Last Week's New Yorker Review: June 19, 2023

jump-squatting, doing pushups with her hands balanced on dumbbells.

Last Week’s New Yorker, week of June 19, 2023

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Must-Read:

“Lives in the Balance” - Manvir Singh asks why the effort to “establish the social worth” of India’s women — and to save their lives — has moved slowly, and maybe backward. Precise, vivid, and grounded in personal testimony without being consumed by it. Presents its sprawling and multifaceted argument concisely — that the Indian “perception that women are burdens” has complicated roots that can’t be easily simplified into English-language “patriarchy” or “sexism,” that patterns of “socialization” and “norms with deep roots,” including some tied to “plow agriculture,” are implicated in women’s poor lives and deaths (“according to a U.N. study, forty to fifty per cent of female homicides in India result from dowry disputes,”) and that the idea “affluence would dissolve oppressive norms and practices” was, in fact, backward, with solid evidence showing that “India seems to value women less than when it outlawed dowry, sixty years ago.”¹ It’s to Singh’s credit that he’s able to suggest solutions (reduce the “stigma against divorce” and fight “resistance to female independence”) without the common compulsion to insist that those solutions be easily achievable through legislation — as he says, “legislative action without social transformation has proved strikingly impotent.” Singh’s previous writing in the magazine has been intellectually engaging, but this piece is the first in which his prose fully, darkly blooms, from Pawan, “quick to greet people with prayer hands and to bow at the feet of the elderly,” (note the performative edge implied in the phrasing) to Preeti, “eyes swollen and plum-colored.”

Window-Shop:

“Comebacker” - Louisa Thomas gets over the yips with once-and-present Major League pitcher Daniel Bard. A sweet little sports story that doesn’t try to be more than it has to be: A chronicle of one man’s reckoning with his own mind’s reaction to his successes and failures, and how they impact his ability to throw a little white ball in big games. Pleasantly recalls the glory days of Grantland, where Thomas was an editor. By emphasizing the silliness of its own stakes without reducing their importance, it makes credible the connection to the reader — we would all benefit from an understanding of the futility of simple narrative in surmounting anxiety. A nice summer read — like baseball itself, pairs well with sun and beer.

“Sonic Signatures” - Alex Ross sees a new opera by Salvatore Sciarrino, and mourns Kaija Saariaho. The tie to Saariaho is indistinct; I’d rather read a standalone obituary than a rushed-through couple of paragraphs, which is no real tribute. But the main piece showcases Ross’ prose at its strongest: Sciarrino has “a lepidopterist’s regard for the slightest fluttering sound,” a piece starts “with softly sweeping gestures across the white keys, like the rapid strokes of a superfine brush,” violins “play an ethereal squiggle of a melody,” when a character “bemoans the bloody mess he has made, a cello laments in tandem.”

“Mortal Coil” - Parul Sehgal brings the “cagey” Lorrie Moore to life. Takes Moore’s defensiveness for its own, a bit, spending a long while pulling the same trick Moore does in the early quote from a review: Stating a critical quibble, then reframing it as a strength. Sehgal keeps mentioning Moore’s disinclination to have her work seen as a chronological journey, and leans into this, picking random points from Moore’s oeuvre to compare to bits of her newest book, instead of starting with the past and continuing on to the future. This kind of refractive referentiality appeals to me, though Sehgal draws so much attention to the emulation that the original, as manifested in Moore’s book, starts to become hazy. Maybe that’s the point: To obscure Moore, thereby providing her the partition wall she’s sought — somewhere she can be heard and still be hidden.

“Dance of Death” - Vinson Cunningham is unsettled by Branden Jacobs-Jenkins’ new play. It’s always hard to judge Cunningham’s more poetic and opaque flourishes without having seen the work reviewed; he often hides tidbits in specific phrases which only activate after the play’s been seen. That’s to say: I wasn’t totally convinced by the ending paragraph here, but this still succeeds in conveying the tenor of the work without unveiling too much of its shadowy picture.

“That Was Awkward” - Lauren Collins gets awkward with Pilvi Takala, the Finnish artist who “does things she’s not supposed to do in places where she’s not supposed to be.” Has a difficult time finding its viewpoint. Collins starts off with lengthy art world quotes about “nebulous” boundaries and “uneasy engagement with questions about consent and privilege.” These aren’t wrong, they just superimpose a museum placard on work that might be viewed through other lenses. (And, luckily, can be: Many of the pieces referenced are on Takala’s vimeo page.) Takala is, for good reason, worried about addressing her personal life at all (the section on her stalker is unfortunately muddled; it’s never clear what the work of art concerning him actually looked like,) and regarding her work, she is clear but not revelatory. So the piece mostly concerns Takala’s latest piece, “Close Watch,” which, Collins admits, is a “departure from much of Takala’s previous work,” since she is “trying to follow the rules, to fit in rather than stand out.” Also because the new piece is seemingly much less interested in the humor of broken codes, and more interested in the tragedy of enforced ones. That means that most of the backstory we’re given doesn’t really apply to the controversial work at hand, and Collins, having to start from scratch, is overwhelmed. She admits the new piece is “far more ambitious than anything Takala had attempted before,” but doesn’t make it clear whether that ambition was justified; in favor of the work we get a very limp quote from its curator (“it’s kind of throwing a pebble in the water, and thinking that maybe she can influence things in some way,”) and against the work we get a sliver of a quote from Ali Akbar Mehta, which barely starts to sum up his lengthy review.² Collins says Takala is “politely dismissive” of his criticisms, which sounds, to me, like Collins accepting a dismissal where she might have pushed back harder. Maybe that would have made things really awkward.

“Eastern Promises” - Keith Gessen chronicles how an insistence on brutal economic reforms and a lack of political imagination on the part of the West created the conditions for today’s Russia. Admirable in taking a wide scope and addressing each of its points seriously and vigorously. Unfortunately, bone-dry for all but the keenest history buffs, and detail-oriented sometimes to a fault. (A representative line: “Bush’s national-security team, which included the realist defense intellectual Brent Scowcroft, had taken a pause to review the nation’s Soviet policy.” Scowcraft is hardly mentioned again, and never characterized.) Still ultimately worth reading, with the last three sections especially brutal in revealing how the U.S. “participated in the creation of the Russian monster” and now is “forced to become monsters to battle it, to manufacture and sell more weapons, to cheer the death of Russian soldiers, to spend more and more on defense.”

Skip Without Guilt:

“The Story of Us” - Amanda Petrusich watches Taylor Swift sing in a stadium in New Jersey. The actual review of the show is okay, especially when Petrusich leans into an almost performatively down-to-earth quality (“My daughter, who is about to turn two, had picked out my socks, which had cats all over them — a little wink to the fans, I thought.”) But the analytical second half falls very flat, rehashing tired points about “the intensity of her fandom” and how it’s “tied to the primal urge to have something to protect and be protected by.” That’s not wrong, but it misses how that pattern plays out everywhere there is passion in human life; it doesn’t make the case for Swift’s uniqueness. Its logic is cyclical, basically saying, “What’s interesting about people caring so much about Swift is that they act the way people act when they care a lot about things.”

Whatever Is Worse Than That:

“Borderline Chaos” - Dexter Filkins surveys the recent history of the U.S. / Mexico border, and the political maneuverings on our side of it. Jesus, what even is this? A big whiff on at least four levels, its perspective impersonal, its politics inhumane, its facts inaccurate, and its storytelling insipid. I’ll address each in turn.

Filkins is one of the great combat reporters, good especially in heat-of-the-moment detail. There is almost none of that here; after a first scene that takes the perspective of Border Patrol and finds them saying pretty much the same things they were saying under Trump. [Edit: This is an error; the “This American Life” story is about a fundamentally different group charged with humanitarian enforcement — they are far from Border Control. I recommend readers note the clarifying comments below, from longtime reporter Dara Lind (now at America Immigration Council), and seek out better work on this subject from actual experts, some of which can be found in this tweet thread.] After that, the only “in the moment” storytelling we get is a ride-along with a Republican House member and a chat with three probable smugglers in a convenience store, who give generic quotes (“They got people everywhere.”) That remove is a major liability: All the scenes of “thousands” of refugees never register as more than statistics, which blunts the arguments for and against making it easy for them to immigrate. (One queer Columbian woman gets about six paragraphs and a few brief quotes. We get a sense of her situation, but never her opinion on the border crisis, unlike literally every other figure in the piece.)

The case against is made much more strongly, here, than the case for; it’s hard not to read this piece as an apologia for the new Biden policy which strictly limits entries, introduces an app (which is already causing issues) and essentially reinstates Trump-era immediate-return rules. It’s telling that Filkins has to almost entirely remove the migrant voice to create a world in which politics are so removed from the people they affect that these cruel policies can be justified. The Pulitzer-winning This American Life story linked above is a good example of how to blend the human story with the political one; it takes the perspective of humanitarian-enforcement officers, not immigrants, and I view it as relatively moderate on the issue, yet it’s hard for an empathetic listener not to walk away with, at least, a sense of the inhumanity involved in Trump’s, and now Biden’s, protocols. (Editing to add that as good as that piece is, it’s far from the last or only word on the subject — “multifaceted” doesn’t begin to address this issue.)

All this would make for a troublesome piece, but still one that could perhaps present a sharply contrarian, realpolitik take on the border crisis. But Filkins’ facts are frequently incorrect, as chronicled in tweet-threads beginning here and here. A really questionable response from fact checking makes this look even worse for the magazine. Some of the points there are arguable, but the overall picture is of sloppy work, combined with some really iffy sourcing: Andrew Arthur at the Center for Immigration Studies, which the SPLC designates as a hate group, gets two quotes; in the first, they’re tagged with “…which advocates stricter border controls,” and in the second, called “advocates of restricting immigration.” Both times, the article basically takes their viewpoint as its own, using it to sum up Filkins’ language in a punchier way. Mark Morgan, the guy who ran border security under Trump, also gets a summarizing quote, as does David Axelrod. There are literally more retired politicians quoted than immigrants.

That leaves us, exhausted already, with the narrative structure, which is basically entirely missing. Man, oh man, is this piece an endless slog, one totally unmoored from chronology, with few grounding moments, zero visceral detail, and, generally, the voice of a chatbot fed Associated Press articles. This is a major failure on many levels, and, frankly, one the magazine needs to answer for.

Letters:

Heather liked the Merve Emre piece as much as I did, saying, “I finished and pulled out my notebook.” They write of Emre that she can “lean… on her own prose in a way that feels obfuscatory of ideas or arguments that haven’t been fully cooked or, when scrutinized, reveal fault lines of imprecision,” which is, frankly, something I could probably be accused of as well — it’s hard to have snap takes on writing I’ve just read, so I’m often trying to plate raw ingredients with a flourish. In this case, though, Heather “thought this showed an exhaustive amount of thought and background reading and the prose was absolutely earned and very satisfying.” Caz, though, disagreed, calling the piece “loopy and trippy and a bit too pleased with itself.” …I could probably be accused of that, too.

Kit “appreciated” Michael Schulman’s Marvel piece I, frankly, couldn’t stand, saying they “sensed a strong frustration on the author's part that he wasn't able to get anyone who'd actively participated in a Marvel project to say anything substantive, much less critical. It's all, ‘boy do I love doing Marvel movies’ from people whom I'm 100% sure have more nuanced thoughts on the subject but obviously can't bite the hand that feeds.” I agree, but didn’t view that as a strength. But for a good example of how to write a profile when you don’t have any quotes, check out this Tim Robinson profile in the Times.

Regular correspondent Michael liked Idrees Kahloon’s piece on immigration more than I did, saying it “presented a good balance of the political, philosophical, and economic dimensions of borders with some interesting historical details.”

What did you think of this week’s issue?

PS. Go Nuggets! 🏆

1. He added some compelling details about whether bride-burning has actually decreased, or whether old numbers were a major over-count, on his Twitter.

2. (I didn’t finish it, but I read enough to tell that its argument was far more sophisticated and complex than Collins’ summary of it.)