cultural commentary from the desk of Don Shewey
A super-downbeat issue whose highlights include Kelefa Sanneh’s piece about the dysfunctional state of Arizona (though Democratic Senate candidate Richard Carmona sounds like a pretty good guy); Lorrie Moore’s short story, “Referential,” about the parents of a mysteriously disruptive kid; and Charlayne Hunter-Gault’s horrifying story about the dismayingly widespread phenomenon in South Africa of “corrective rape” of lesbians. Oy.
Aside from the cover by Bob Staake and Margaret Talbot’s right-on editorial about Obama’s endorsing gay marriage, the most remarkable thing about this issue for me is the indication that Robert Falls has upped the profile of Chicago’s Goodman Theater so much now that many of its productions command coverage by New York critics. Hilton Als reviews Falls’ production of The Iceman Cometh, starring Nathan Lane but featuring a couple of young actors who Hilton thinks are stars of tomorrow (Patrick Andrews and Kate Arrington). And the always plugged-in culture reporter Alec Wilkinson’s “Stage Secret” follows the acclaimed black Shakespearean actor John Douglas Thompson to clown school. I have yet to see Thompson onstage but I plan to repair that lacuna the next chance I get.
Otherwise, not a lot of essential reading. Jeffrey Toobin’s long piece on the Citizens United court case — the one that has unleashed a bottomless flood of unaccountable corporate donations to this year’s elections — reveals the couple of small errors on the part of the Solicitor General’s office that allowed this egregious legislation to get by the Supreme Court. But Toobin basically establishes that the Supreme Court has a very, very long history of being very conservative in the direction of considering corporations to be “people” whose First Amendment right to self-expression is sacrosanct. Which is of course of a lot of horseshit that denies what should be perfectly obvious to any impartial law court, which is that the money corporations have to sling around allows them to drown out the voices of actual people.
I also read with interest Xan Rice’s story, “Finish Line,” about Kenyan runners in general and Olympic champion Samuel Wanjiru in particular.
The “Innovators” issue contains any number of astonishing sentences, including this one, from Michael Specter’s “The Climate Fixers,” about geoengineers laboring to find drastic solutions to global warming:
“The Stratospheric Particle Injection for Climate Engineering project, or SPICE, is a British academic consortium that seeks to mimic the actions of volcanoes like Pinatubo by pumping particles of sulfur dioxide, or similar reflective chemicals, into the stratosphere through a twelve-mile-long pipe held aloft by a balloon at one end and tethered, at the other, to a boat anchored at sea.”
From the same article: “In 2008 Chinese soldiers fired more than a thousand rockets filled with chemicals at clouds over Beijing to prevent them from raining on the Olympics.”
And Joan Acocella’s essay about English usage manuals and the battle between prescriptivists and descriptivists offers this summary of Ruth Wajnryb’s 2005 book Expletive Deleted:
“Arabic and Turkish, she says, are justly praised for elaborate, almost surrealist curses (‘You father of sixty dogs’). Bosnians focus on the family (‘May your mother fart at a school meeting’). Wajnryb gives generous treatment to the populations, such as the Scots and the African-Americans, who hold actual competitions of verbal abuse, and she offers memorable examples:
I hate to talk about your mother, she’s a good old soul,
She got a ten-ton pussy and a rubber asshole.“
In addition to these, other excellent pieces include Evan Osnos’s “The Love Business,” about Gong Haiyan, who created the most successful online dating website for Chinese match-seekers, and an extremely illuminating and well-written profile by Larissa MacFarquhar of Clayton Christensen, who wrote a classic book called The Innovator’s Dilemma. Christensen has applied a huge amount of research and thinking to the subject of why and how successful businesses can and almost inevitably do fail. He’s an incredibly smart who is also a devout member of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints who fervently prayed to God to tell him whether the Book of Mormon was true, which He did. Go figure.
Best story: the report by the magazine’s expert on Iran, Laura Secor, about the recent elections there, unusual in its minute details about the experience of how she is treated personally, controlled and manipulated and hounded by minders who are most upset about the possibility that she might write about how much things cost in Tehran these days. Very interesting read.
Best story on a topic I didn’t think I cared about: a profile by David Kushner of George Hotz, a 22-year-old hacker who succeeded in breaking into not only one of the first iPhones but Sony’s PlayStation 3.
Best parenthetical remark: in TV reviewer Emily Nussbaum’s entertaining piece on Game of Thrones, she mentions that “This season, early episodes have suggested the outlines of a developing war, hopping among a confusing selection of Starks, semi-Starks, and members of the Baratheon clan. (There are so many musky twenty-something men with messy hair that a friend joked they should start an artisanal pickle factory in Red Hook.)”
The travel issue surprisingly didn’t excite me much. I read without interest Basharat Peer on the hajj and Lauren Collins on Croatia as destination for drunken revelers from Britain. I skipped Julia Ioffe on Russian borscht and Daniel Mendelsohn on the Titanic. The high points for me were Patricia Marx’s fascinating piece on CouchSurfing.com — never heard of it! must make note! — and Bruce McCall’s great cover, “Carry-On Luggage” (above), which reminds me (like so many things these days) of Louis C.K.’s neo-Seinfeld episode on that subject. Hilton Als writes about a couple of plays in Chicago by intriguing writers new to me. And although I’m often happy to follow Sasha Frere-Jones wherever his musical enthusiasm leads him, I remain unconvinced by his take on Spiritualized, whose new album “Sweet Heart Sweet Light” strikes me as pretty yawny. If you hurry, you can check it out free yourself on NPR’s First Listen page.
