Last Week’s New Yorker Review: May 27, 2024
Last Week’s New Yorker, week of May 27
"the vexed ontological question of whether blowing up little green pigs with crates of cartoon TNT does or does not have any meaning, in a universe already rich in absurdity"
Must-Read:
“Abridged Too Far” - Anthony Lane thumbs through Blinkist, a business-bro-coded summary app. Blinkist is an idea which is both obviously terrible and incredibly derivative – which ought to make a takedown redundant and dull. But Lane is on his witty A-game; I LAMPed – again, around here that’s “Laughed at my Periodical” – multiple times. (On The Power of Going All-In: “Given the title, I was hoping that it might be about breakfast buffets, or the best way to behave yourself at an orgy.”) Lane chooses Reader’s Digest’s abridgements as Blinks’ closest predecessor, though other groups and generations have had their own similar tools, from CliffsNotes to befriending reference librarians to my personal favorite, reading five book reviews instead of the book. Ultimately, people without enough time will find their own solutions – I’ve always been slightly horrified by the number of readers of this newsletter who report using it as a substitute for the magazine instead of a companion. Lane convincingly argues that Blinks turn “the inhabitants of literature… into businessmen.” Whether that’s merely a byproduct of their silicon soul or something more foundational built into summarization (Reader’s Digest has always had a right-wing slant, too) is hard to say – and is a question Lane might dig into a bit more. Is the whole enterprise against artistry, or just this A.I.-ified iteration? Either way, these may be sum times always…
Window-Shop:
“Castoffs” - Emily Nussbaum has Love is Blind faith in reality-TV-star unions. An excellent labor-rights story unhappily married to a sordid behind-the-scenes-drama story. The question of how to get labor protections for a particular bizarre edge case is a fascinating one, but legal stories move at a snail’s pace, and there’s just not much to report yet on that front. Nussbaum spends a long time convincing us that Love is Blind is a pernicious and emotionally manipulative environment with too much alcohol and not enough therapy, and that the show itself is misleadingly edited and falsely self-regarding. None of this will come as much surprise to anyone who’s watched Love is Blind, but it’s still worth saying. I’m not sure quite as much is needed about the Instagram posts of one particular abusive shithead, Carter Wall. Nussbaum got a revealing interview with him, and probably felt obligated to include it, but the specific dynamics between Wall and his match Poche aren’t especially related to the wrongdoings of the Blind team. Sure, on its surface, it’s a more dramatic story, but in practice I wished Nussbaum would get back to legal minutiae and the blurriness of what a “job” even is. (As she says, “even legitimate workplace complaints look like spilled tea” – but jumping between one and the other confuses things further.) It helps that regardless of the subject, Nussbaum’s prose is sharp and propulsive; this longread reads quickly. You can binge it all in one sitting.
“Apocalypse When” - Justin Chang takes a swig of Megalopolis, the great Coppola-wine-funded folly. It’s hard to separate my feelings on Chang’s review from my desire to get a glimpse of this bizarro project. This particular brand of ambition just doesn’t seem to exist in the filmmakers who are allowed Hollywood budgets nowadays. Hopefully, there are also fewer sexual harassers involved and less opportunities for abusers like Shia LaBeouf to get work, sure, but there’s no reason we can’t have both things; no reason to assume that the vices of New Hollywood were a product of its ambition and not just its era and demographics. Chang balances some light mockery (“…a sex scene containing the unimprovable line ‘I want to fuck you so bad, Auntie Wow’”) with an obvious fondness for Coppola’s project: “…the mere fact that it exists, in its breathtaking and sometimes exasperating singularity, feels like an expression of hope.” That’s beautiful – although hope usually points a way forward; I’d say the appeal of this project lands somewhere between hope and nostalgia.
“You Make Me Sick” - Sharon Lerner has a chemical reaction. Lerner has done lots of excellent work breaking the PFAS story for outlets including The Intercept and ProPublica. For this magazine, she tries to stretch herself toward a more psychologically probing feature story. It’s not totally successful. It’s clear her comfort zone rests in communicating the details of a scientific and public-health story; when she tries to find moments of poetry, they feel halfhearted. (“In the awkward silence that followed, I looked out the window at some hummingbirds.”) Her thesis concerns the nature of secrets in bureaucracies – that they aren’t always self-contained bombshells, and that the same people who keep them are often responsible for eventually revealing them. This isn’t the great leap Lerner seems to think it is – Hannah Arendt famously came to a similar conclusion about the banality of evil in these very pages. At times here it seems like the fundamental malignancy of corporate capitalism is deliberately left ungrasped in favor of a less ambitious, less ideological conclusion. Still, beneath the surface of Lerner’s piece is a story about journalism and sources, and this story is fascinating. The ways she negotiates with Hansen and Johnson, managing to get them on the record discussing their own complicity, is remarkable; there are also peeks into court filings and other complicated tactics. Her work on this story is heroic – if PFAS will last, it will last too.
“Wait for It” - Kathryn Schulz puts on her suspenders. How much you’ll enjoy this depends entirely on how much you like having a fairly simple logical thread followed patiently to its predictable conclusions. In other words: How little you need suspense! Mostly, I didn’t miss it; it’s a pleasure to join Schulz in patiently unpacking the importance of foreknowledge and “artificial slowing-down of time” in keeping things gripping, complete with the Hitchcock reference you expect. It ought to be annoying to read four paragraphs on the similarities and differences between anticipation and dread – but Schulz shows that the high-school-style informative essay, in which research is limited and generalizations abound, still has life in sufficiently capable hands. But will this piece stick with me? Probably not. To hang from the cliff, I need something more to hold onto.
“Age of Anxiety” - Amanda Petrusich spurns the spotlight with Billie Eilish. A solid album review. One song “shifts from a lovelorn, jazz-inflected torch song into a puling club banger”, exactly right; Petrusich nails the thematic précis, too: The album is “about wanting a relationship but failing, in some fundamental and inescapable way, to sustain closeness with another person.” But the second-half plea for a younger Eilish’s silliness to make a return is a bit confused: Having exactly one relatively upbeat pop song on the album is basically her thing; “Bad Guy” and “Lunch” are both anomalies on their tracklists (as is “Therefore I Am”.) Petrusich doesn’t manage to express a strong point of view on Eilish as a star, so the piece is better when it focuses on the details of her music and lyrics – as it mostly does.
“Eyes Up Here” - Lauren Michelle Jackson racks her mind and minds her rack. As you might expect: Top heavy. The opening segment is an excellent dissection of the shifting role of the “breast man” – and related cultural attitudes. “The prurient and the puritanical share custody,” Jackson says. A cultural history could go in many directions, but once Jackson focuses in on the book at hand, by Sarah Thornton, things veer terminological for a long while, in ways that feel disconnected from the piece’s supposed thrust. Then Jackson begins critiquing Thornton for being “less interested in how [breasts] appear than in how they can be put to work” – and for favoring “‘small, shapely tits’” in the process. That’s interesting enough, if a bit underdeveloped; it’s still not really the piece Jackson promised at the start. But I guess it’s the next breast thing.
“Family Portrait” - Thomas Mallon scopes out Garth Risk Hallberg’s too-intimate new novel. Yet another entry in the compendium of book reviews where a new novel is mostly disappointing for not being more like the author’s previous novel. Here, the “prolonged tour de force” of City on Fire is but brief context for The Second Coming’s “narrative stupor.” Mallon’s prose is mostly excellent (“At times, Hallberg invites readers to give up on his feckless protagonist, but one can’t escape a sense that the author himself is often hoodwinked by his character”) but the setup is inescapably awkward: The hopeful bad review is a nut I’ve not seen cracked. The last paragraph is a double thud, pitching Hallberg on a “truly encompassing book of fiction set in the time of 9/11 or of COVID” – spare me! – and ending with a corny reference to the author’s name. I’d bring things full circle – but for that I’d need a Mallon baller.
All-good Talk of the Towns this week means – a Special Section!
“Abortion and the Election” (Comment) - Margaret Talbot recaps the post-Dobbs fight. Precise and fairly comprehensive.
“Trump Trial Sideshow” - Zach Helfand finds in other courtrooms, other blunders. Great concept, borderline too-goofy tone for what’s ultimately a piece about hospital-cop brutality. Still compelling.
“Saying Yes to the Dress” - Henry Alford checks out something else borrowed at the library. Just wonderful from start to finish – how could anyone not be charmed by this?
“Eek” - Eren Orbey sees a rodent in residence at a school in Cambridge. I can take or leave the connection to encampments; all the mouse stuff is vigorously visceral and vibrant. Great button.
“Family Game” - Gideon Jacobs sits Kindergarten-kourtside. The main story is cute, but I mostly dig Randle’s choice to live in Manhattan: “‘People look at me: “Bro, why are you just walking around the city by yourself?” Because I’m a normal person.’”
Skip Without Guilt:
“Say the Word” - Adam Gopnik has a liberal helping. When a piece begins by outlining how confusing the bounds of its subject are, I’d expect it to, by the end, deliver a clearer idea of what those bounds are, exactly. Gopnik seems to delight in muddying the waters, showing how everyone means something different by the word ‘liberalism’ – and then weakly concluding that it’s still worth saving. If we’re expected to want to save it, it would be nice to know exactly what Gopnik thinks it is, and even more importantly, what it isn’t. If liberalism is truly just the “water we swim in without knowing it’s wet,” then wouldn’t it be more helpful to get the arguments for and against getting out of the water, instead of just the arguments over how to swim? (Also, the central metaphor switching from ‘liberalism is water’ to ‘liberalism is the Titanic sinking into the water’ is inelegant.) Gopnik really ought to speak to an actual Marxist or anarchist to find out exactly what those counterarguments to liberalism are – he focuses entirely on a Brookings-employed defense and a hyper-reactionary fake-leftist opposition. Regardless of whether one agrees with Gopnik that liberalism shouldn’t be hastily dismantled, it’s clear that by not seriously engaging with the best opposing thinkers, he’s undermined his credibility terribly.
“Photo Realism” - Vinson Cunningham faces away from a documentary play about photos of the Holocaust’s perpetrators. The review is serviceable; I saw the show and quite disliked it – the acting is all pitched to the same bizarrely hammy tenor, like a soap-opera voiceover; it’s as if, terrified that the audience will zone out, the creators have amplified every moment to such extremes that no moment can resonate. Plus, as Sara Holdren writes, there ought to have been mention of Gaza. Cunningham gets there too, in the last section – but he makes the bizarre choice to only speak of current events in a generic tenor, scrubbed of proper nouns. (“…here come the images: a bloody limb, a shell-shocked parent, a dead child caked in rubble and dust.”) Why is he afraid to call things by name? It comes across like a TikToker speaking of “unaliving” and “seggs.” Especially as student activists must constantly remind the public and the media to focus on Rafah, omitting all place names feels like a political choice – an unsavory and even cowardly one. I’m sure Cunningham was just aiming for poetic effect by universalizing – but this isn’t the time for poetic effect. It borders on barbaric.
Letters:
A sizeable mailbag this week, on a variety of topics. I love my readers!
Meave Gallagher writes in on the subject of the Grenfell fire, covered in a Talk of the Town by Rebecca Mead profiling the actors in a documentary play on the subject. “I… watched the channel 4 version of the play, which was quite moving… The most current and informative journalism I’ve read on it is Show Me the Bodies by Peter Apps. Apps is an investigative journalist at a B2B publication called Inside Housing, so he knows what he’s looking for and how to find so much damning evidence about the national problem Grenfell is the most public example of. He also spoke to many survivors and people who lost people in the fire, and for its length, it feels quite comprehensive. Too bad the public inquiry is going to go on for the next trillion years, while people still live in housing with the same issues Grenfell tower had. It also gave me nightmares and made me finally make an escape plan, and look up my building to see whether it was made out of 12 kinds of burnables, so keep that in mind if you do decide to read it.”
Continuing the discussion of malignant authority in the U.K, Meave continues: Rachel Aviv’s “Lucy Letby story really shook me up. I can't stop thinking about it. I think I dreamed about it the other night. Perhaps obviously, it reminds me of the Louise Woodward "shaken baby" case from the '90s, which you may not remember, but that was full of now-suspect science and tabloid furore and Who Is This Accused Baby-Killer, Louise Woodward?, and at the heart of it is a still a dead child. Having read the piece, though, the evidence against Lucy Letby feels much thinner than i understood when it was first reported, and the whole thing is nauseating.”
H. writes in on Aviv’s story: “If Aviv's account is to be believed – and i see no reason why it shouldn't be – this poor woman has essentially been convicted of witchcraft. Rather than face the reality of rotting public health and the negligence of the institutions dedicated to it, the authorities in this area have found someone to blame, destroying her life to preserve their own power and position. The fact that the police department then celebrated this gross miscarriage of justice by making its own documentary that may well be adapted to some Netflix schlock to feed our bloodlust for "true crime" — AND that the justice system in England criminalizes criticism of itself – well, I think there are a ton of ‘broad and distinct political implications.’” A point well-taken.
Michael writes in on Sarah Stillman’s piece on prison visitation: “I felt that ‘don't we know this already’ feeling about the prison feature that was your must read this week. The scammy nature of prison communication has been well covered elsewhere. It's rare that the ‘tie this to a specific person’ angle on these stories is what sticks with me and this one was no different. I guess this gets at a broader point around novelty in investigative pieces like this. I imagine I would have really liked this one if I came into the topic cold. And maybe my sense that the magazine more regularly delivered bangers ten years ago comes down to me just consuming less news and literary content then.” Totally valid – although for whatever reason, the “tie this to a specific person” angle was exactly what made Stillman’s piece so vivid for me.
Michael also liked Bob Morris’ party-crasher Talk of the Town – which, for me, was just sort of an obnoxious display of white male privilege by a dude that has plenty of power already, signifying little to nothing… but Morris’ writing is good.
Susan writes that her reaction to John McPhee’s latest Tabula Rasa is, “in short - what an asshole! My overall impression of McPhee altered dramatically after reading this. Such an overwhelming sense of self-importance. I don't think he could be more impressed with himself. And the comment from Knopf? It seems to me that what Knopf was trying to tell him was, hey, you're a young writer, and if I send you these reactions, you are going to be way too discouraged, so I'm not going to do that. This is clearly a guy who does not believe, and maybe never has, that he could possibly be criticized – for anything. No generosity of spirit.” I don’t really disagree, he does come off as prickish – it’s just a matter of whether you can find it in yourself to enjoy that curmudgeonly quality, and view it as, to some degree, intentional on McPhee’s part. There’s a reason I said I’d be “reluctant to recommend” that piece – if you can’t get on McPhee’s wavelength, his self-deprecation by way of semi-ironic self-importance, you won’t have much fun.
Last time I wrote that my Denver Nuggets had rebounded terrifically from their failures. Since then they lost the last two games of the series in sometimes embarrassing fashion. Ah, sports.
A paying subscriber let me know that on her receipt it looked as though the subscription renewal money was going to Substack. I can confirm it is not, even if it says “substack” on it. Sorry for any confusion!