The pieces in this week’s issue I enjoyed most are:
Patricia Marx’s Talk story “Happy Hunting” (The bit about
the six-year-old cupping “an oodgy-colored something” is inspired.)
The “Briefly Noted” review of Iain Sinclair’s Ghost Milk (Its description of Sinclair’s prose as “lacerating,
off-kilter” is perfect. In my opinion, Sinclair is one of the greats. Maybe
someday The New Yorker will do a
longer piece on him. He merits fuller analysis.)
Anthony Gottlieb’s “It Ain’t Necessarily So” [Contains several witty lines, e.g., “We are, in
short, all running apps from Fred Flintstone’s not-very-smartphone,” “American
college kids, whatever their charms, are a laughable proxy for Homo sapiens." But Gottlieb’s mention of Stephen Jay Gould doesn’t do justice to Gould’s view
on evolutionary psychology. For example, Gould would be vehemently opposed to
the “snappy slogan” (“Our modern skulls house a Stone Age mind”) that Gottlieb
says sums up the current line of post-Darwinian thinking. In his “Natural Selection
and the Brain” (The Panda’s Thumb, 1980), Gould says, “The brain is
vastly overdesigned for what it accomplished in primitive society; thus,
natural selection could not have built it.” However, there’s at least this to
be said for Gottlieb’s piece: it’s rekindled my interest in Gould’s writing.
Gould wrote one of the most powerful book reviews ever to appear in The New
Yorker. I’m referring to his extraordinary “Curveball” (November 28, 1994), an
evisceration of Richard J. Herrnstein and Charles Murray's The Bell Curve. The
piece is a fit subject for a “Retrospective Review.” Maybe someday I’ll get
around to writing it.]
Peter Schjeldahl’s “All Stripes” (Regarding Gerhard
Richter’s “STRIPS,” Schjeldahl writes, “I like and don’t like the work.” But
when he says earlier in the piece, “I can’t think of any other important art
that has seemed to expect so little imaginative participation from a viewer,”
I’m left wondering what there is to like about it.)
Anthony Lane’s “Sail Away” (I like reviews that proceed by raising
questions, and this piece poses a beauty: “Here is frustration made flesh, with
fearsome results; would it be heretical or ungrateful to say that there are
times, when Phoenix is in full spate, and when Hoffman is revealing similar
ruptures of rage in Dodd’s more genial façade, when there is just too much
acting going on, perhaps with a capital ‘A’?”)
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