September 7, 2024

Last Week's New Yorker Review: September 9, 2024

Last Week’s New Yorker, week of September 9

"’that woman on the Food Network whose husband only comes home on the weekends and she spends the rest of the time eating and drinking with her gay friends.’"

(I have very slightly changed my workflow, which inevitably means I’ll screw a thousand tiny things up this week. Please excuse that, along with the delay.)

Must-Read:

“Be Her Guest” - Molly Fischer is lead up the Ina Garten path. A tender, buttery filet – like Garten’s recipes, this just works. Clearly Garten’s popularity relies on a kind of transference, but she’s not exactly a mother figure – she’s the idealized version of the fun, childless relative; one doesn’t scream “Aunt!” in the club, at least not yet, but Garten still serves it, tender as her roast chicken. Fischer provides a portrait so far-reaching and thorough one hardly needs the memoir Garten is ostensibly pitching (as far as I can tell, there is only one quote from the book here – maybe not a good sign.) Most of the piece is just a casually observant tour of Ina’s eras; Martha Stewart stops by icily, the “uxorious” Jeffrey lounges, Nancy Meyers plagiarizes barstools, some tragic T.V. producer tells Ina not to talk with her mouth full. It’s all great fun. Garten’s grim childhood intrudes a few times; it shades her in but doesn’t define her – not even in negative. Things get even better in the last section, which both presents Garten as a sort of universal sage of comfort and also reveals the tentativeness, willful obliviousness, and even repetitiveness needed to maintain that position. It’s Cosmos all the way down.

“Desperately Seeking” - Judith Thurman says it’s Simone Weil or the highway. This is a biographical analysis of Weil – specifically, a survey of their correspondence – and very much not a philosophical analysis; their life, and not their work, is on trial, which certainly isn’t in the spirit of Weil, who privileged mind so far over matter as to reject matter entirely. Yet Thurman paints a picture of Weil which feels accurate to their moment but pertinent to ours; to wit, Weil is the O.G. swagged out neurodivergent T-boy self-loathing Jew. Weil’s gender queerness¹ is so self-evident it’s not even necessary to do the Hilton Als “Hemingway was a lesbian” thing; no reading against the grain is needed – by midway through the piece, even the she/her pronouns are grating. (Not that Thurman is wrong to use them – gendering the past is an impossible conundrum)² What Elizabeth Hardwick calls Weil’s “exemplary abnormality” is even more unignorable – it’s at the heart of all Weil’s work. Thurman is especially astute on the family structure which both enabled Weil to survive and write, and ultimately enabled her worst tendencies, too. The piece comes to full flower in a paragraph-long ode to Weil’s phenomenal extremity, one which will hit home for anyone who’s struggled with extreme traits and illegibility to themselves… such as, ahem, your humble servant. I must quote it at length: “...her hunger for hardship was the search for an experience of shared reality from which she felt excluded. She wasn’t real to herself as a woman or a Jew. The body that she couldn’t love was a stranger to the appetites that doom utopias. Yet a wounded human heart beats fiercely in everything she writes, and its enigmas speak to us intimately, since no one’s contradictions can be reconciled.” It’s poetry, it’s philosophy, it’s my favorite paragraph in the magazine this year.  

Window-Shop:

“Affinity Comedy” - Vinson Cunningham is uninfected by laughter. As regulars know, I find comedy one of the hardest things to write persuasively about, so I’m incredibly impressed with Cunningham’s efforts here. It helps that his roasts are of fairly easy targets; it’s not difficult to tag Joe Rogan as “formlessly reactionary” – I think they print that on his sweatshirts. But I still laughed: “Forget about being offensive – whatever happened to trying not to be a hack?” The brief appreciation of Langston Kerman as a comic who isn’t persona-based is also excellent; tightly framing the two in opposition to one another means the piece has a point beyond proclaiming jokes funny or unfunny – it’s about comedic styles; which ones could be reclaimed and which abandoned. The middle section, on plastic crowdwork bro Matt Rife, could safely be excised.

“Duty Dancing” - Maggie Doherty frolics in nutrient-dense mud with Seamus Heaney. I’m just happy to have any poetic exegesis in the magazine, which hasn’t published a review of new poetry in over a year now.³ Heaney’s work isn’t new, and frankly I find much of it bruisingly purple, but I can still appreciate Doherty’s appreciation. She does an especially good job differentiating Heaney’s eras – the early work, “agrarian” and “intimate”, “poems you taste”; the more constricted political poems, which “one practically spits out”; “more cheerful”, “questioning” work that grows self-referential; late work with a “lightness” and a return to family. I now feel I could sort a selection of Heaney poems chronologically. Doherty’s point about Heaney’s pluralism is harder to grasp: She’s clear that Heaney, in many guises, is always returning to an idea of “tolerant” and disinterested “creative freedom” – but that alone is not really a message, just a stance, and Doherty seems reluctant to pick out what messages Heaney might have been trying to convey. Instead, her micro-level analysis is all about form and craft, which leaves her macro-level thesis about politics underarticulated and undersubstantiated. Still, I’m happy for all the little moments Doherty picks out; like Heaney’s flecks of butter, they’re “coagulated sunlight”.

“Drug of Choice” - Dhruv Khullar hits paydirt on the search for new antibiotics. The obvious editor’s note on this piece is that if you’re talking about A.I. use in medicine, you ought to mention that in the first two-and-a-half sections. In practice, though, I rather like Khullar’s approach, which makes sure we’re focused on the process of drug discovery – the piece isn’t meant to be about A.I, that’s merely a new tool in a long trek. Khullar relies a lot on rather unpoetic metaphors (scientists modify drugs “like video gamers customizing their characters to gain an edge” just paragraphs after they look for new drugs “something like building a championship baseball team”), but these do get the job done – some may cry oversimplification, but I’m dense and I appreciate it. I did want a bit more about the efficiency of all this: “‘For twenty billion dollars, you could have it solved,’” says the scientist – but I assume that doesn’t include the costs of building, training, and running A.I. models; just the cost of, you know, a hundred million pipettes… or whatever scientists buy.

“Mr. F.’s Hotel” (Talk of the Town) - Charles Bethea grabs an espresso at the Francis Ford Coppola All-Movie Hotel. Now this is how you spend a fortune.

“Luck of the Draw” - Idrees Kahloon wants to hold ‘em like they do in Texas, please. Nate Silver’s new book, which is essentially about how much smarter a Bayesian-informed nerd cult is than the normie plebs, sounds positively insipid. (William McAskill, one of his subjects, was picked apart beautifully by Gideon Lewis-Kraus in the magazine.) Kahloon grants Silver a fairly wide latitude, but eventually takes him to task for statistical hubris (“There is a reason that religion specializes in matters of cosmogony and eschatology”). I found Kahloon’s framing device, in which he learns poker, surprisingly charming; it has the added benefit of casting him as a novice pupil who gradually comes to realize that his charismatic teacher⁴ is a bullshit artist. The recap of that bullshit is still pretty tiresome; I really didn’t need to hear that fox/hedgehog analogy again. But I did like Kahloon’s oddball example of something Silver missed: “the government’s role in funding and fostering scientific innovation”, which is apparently quite broken. I’d read a whole piece from Kahloon on that quandary.  

Skip Without Guilt:

“Spreading the Wealth” - Joshua Yaffa gives it away, gives it away, gives it away now. (How come everybody wanna keep it like the Kaiser?) This piece is structured like a short-form vertical video⁵ – an unexpected and suspenseful setup, a drawn-out buildup, a fairly late-arriving payoff that’s totally deflating in a surprisingly obvious way. (Bigger than before.) To wit: An heiress is letting randomly chosen strangers give away most of her money! Followed by this ominous sentence: “Salzburg, a handsome storybook city at the foot of the Alps, is best known as the birthplace of Mozart.” (Defeat at the castle seems to have utterly disheartened King Arthur.) Here’s Engelhorn, the heiress’, life story; the predictably⁶ ghastly history of her family’s wealth; the story of wealth inequality in Austria… and just as you’re nodding off (not that any of this is poorly written, it’s just irrelevant to the fun parts of the inciting incident) it’s finally time to hear of that grand experiment in democracy! And the result is: The moderators exert so much control in the interest of providing “a feeling of safety to the participants” that they remove “the unexpected” completely; it’s essentially a corporate retreat for a grant-giving organization, with a bit more diversity amongst the participants. What a bummer – but also, if you blink away the Brewster’s Millions of it all, certainly to be expected. Yaffa is more focused on inequality, but the problem of inefficiency in philanthropy and charitable giving is an interesting one; he could delve much deeper there. (To reference a second idiotic Gen-X-era comedy, when you get down to it it’s hard to beat, for efficiency, the method used by Adam Sandler in Mr. Deeds: Just ask for a random charity. The United Negro College Fund can use the money, as can just about anyone else. It’s not as though Engelhorn is even giving that much away – the numbers would hardly make Dr. Evil lift a pinky. There, that’s three.)

“Wild Thing” - Amanda Petrusich likes what a borrower MJ Lenderman be. I’ve been generally on board with the magazine’s recent turn toward letting their critics have more formal leeway – Goldfield’s travelogues, Arn’s theorization, Cunningham’s cultural studies, Brody’s… usual thing, but now in the actual magazine. Unfortunately, I don’t think Petrusich’s recent turn toward musician interviews as a substitute for music reviews has been working at all. To focus so intently on an artists’ biography gives short shrift to their art. Lenderman is one of the better musicians to make the magazine recently, his lyrics are enigmatic and his style is original, and it was nice to hear about his influences. Petrusich conveys his “real, modern heartbreak” and his wry comedy (though it kills the joke when she explicitly tells us she finds a line funny.) Still, I don’t care at all about Lenderman’s relationship to Instagram Reels or his thoughts on financial stability. Much of the piece seems to come straight from Petrusich’s Tascam. There are podcasts for that sort of thing; I’d like a review, please.

“The Hem of His Garment” - David Sedaris gives the Pope a grope. The best joke here is, I think, unintentional. Setup: Both the jokes Sedaris tells at dinner “were ones people had told me at book signings.” Punchline, a bit later: “Standing before [the Pope], I felt the same pity I’d felt for the Queen and would feel for anyone who has to meet people for a living.” That’s the mirror, David. Anyway, this is a pretty strained effort, with enough of his usual culture-war-adjacent jabbering up front to put me in a bad mood for his bits, which are more screwball than his average, to mixed results. His ain’t-I-a-stinker routine has started to actually smell, at this point, and there’s no pathos here to make up for it. But I did smirk a couple times (“Whoa, you really need the collar”) and, hey, it’s short.

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Letters:

Michael writes that he “didn't get a good sense from Schulz's piece [on a memoir-in-ten-rocks] what made [Bjornerud] different than any other geologist. These ideas about deep time and how humans have only lived for a very small slice of it come up in every discussion about geology.

He also recommends “Kyle Chayka's analysis of Season 4 of Emily in Paris” [online here].  

What did you think of this week’s issue?

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hands up,

hands down.

[Maïa, above, attended my mom’s animation summer class in 2009!]