Last Week's New Yorker Review: December 11, 2023
Should genocide really be the stuff of a night out at Carnegie Hall?
Holy Cow!
When I started this newsletter at the beginning of the year, I expected to entertain my parents and get some writing practice out of something I was already doing (reading the magazine cover-to-cover.) The newest wave of publicity is beyond my wildest dreams. First, I was interviewed by Choire Sicha for this week’s New York magazine — I’m reason #35 to love New York! I was also featured on kottke.org by guest editor Edith Zimmerman. Kottke has been required reading for me since, like, fifth grade; Choire’s late lamented The Awl was literally my homepage in college. New York magazine… I don’t even have to tell you. Wow. Wow! What the heck!
So, welcome, new readers! I try to keep things self-explanatory, but here’s a quick re-introduction. This entire format was lifted from the newsletter The Tilly Minute, which ran on-and-off from 2015-18. I’ve infused it with my writerly voice, which trades Tilly’s biting single-line concision for something slightly sprawling, a bit experimental, and hopefully occasionally funny. Reading from top to bottom, pieces are ranked roughly in order of how much I enjoyed them (so being at the top of “Window-Shop” is better than being at the bottom.) I review all features & critics’ pieces, and I sometimes highlight exceptional Talk of the Towns and Shouts and Murmurs, along with any other notable errata. The newsletter arrives as quickly as I can write it, usually on Thursdays but so far always before the end of the workweek.
If you would like my opinions on the magazine’s cartoons and poems, please purchase a paid subscription to receive the Cartoon and Poem Supplement each week! I don’t currently cover the magazine’s fiction or any of its online-only pieces, but paid subscribers are welcome to influence my decision-making on future coverage.
Finally — I absolutely love receiving comments and letters regarding the magazine — or regarding literally anything else! I receive all emails sent in reply to these newsletters, and there’s also an open comments section down below. I will excerpt your takes in the Letters section! (Unless you ask me not to — that’s fine too.)
Enough exclamation marks, on with the show:
Last Week’s New Yorker, week of December 11
Must-Read:
“The Sound of Memory” - John Adams builds a musical monument. Adams, one of the foremost contemporary American composers, is a “get” for the magazine — and he can really write! The book allegedly under review is really just mined for its structure, a discussion of “four key mid-century works that attempted to address the catastrophe of the Second World War.” The brief histories of each composer are perfectly balanced with Adams’ takes on their compositions; Schoenberg’s “scream of terror” is the highlight — “because its violence comes to us in the form of sound it feels far more viscerally assaultive than, say, Picasso’s ‘Guernica.’” Adams also reveals the “agonizing” process behind his 9/11 commemoration, “On the Transmigration of Souls,” which won a Pulitzer — in the piece’s only moment of dry humor, Adams says that it was “received with respect” before recounting his feelings of failure. Adams’ inside perspective helps the piece; though Alex Ross is a treasure, it’s nice to get a more personally invested take on the form.
Window-Shop:
“The Mistrial” - Jill Lepore recounts the failed prosecution of Jefferson Davis. The ties to Trump are hardly needed; they pop up at the beginning of each section and are easily ignored. The history is interesting enough on its own, and its lessons for the present are difficult to overlook anyhow. Lepore is better with telling details than broad strokes — there are stunning tidbits, like Chief Justice Chase writing of a newsboy who shouted about the trial he was intentionally missing, or the law professor worried about Davis becoming “the Democratic candidate for the next presidency,” and adding, “I do not joke,” but there are too many characters introduced to follow each story without considerable re-reading; lines like “Chase agreed with O’Conor; Underwood agreed with Dana” almost demand paper and pencil. Stories that recount the slow trot of injustice as wrought by the American politicolegal system are always worth telling; they map the cracked foundation which any reparation seeks to mend — if you want to fix shit, you have to know how it broke.
“Artist Statement” - Vinson Cunningham furnishes pictures of the new play Spain. The three block quotes here are just… dire. But Cunningham is at his best with a political angle to work, and the play provides him one, regarding the “sometimes terrifying power of art.” I have to quote his late-breaking thesis in full: “As dismissive as some artists, even now, tend to be about the political implications and possible ramifications of their work, you can’t deny that the powers that ring the boundaries of acceptable discourse — governments and corporations, deeply rooted and venerable institutions — treat the divine play of art with deadly seriousness.” Invigorating! And the usual formal survey is good here too, the “dark, withholding set” in which the “specifics of the actors’ performances… give way to a blank canvas of a backdrop.”
“Turning the Page” - Parul Sehgal considers the lives of critics. I risk opening a wormhole by critiquing this critique of critiquers, but onward I’ll pen. Sehgal, who could park a bungalow in the must-reads section, remains her brilliant self — she reels in big fish with ease. Despite her brilliance, her premise here is a bit bizarre; she’s read “eighty-three books” on critics’ lives, but seems to have taken notes on none of them, instead soaking in their gestalt and emerging from the “fever” with an armful of hypotheses. It’s a bizarre exercise — she isn’t deep-sea fishing, she’s draining a pond and surveying the layout of minnows. She’s still good at it; the “carnal receptivity” and “lack of self-awareness” she finds as possible common threads amongst critics do feel charged, if perhaps not inherently central to the process. The idea that there can be one center, that this scatter plot can be tracked with any arc, is what’s so strange here — I don’t quite catch Sehgal’s bug, but I’ll sit in her bed any time.
“Christmas Miracle” (Talk of the Town) - Michael Schulman takes a walk with Alexander Payne and the youthful-unknown lead of his new film. Dominic Sessa, the lead, is very genuine, while Payne has an odd quality I also associate with his filmmaking — acid corniness. (“I’ve been pleasantly surprised to read some notices that suggested it may join the holiday-cinema canon… That means residuals!”) They’re a charming pair, and Schulman has a good story on his hands — Sessa’s truly been plucked from anonymity — which he makes into more than just a press-release.
“Creature Discomforts” - Anthony Lane finds his license to pump. Some usual Lanean sour notes (there’s both a “Say what?” and a “You getting all this?”) don’t dull his approach to this excessive film; for once, he stays tightly focused and attentive, addressing the film’s “carnality,” “meliorism,” and “audacity.” He’s reluctant to give too much plot away, so everything’s a little confusing, but the spoiler-averse will salute his restraint — not usually his habit.
“Vigil” (Talk of the Town) - Adam Iscoe prepares paper poppies with pro-Palestinian protesters. From where I stand, this feels like the U.S. story of the moment (certainly moreso than A.I, which got its own issue and has still had related pieces in the two subsequent issues.) I’m hopeful deeper coverage is in the works; in the meantime, this is solid.
“Pacific Modern” - Alex Ross will even kiss a sunset pig. Basically a rapid-fire sequence of capsule reviews regarding the sprawling new California Festival. You might adore that approach; I prefer Ross with space to dig deep. Still, his phraseology is bright and brilliant: Two pieces “breathe an atmosphere of nervous trance, blending sweetness and strangeness,” and in another, “dulcet intimations of sweet slumber give way to darker, more dissonant harmonies.”
Skip Without Guilt:
“Close to the Bone” - Casey Cep gets religion with poet Christian Wiman. The magazine has lately overindexed on Wiman, printing three of his poems since June. Based on that repertoire and what’s quoted here, he leaves me quite cold; I have no issue with rejecting “self-obsessed confessionalism” but Wiman uses plenty of first-person pronouns and circles back to his own epiphanic images — I wonder if he’s being totally honest about what he’s rejecting. Of course, you need to have specific taste to edit Poetry for a decade, though I wish Cep would seek more sources as to how exactly Wiman “managed to annoy almost everyone by the time he left” — she calls it “too tedious to recount” then relies on Wiman’s memory, but to me it’s not a charming detail. Mostly, Wiman seems kind but not especially interesting; his continuing narrative of illness and recovery is compelling, but neither he nor Cep find any insights in it that really struck me. Regarding religion, Wiman seems largely unconcerned with the culture of Christianity; he’s mostly invested in the eternity of love and the constant confrontation with nothingness, which are basically Buddhist themes — why Christianity in particular is his thing is left unspoken, but perhaps that would be too confessional. Cep is a fine writer, and the piece proceeds with focus, but it’s hazy around the edges.
“Peak Performer” - Tad Friend feels outstanding with motivational speaker Jesse Itzler. Never justifies why we should care at all about Itzler, who’s just some random party-rapper prick with a very rich wife and extra confidence. The entire time, I was waiting for the other shoe to drop, for the essential hollowness of the grustling success-obsessed world of motivational speaking to be revealed. It takes until the next-to-last section for Friend to underline that subtext, and he’s not nearly as vicious as I’d like. I view the entire profession as basically malignant, a den of scammers with no product to push beyond their presence. Friend doesn’t do anything to challenge that assumption, but neither does he press hard enough to reveal things for what they are — he relies on thin irony and the accidental revelations of out-of-context quotes. Why is Itzler the guy worth profiling? Sure, he’s especially successful, but if success is the only metric you’re using to gage who’s interesting, you’ve fallen for the motivational speaker’s trap before a word is spoken.
“The Optimists” - Charles Duhigg sits in the Copilot’s seat at Microsoft. Regarding Sam Altman’s outster, this piece doesn’t have much to add to the initial story, as outlined by Max Read and various others. If you haven’t been following the drama, it’s a perfectly good place to catch up, though it’s remarkably sympathetic to Microsoft’s side of things. That’s more apparent, and egregious, in the piece’s other half, which concerns Microsoft’s general A.I. strategy and their new Copilot system. I’m sure Duhigg was on the inside at Microsoft, but it’s the reporter’s job not to be won over, especially not by the nimble tech arm of a multinational corporation. Kevin Scott, their C.T.O, is the central character here; his journey out of poverty is compelling enough but we’re then given his entire resumé. His quotes are dull and despite all the personal connections he draws, his cautious optimism regarding A.I. just reads as the company line. That line gets regurgitated early and often, the adversity of Clippy giving way to present triumphs such as… a version of Excel “designed to remember a user’s previous queries and results, allowing it to anticipate the user’s needs.” This user needs a stop to all this lukewarm, credulous A.I. coverage.
Letters:
Gabe writes that Jennifer Gonnerman’s piece on school shooter Kip Kinkel “definitely puts you into the different philosophies of incarceration like I learned in first year of law school, in criminal law (deterrence, incapacitation, rehabilitation, punishment / just desserts). [Kinkel] doesn't seem dangerous anymore, seems pretty well rehabbed, was kept out of society while still dangerous (and probably won't be again so long as he doesn't go off his meds / is honest with his treating professionals about side effects he experiences). Certainly don't think prison was any kind of deterrent when he was experiencing voices in his head...so you're left with just punishment.” Yup.
What did you think of this week’s issue?
Wow indeed! So happy to see you get some well-deserved attention. I was late in finding Kottke, but now I’m truly hooked.
I assume the AI-related pieces in the post-“AI issue”s were pieces commissioned or at some point contemplated for that issue that didn’t pan out in time. (Note how many other features that have been published in the last several weeks don’t seem to feature recent reporting; it seems like the cupboard-clearing hour.) The tantalizing possibility this raises is that the OpenAI feature got held from the AI issue—which went to press before l’affaire Altman—because Duhigg had intimated something was going down…