May 17, 2023

Last Week's New Yorker Review: May 22, 2023

Last Week’s New Yorker, week of May 22, 2023

Must-Read:

“Driven Around the Bend” - Adam Gopnik wonders why we cling to our cars. Really clever, in the joyfully onanistic Gopnikian mode which finds it perfectly natural to begin and end with paragraphs on half-century-old sitcoms or to launch into a parenthetical on the “exhausting intensity, not to mention the insalubriousness, of a horse-pulled culture.” Gopnik’s balance can waver, but his form is fine here, in part, I suspect, because reviewing two books in a short span leaves only just enough time for digression. The first book sounds sort of banal, but Henry Grabar’s Paved Paradise clearly delights Gopnik, who points out the just humor in directing “a stomping, hat-throwing fury” at the cold mechanism of the parked car. (Since it’s Gopnik, he ties this to “the humorless French philosopher Henri Bergson.”) It also prompts Gopnik’s rather clever supposition that cars are popular not primarily for practical reasons but for emotional ones: The argument for the car “resides simply in its appeal, an appeal already apparent to the majority of people on the planet… We pay an enormous price for our automotive addiction… but telling the addict that the drug isn’t actually pleasurable is a losing game.” Ultimately, the car is “a metaphor for liberty… as firm as that of guns,” “a matter less of reason than of familiarity and nostalgia.” It would be easy to get annoyed by this assertion, whether because you’re on Gopnik’s side but detect, correctly, that he’s condescending tremendously toward you, or because you’re not on Gopnik’s side and feel, correctly, that his flippant intellectualism is subsidized by a certain blithe privilege. But like the standup comic who makes everyone mad, you have to respect the hustle a bit, and take pleasure in the beauty of Gopnik’s snot-nosed antistrophe.1

Window-Shop:

“Chaos Theory” - Sam Knight precogitates with British disaster expert Lucy Easthope, an emergency planner who rejects bureaucratic efficiency in favor of empathy and immersion. Gorgeous on a paragraph-by-paragraph level; the horrific absurdity of Easthope’s acute pancreatitis happening during the Grenfell Tower fire she’d practically just predicted is almost too much to bare, and that’s the opening section. Easthope’s “very strong sense of the us and them” is endearing, though Knight dodges the issue of class a bit, focusing more on her precocious draw toward disaster. There are many fascinating ideas here: the unexpected link between disaster studies and Kropotkin’s conception of “mutual aid,” the popular line graph of predictably wavering recovery, and the idea that ‘recovery’ can be an unhelpful concept, better replaced by “finding meaning, or… making something of purpose.” The last section revealing that Easthope published a bestselling memoir last year, though, casts the rest of the piece in a slightly different light; the emphasis on Easthope’s providential humaneness suddenly rings more canned. The stuff on COVID, too, isn’t especially illuminating, and the lack of a stuck landing makes the rest of the piece’s structure feel arbitrary. Perhaps the piece would work better focused around the “heroic phase” of a disaster, further investigating Rebecca Solnit’s question, “not why this brief paradise of mutual aid and altruism appears… but rather why it is ordinarily overwhelmed by another world order.” Easthope’s work would still be relevant enough to grant her a few segments, and a bigger canvas would make her story feel like a gripping detail, not a murky central object.

“The Revolving Door” - Adam Iscoe, in the wake of Daniel Penny’s subway homicide of Jordan Neely, dives into the bureaucracy built around the city’s unhoused and mentally unstable people. It feels odd that Neely’s death has lead to a renewed focus on the city’s “homelessness problem,” which suggests that in some way Neely was to blame for what happened. Iscoe says, early on, that “a person with a mental illness is more likely to be the victim of a crime than to commit one, but every so often the script gets flipped. It's in those moments that local and state politicians feel compelled to talk about change.” Neely, though, wasn’t charged with a crime, and perhaps this moment demands a different framing.

This is mainly a survey, part systemic and part individual, of the unnavigable difficulties the homeless face in a system made up of stopgaps, one in which “the dream of deinstitutionalization collapsed” decades ago and the patient’s “locus of living and care [was] transferred from a single lousy institution to multiple wretched ones,” as the president of the A.P.A. diagnosed back in 1985. There’s been plenty of time since then to build new tracks, but little to no holistic change, leading to a vast number of acronymic groups, many of which which Iscoe praises (I.M.T. has a long waiting list, for example, but “once someone has been assigned they are in really good hands”) but all of which are ultimately dwarfed by the problem’s scale. Carli Wargo, who runs another initiative Iscoe highlights, one that has housed a mere eight hundred fifty people in three years, says “it can feel like we’re not able to do a lot for people… we’re not going to fix the system. It’s just not possible.” I’d like to see Iscoe delve into the reasons more revolutionary change is seen as so unfeasible; clearly it runs deeper than mere mismanagement. In lieu of that, his overpraising makeshift solutions risks promoting more investment into tactics that will fail at the scale necessary. Mostly, though, the worthy focus here is on empathy, explaining, say, why a homeless man might go off his drugs (prescriptions could be sent “to a Walgreens in the Bronx… even though he is staying in a homeless shelter downtown.”) I appreciate the piece’s aims, but I wonder what a wider lens might catch.

Skip Without Guilt:

“Hunting the Hunters” - Tad Friend fights poachers with Andrea Crosta. Somewhat scattershot, jumping between its in-medias-res spycraft beginning to background on animal trafficking, background on environmental conservation in general, then a vivid but somewhat distracting scene of Crosta fundraising which ends with a dog-bite anecdote that's vivid and bizarre, but a bit out of place. After that comes an excellent but short section on the issues with fortress conservation (it "proved to be inescapably neocolonial," displacing indigenous African peoples.) Then we get a profile of Crosta, including his family background, then a history of his group, ELI, then background on China's involvement in the illegal animal trade, then background on Crosta's methods. Finally, we return to the spycraft at hand, and while there's still plenty of article left (this piece is very long) I was a bit exhausted. Despite all that background, the scenes of ELI at work are still totally confusing; "I really need you to start at the beginning," says one member, and Friend calls it "nebulous, inferential work." He conveys that well, but it doesn't make it all less head-spinning to try to comprehend. 

Crosta is deeply critical of the need to fundraise through anecdotes about baby elephants; a recurring theme of the piece concerns the issues with "singling out trophy species to valorize." But he can be quite sentimental himself ("I had a dream about the last vaquita... I saw a little head popping up outside the water... and I was /so sad/") in ways that make one wonder about what leaps he might take in service of his mission; it's unsurprising to hear NGO-lead criticism of one Crosta study, that it was "poorly evidenced" with "embellished" data, and ended up advancing "the U.S.'s global agenda, by making wildlife preservation a mere by-product of mitigating security risks." Crosta waves this off by saying he's "happy, because it helped the elephants," and Friend lets him get away with that kind of answer, to the piece's detriment. Crosta generally makes for an uncomfortable hero; while criticizing the Chinese government for their weak policies is totally reasonable, when Crosta says "they're eating the planet alive" and "they have this Pantagruelic appetite for everything," the criticism slides well over the line of cultural insensitivity. Ultimately, the piece basically positions the fight against animal trafficking as the tiny, under-resourced little brother of the War on Drugs, yet beyond those glancing mentions of colonialism, there's little thought put into the ways in which ramping up and federalizing the fight against animal trafficking, as Crosta clearly wants, might end up replicating the War on Drugs' wasteful, racist failure. 

“Drama Queen” - Inkoo Kang indulges in the Rhimesian Bridgerton spinoff Queen Charlotte. I’m not sure if the series’ racial, gender, and general plot dynamics are woefully confusing, or if Kang’s description of them is just confused — probably the former; this is a soap, after all. But regardless of the material’s convolutedness, I shouldn’t get to the end of a review and think, “I wonder what that show is about.” Also lacks any material on the show’s formal qualities — not that there’s time.

“The Bling King” - Naomi Fry clings to the door handle of Philipp Plein’s Mercedes as he hawks proudly distasteful, incredibly expensive, “loudly luxurious wares.” Mercifully short, so we don’t have to spend too much time with this reprehensible jackass. But Fry is shockingly willing to frame the piece as, ultimately, an apologia; while Plein blasts R. Kelly and reclaims gaudiness for rich heterosexuals, Fry concludes that “there’s something to respect, if not necessarily revere, about Plein's straightforwardness,” his “undeniably Trumpian,” “apt and honest reflection of our fiddle-while-Rome-burns cultural moment.” This is a silly argument, and one which could be applied to any bad cultural actor: Things are “just the way they are” because people like Plein are making them be that way.

Fry clearly has a soft spot for Plein’s designs — she even, bafflingly, calls his clothing “sexy” at one point — but she never justifies this opinion, only hides behind the supposed dishonesty of the A-list’s more muted styles, “consumption of the IYKYK sort.”2 But like Trump, Plein is not a powerless conduit of culture; by supplying his take on new-rich glam, he reifies it. Besides, Fry keeps changing her thesis to account for contradictory evidence: She says there’s “arguably something radical in waiting for the culture to come back to you,” but later Plein recalls that his personal taste tended toward “Bauhaus-influenced design” but he realized that “people liked bling.” The culture isn’t “coming back” to diamonds, faux-leather, and Lindsay Lohan; that’s what the nouveau riche have always liked, in various forms. Palm Beach, chinoiserie, and Annette Funicello are only charming in retrospect, because they’ve been so outmoded by the never-ending escalation of bedazzlement. The clearest example of Fry’s bad judgement comes from a parenthetical describing author Buzz Bissinger, a Plein buyer, as having “an infatuation with luxury.” That’s not quite right: He had a compulsive spending addiction, one he checked into rehab to surmount. Plein isn’t radically honest just like Trump wasn’t radically honest, they’re feeding the same maw as every other member of the amoral elite. The cursing and bluster may be authentic, but that’s still part of the mask.

“Reckless Disregard” - Jeannie Suk Gersen knows the Times v. Sullivan Supreme Court ruling helps ensure media freedoms. What this article presupposes is: Maybe it doesn’t? Relentlessly myopic, positing a weak thesis in favor of bulking up defamation laws (it’s no coincidence that this would lead to bigger paychecks for lawyers), then inadvertently undercutting it at every turn until the last section literally proclaims that “stricter defamation laws won’t save us, either,” except “it’s still possible to ask whether we could do a little better.” Her great rallying cry is: “A healthy polity can’t give up on fine-tuning the ground rules.” But it’s not “defeatist” to ask whether there aren’t more substantive ways to change things, and whether focusing on the details while the right tries to tear the whole edifice apart can be seen as anything other than a fool’s errand. Suk Gersen is pointing out that the floorplan could use improvement while the right wing pours gas on the floor. Anyway, if you aren’t familiar at all with the original Supreme Court case, which concerned an ad placed by MLK’s legal defense, and you’d like a bone-dry but accurate recap, you could do worse than the second section of this piece. Otherwise, steer clear.

Letters:

Regular correspondent Caz didn’t care for Heller on Traffic, (as cited in Today in Tabs, the best take on the book was Leah Finnegan’s in The Baffler) and doesn’t care for Anthony Lane’s “shallow” perspective in any context. But she did like the Moehringer ghostwriting piece I was put off by, saying “the entire thing was salutatory for anyone thinking of being a writer, a ghost writer, or even a journalist.”

Do you have any thoughts on this week’s issue? Not my favorite batch of pieces — even the Gopnik would have been at the very bottom of “Window Shop” last week, for example. And it’s a bit scant to only have one critic’s review, worse that it’s just on some dumb T.V. show — especially given the Goings On About Town are filled with the Summer Previews instead of relevant local reviews. I craved some topical arts coverage!