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John Ganz
Rave The New Republic When the Clock Broke makes a convincing case for paying closer attention to the early 1990s ... Ganz writes about the right’s trolls and brawlers with an unusual perceptiveness ... When the Clock Broke reads most powerfully as an account of how America fell out of love with the ideology of the civics lesson and embraced the political darkness
Kyle Chayka
Mixed The New Republic Chayka’s basic thesis is hard to dispute ... But culture also still exists beyond social media, a point it’s easy to forget when reading Filterworld ... Even though Filterworld is careful to underscore the cultural now’s \"general state of ennui and exhaustion, the sense that nothing new is forthcoming,\" Chayka does not exactly lead the charge for a wholesale reboot of contemporary culture. Instead, he often simply appears nostalgic for a bygone era of superior taste.
Ben Smith
Pan The New Republic Through the stories of BuzzFeed and Gawker, Smith aims to show how the media, high on the early internet’s spirit of creative adventure and freedom, got hooked on traffic ... Deft ... All history is selective, but the focus on Gawker and BuzzFeed means that Smith’s account of the societywide race to go viral necessarily omits and underemphasizes important players ... In place of analysis, Smith gives us a whirlwind nostalgia trip ... Traffic is less interesting as a history of digital media—much of the book’s raw material comes from other historical accounts, a debt acknowledged in an endnote on sourcing—than as a record of its author’s evolving thinking on the role of journalism online ... As both witness and participant, Smith occupies an unusual role in the story of the digital media revolution. If he feels any doubt about the objectivity of his account—if he feels that his ability to reliably chronicle the rivalry between BuzzFeed and Gawker is in any way compromised by his longtime employment by the former—he does not show it in the pages of Traffic ... These might seem like small criticisms, but they go to the heart of what it takes to tell a story that people can trust, to be a credible reporter—the essence of journalism, and the mission to which Smith’s new venture is supposedly directed. In truth, what Smith does these days is less journalism than journapreneurialism, a hybrid activity that involves reporting on power while aspiring to wield it.
Vladimir Sorokin
Positive The New Republic The idiosyncrasies of Sorokin’s fiction are not only a matter of style; his plots also often resist easy summary. In both form and content, Telluria is perhaps the strangest, most unstraightforward Sorokin novel yet ... a story with no happy endings, but moments of fleeting relief. The fragmentary structure of the novel emphasizes the narrative irresolution: Telluria is not told through the voice of a single narrator but dispersed across 50 vignettes that introduce us to different dimensions of this strange—and strangely recognizable—new world. Some of these vignettes function like relatively conventional short stories, while others are single-page explosions of decontextualized verbiage. The overall effect is submersive and subversive: The reader is denied the life raft of narrative coherence, and though points of contact between the different fragments do exist, any semblance of linearity is rubbed out the moment it appears ... In prose that slips from humorlessly insistent bureaucratese to epistolary tenderness, from techno-religious uplift to soft-focus chat room sleaze, the novel moves from the \'halls of power\' to the \'bunks and shitholes\' of this new world ... there is no escape from the chaos of history, and the novel’s twisting, relentless sentences—rendered by Lawton into a wonderfully liquid English—enact this entrapment ... reads as a chronicle of projects forestalled, exits that become entrances, horizons glimpsed but never attained, and advances that lead back to their point of departure ... The task of Sorokin’s reader is not to make sense of his violently uncertain worlds, but to surrender to them.
George Packer
Pan The New Republic Packer brings Last Best Hope: America in Crisis and Renewal home at a touch over 200 pages, and for many of those pages it’s unclear whether he’ll have enough material to make it to the end. The physical thinness of these books betrays the frailty of liberal thinking in its moment of crisis: Assailed from both the left and the right, hostage to finance, and no longer able to secure the equality that grounds its central promise of individual freedom, how can liberalism reinvent itself? ... Neither genuinely critical nor full-throatedly prescriptive, these books are closer in spirit to catechism. A basic incoherence defines the genre. Last Best Hope is no exception ... The orientation of this investigation is strangely solipsistic, a fact captured by the surgery that Packer has performed on the line that gives the book its title. Whereas Abraham Lincoln once declared that America was \'the last best hope of earth,\' Packer believes—correctly—that the United States can no longer claim to be \'a light unto the nations.\' In the hands of a different writer, perhaps even an earlier version of Packer himself, \'last best hope\' might have been repurposed ironically, as a critique of America’s projection of its own power abroad or as an injunction to learn from the rest of the world; what we get here instead is its deployment in the service of an earnest, unthinking insularity. \'No one is going to save us,\' Packer declares. \'We are our last best hope.\' The only way America can fix itself is with more America ... he spends much of the first half of the book summarizing year-old tweets ... Tiny shards of insight do emerge occasionally, but they do not pierce the book’s curtain of nationalist kitsch. Packer is not unaware of the real drivers of American dysfunction, but he never seems particularly interested in probing these causes too deeply. His real interest is in description, not analysis ... a Friedman-esque exercise in overexplaining the obvious, which basically boils down to the idea that radical forces are buffeting the political establishment on both the left and the right. This jaunt through the four Americas sees Packer indulge his flair for dad-style moralizing and the off-kilter character sketch ... What this silly taxonomy makes clear is that Packer’s real beef is not with Free America, Smart America, or Real America, which are mostly treated with humanizing sympathy, but with the wokes and snowflakes of Just America ... In an era crying out for radical thinking, Packer offers the damp squib of incrementalism ... If liberalism is to remain America’s guiding political star, it needs a better vision—anchored in creativity, care, ecology, whatever it might be—of how individual freedom and the common good can knit together. That vision is not the one found here.
John Birdsall
Positive The New Republic ... painterly ... These aspects of Beard’s story—both his sins and his suffering—relate directly to many of the problems plaguing today’s food culture, in which debates over authority, identity, and appropriation had long been suppressed ... The story of Beard’s life invites us to recognize the violence that was done in the name of American cooking, and expand our understanding of authenticity to include not only what’s on the plate but everything around it: the norms, prejudices, economic wounds, environmental traumas, and other social forces that go into the production of food and culinary authority. It’s a reminder that food is part of culture, and terroir not simply a matter of the soil.
Michael Lewis
Pan The Baffler \"In The Fifth Risk, [Lewis] gives us his up-tempo impersonation of Hannah Arendt, and things go every bit as badly as you might expect. Instead of offering a groundbreaking thesis in the vein of Eichmann in Jerusalem’s banality of evil, Lewis delivers Nobodies in Washington, a report on the banality of good in Trump’s America ... What emerges from the exercise is 250 pages of forgettable prose that serve mostly as a reminder of liberals’ unending faith in the power of rules to tame the tyrannical impulses of government. The Fifth Risk is a political book with nothing interesting to say about politics ... Because this material is boring and Lewis himself seems bored by it—when is a caricature ever interesting?—he lightens things up with a few twinkly eyed wisecracks here and there. But even the gags feel forced.\