January 26, 2015 Issue

The tagline of Jill Lepore’s brilliant "The Cobweb," in this week’s issue – “Can the Internet be archived?” – struck me as dry and theoretical. Not my cup of tea, I thought. But I read the first paragraph, which begins, “Malaysia Airlines Flight 17 took off from Amsterdam at 10:31 A.M. G.M.T. on July 17, 2014, for a twelve-hour flight to Kuala Lumpur.” I read the next line and the next line. The paragraph is anything but dry and theoretical; it’s vividly specific and real. It tells about the crash of Malaysia Airlines Flight 17 in a field outside Donetsk, Ukraine, and about a Ukrainian separatist leader known as Strelkov posting a message on VKontakte, a Russian social-media site: “We just downed a plane, an AN-26.” I went on to the next paragraph, conscious of being hooked by the story and by the prose, which is crisp, direct, and factual. The second paragraph reports that two weeks before the crash, Anatol Shmelev, the curator of the Russia and Eurasia collection at the Hoover Institution, at Stanford, had submitted to the Internet Archive, a nonprofit library in California, a list of Ukrainian and Russian Web sites and blogs that ought to be recorded as part of the archive’s Ukraine Conflict collection, and that Strelkov’s VKontakte page was on that list. It also tells that the Internet Archive’s collections are stored in its Wayback Machine, in San Francisco. I moved to the third paragraph, fascinated by the linkage of the downed Malaysian Airlines plane, which I knew about from reading news reports, with the Internet Archive, which I had no clue existed. The third paragraph begins, “On July 17th, at 3:22 P.M. G.M.T., the Wayback Machine saved a screenshot of Strelkov’s VKontakte post about downing a plane.” It continues,

Two hours and twenty-two minutes later, Arthur Bright, the Europe editor of the Christian Science Monitor, tweeted a picture of the screenshot, along with the message “Grab of Donetsk militant Strelkov’s claim of downing what appears to have been MH17.” By then, Strelkov’s VKontakte page had already been edited: the claim about shooting down a plane was deleted. The only real evidence of the original claim lies in the Wayback Machine.

The only real evidence of the original claim lies in the Wayback Machine – and with that remarkable revelation, the utility of archiving the Internet suddenly becomes clear. But it’s the next two sentences, the superb opening lines of the fourth paragraph – “The average life of a Web page is about a hundred days. Strelkov’s 'We just downed a plane' post lasted barely two hours” – that form the lynchpin of the piece, ushering in its main subject, what Lepore calls “the overwriting, drifting, and rotting of the Web.”

“The Cobweb” reads like a streak. I especially enjoyed the part where Lepore visits the home of the Wayback Machine, in San Francisco, and meets its inventor, Brewster Kahle, who is one of the most interesting characters to appear in The New Yorker in a long time. Here’s Lepore’s description of him:

Kahle is long-armed and pink-cheeked and public-spirited; his hair is gray and frizzled. He wears round wire-rimmed eyeglasses, linen pants, and patterned button-down shirts. He looks like Mr. Micawber, if Mr. Micawber had left Dickens’s London in a time machine and landed in the Pacific, circa 1955, disguised as an American tourist.

Lepore tells this memorable anecdote about Kahle:

I was on a panel with Kahle a few years ago, discussing the relationship between material and digital archives. When I met him, I was struck by a story he told about how he once put the entire World Wide Web into a shipping container. He just wanted to see if it would fit. How big is the Web? It turns out, he said, that it’s twenty feet by eight feet by eight feet, or, at least, it was on the day he measured it. How much did it weigh? Twenty-six thousand pounds. He thought that meant something. He thought people needed to know that.

I relish Lepore’s emphasis on “meant” and “know” in the above passage. It allows me to hear the wonder in her voice.

The variegated material that “Cobweb” comprehends is transfixing: Malaysia Airline Flight 17, Ukrainian separatist leader, Russian social-media site, Hoover Institution, Ukraine conflict collection, Internet Archive, Wayback Machine, San Francisco, Britain’s Conservative Party, Andy Borowitz, link rot, content drift, Harvard Law School, United States Supreme Court, Los Alamos National Laboratory, the footnote, Brewster Kahle, the Library of Alexandria, hyper-text, M.I.T., petabytes, the Library of Congress, the National Library of Sweden, the British Library, the Bibliothèque Nationale de France, copyright, Web crawlers, legal-deposit laws, Europeana, Google Books, Harvard Library Innovation Lab, Perma.cc, Herbert Van de Sompel, Memento. All of which coheres in a compelling narrative frame.

“The Cobweb” ends beautifully:

One day last summer, a missile was launched into the sky and a plane crashed in a field. “We just downed a plane,” a soldier told the world. People fell to the earth, their last passage. Somewhere, someone hit “Save Page Now.”

Where is the Internet’s memory, the history of our time?

“It’s right here!” Kahle cries.

The machine hums and is muffled. It is sacred and profane. It is eradicable and unbearable. And it glows, against the dark.

This is great writing. I enjoyed ‘The Cobweb” immensely.

January 19, 2015 Issue

This week’s issue contains an extraordinary piece of reporting called "When the Fever Breaks" by Luke Mogelson. It’s a firsthand, front-lines account of how communities in Liberia and Sierra Leone are fighting the spread of Ebola. Mogelson visits slums, hospitals, holding centers, jungle villages. He talks to “survivors” (people who catch Ebola and don’t die), local organizers, health officers, social workers, ambulance drivers. At one point, he accompanies a county burial team to the Liberian village of Jene-Wonde. “Ebola victims are most contagious when they are no longer alive,” Mogelson says, “and in West Africa—where burial rituals, for both Christians and Muslims, entail anointing the deceased—many people have contracted the virus from a corpse.” The wife of Jene-Wonde’s chief has died of Ebola. Her body is inside the village general store. The chief gives permission to retrieve her body. Mogelson describes the procedure:

The sprayers went first—a pair of minesweepers clearing a path. Then the others entered with the bag and the stretcher. They emerged several minutes later and loaded the corpse into the back of the truck. As the truck made its way across the square, women and children spilled out of their houses, sat down in the dirt, and keened. I followed on foot, along with a few locals, all of whom turned back when the truck stopped at a wall of trees. The team filed down a narrow trail, carrying the stretcher through dark jungle. After about a hundred yards, unmarked mounds of rich orange soil rose here and there from the grass. Beside a shallow, rectangular hole, an elderly man in flip-flops, cargo shorts, and a white skullcap leaned on the handle of an old spade. He had dug all the graves. No one else from the village, he told me, was willing to tread in that place.

The team lowered the imam’s wife into the grave. On top of her, they dropped a heap of freshly hacked branches and leaves. Then they stripped off their suits, gloves, and masks and deposited them in the grave as well.

Mogelson’s writing style is factual, unostentatious – well suited to the hard reality he describes. But it has its artful aspects. At one point, describing a trip in Tonkolili District, Sierra Leone, he says, “To get there, we followed barely discernible tire tracks, for miles, through grass so tall and close you feel as if you were in a car wash.”

“When the Fever Breaks” can be read as a companion to Richard Preston’s brilliant "The Ebola Wars" (The New Yorker, October 27, 2014), which describes the work of scientists at the Broad Institute to sequence Ebola’s genome and track its mutations. But the two pieces differ from each other. “The Ebola Wars” is written in the third person; “When the Fever Breaks” is a first-person narrative. It abounds with sentences like “One day in early November, I followed several young men down a warren of sand alleyways, veined by rivulets of sullage, that wound through West Point, the slum to which Fahnbulleh and her husband had been taken,” and “When I visited the quarantine center, in Monrovia, a group of children sat in plastic chairs inside the gate, near a metal seesaw.” I relish such sentences: the observer becomes a participant; reporting becomes experience.

Postscript: I delight in thisness, i.e., “any detail that draws abstraction toward itself and seems to kill that abstraction with a puff of palpability, any detail that centers our attention with its concretion” (James Wood, How Fiction Works, 2008). Thisness is palpability, specificity, concreteness. New Yorker writing brims with it. For example, in this week’s issue, it’s there in the description of the Goldschmied & Chiari mirrors on show at Lorello Gallery: “Composite photographs of billowing smoke transferred to reflective glass, have been tinted petal pink or storm-cloud gray” (“Goings On About Town: Art”). It’s there in Amelia Lester’s representation of the Via Carota’s pumpkin-and-sage ravioli: “fluffy, beautiful, and fleeting, an exercise in virtuosity equivalent to a concert pianist running up and down a scale very fast” ("Tables For Two"). It’s there in Jiayang Fan’s description of Nitecap’s Key Lime Fizz “with a lit candle suspended in its froth” ("Bar Tab"). It’s brilliantly there in Sarah Larson’s capture of Bill Murray’s line to the waitress at Tao when she brought him two rum-and-waters: “He took one and said of the other, ‘You give that to the kids at the orphanage’ ” ("Cinephiles"). Sometimes thisness can be in the form of a piquant fact, e.g., “KidZania has its own currency, kidzos, which can be used in branches around the world, or deposited in the central bank and accessed with a realistic-looking credit card” (Rebecca Mead, "When I Grow Up"); “Recently, researchers at the University of Southern California built a prototype 'virtual human' named Ellie, a digital therapist that integrates an algorithm similar to Affdex with others that track gestures and vocal tonalities” (Raffi Khatchadourian, "We Know How You Feel"). It’s hard to say how useful all this is. But in terms of writing as pure writing, I devour it. My favorite example of thisness, in this week’s issue, is Sasha Frere-Jones’s description of the Sleater-Kinney band’s guitar tones: “fuzzed, doubled into octaves, thin, then soaked, overloading” ("Sister Saviors"). “Sleater-Kinney” is itself an inspired bit of thisness. It comes, Frere-Jones says, from the name on a highway exit ramp in Olympia, Washington.

January 12, 2015 Issue

Pick of the Issue this week is Julia Ioffe’s "Remote Control," a profile of the exiled oligarch Mikhail Khodorkovsky. It isn’t as good as Ioffe’s "The Borscht Belt" (The New Yorker, April 16, 2012), in which she memorably describes, among other things, the use of a pech, a traditional Russian brick oven (“Still, the oven’s three little compartments provided enough room for frequent rotation of pans and traditional cast-iron pots – fat-bellied, with narrow bottoms – and its warm roof, about a foot below the kitchen’s ceiling, became a favorite for the three young chefs in the kitchen”), and the making of samogon (Russian moonshine). But it does contain some interesting observations by Khodorkovsky on life in a Siberian prison. For example:

“The penal colony isn’t scary,” he observed. “It’s full of average people, and your place in that world depends on you, and more on will than on strength. You can’t be scared. The result is a vile and filthy life that is worse than death. And death, well, what is death? The risk is low, just two or three per thousand inmates a year.

It’s going to take this kind of steeliness to overthrow Putin. Maybe Khodorkovsky is the man for the job. Would he be an improvement? His track record as a ruthless exploiter of Russian state capitalism isn’t encouraging. But maybe his prison experiences have humanized him.

Photo by Davide Monteleone

The Davide Monteleone photo of Khodorkovsky that accompanies Ioffe’s piece is transfixing. I can’t make up my mind about it. It crops off about a fifth of Khodorkovsky’s face, including part of his left eye. Why? What aesthetic is in play here? The photo draws attention to Khodorkovsky’s eyes. They are hard, determined-looking eyes. It’s not a blasé shot. It’s not a “no style” portrait, that’s for sure. It’s eye-catching. I guess that’s its point. But it’s incomplete. That’s what bugs me about it.  

"Boyhood": An Unsentimental Story of Tough Survivorship (Contra Richard Brody)

Finally, Richard Brody provides his reasoning for including Boyhood on his “Negative Ten” list (see "The Best Movies of 2014," newyorker.com, December 11, 2014). Today, in his "The 2015 Oscar Nominations: Selma Snubbed and Wes Anderson Triumphant," newyorker.com), he says,

But for all the performers and directors in the Academy who may have received bad reviews, there’s another category that absolutely everyone within it shares, and that accounts, I think, for the movie that will clean up at the February 22nd ceremony. They were all children, and they will vote for “Boyhood,” which is an audacious movie in the sole regard of Richard Linklater’s sheer tightrope nerve in keeping the production going a couple of weeks a year for twelve years. The very fact of pulling off “Boyhood” deserves praise, but the movie’s absurd sentimentalization of childhood and adolescence, its vision of a boy and teen without a spark of ferocity, without an evil thought, without energies to tame or impulses to master—without any wildness at heart—could satisfy the old studio system. Even Mickey Rooney’s Andy Hardy had more spunk. Linklater’s version of the best little boy in the world will, I think, win the Oscar. Having nothing to apologize for means never having to say you’re sorry.

What Brody construes as “absurd sentimentalization,” his New Yorker colleague Anthony Lane views as a depiction of “a tough, daily quest to refloat and sail on” ("Balancing Acts," The New Yorker, July 21, 2014). Lane says,

So many of the men in “Boyhood” seem like losers, or bullies, or both, minds and mouths locked tight with disapproval and denial, and the challenge for Mason—and, you feel, for any kid—is not just to survive the squalls of youth but somehow to grow from boy to man without suffering a death of the spirit.

Michael Wood, in his "At the Movies" (London Review of Books, August 16, 2014), shares Lane’s view:

There is also a sense in Boyhood that ordinariness is not what happens anyway but what happens if you’re lucky. The film invites us to conjugate the messed-up and far from happy lives of so many adults (and of the historical world around them) with the modest, mildly stubborn sanity of the children. They are lucky but luck isn’t all they have. Broken marriages, drunken husbands, desperate mothers, violent school bullies, drugs, temptations to drop out, break-ups with boyfriends and girlfriends: the children survive all these because they know when to stop, because they can’t be lured into the follies of their elders and so many of their peers.

Wood goes on to say:

At moments you think they are not going to make it. The alcoholic husband is thoroughly out of control, as are the school bullies practising throwing circular saws at their victims. Something bad has to happen here, you think. Because it often does in life, and because it always does in the movies, once the possibility has been announced. In movies where it isn’t going to happen the violent alcoholics and the flying sawblades don’t even show up. Still, what is guiding Linklater’s story here is not easy optimism but something like a best-case scenario when the odds are bad – a refusal of the odds as destiny.

Wood and Lane express my view. Boyhood isn’t a sentimental picture of “the best little boy in the world,” as Brody alleges. It’s an intricate portrait of a kid who, through luck and caution, manages to survive the psychological wreckage happening all around him. Brody’s criticism of Boyhood seems flimsy, disregarding the film’s many strengths – its brilliant use of elision, its naturalism, its intimate scale, its “twin sense of continuity and interruption” (Lane’s words), its miraculous ability to make time’s flow visible, its discovery of the extraordinary in the ordinary. Brody’s listing Boyhood  as a “Negative Ten” is hard to comprehend. He probably thinks it's a provocative move. It is. It's also a disservice to a great movie. 

Moral Clarity: Shatz v. Packer

Adam Shatz, in his "Moral Clarity" (LRB Blog, January 9, 2015), refers to George Packer’s "The Blame for the Charlie Hebdo Murders" (“News Desk,” newyorker.com, January 7, 2015) and accuses Packer of being “bathed in what liberal hawks like to call ‘moral clarity.’ ” Shatz says,

To demonstrate ‘moral clarity’ is to be on the right side, and to show the courage of a fighting faith, rather than the timorous, context-seeking analysis of those soft on what Christopher Hitchens called ‘Islamofascism’. Packer’s New Yorker article is a declaration of this faith, a faith he confuses with liberalism.

Shatz’s attack stems from Packer’s opinion that the Charlie Hebdo murders “are only the latest blows delivered by an ideology that has sought to achieve power through terror for decades.” Packer says,

It’s the same ideology that sent Salman Rushdie into hiding for a decade under a death sentence for writing a novel, then killed his Japanese translator and tried to kill his Italian translator and Norwegian publisher. The ideology that murdered three thousand people in the U.S. on September 11, 2001. The one that butchered Theo van Gogh in the streets of Amsterdam, in 2004, for making a film. The one that has brought mass rape and slaughter to the cities and deserts of Syria and Iraq. That massacred a hundred and thirty-two children and thirteen adults in a school in Peshawar last month. That regularly kills so many Nigerians, especially young ones, that hardly anyone pays attention.

Shatz questions what he calls Packer’s “exclusive” focus on radical Islam’s murderous ideology. He says,

In laying exclusive blame for the Paris massacres on the ‘totalitarian’ ideology of radical Islam, liberal intellectuals like Packer explicitly disavow one of liberalism’s great strengths. Modern liberalism has always insisted that ideology can go only so far in explaining behaviour. Social causes matter.

But in fairness to Packer, it should be pointed out that he doesn’t disregard social causes. In his piece, Packer says,

The answer always has to be careful, thoughtful, and tailored to particular circumstances. In France, it will need to include a renewed debate about how the republic can prevent more of its young Muslim citizens from giving up their minds to a murderous ideology—how more of them might come to consider Mustapha Ourrad, a Charlie Hebdo copy editor of Algerian descent who was among the victims, a hero.

But it’s true that Packer sees the Charlie Hebdo killings as an aspect of “a form of totalitarianism called Islamism—politics as religion, religion as politics.” I think he’s right. As for “moral clarity,” Packer claims no such thing. In fact, in his “Living Up To It” (in his 2009 collection Interesting Times), he says, “Moral clarity is not why we should fight, it is why the other side fights.”

Credit: The above photo of a tribute at the Place de la République, in Paris, to victims killed during the attack at Charlie Hebdo is by Aurelien Meunier; it appears on newyorker.com as an illustration for George Packer’s “The Blame for the Charlie Hebdo Murders” (January 7, 2015).

January 5, 2015 Issue

Raffi Khatchadourian’s absorbing "A Century of Silence," in this week’s issue, differs significantly from his previous New Yorker work, which is written in either the third person or the first-person minor. His new piece is written in the first-person major. The opening sentence establishes the point of view:

When I try to imagine my grandfather, the face that appears to me is a variation of a pencil drawing that hangs in my parents’ house.

Never before has Khatchadourian opened in such a subjective way. I find it exhilarating. I’m an avid fan of his work. His "No Secrets" (June 7, 2010), "The Gulf War" (March 14, 2011), "Transfiguration" (February 13, 2012), and "A Star in a Bottle" (March 3, 2014) are among the glories of New Yorker reporting – intricate weaves of fact, quotation, and detail. I’ve longed for him to write more in the “I.” And now he has.

“A Century of Silence” is an account of a trip that Khatchadourian made to Diyarbakir, in southwestern Turkey, where his Armenian grandfather spent most of his life. Diyarbakir was a locus of the 1915 Armenian genocide. Turkey’s government still denies the genocide. But recently, as Khatchadourian shows, Diyarbakir, led by its old town mayor, Abdullah Demirbaș, broke with state policy and began to revive the city as a center of multiculturalism, the main feature of which is the restoration of the cathedral known as Sourp Giragos, the largest Armenian church in the Middle East.

Khatchadourian’s trip is a sort of quest. He says,

Hundreds of people began coming to Sourp Giragos every day, the visits minor acts of curiosity, atonement, remembrance, a reckoning with a distant Armenian identity. Some came trying to piece together family history, lost stories of survival. Last April, I packed a bag (and the old Bible) and made the journey, too—to solve the mystery of my grandfather’s survival, if possible, and to learn how the cathedral had been resurrected, how the city had so unexpectedly changed, and how a century of contested history could finally appear to be resolved.

My favorite passage in “A Century of Silence” is the last paragraph, a description of Khatchadourian’s visit to the ruins of another old church in Diyarbakir, called Sourp Sarkis:

I went farther into the church, making a list of the things that the people of Diyarbakir had left there. Dried scraps of bread. Automotive carpeting. An old shoe. A fragment of a transistor radio. Corrugated plastic, some of it burned. Where the main altar had been, there was a fire pit; among the ashes, a wrapper for a candy called Coco Fino and empty cans of Efes beer. A rusted wire. Coils of shit. In the inset of a wall, someone had arranged several stones in a neat line. Hundreds of daisies reached upward. And as the sun descended behind the high city walls the smell of grilled meat drifted over from nearby homes, and the sound of children playing began to fill the streets. A ball was kicked and it hit the side of a building and bounced. Some boys clambered over the wall that surrounded the church. Women left their kitchens, and climbed to their roofs to collect carpets that had been put out to air. TVs wired to satellite dishes came on, filling spare rooms with their ethereal glow. All of Diyarbakir, it seemed, except the church, drifted forward in time. Overhead, a flock of common swifts darted and circled among the old stone arches. Their black wings arced like boomerangs as they swooped through the ruins—above the piles of earth, the weeds and the wildflowers, all the trash—and their movements were ceaseless, careless, as if unweighted by anything.

That “All of Diyarbakir, it seemed, except the church, drifted forward in time” is very fine. It’s one of two lines I’d like to remember this story by. The other one occurs earlier in the piece. It’s unforgettable: “Mass violence was buried in the city like strata of rock.”

Reality Cake

A couple of weeks ago, in the "Bookends" column of The New York Times Sunday Book Review, Leslie Jamison and Daniel Mendelsohn extolled the merits of memoir-novels. Jamison’s piece particularly sticks in the mind. She seems to think that fictionalizing memoir makes it more artful. She asks, “So what’s the lure of the blur? Why do we like that space of uncertainty in which we don’t know what’s been invented and what hasn’t?” She answers, “There’s an electric charge in toggling back and forth between the shimmer of what’s been artfully constructed and the glint of what actually was.” She says, “We get the frisson of admiring the narrative as both artifact and plain fact, a North Pole both imagined and constructed. We get to have our reality cake and eat it too.” “Reality cake” is a good name for memoir-novels. They’re confections of the real and the fictive. I have no interest in them. I prefer reality served straight – all facts, no fiction. But this doesn’t mean that I lose out on the experience of Jamison’s “frisson.” This is where I take issue with Jamison. She asserts that it’s fiction that makes reality artful, as if, say, John McPhee’s Coming into the Country and Ian Frazier’s Great Plains are just inert lumps of raw fact. There are works of factual writing that are as beautifully and artfully wrought as any novel. Fiction doesn’t necessarily make reality artful; it just makes it fake.