Last Week's New Yorker Review: January 16, 2023

injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere

Wow

The warm reception of this newsletter has been a real pleasure. I’ve been reading “Today in Tabs” (the newsletter where most of you probably found this) since the early Newsweek days, and my original idea for this newsletter was that I’d just post my takes to a channel on the Tabs Discord. Instead I now have two-hundred-ish kind folks gathered around my nerdy soapbox. Welcome. This edition is going out much earlier than will be usual (it could almost be called “This week’s New Yorker”) as it’s my winter break.

Last Week’s New Yorker, week of January 16

Must-Read:

“Deep Cuts” - Becca Rothfeld reads Franz Kafka’s newly uncensored, still sometimes evasive diaries. Rothfield simply guides us to all the quotes she’s selected from the diaries, and lets us take in the language with minimal, perfectly clarifying accompaniment. Sometimes, nothing more is needed.

Window-Shop:

“Lands of the Lost” - Helen Shaw dashes across the pond to see three plays. Shaw is a major favorite of mine; I parasocially dork-squealed when I saw she was coming from New York to “this magazine.” So expect bias, and three thousand ways of saying “lively prose, as always.” Fitting three shows into the usual 1500-some words is a tall task, and the framing device at the beginning and lesson-learned at the end don’t feel connected, or strictly needed. But the reviews themselves are a delectable trio, the first artful (“time’s gnomon” is perfect), the second charming (courtesy of the “seven-year-old friend,”) and the third hilarious (interactive theater is stressful!)

“Thought Process” - Joshua Rothman considers the act of thinking and the differing ways we describe our thoughts. Overly wedded to the two books it’s nominally a review of, which means it takes a while to get through the recap and onto the critique; when it arrives, though, it’s compelling. As both a skeptic of these pop-psychological, human-taxonomical realms and a deep enjoyer of them (at least, when they’re detailed and compelling; yay Socionics, nay “Three Thinking Styles,”) I agree that “thinking about our thinking risks forcing it into a form it does not have,” but I’d go further: Metacognition is so fundamental to the human experience this form-forcing may be as much a part of our inner selves as thinking itself. The idea that we might be “accurate” or “inaccurate” when describing our minds’ inner workings feels a bit like saying the eye might be “inaccurate” when staring at a bright light; any vision is a vision of both the bright light and the inner process of sight and flesh itself, and any thought about one’s mind is both “part of the story,” as Rothman says, and also made of its own burnt tissue. Anyway, read at least the next-to-last section for the delightful Melanie, a poet of the mind.

“Collusion” - Anthony Lane close-reads two journalism-inflected narratives. Shockingly sober for Lane. Saint Omer’s subject matter is obviously too serious for japes, and Lane foregoes them to make a convincing moral argument concerning the film’s dramaturgy. More is needed, though, on its formal elements and how they might reinforce or undercut the “controlling” parable’s judgement.

“The Missing” - Alexis Okeowo exhumes the story of migrants’ deaths crossing the Mediterranean, and the forensic scientists working to identify them. Grueling and grim, with haunting details like the memory “bags of soil” found on the corpses. Most interesting when discussing the psychological effect on survivors, and ultimately a bit repetitive, with too much political point-hammering (“It’s morally outrageous,” etc); the point is inescapable, so it’s not needed.

Skip Without Guilt:

“The Total Package” - Jennifer Gonnerman lugs boxes with unionizing UPS workers. I’m always here for labor and unionization narratives. Unfortunately, this one is somewhat dull. The answer to the thesis question “Why are UPS workers striking despite their high pay?” ends up being exactly what you’d expect: It’s a really tough job, and not all of them are well-paid. I’m not asking for shock or scandal, but in lieu of either, concision would be nice.

“The American Beast” - Jill Lepore distills the January 6th Report. Lepore's style is tightly wedded to the primary source texts she investigates. This poses an issue when she's this critical of those primary source texts, which is that as valid as her criticisms of those texts are, the reader still has to wade through endless quotation and summary. So let me sum up Lepore's piece, taking her "forty gallons of sap to one gallon of maple syrup" and turning it into a maple drop. She argues that the report is so fixated on Trump's travails, it's unable to see "the tornado" of pain that caused January 6, as well as the American landscape that tornado ravages. Lepore is a historian, so she takes it personally that the report is apolitical. But when it comes time to give her own best shot at explanation, her guesses are oddly apolitical themselves (2020 was a hard year! Social media corrupts! The news media sucks!) and seem uninterested in thinking about the ideological, and not merely circumstantial, reasons why people might storm the nation's Capital. Even the question Lepore asks, "Why believe?" seems less relevant to me than "Why act?" The radical fascist fundamentalists that Trump has roused aren't just motivated by belief, they feel there's something to be won. 

“Everything Everywhere” - Rachel Syme globetrots with Netflix exec Bela Bajaria. It’s interesting that Sarandos picked Bajaria so as not to get “bottlenecked behind one sensibility,” because so much new Netflix programming feels borne of one sensibility: A plasticky and somewhat glib tone that feels more than anything like it’s stalling for time. Despite her apparently hands-off nature regarding content, Bajaria might well be the source of that; her quotes here all taste of canned sparkling rosé, and indeed, the only moment she shows any sense of taste at all, it’s regarding wine.¹ Sure, this piece is self-aware of her and Netflix’s artifice, but that’s not the same as having a point of view on it.

Letters

A big part of the appeal of this project for me is getting to hear from you all about YOUR thoughts on last week’s New Yorker! Please, please, write in with your takes; I’ll publish excerpts down here in a little letters column. Along with the generic prompt of “what did you think?” I figure I’ll give creative prompts you can reply to, vaguely based on something from the issue. This week, since we’re starting things off, let’s try this instead: What’s your history with “the magazine”? How long have you been reading? Who got you into it? Have certain sections been your favorite at different parts of your life?

I’ll start. When I was a kid, my dad and I would read the New Yorker cartoons together and he’d do his level best to explain them to me. Eventually I graduated to “Shouts and Murmurs” - the only section I now skim or skip, but perfect onboarding for nerdy 13-year-olds. Around when I started college the Tilly Minute newsletter was coming out, and having that sort of one-step-removed analysis, along with an opinion to compare to my own, made the magazine super fun to read. When that publication trickled to a halt, I kept reading, and, well, here we are. I love an obsessive project, whether it be regarding high or low culture (in high-school I reviewed every new song on the Billboard Hot 100 for a number of years on my Facebook page, using a prose style I’d describe as “the nuance of the A.V. Club comments section, the wit of Perez Hilton.") In any case, I’ll keep this thing going as long as I reasonably can.

1. I jotted this note down in the middle of reading the piece: “She reminds me of season one Princess Carolyn, from Netflix’s Bojack Horseman before it had time to deepen its caricatures; nowadays, the show’d probably be swiftly cancelled before that point.” Then I got to Syme pointing out how “the company today has little patience for shows that don’t perform immediately,” Bojack’s showrunner saying he “cannot imagine another time or place where ‘BoJack’ got the acclaim and number of seasons that it did,” and then recounting an anecdote in which he joked they might as well cut out Princess Carolyn and a Netflix executive said “Who’s Princess Carolyn?” This somehow rendered my note both much more relevant to the piece and also totally impossible to incorporate into my brief review, thus necessitating this ridiculous footnote. For future reference, you really don’t need to read the footnotes. Hey, now you know.