Last Week's New Yorker Review: October 28, 2024
Last Week’s New Yorker, week of October 28
Exciting news from Last Week’s New Yorker headquarters! Now that I have a full-time job and am not in immediate need of the funds, I want to invest some of this newsletter’s (very, very modest) profits into the creation and distribution of art. I know I don’t need to do this, especially as an early-career, uh, “striver” …but it’s a practice I’d love to see far larger and more well-resourced venues adopt, so I figure I should be the change I want to see, and all that.
With this in mind, I’m proud to announce Last Week’s New Yorker is now the founding sponsor of Videodome, a monthly film screening of out-there work, run by my friend Dylan Mars Greenberg. We’re on the poster! It’s in the back room of Lucky 13 Saloon in Brooklyn – follow Dylan’s Instagram for details and updates. I’ll be there; if you’re brought there by LWNY, definitely come say Hi!
On with the show…
“‘Someone who was qualified psychologically and financially to be a custodian of the letters’ (A buyer)”
Must-Reads:
“Pivotal, Seminal, Rare” - Tad Friend knows dealer Glenn Horowitz wants everything rare books for the rare. I know the era of the erudite sleazeball is long past – that’s basically what this whole piece is about, that Horowitz’s era is over – but despite or perhaps because of that, Horowitz has an eccentric charm; he’s a Bennington grad who talks like he’s hoping to attract a devoted cadre of murderous collegiates (I’d read his journal). Or perhaps a conveniently vulnerable lineage of Guinness-faced aristocrats: Friend presents him, with a great dollop of irony, as a sort of Mazzini figure – killing off the very thing he represents, the gentleman’s profession of book dealer, by turning it into a capitalistic enterprise focused largely on predicting the swing of the reaper’s scythe. (“‘There were elderly people whom it made sense to befriend, to do the errands for them that young people can do,’” goes his slightly venomous origin story.) All the other booksellers were actually capitalists already, of course, but that Horowitz was pulling tricks faster made him a target. (“There is certainly an argument that other dealers see themselves as hedgehogs outraged by a fox, when they’re actually foxes outraged by a wolf.”) I know antiheroes aren’t en vogue (especially those who give “unprompted… weight-loss targets” to the young women under their employ), but make an exception for Horowitz, whose catty summations are delightfully unfair (Nabokov’s son “‘never achieved that third dimension that befitted someone who bore the name Nabokov’”, “Louise Glück, who wouldn’t let him sell her archive, was ‘a madwoman’”, another unfortunate is ‘an ancient woman who, as it seems, has a brain illness.’”) and whose cockroach joie de vivre is undeniable. It’s his bad luck and our good fortune that a profiler as astute as Friend made his acquaintance; he gets completely trapped on the matter of some Nixon letters he obviously purloined, and he has an egotist’s irrepressible desire to present his side of things, which overrules whatever minimal press training he might have picked up. This is a character assassination, pretty much, yet I come away from it with a lot of love for Horowitz, a New York original, sleaze and all.
“Alpha Girls” - Jazmine Hughes pledges Alpha Kamala Alpha. Possibly the definitive piece on Harris’ character, which is truly impossible to understand without the context of AKA. Did I need quite so much of that context? Probably not – the organization’s proclaimed politics (they’re scrupulously hush-hush regarding them, but they’re also that way regarding everything else) don’t seem nearly as important as their implied politics, which might rhyme with respectability, but are arguably distinct, since the AKA battle isn’t “for acceptance” by the majority but instead for dignity within a Black identity. (Of course, there’s still a heavy reliance on a majoritarian standard of dignity, which raises the question of who’s setting the terms of the thing they strive for – is white dignity dignity at all?) It strikes me that Harris’ AKA mindset is notable not just for what it says about her relationship to race but also for what it says about her relationship to information – her paranoia is institutional because she’s been trained that way. (Plenty of Republicans have been frat bros, but she’s the first postwar Democrat to really come from Greek life – sorry, Bill Clinton; APO doesn’t count.) Hughes’ piece really comes to life in its last two sections, where things get personal. (“Even before I grew up to be a dreadlocked, braless lesbian with tattoos and hairy armpits, I was always suspicious of sororities… I am the eldest of five daughters, and I never want to wear a matching outfit again.”) The extreme supportiveness of the AKAs does have a win-friends-and-influence-people eeriness – I suppose that’s the result when your cultlike initiation rituals are in service of the message “uplift other Black women at all costs.” Still, those efforts are obviously genuine. “The only people who care enough about us to work consistently for our liberation are us,” goes the Combahee River Collective phrase. AKA presents a twisted version of that vision – take out “liberation,” insert “power.” And in about a week, four hundred low-information white mothers in Pennsylvania will decide once and for all whether that power will be granted or ripped away in favor of fascism. Or so, at least, will go the narrative. If you can smile and skee wee through that, well… I suppose the phrase is, “more power to you.”
Window-Shop:
“Bucks Without Borders” - Gideon Lewis-Kraus answers the call of duty-free. It takes most of this piece for the connection between the opening anecdote, in which a Silicon Valley cabal subsidizes the snow crash society from classic sci-fi novel Don’t Create The Snow Crash Society, and the body sections, in which governments sell off the obscure perks of their sovereignty to corporate interests, to become entirely clear. That’s fine if you don’t get lost along the way, but this is a piece where the punchy, summative lines are things like, “The mobility of capital insured an inexorable race to the bottom for labor and the environment; vulnerable nations have been left to absorb the costly externalities.” Once I reread the preceding paragraph of context three times so that I could understand that line, I thought it was wonderfully put… but have patience with the piece, and with yourself. (Try my mantra: Nobody but you cares if your newsletter is a few days late. All-applicable, no?) Eventually, Lewis-Kraus comes in for the landing: Srinivasan’s society is formed in opposition to the very things Abrahamian is critiquing – “legacy institutions” that have rigged the game – yet because his solution is ultra-individualistic, he’s proposing a system set up much like the one we have now, where wealthy “elevated hunter-gatherers” have true autonomy, and the rest of us serfs have opiate data files. Home seems about right.
“Pop Culture” - Hannah Goldfield puts the lime in the coconut and drinks it all up. The Mormon culture of inedible treats provides a grotesque spectacle, though usually it’s heightened by a more skeptical witness (see: Black people trying Crumbl cookies.) Goldfield actually seems to like these monstrosities, even the one with, avert your eyes, “sugar-free coconut syrup” (apparently it “brought to mind a piña colada”, a compliment that seemingly isn’t backhanded). The visit to a seemingly out-of-place Jewish deli – apparently there’s a pocket of Utah Jews – is charming in a less profane way; I wanted to spend more than a paragraph there. Anyway, I suppose Boba is too good for white people and Papaya King drinks are too good for suburbanites, so the market was there; now it’s filled. My coconut La Croix tastes like the narcissism of small differences this evening, and boy does it taste good.
“Cinderella Story” (Talk of the Town) - Jennifer Wilson diner-dashes with Anora’s team. A superlative special feature if you’ve seen the film; fun enough, I think, if you haven’t.
“City of God” - Jackson Arn says you haven’t Siena thing yet. Arn is practically drooling, as is Cotter at the Times, as is Saltz in New York; sometimes, a show is just that self-evidently fantastic, and I don’t begrudge it all the press. Of course it’s not the most original thing to praise what’s self-evidently the blockbuster show of the season, and I do wish the magazine would find more room for out-of-the-way art. (The Als “pick three” feature in Goings On a few weeks back, highlighting some LES galleries, was a nice start.) Arn wants to give us lots of relevant history, but it’s hard to grasp on the page; it feels like an interpretation of wall text. He hits on something bolder with the idea of “sophisticated… childishness”, a risky proposition – watch who you’re calling a child – but one he justifies (it’s not about lack of sophistication but about “total indifference to either-or choices”.) The ending is pleasantly unexpected, too. I wish Arn would trust that we’re with him if he wants to just walk around and look; we don’t need quite so much scaffolding. Scaffolding is not Arn’s strong suit, anyway – you can tell he wants to push it out of the way; it blocks his view.
“Gig Economy” - Hua Hsu bands together. This is an odd one: A book review the length of a culture review, filed under “Pop Music”. In no way, shape, or form is this a music review – except, I guess, for the final paragraph, a nice little tribute to a totally obscure new post-punk record; I didn’t buy that it was related to the thrust of the piece, but it’s still charming, and that’s enough. Elsewhere, Hsu begins in such a basic place – literally telling us what bands are like (“some band people prefer hierarchy and assertive decision-makers; others aspire to a more chaotic kind of democracy”) – that the argument about labor rights gets rushed through, and there’s no time for anything else. Stating an argument in simplest terms is a useful exercise, but I’d love more nuance, and more space – there’s a reason songs need more than one verse; Hsu doesn’t really even get a chorus in.
“Home Again” (Talk of the Town) - Henry Alford knows Devoné Tines is of the essence. Vivid.
Skip Without Guilt:
“Purchasing Power” - Susan B. Glasser measures the might of the MAGAdonors. Of all the things the magazine chose to have their big October Trump piece be about… it’s just about… how rich people have his ear? Basically, Glasser argues that because it’s fewer rich people giving more money, it’s a far more oligarchal system, and, yeah, I don’t disagree. But it’s also important mostly insofar as it’s part of the entire Trump phenomenon, and focusing on it in such detail seems a bit like rearranging deck chairs on the Titanic. (Except that four hundred low-information white mothers in Pennsylvania get to decide whether we turn the ship left or right.) Also, god forbid I say a piece isn’t fair to Republicans, but surely this could’ve been written to include at least a little information on who, exactly, Kamala’s billionaires are. That information feels deliberately obscured, which doesn’t look great. We hear about a few defectors, but the piece really could’ve been split down the middle; that way, we’d also get a sense of how a “regular” campaign handles this sort of thing. Controlling elections? Coming from them, that’s rich.
“Foreign Influencers” - David D. Kirkpatrick runs interference for the spies assessing election misinformation threats. It’s very unclear to me what constitutes malign or illegal foreign influence and what is acceptable. The line between “influence” and “misinformation” is blurry too. All the examples given are of misinformation, but surely there are other manners of influencing an election; is the state monitoring these, too? Could it be that the very forces Kirkpatrick profiles have reason to want to blur these boundaries – perhaps because the things it can control are so limited, and making them look sweeping and important is a sort of self-justification? (In other words, digital spycraft is a very particular hammer, and foreign social media misinformation campaigns are a very particular nail.) I don’t have evidence of that, but I wouldn’t be surprised. These areas are so vague and shaky that the definitions of the terms defines the battles which are fought; I wish Kirkpatrick would do more to untangle the official terms, and question their meaning. Much of this piece is about disclosure, but at times it feels as though Kirkpatrick wants to be the discloser, to write a piece which properly warns us… but he can’t share the evidence, because he’s not part of the agency. It’s all very fourth estate – Kirkpatrick is doing his part by advocating for “real-time transparency”, contra intelligence and law enforcement’s desires for a slower process. I’m comparatively skeptical of the ability of misinformation to sway votes en masse – the science is, charitably, mixed, and Kirkpatrick pointing to, for example, “a Chinese-linked account” calling a non-Jewish Republican Representative “‘a Jewish dog’” certainly doesn’t convince me. Kirkpatrick hammers his point home, but he doesn’t nail down his definitions.
“Closed Chambers” - Amy Davidson Sorkin is judge-memoir jury, and executioner. Why do we need to know that none of the books published by the Supreme Court justices are very good? Couldn’t we have, you know, guessed? It’s not only that these books all sound like rush jobs published for the advance, it’s that they aren’t even revelatory rush jobs – at least, Sorkin doesn’t use them to reveal much. Near the conclusion, Sorkin admits that they certainly don’t show how the Justices will vote – which is really the only reason we ought to care about them. Failing that, the summation Sorkin calls cynical is also the one I reach: They’re “celebrity autobiographies for a polity that has seen healthier days.” But that’s a conclusion I could’ve reached on my own.
Letters:
Michael B, who correctly pointed out that since I have two regular Michaels writing in I ought to add an identifier, also directs readers to a fun Adam Gopnik piece on the Montreal Expos, for those who need a fix.
Kristina writes in regarding the week’s poem by Elizabeth Metzger, “I would say that I like it, save that on getting to the end I was pretty horrified.” Confirming that the writer has written of high-risk pregnancy in an autobiographical style before, Kristina writes that she feels “not quite really the moral injury of the witness to an accident/disaster, but getting there. …Five stars out of five. Also: wish I never read it.”
What did you think of this week’s issue?
that dog
won’t hunt