Last Week's New Yorker Review: May 26
Last Week’s New Yorker, week of May 26
“ersatz-paganistic goings on in the background: men wearing ram’s heads, a naked maiden, spectral servants.”
Must-Read:
The best thing in this issue, which is filled with decent-but-flawed pieces (plus a truly awful one), is easily Patricia Lockwood’s short story. I’ll still pick a must-read – and if you’ve been thinking I should change this newsletter’s name to Last Week’s Alex Ross Review Is Very Good, you’ll be unsurprised.
“Head Cases” (Musical Events) - Alex Ross is seeing double here: twenty-eight veils! I was lucky enough to catch both these productions of Strauss’ outré opus; I agree with all of Ross’ takes, both his conceptual readings – unlike the usually reliable Justin Davidson, who wildly misunderstood the Met show as some kind of character assassination of the princess, somehow missing the not-exactly-subtle intimations of sexual trauma – and his performance reviews (the “queasy lyricism” Patrick Cook found in Herod and the “sinewy” Nathaniel Sullivan Jochanaan were highlights of the Heartbeat show). Two ambitious productions with contrasting flaws, they made one wish for more double-staged operas. Two heads are better than one!
Window-Shop:
“All the Billionaire’s Men” (Annals of Communication) - Clare Malone is a Post-structureless. Bezos is obviously malignant in general, but he mostly comes across as clueless here, the kind of rich guy who thinks everyone just wants to read The Atlantic, so he’ll make a faster, cheaper version – sort of like saying everyone wants to eat rare steak, so let’s only serve cold Spam. The piece gets much more interesting when it stops paying attention to Bezos and starts focusing on the numbnuts he put in charge, namely Will Lewis, an ex-Murdoch lackey whose plan for the Post seems to have been implementing every stupid, failed idea from the long history of dumb failure in the media business – loudly, and all at once. Micropayments? Of course! Social-media-centric verticals? Yup! Something called “‘distribution partnerships’”? Uh-huh! Ethics violations and open white supremacy? You betcha! Malone also finds time for a good old-fashioned character assassination, portraying Lewis as a sloshed absentee with no vision. There isn’t any new news here; this is really just a longread for media nerds who want a hit of schadenfreude. In other words, I assume, my entire readership.
“You’re Killing Me” (Pop Music) - Hua Hsu just keeps chasing Pavements. Neither a movie review nor a music review but more of a brief tribute – almost an obituary – to a band whose “weaponized awkwardness” was a balm to Hsu, followed by a little op-ed about the importance of “ambivalence” and “messiness” in the content we make about artists. (I hadn’t heard about the shelved Ezra Edelman Prince documentary, and now I’m not sure I’ve ever wanted to see anything more.) So much for needing secrets-crets-crets-crets-crets back right now.
“Deal or No Deal” (Books) - Adam Gopnik plays Diller’s choice. The business of film and TV, ruled by “serendipitous imponderables”, is hard to draw conclusions about; Diller put himself in the way of, if not good, at least money, and now he gets to write a book about it. In other words, yet another Weird Boss Boomer memoir – Choire Sicha covered three at once in his last piece before departing New York for the wilds of cable news. Why should we care? Gopnik’s argument about the “micro-mechanics of consumer capitalism” is not that convincing, but Diller’s advice is, weirdly, very good, and not as rote and expected as that of so many people who make money telling you how to make money. Avoid data, aim for consensus, give newcomers big responsibilities and allow them to learn from failure. Less convincingly: Always claim innocence; try, even, to believe it. Diller just knows what worked for him; if it doesn’t work for you, well, go to Little Island and cry about it.
“High Priests” (Dept. of Psychopharmacology) - Michael Pollan is full of enthios-iasm. Down below I’m going to go very hard on Daniel Immerwahr for his anti-scientific takes, but this piece has pretty much the opposite problem – it’s devoted to the idea that, while scientific studies can be totally problematic, “science” is in the end synonymous with “truth”, and the only way to validate truth is through the scientific method. But science, of course, is born of culture, and can replicate culture’s biases without malice on the part of scientists. Pollan points some of that out here, but by casting it as an issue with this particular experiment, I think he doesn’t go far enough – it may be that the “truth” of a psychedelic experience, especially one so crucial to indigenous communities, cannot be meaningfully transcribed into a Western scientific context. To quote Kathy DeerInWater, “Modern medicine is built on Indigenous knowledge of plants, but the way that knowledge was extracted, narrowed down, and commercialized often removes the relationships and the cultural context that made it work in the first place.” Is there any better illustration of this than a study of the spiritual dimension of psilocybin that pumps in Enya and Bach CDs while the holy folks trip? To quote some hippie, “the nature of the experience depends almost entirely on set and setting,” including “cultural – prevailing views as to what is real.” Trying to measure the spiritual reality of a psychedelic experience is like trying to measure the beauty of a child – the operative question is, are you its mother? And if you’re inclined to believe in the power of these plants, it’s worth considering, too, whether it’s a bit perverse – unholy, even – to turn plant knowledge into measurable data. So yes, the study is terrible science, maybe even pseudoscience – but as Pollan (who is also not unbiased) points out, it’s still compelling as ethnography. A statistician says that “‘the punch line is that if you enroll people in a study and tell them they’re gonna have a sacred experience, then some people will have a sacred experience.’” But what is organized religion if not a study of the sacred that aims to create an experience of sacredness? That science was needed to confirm to a bunch of white Baltimoreans that shrooms prompt a bodily experience of the sacred is, mostly, just kind of sad. After all, I know a guy who’ll meet you outside of the Ottobar before the 9pm Dan Deacon show and, for forty bucks, have you convinced of exactly the same thing.
“Guitar Heroes” (Onward and Upward with the Arts) - Nick Paumgarten goes instrumental. Paumgarten was assigned this piece because, I guess, he’s seen as the Boomer Correspondent; he doesn’t seem like a guitar nerd, but he brings his usual zen jollity. There is too much time devoted to the ownership structure of this remarkable guitar collection; I really just wanted a list of interesting guitars – although, of course, I’ll be able to get that when the Met opens the collection. Paumgarten protests perhaps a bit too much when he claims the collection’s owners bear no resemblance to rock nostalgia-heads; maybe their motives are different, but they’re still rich older dudes, and not formal scholars. This is mostly just an advertisement for the Met exhibit, and one that seems more interested in the collection’s monetary value than its artistic merit, despite paying some lip service to the latter. Still, it’s undeniably fun, and just the right length. A couple verses and a chorus – strum along.
“Production Meeting” (Shouts & Murmurs) - Larry David has cabinet fever. To write this without addressing the Cheryl Hines of it all is totally bizarre, and it’s far less punchy than David’s all-timer Dinner With Adolf piece for the Times… but the man is funny; I laughed out loud, so I have to include it.
Singer on Bainbridge (Takes) - A remarkable little anecdote about Singer’s start at the magazine is not really related to Bainbridge, and leaves Singer with too little time to get anywhere regarding the man’s work. But the article does sound good.
Skip Without Guilt:
“Escape from Khartoum” (A Reporter at Large) - Nicolas Niarchos lands in Sudan. The politics of Sudan, and their human faces, are worth knowing about, and I really ought to put this piece in Window-Shop just for its importance. Niarchos’ prose is serviceable, his reporting is solid. But he’s structured this piece in a manner so jumpy and confusing it becomes extremely difficult to follow – one almost has to rearrange the sections like a puzzle just to figure things out. In order, we get: The start of Wanis’ family’s attempt to escape; a political explanation of the current civil war; the leadup to Wanis’ family’s escape; historical background on the Sudanese crisis; the start of a different man, Mudathir, attempting to escape; the middle of Wanis’ family’s escape, the background of Wanis’ struggles, and finally both Wanis and Mudathir’s arrivals at the camp – when Niarchos finally enters the picture, and it becomes clear that we’ve been hearing a reconstructed history based on interviews he conducted at the camp. In other words, the chronology of these sections runs, roughly, 5, 2, 4, 1, 6, 7, 3, 8. If there was an obvious storytelling need for this jumbled chronology, I’d have no problem with it, but it mostly seems like crosscutting for the sake of crosscutting. If the piece opened in the camp, then followed Niarchos as he meets these characters and learns their backstories – with the history coming in when a scene-break is needed – I think it would be far easier to follow the tale without a map. The situation in Sudan is unspeakably grim, and reportorial coverage isn’t a salve, but it’s, well… something. May eyes bring power to the powerless.
Shut the Fuck Up:
“Doctor’s Orders” (A Critic at Large) - Daniel Immerwahr is just questioning askers. Aaaaauuuuuggghhhh!!! I should probably attack this for its broad strokes, but I’m tempted to just load up Genius like it’s 2016 and annotate all the tiny moments of fallacy and misinformation. The unbelievable dishonesty of laundering R.F.K’s pre-cabinet reputation because, basically, he hates experts and experts do sometimes lie, rests on foundations of nihilism; it’s an argument I thought this magazine was too good for. Should I go point-by-point? Sure, why not.
“Citing evidence, ignoring appeals to authority, reserving judgment, demanding more research—these are potentially exhausting traits in a conversational partner, but they’re also marks of a scientific mind. Rather than being ‘anti-science,’ Kennedy seems enchanted by it.” Using the trappings of science in ways that are actually incompatible with the scientific method is the literal definition of pseudoscience, you buffoon!
“If Democrats had hoped for a showdown between learning and ignorance, this wasn’t it. It looked more like learning versus learning, with each side dug in and lobbing citations toward the opposing trench.” That’s not learning versus learning, that’s learning versus delusion! Their side is demonstrably wrong!
The section on the undermining of expertise misses a number of tricks by focusing extensively on paranoid (if sometimes justifiable) conspiracy, and not, for example, how Kennedy’s technocratic “whiz kid” approach to Vietnam, often avoiding the advice of State Department experts, escalated the disaster while undermining Americans’ trust in the government. Immerwahr even mentions some of Noam Chomsky’s writing on this very thing, but mis-frames it bizarrely, gesturing toward something he bafflingly calls “ensuing events”, as if the Vietnam War started in 1963.
RFK “came to see evidence of C.I.A. involvement [in the assassination] as ‘so insurmountable’ that it lay ‘beyond any reasonable doubt.’” A few paragraphs later, a journalist reminds us that “‘doubt is a cardinal virtue in the sciences, which advance through skeptics’ willingness to question the experts.’” But no connection is drawn – and RFK is implicitly presented as one of the doubting skeptics!
“In his suspicion of pharmaceutical firms, support for unsanctioned drugs, and wild accusations against Fauci, R.F.K., Jr., resembled ACT UP’s Larry Kramer. But Kennedy didn’t receive the Kramer treatment. Rather, his ideas were treated like contagious diseases.” This has to be one of the most disgusting things I’ve ever read in the magazine. To compare an activist whose friends were dropping dead in the streets while the government ignored them to a literal Kennedy whose biggest idea was that people were too worried about a deadly disease, and then to use the metaphor of “disease” to describe the treatment of anti-scientific conspiracy, as though deplatforming (of people that were, and remain, wildly popular) is in any way akin to literal death, spits on the graves of generations of AIDS victims.
As if all that wasn’t enough, for his next trick Immerwahr decides to indulge in the lab-leak theory, which he eventually, and without citing any evidence, says is “likely.” Just because a Times op-ed says it, doesn’t make it true, though (almost as if “not trusting the experts” just involves blindly trusting other people, whether savants or total cranks) and the harm done by the politicization of the lab-leak theory is so much greater than any theoretical insight it might provide that trumpeting it is a pretty strong indicator you don’t actually care about truth, just about looking like a free thinker. (And seriously, the epistemological case for the wet-market scenario is extremely strong – and the research is surprisingly fun to read about!)
Immerwahr also says that “closures and mask mandates accomplished little”, seemingly based on that one poorly-conducted study review which he probably only read the misleading media coverage of. Get a grip!
I’m furious that this piece was published, and that journalists keep falling for the propaganda of the fascist death cult running our country. To quote Larry Kramer: “FUCKING SON OF A BITCH OF A DUMB IDIOT.” You can say that again.
Letters:
Nah, I’m too quick. But do write!
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