Last Week’s New Yorker, week of May 11 & 17

“amid all this anthropological interest in male behavior, a world beloved by men that is organized around the legacy of kings and a single precious metal has been hiding in plain sight, like a white Wakanda.”

This is the America at 250 issue, and it’s a good one! (If noticeably West Coast-forward.) I was sorely tempted to expand to three Must-Reads; honestly, any of the top four below would be Must-Reads in almost any other week. And since it’s a double issue, it’d arguably be justified. But I’m not going to do it, dear reader, because I care that much about your valuable time. Something I’m demonstrating by letting you know how much I care about your time in this blurb, which you’re wasting your time reading right now. Sucker!

Must-Read:

“Fools Rush In” (Letter from California) - Jennifer Wilson plays a gold miner role. A dynamite blast; the most front-to-back delightful take on the magazine’s specific model of a trends piece in recent memory. The blueprint combines a personal journey to the heart of some phenomenon with plenty of historical contextualization. Wilson doesn’t have to break from that format to execute it with flair, insight, and even genuine pathos. She’s reliably one of the magazine’s funniest writers, operating in a mode that’s more mezzo side-eye than the zany high notes of a Patricia Marx, and more successful for it. Wilson starts with the silliness and surface-level commercialism of this gold rush before revealing its deeper meanings, as expertly presented by Quinn Slobodian, whose Hayek’s Bastards won a National Book Critics’ Circle award (what color is that medal?) – his reading at the nominees ceremony, which I attended, was a highlight of the night. Gold is such a self-evident symbol that the realities of its extraction can be obscured or romanticized; smartly, Wilson doesn’t present its brutality as revelation, exactly – the Indigenous people whose “ecological practices” were erased during the gold rush and concurrent genocide haven’t been waiting to be revealed – but instead uses the gold rush as a way to explore the American pull toward extractive nostalgia. Amazingly, she does this without ever lapsing into abstractions; everything is grounded in the same often amusing detail, mined both from historical research and the present moment. (The reality show Gold Rush – which I’d never heard of, though apparently it’s a huge hit – is a vision of American masculinity; it’s also, as its critics suggest, “settler cosplay and plunder porn”. The two are intertwined.) And an ending I won’t spoil is a perfectly ambivalent finish to this remarkable piece, a shining example of exploration and explanation without didacticism. The hills are alive.

“American Tween” (Profiles) - Anna Wiener is just be tween US girls. I’m glad I’m already on record as a Wiener appreciator. This piece, which expands her focus from Silicon Valley culture to the culture of kids who may live in SF but whose key identity is their age, has already gone viral, its empathy and optimism, along with its full-tilt litanies and oddball descriptors, making it the sort of longread that has insight for some but pleasure for all. If you have or know kids this age, this flurry of signifiers Wiener chronicles will likely be familiar; the step back from their immediacy allows the similarities (little kids have, I think, always made jokes about bumping butts) and differences (tween status drinks skipped the post-soda-fountain era, but they’re back, baby) between eras to pop. Billing this piece as a profile seems odd, but Wiener does make an effort to get at the psychology behind Mira, the central character; that her attempts are expertly rebuffed by the natural P.R. mechanism of preteen insecurity – in which the ego, examining itself for the first time, realizes its falseness and tries to ignore it – is inevitable but very funny. There are only very brief diversions into research; Neil Postman gets maybe two sentences. This is almost entirely a moment-by-moment account, something readers love – which writers and editors, on a mission to educate us, forget at their peril. We want to know about one another; we want to know what other people do all day, and what they think about. Too often, adulthood means having to pretend that you already know – Wiener’s piece is a reminder that we aren’t as grown-up as all that. The first thing we have to learn from children is the necessity of curiosity. The second thing we have to learn from children is that whatever you dish out, you’ll soon have to take. Clock it.

Window-Shop:

“Visiting Hours” (Books) - James Wood foots the bildungsroman. Only in James Wood’s hands can an argument in favor of deprivation, withheld information and emotion in the novel seem not only reasonable but almost self-evident. It surely would be easy to “flood” an autobiographical novel about a mother imprisoned for her role in the Weather Underground with politics, and it is a risky and wise choice to choose the dehydrated, realist forms James Wood favors and advocates for when the topic presents as full of such meaty trauma. Some readers will surely be frustrated by the writer’s choice to focus on morality – and a certain stripped-down theology – over a deeper-seated politics, a criticism Robinson has also faced. But Wood is worth reading in part because he brings himself to every review – his predilections, his histories. That’s all the more fun in an out-and-out rave like this one, where one sees in Wood’s love for this book a sort of mirror. There he is; there you are.

“Couture Shock” (The Current Cinema) - Justin Chang just wants to get high fashion. Man is it nice to have a critic at the magazine who can bring wit and insight to the table without having to scoff at the stupid fun of a film like this. (Though to be fair, I’m really just jabbing at Lane; David Denby’s review of the first film was down for the ride and ahead of its time in its reading of Andy as a shithead – see also the middle-schoolers discussing Andy elsewhere in the magazine, the fem version of the Is Fortnite Overrated? meme.) Chang points out that Hollywood and the fashion world, which turn “beautiful, original works into cheaply reproducible goods, season after season”, are both “a grind, but not always or entirely a soulless one”. Coming to the defense of the magazine industry in a Condé glossy is a tricky assignment, but Chang, like the film he reviews, finds “the appropriate ratio of cynicism to hope”.

“The Shot Heard Round the World?” (A Critic at Large) - Daniel Immerwahr weighs the import of our exports. Immerwahr uses two new books to undermine the idea that the American Revolution was especially important. It’s an interesting argument, but quite a technical one, really – if one takes a results-oriented view of every war, then the British empire mostly flourishing in the wake of the American Revolution must, sort of, mean that the British lucked out, or even won. (Those italics are Immerwahr’s and mine.) Meanwhile, the import of the revolution can be undermined by other means: The ideological underpinnings that spread revolution derived largely – almost exclusively – from the French edition. This is interesting enough, and winningly revisionist, even if the two arguments aren’t actually that connected. Even pre-globalization, world events did tend to happen in concert with one another; answering why is enormously difficult. A technological determinist will point to the spread of technology; an economist will point to the economy; an astrologer will point to the stars. Sure, the American Revolution wasn’t the spark, but it was a spark – and a highly visible one. The world twirled ‘round the shot.

🗣️ “Elevated Taste” (Art Dept.) - Julian Lucas sees Buddha, Buddha, Buddha, Buddha rock in everywhere. Can’t wait for the new statue, which surely won’t beat the pigeon or the Simone Leigh bust, but will certainly top that awful, smug drone, and possibly also the hot-pink tree, which had oddly little impact and isn’t mentioned here. Good enough, in other words, and possibly wonderful – we’ll see!

“The Big Picture” (Books) - Sebastian Smee takes us to Church. Smee is yet another Post refugee, here to drop some art history on us, with the emphasis on history over art. If Frederic Church declared that American art was valid, he also defined it as, basically, glowing and triumphant pictures of imagined American landscapes, with a heavy dose of moralizing uplift; promoting a certain sort of liberal-minded sublimity that has fallen so far out of favor it’s difficult to even recognize. Trying to understand how Manifest Destiny could be seen as as a well-intentioned liberal project is now as difficult as trying to understand how eugenics could have been seen, by a later generation, the same way. Smee’s project is explication; he doesn’t really bother making any case for Church’s continuing importance, meaning that readers without preexisting interest will have to labor not to zone out. As with Church’s oft-didactic art, you can look and learn your lesson, or you can live and learn something else.

“What We Hold” (American Chronicles) - Jill Lepore dodges drafts. Excerpted from a book put out by Monticello, and accordingly granting Jefferson a lot of credit for his liberatory ideas, and not lingering too long on the well-documented horrors he inflicted in his personal life, beyond pointing out their startling hypocrisy. Indeed, the most egregious modifications to what Jefferson wrote utterly defanged the anti-slavery message at the heart of his original Declaration, and they may have been deleted so as to avoid making the Americans look like hypocrites. Lepore, who just won a Pulitzer for her extensive history of that other central American document, is certainly a subject-matter expert; so that she ends up focusing almost entirely on the theoretical import of words while ignoring their practical consequences is forgivable – it’s the lawyer’s take on history – but still annoying, especially the hedge of a final sentence. I’d rather have read a back-and-forth between her and Immerwahr, whose pieces paint nearly opposite views of the same events, than either of their individual pieces.

“Revamps” (The Theatre) - Emily Nussbaum’s days are musical numbered. Nussbaum’s assertion that Lost Boys is playing it straight, aiming for darkness and blunt mythologization, is a departure from the critical consensus but is closer to the leaden musical I saw – except that Nussbaum enjoys it, as did basically everyone. (With reservations, sure, but whatever “exhilaration” they apparently found I missed entirely. I promise I am not a sourpuss!) Nussbaum loved Schmigadoon! even more – it was her favorite musical of the season – and her joy totally comes across on the page. Whether or not she can be trusted, her taste is convincing, and her attentiveness to performances is important when discussing the actor’s medium. I do wish these reviews had more space to breathe; there’s pretty much nothing about Schmigadoon’s actual production qualities, for instance, and not enough room for Nussbaum’s joy to reach full flower. One chorus is not enough!

“Resolved” (Portfolio) - Eli Durst and Jay Caspian Kang amass debaters. Charming, compelling photos in the magazine’s usual flashbulb-lit B&W style paired with a moderately annoying Kang blurb about independent thinking that ends up obviating the comparatively nuanced pictures. Still worth flipping through.

🗣️ “Looking Back” (Comment) - Jelani Cobb says that was the country that was. Fulfills the assignment.

Skip Without Guilt:

“Crossroads” (Books) - Kelefa Sanneh leaves ident. Whether Sanneh’s argument strikes you as subtle and sophisticated or unclear and edgelordy will depend more on your preconceptions than this piece itself, which prods at Crenshaw without ever actually punching. Is Sanneh objecting to Crenshaw’s view of intersectionality on the grounds that it is too neatly reverse-heirarchical, thus entrenching heirarchy despite itself? Or is he merely trying to cast Crenshaw as blind to the issues facing Black men? A restorative reader ought to assume the former; a reader who’s had to suffer through Sanneh’s credulous recent coverage of various malignant Black dudes would probably be inclined toward the latter view. If Sanneh’s argument is too hazy to take seriously, his biography of Crenshaw, occasioned by her new memoir, is generally clearer and, if slanted, at least has its facts in a row. (He does make the argument that moments of progress are “illusory” because they’re inevitably followed by reactionary backlash, which betrays his thin and cynical politics in ways I’m not sure he intends.) Because his bad-faith reading spends more time on the reading than the bad-faith, Sanneh produces a piece that works despite itself; he’d like it to be a conversation finisher, but we can keep talking.

“Out of Office” (A Reporter at Large) - Peter Slevin loves you like Barack. (And if I was President / the minute the Congress called my name / I’d say now who do / who do you think you’re foolin’?) This could’ve been a fundraising email. It’s actually remarkable how little insight Slevin is able to get on Obama’s true thoughts or feelings; 44 is firmly in salesman mode, and what he’s selling is his own future relevance as a voice on the left – this despite most of the article serving as an excuse for his absence as a voice, which he mostly blames on Michelle. The man can do what he wants, but if he’s going to decline the pressure, he should also decline interviews like this one; the picking and choosing is more distasteful than his absence. The new news about the man is that his giant, unlovely, but certainly striking library is about to open in Chicago; Slevin’s most insightful quote is from the architect who describes Obama’s absurd levels of micromanagement. (I think he’s trying to puff the man up, but what comes across is that Obama does not like to delegate.) This piece is long and repetitive, dull and needless, and while Obama remains once-in-a-generation charismatic, he has nothing new to say.

Letters:

Not really! One little thing, but it’ll be covered in the Weekend Edition.

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