Last Week's New Yorker Review: December 18, 2023

Think Scotch-bonnet peppers!

Last Week’s New Yorker, week of December 18

Must-Read:

“What Makes a Murder?” - Sarah Stillman relitigates felony murder, a system of laws that imprisons people for crimes they did not commit. Stillman drops articles at the same pace some musicians drop albums; it’s been more than two years since the last one. It’s clear from reading this piece just why that is — a massive amount of investigation went into this piece, from public-records requests and data journalism to old-fashioned narrative scrounging. (It’s the kind of piece so deeply reported it’s been turned into a “Project” with its own fancy website.) The overarching story is truly remarkable and features a few key turns that make clear why Stillman selected it as the framing narrative, but there are three or four single-section stories that are nearly as gripping; any one of these could have ably contextualized the felony-murder issue, but Stillman’s method aims for breadth along with depth. The central Sadik Baxter story is especially notable for the way everyone involved seems to have their own connection to justice and law — Baxter’s “mastery of felony murder” laws is quasi-professional, his victim’s children are all three public defenders (I wanted to know a bit more about that detail!) and the man that called the cops on Baxter… I won’t spoil that turn.

At times I feel that this magazine’s justice coverage loses something when it has to continually begin from the assumption that readers have trust in the justice system before patiently undermining some small corner of that trust. Stillman is careful to include a quote from the child of the victim that he “‘didn’t go in with an abolitionist perspective.’” But read enough of these stories in these pages and that abolitionist perspective¹ feels more and more like a desperate cry for justice and common sense. I’d like stories like this to push their conclusions a bit further, though I understand that the magazine has to speak from the present status quo. Taken for what it is, this story is a trumpet-blast — here’s hoping it can help rouse power.

Window-Shop:

“Tokyo Story” - Hannah Goldfield gets a taste of Japan in Greenpoint. Goldfield’s food prose is characteristically precise, finding great pleasure in simple litany: “Soba miso is mixed with toasted buckwheat kernels, shiso leaves, scallions, dashi, and bonito to form a pleasingly gelatinous, tangy, umami-rich substance…” The space of the new, longer format allows Goldfield to delve into the history of Japanese food in America, and the elements that are often adjusted to fit our food culture. It’s all as thoughtful and restrained as a bowl of soba.

“Dispossessed” - Helen Shaw devalues property. Finds a lovely common thread between these two plays and others; the idea of “non-ownership” as having the possibility to break the “dispossession plot” is a fascinating one. This reading does feel somewhat grafted on to a misbegotten-sounding show; Shaw is kind but pays selective attention to the aspects that interest her — the plot synopsis has little sparkle. Regarding the puppet show, Shaw tells us how wonderful its mechanics are, but never lets us know if the story works — perhaps it doesn’t, and her kind selectivity is again at play.

“I Spy” - Amy Davidson Sorkin violates the espionage act. A crisp, straightforward history that’s most compelling in its first section, which explains exactly how the act came to be linked with secrecy in a way that lead the government to start “stamping that word on every piece of paper it could.” (See this Patrick Radden Keefe tale from last year to understand how much trouble can result from overclassification.) Grows scattered toward the end as it runs out of narrative runway and leans into the Trump connection with diminishing returns — so its brevity is an asset. Classify this!

“Watch This Space” - Lauren Collins flashes street mosaicist Invader. Generally a snappy profile despite an unexceptional central character. I have some minor reservations about the in-medias-res opener, which gives us a cliffhanger that’s such a fakeout when it’s resolved it feels retroactively unearned. Mostly, though, I just don’t care much for Invader’s art, and Collins is clearly a fan — she does briefly interrogate the “colonialist connotations” of the work, but this is primarily a celebration. I wish there was a bit more on race and class — Invader says he was raised middle-class, which is a broad spectrum, but I think of street art as a protest by the disenfranchised. In any case, once you can get into museums or get your work sold, it should no longer be your space. I could forgive that if the work was genius, but it strikes me as totally vacant, mainly a branding exercise. Invader’s also just not a compelling speaker, and Collins, sensing this, spends most of the second half of the piece with his obsessively chronicling fans, who use his app to spot works. These bits fare better, and I understand the appeal of the observational hunt. Spare me the Damien Hirst, though — man are his quotes shallow. (“The thing that sort of made me take notice was when he used that weather balloon to put a piece into space, right? I just thought, Wow, the levels.”)

Skip Without Guilt:

“Sleeper Cells” - Siddhartha Mukherjee charts how the scope of cancer research may metastasize to other medical fields. Mukherjee literally wrote the book on cancer, and this is an intelligent and detailed study of new discoveries in the field. Unfortunately, it fails the more basic test of clarity, relying heavily on a muddy and confusing Sherlock Holmes metaphor that comes out of nowhere and recurs again and again. I know Mukherjee wanted to be accurate; he’s gotten docked in the past for relying so heavily on poetic explanation that he ends up getting the facts wrong.² But I needed more metaphor to be able to grasp what he’s discussing here, and less lines about how scientists “might, for instance, expose macrophages to chemicals that would jump-start the particular immune response, mediated, in part, by interleukin-1 beta.”

Throughout, Mukherjee uses the term “inflammation” as a catch-all without ever really defining it, which repeatedly prompted me to wonder whether the issue might be with the broadness of the term. Finally, at the very end, Mukherjee says, “We use the term ‘inflammation’ colloquially, as if we understand what we are saying. But dig a little deeper and the word becomes a clown car of meanings.” Not the best metaphor, and also — the we here seems primarily to refer to Mukherjee: He’s pointing out something lacking from the rest of his piece and claiming we’re to blame for the confusion! Defining inflammation from the start instead of vaguely gesturing toward unanswered questions would go some way toward clarifying this fairly confusing piece. I always feel bad when my criticisms amount to “I’m dense!” but I do feel that in this case, Mukherjee could have done more to clear things up.

“Terms of Aggrievement” - Rebecca Mead laughs at Leo Reich’s lived experiences. Stand-up comedy and print features are a terrible combination — it’s to Reich’s credit that even half his jokes survive the transition. It’s not merely the flatness of bits made text, though; it’s that the narrative impulse to explain inevitably dulls the surprise of humor, especially with a comedian like Reich, where the shifting distance between persona and person provides the punch. The portions profiling Reich are pleasant but read as a standard and unsurprising bio of a comedy nerd, the portions that essentially outline his upcoming HBO special (and give away so much of its material) are entirely pointless. Reich is a talented comedian, but he’ll convince you of that much better than Mead can.

“Gray Areas” - Anthony Lane sees two films with echoes of the Holocaust. I can’t decide if it’s totally obnoxious or sort of brilliant that Lane critiques The Zone of Interest for not being Resnais’ Night and Fog — certainly an unreachable bar, but perhaps it’s true that representations of the unspeakable ought to be magnificent or not exist. The Anselm review spoils things regardless, with Lane using it as an excuse to recount the process of an artist he likes. His only formal notes regard his experience of 3D-IMAX. And that last line… Oh no.

“Laugh Lines” - Adam Gopnik gags. Among many issues with this piece — it never decides whether it’s talking about standup in particular or just anything funny ever; most of Gopnik’s conclusions pertain fairly narrowly to the former, I’d say, but he brings in lots of evidence from the wider world of generally funny people and things, which is messy. The books under review all sound terrible (maybe not the last, which is glossed over) and it’s almost beneath Gopnik to dismantle them — though he scores a few own goals in the process. (That is not what “woke” means, Adam!) Things really fall apart toward the end, when Gopnik just starts… listing some jokes he likes? See Mead above re: the dangers of this. Mostly, the trouble here is that Gopnik’s nugget of wisdom is worthless — basically, people laugh at impious truths, who knew? — but he treats it as though he’s cracked the Rosetta Stone. It gets tired fast: Cue the vaudeville hook.

Letters:

I got quite a good response to the letter explaining my upcoming move to Buttondown. Thanks for your support. More on that before the year’s out.

Dara Lind says: “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. …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…” I find that plausible!

What did you think of this week’s issue?

1. Shouts to K.Y. Taylor at the link, whose fantastic coverage of race and justice is a highlight of the magazine’s website — I wish it made print more often.

2. For what it’s worth, I love that Mukherjee epigenetics piece, and despite reading the rebuttals I still don’t understand what exactly it got so wrong — which is why I’m not going to med school any time soon!