Last Week’s New Yorker, week of May 8, 2023

Must-Reads:

“The Fugitive Princesses” - Heidi Blake tracks Sheikha Latifa and her sister’s torture, abuse, and multiple escape attempts, as they try to slip the tight grasp of their father, the emir of Dubai. There’s little one could add to this powerful, superlatively paced, and yes, unbelievably long and bleak piece, which manages to balance major political implications with a single, complex, human story. The most sickening and strongest aspects are the moments where the mundane cruelty of everyday bureaucrats is revealed, especially the British lawyer Paul Simon, who repeatedly cites his “lack of competence and expertise” as a good enough reason to not fight obvious and powerful evil. There is so much here, yet it never overwhelms or starts to feel newsy; neither does it come across too obviously as a rote “advocacy” piece. There are no easy answers. Blake comes to the magazine from the recently-destroyed Buzzfeed News; clearly, she brings a sharp voice and keen investigative eye. Side note: If you want to read a piece that will win awards before it wins awards, this is likely such.

“Sad Dads” - Amanda Petrusich shuffles to the gloomy tunes of The National’s new album, First Two Pages of Frankenstein. I was worried about this one; I have mixed feelings on The National, whose High Violet was a high-school favorite record, but who haven’t stood up to recent listening, often appearing a bit juvenile, like the gloomed out frowny-face mirror image of Arcade Fire’s blissed out smiley-face. Petrusich points out the juvenile tendencies, though, and actually reconfigures them into a strength; the Phoebe Bridgers analysis that “something middle-aged men and teen-age girls have in common is the act of finding yourself, and being kind of self-conscious,” is as brutal as a good Phoebe Bridgers lyric. Mostly, I was worried because the band’s last two albums, 2017’s overbearing Sleep Well Beast and 2019’s overorchestrated I Am Easy to Find weren’t just flops but grandiose misfires so major I probably wouldn’t have listened to the new record if not for this piece. In retrospect, knowing that the band spent the period spanning those albums trying fruitlessly to create a gritty cable version of “The Monkees” (?!) says something about how far inside their own image they’d slipped.1 But Berninger’s honesty about his major depressive episode that resulted from Covid and various minor failures is refreshing, and the new album (to which I’ve so far given only a cursory listen) strikes me as the band’s best since their early years, one that is able to capture the wit at the heart of gloom without slipping into performative ennui, choral nihilism, or, worst of all, dad jokes. The airiness of the instrumentals probably won’t be to the taste of amphead Alligator fanatics, which is fair; I mostly focus on songcraft.