October 5, 2023

Last Week's New Yorker Review: October 9, 2023

Last Week’s New Yorker, week of October 9

Must-Reads:

“Big Little Lies” - Gideon Lewis-Kraus fudges the numbers with the behavioral economists whose work on deceit was deceitful. You likely don’t need me to tell you to read this one; I’ve seen it linked everywhere, in part because it was up on the magazine’s website a few days before the print issue dropped. (I’m never sure why the occasional piece gets that treatment.) It’s obviously delicious, a fine new specimen in the magazine’s fairly vast and ever-growing collection on the theme of liars unmasked.1 I don’t have to tell you why the main thrust is so much fun — it’s literally dishonesty researchers being dishonest, and possibly on a vast scale — and if you knew how often I say my catchphrase, “You can never trust a social scientist,” you’d know this piece reaffirmed a few of my own biases to delightful effect. Lewis-Kraus aims at more than the obvious targets, though; he threads a political argument through the piece, which is dense with Obama references, that implicates the neoliberal “emphasis on the individual at the expense of the systemic,” and the desire for easy solutions that reaffirm power relations, in the success of the researchers and their pop-psychology. As far as reportage, the best get is a business-school professor who cheated and confessed to one of the lying economists, who speaks of putting the lie “in a lockbox in your mind where it never gets opened” — without her remarkable testimony, the argument that the deceit research may have lead to deceitful tactics could seem hammy or forced, but with it, it feels powerful. Maybe that’s my fallible human brain falling for a canny anecdote, or maybe it’s the truth, doing its thing — it will out, after all.

“Firestarter” - Margaret Talbot saves the cow at the Great Chicago Fire. I always appreciate a sharp historical analysis of an event that's well-known but mostly in a hazy, decontextualized way. It takes scholarship to point out the many ways in which these events intersect with broader social and political concerns. Talbot probably over-focuses on the falsely accused Mrs. Leary, though her argument that Leary’s framing represents “class snobbery with a side of misogyny” is convincing, and the piece lands with a punchy beat. Other details are even sharper: The newspaper's “iron rollers” that “had ‘melted into a mass,’” the “complacent, tightfisted city council” that was caught unawares. Most of these are probably taken directly from the book under review, but Talbot's picks are still prime. What will really stick with me, though, is the final section, which posits that a forgotten nearby fire with a higher death toll, caused directly by the industrial development that built Chicago, may be the more telling tragedy, with “a claim to greater significance” for the modern day.

Window-Shop:

“Top of the Line” - Hannah Goldfield deep-fries pods of okra with star chef Kwame Onwuachi. I was familiar with Onwuachi's personality and mythos from Top Chef, and assumed this relatively brief profile would add little new. But Goldfield threads an argument on Black creativity within capitalism that's surprisingly nuanced and offers no too-easy answers. The balance of the “radical” with the “mainstream” is particularly challenging in food, where every restaurant must also function as a business, something Onwuachi, whose Shaw Bijou was a far higher-profile fine-dining failure than most, knows all too well. Goldfield gives us Onwuachi's justifications, and they’re compelling (“...we're putting oxtails on the menu, I'm putting a Black woman's name on the side of Lincoln Center”) but complicated — the glad-handing and corporate sponsorship is always at the surface. With a chef as autobiographical as Onwuachi, it would have been easy for Goldfield to focus on recounting his history and sprinkling in some luscious food descriptions. She goes further, and the piece is better for it.

“The Group That Overturned Roe” - David D. Kirkpatrick gets the Gospel from the legal bigots at the Alliance Defending Freedom. This magazine has often struggled to make its legal reporting as engaging as most of its other reporting, in part because too much of the legal apparatus is taken as a given, not interrogated as deeply as other systems usually are. This is a step in the right direction; Kirkpatrick carefully unveils A.D.F’s extremism and its consequences, and he finds a good central character in Kristen Waggoner, a smiling assassin who finds a lot of ways to rephrase the 14 Words. There is still a lot of recounting the minute details of cases you might already be familiar with — gay wedding cakes and such. But it’s always worth remembering the mix of false grievance, cultural revanchism and clerical fascism that undergirds the view of the professionals on the American right. Kirkpatrick takes his time, but he makes it pretty clear.

“Preacher Man” - Vinson Cunningham grapples the apple of peace at Purlie Victorious, a comedy revival. A serviceable review, slightly squished in to accommodate Cunningham’s blazing panegyric to Kara Young, who acts as “almost a metaphor for an entire race trying to squirm itself, by hook or by crook, toward higher ground.” She approaches acting “like the sophisticated engine of a sleek sports car — she floors the pedal around perilous curves and somehow stops on a dime.” I want to quote the whole thing — it’s a praise song, lit from within.

“Songs of Surrender” - Hanif Abdurraqib praises the sound of a gospel recording made inside an inhumane Mississippi prison. Reading this in partnership with Page Williams’ slice of a different Mississippi life creates a dichotomy too brutal to put into words. Without that context lending it a nauseating cast, this is a simple and unvarnished consideration, one that puts the record in the context of “a trope in entertainment [that] encourages the average person on the outside to consume the horrors inflicted inside while remaining at a safe remove,” but ultimately favors a more reparative reading in which the record is made “for the men singing.” That simple thought faces reality and emerges transformed, like the men praising eternal life in a brutal prison.

“Dystopian Sublime” (Talk of the Town) - Ben McGrath steers clear of the bubbles at a Superfund-sited outdoor opera. Leans into the eternal ‘Talk; conceit of unnecessary third-person objectivity: “A man who had just met them both sat amidships.” Some artful description; a barge “festooned with fluorescent light sticks and suspended jetsam that clinked and chimed,” and some that's just memorably silly: A cork popping means “the man's thoughts floated briefly to a different sort of fizzy toxin.”

“Cabin Fever” - Paige Williams gets country-fried at the Neshoba County Fair. It's understandable why Williams back-loads the inevitable discussion of the white-supremacist nature of the week-long festivities -- put that at the beginning and everything after will seem half-hearted, and Williams does want us to appreciate the friendly communality of the fair for what it is. But it creates a mood of waiting for the other shoe to drop that pervades everything anyway; when the discussion does finally come, it's conclusive but could sting more: Is it merely that the fair and racism “cannot be separated,” or do they actually reinforce one another? Williams' eye for sensory details — fried green tomatoes turning red in the heat — makes the piece sing, but it didn't pierce deeper than my preconceptions.

Skip Without Guilt:

“Frankenstein's Daughters” - Ruth Franklin reads a few fictional attempts to expand on Mary Shelley's novel. The history of Frankenstein here was largely covered by Jill Lepore, with vivid style, in a widely circulated piece from 2018. (Of course, the average reader can't be expected to retain vivid knowledge of what's being repeated -- but that's what I'm here for!) Franklin adds connections to Virginia Woolf and queerness, which are compelling; her deep reads of the original work are the best thing here. The brief reviews of three newer works aren't especially persuasive as to their quality. (“There is a beast inside her, a monster... it howls. It is awake” goes one quote.) And the final paragraph extends Franklin's ideas too far, moving toward generic philosophical musings that could apply to practically any work of science fiction. This monster's lost.

“This Is Fine” - Jackson Arn burns, baby, burns for Ed Ruscha. I’m still not sure quite what to make of Arn, who spits out winning theses with confidence and verve, yet is only sometimes convincing. Sometimes even he doesn’t buy what he’s selling: Ruscha “never uses scale as a proxy for importance” except for the major installation piece where he does. It’s a good problem to have, I guess, but the confidence has an almost psychotic edge, and for some reason, here, it slips into the scent of hair gel and business cards. (I have no idea why, exactly, but I’ll take after Arn and state it confidently.) Part of the issue is that the ideas come so fast the overall shape here gets lost; a paragraph-long block quote of someone else’s (compelling!) ideas toward the end is a sign of a consciousness vibrating too fast to tell us what, exactly, we’re supposed to be seeing.

Letters:

Neil liked this line from Helen Shaw’s review: “Rebeck, who also directs the play, makes sure the performances are visible from outer space.”

Regular correspondent Michael says Margaret Talbot’s piece was reminiscent of a Francisco Goldman piece on Argentine orphans “in its exploration of both a singular scandal and the broader malaise in a country which caused it.” He also liked Laura Lane’s Talk of the Town on weather prediction: “I would have gladly read a feature about this company and modern weather prediction.”