs that could help keep flights reasonably smooth are, predictably, expensive, hard to test, and not as efficacious as one might hope. One could predict a lot of this. It’s hard not to wonder if, as the climate crisis produces ever-bumpier rides, so many other things will be careening toward disaster that worrying about turbulence will feel quaint. What good is a plane when the sky is falling?

🗣️ “ICE Out” (“Police” Dept.) - Jane Bua works while she whistles. A tough assignment, demanding presence and urgency but not leadenness, tsuris, or snark. By collaging an array of local voices, she finds a clever way to thread the needle.

🗣️ “Mouths of Babes” (Innocence Dept.) - John Kenney is tune-and-a-half years old. It takes a lot of skill to make music this effortlessly silly and fun. Kenney makes that effort clear without spoiling the joke.

“Leave It to Beavers” (The Current Cinema) - Justin Chang discusses Western art and dramas with intellectual llamas.⁵ Quite funny (“no one bats an eye, or side-eyes a bat”), and I’m happy Chang appreciates this film’s “screw-loose comic vigor”, even if I’m not sure that’s the defining trait of prime Pixar he thinks it is. It sounds like the film backs away from its wildest tendencies, which is a shame; the best films for children find a way to cosign anarchy.

“All That Remains” (The Current Cinema) - Justin Chang looks at a couple large grey things. Not that Chang requires humor! I caught Pompei at his recommendation, and while some landscape segments make surprisingly good use of digital B&W, which I usually find lifeless, the “roving curiosity” Chang cites often felt to me more like a lack of urgency. Herzog’s new effort gets just a dashed-off look; I’ve found it hard to take seriously since I realized it’s an entire movie about looking for a special kind of elephant that is very slightly larger than a normal elephant. I can find curiosity about many things, but that quest is not one.

🗣️ “Up in Smoke” (The Wayward Press) - Mark Yarm is on paper view. Groovy. Here’s to a specialty-periodical renaissance. Flip, flip, pass.

🗣️ “Big Time” (Hoisting Dept.) - Sarah Larson says if the game is rigged, the rigger’s still game. Sure, maybe your kid could make that – but her dad couldn’t move it!

“Sweet Nothings” (Brave New World Dept.) - Anna Wiener knows they’re yours and they’re not yours. Wiener is a superb tech writer – I still think about her V.R. article – though in case you haven’t noticed I’m getting a bit fed up with the continual onslaught of A.I. stories in the magazine. The issue I take here is not actually one of misunderstanding or misrepresenting, but something far simpler: Wiener doesn’t highlight what is by far the most compelling story she found. She focuses on a variety of A.I. companion apps and their founders. The leaders of these companies exhibit various degrees of cluelessness and psychopathy, but they blur together, as do their products. Replika’s Kuyda totally misunderstands Her, which is not exactly a master’s thesis of a movie – the “‘good Her’” is the “‘Her that leaves’”, duh??; Tolan’s Peper is comparatively conscientious but ‘we aren’t as evil or as fun’ is never a good selling point and his app seems doomed to fail, Ello-style, plus he could probably stand to research the uses of clinical therapy before he trivializes it; Friend’s Schiffmann is openly sociopathic, but he’s at least telling the truth when he says the fact his product can tell its users to kill themselves “‘is kind of what makes the product work in the first place.’” The ever-annoying Sherry Turkle, who I can’t believe I’m even marginally in agreement with⁶, is here to provide the skeptic’s view; Lynn Hershman Leeson is here to provide the ahead-of-their-time artist’s warning. It’s all diverting enough, but pretty expected. What is not expected is the two-paragraph detour into Amelia Miller, who is working as a Human-AI relationship coach, helping people divest their “emotional energy” from “frictionless” systems without prohibiting their use, by way of “custom prompts” that “de-anthropomorphize” the machines. I couldn’t believe I wasn’t reading a whole article about this project, a genuinely new and fascinating development in the field, because it asks not merely what the future will look like, but how we’ll deal with it. More of that.

🗣️ “Iran-Bound” (Dept. of Stealth) - H.C. Wilentz says Jafar Panahi’s got to wear shades, but assuredly not because the future’s so bright. Something iffy happening here tonally – is this tragedy or farce? – but the accidental resonance of a time-to-go-back-to-Iran story at this particular moment can’t be ignored.

“Nineteen Seventy-Six” (American Chronicles) - Jill Lepore is doing bicentennial erasure. I don’t think I realized that the success of the 1976 biennial was borne of its failure; basically, after plans for something centralized collapsed, everyone everywhere was encouraged to do their own thing and call it part of the bicentennial. I also don’t care much, though, and Lepore’s attempts to find political resonance in what was essentially a simple but clever marketing ploy are not convincing. But she’s decent company anyway and there are a few good anecdotes here. (“You could buy Old Glory Bicentennial condoms”, apparently; Gil Scott-Heron was unenthused.) She first goes through the earlier celebrations, including the disastrous 1920s one that culminated with an unsuccessfully cancelled Klan march; by that metric, anything would look good – anything except whatever we’ll do this year, which might be nothing and will certainly be nothing good.

Skip Without Guilt:

“Lying Low” (Books) - Elizabeth Kolbert is preoccupied and postoccupied. The rare piece which could stand to be more specific in its parallels to the present; Kolbert stops a bit short of drawing any practical conclusions from a book which she asks us to treat as a warning. More commentary on the Berliners’ deliberate obliviousness would be welcome; the most complex Buruma quote ends a paragraph and gets no commentary. I’m also generally against the magazine turning into a Review of Each Others’ Books, and Buruma is a regular enough contributor that the appellation applies. Kolbert is interested in his book, but I’m not sure she finds anything to say about it. Still, the historical material is compelling enough, and suitably brutal without being pathetic. Eventually, every wall falls.

“Pay Later” (Letter from Washington) - E. Tammy Kim wonders if C.F.P.B. now stands for Corporations Fucking People Bigly.⁷ An extremely dry (I longed for some Matt Levine commentary and summation) but essentially clear take on the dismantling of the CFPB – basically, it hurts everyone but the biggest businesses, it’s certainly an enrichment scheme, it’s blatantly illegal, and there’s nothing to be done. Since this is largely the same road map of catastrophe playing out across the federal government, it’s not quite exciting news, but it’s still important that it be chronicled. There is more than the necessary degree of overlap here with Andy Kroll’s fairly recent profile of Russ Vought, though. Of all Kim’s Deep State Diaries to elevate to the magazine, I’m not sure why this one in particular merited that treatment.

“Valley Boy” (A Critic at Large) - David Denby pays attention to the P.T.A. meeting. Denby gets the director totally wrong by ignoring the comedy that is so very central to Thomas Anderson’s work; of course he doesn’t like Inherent Vice – he isn’t letting himself laugh at it. I’m not sure there’s a single thing he says about Thomas Anderson that isn’t more true of Martin Scorsese: Fetishization of detail, exuberant maximalism, perversity, “tender” irony, “studies of American loneliness”. He runs through most of Anderson’s films one by one; he’s a decent writer, though nowhere near the Kael levels of talent that let a critic get away with silly opinions. I wasn’t reading the magazine when Denby was the regular critic, and it’s a fun idea for him to pop in on the eve of PTA’s presumptive Oscar win and give it a whirl for old times’ sake. That doesn’t mean I have to like it!

“Severance” (Annals of Higher Education) - Nicholas Lemann wonders how to un-reverse the university. Pretty weird to frame Trump’s vindictive attempt to blackmail universities as some sort of widely popular conservative crusade which universities brought on themselves. Lemann admits that even universities which bent the knee to Trump gained nothing from it, but this undermines his own argument that the fight against universities is spurred by genuine attention to the popular resentment of meritocratic elites, and not a simpler and baser fascist power struggle, in which Trump tries to undermine any institution which he cannot control. If the primary goal were actually ideological capture, the administration would look to reward compliance instead of focusing on punishment and fear. Lemann wants us to gasp at the irony that it’s not the radical humanities which will be hurt by these cuts but mostly the sciences; we already know, though, as evidenced by the closure of USAID, that Trump doesn’t give a shit: He’s more than happy to sabotage institutions, and to sacrifice the well-being of our country, to consolidate political power. In fact, that’s basically his whole project! Lemann is overestimating the right’s ideological coherence and underestimating its venality. At this point, we should all know better. As someone once said: OPEN THE SCHOOLS!!!

“The Hating Game” (Onward and Upward with the Arts) - John Lahr plays with Dahl. Indefensibly promotional in tone (The show is “at once uncomfortable and thrilling”, Lithgow is “dazzling”, it’s “an invitation for people to think for themselves”, apparently), which made me skeptical of the meta-politics of putting on this show right now, and of writing about it so glowingly. Roald Dahl was by all accounts a cantankerous and difficult-to-like figure, and his defenses of Palestine absolutely crossed the line into antisemitism. But the show, at least as Lahr writes about it, presents the definitive crossing of that line as a final blow against Dahl’s argument in general, as if to say that any pro-Palestinian argument must have underlying antisemitism. In the seventies, you could’ve said as much openly; now the pretense has collapsed and the message must be smuggled inside a historical play. Again, I might be reading things unfavorably, but Lahr prompted that reaction by telling of the show’s brilliance without sufficiently showing it. Otherwise, this is a small portion of thin gruel. Rosenblatt, the playwright, seems cordial and entirely ordinary (British division); Lahr barely even tries to claim he’s interesting. Lithgow, the star, gets only a few quotes; virtually everyone involved talks almost exclusively about how great they think the project is. What is this, a press junket? Spare me.

Letters:

Michael O. is “way behind” (I feel ya, bud!) but “enjoyed Gideon Lewis-Kraus's article on LLMs” – “I think what haunted me most was the reaction from people in other tech-related fields. They've been doing this stuff for ages, but suddenly when it's words, everyone loses their mind.”

Congrats to my alma mater UMBC Retrievers Men’s Basketball team on winning our (admittedly piddly-shit) conference and advancing to March Madness. Go Big Dogs.

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