PanThe New YorkerRatajkowski has spent decades receiving the world’s lecherous gaze, metabolizing it, inviting it, rejecting it, capitalizing on it, and agonizing over it. In her new essay collection, aptly titled My Body after her foremost preoccupation, Ratajkowski attempts to reckon with how her appearance has shaped her personal relationships, her career, and her psyche. If there is a thesis statement to be drawn from Ratajkowski’s somewhat muddled, overly lyrical début, it’s that physical beauty—in particular, a near-perfect, if outdated, sort of beauty—is a heavy cross to bear ... The central, and perhaps most exasperating, contradiction of My Body is Ratajkowski’s warring descriptions of her career path—one moment, being on display is an act of pure empowerment that makes her feel \'badass,\' \'special,\' \'in control.\' The next, her career is a hideous double bind that she pursues strictly in the name of financial security, or because people won’t take anything but her looks seriously ... [\'Buying Myself Back\'] is a compelling examination of intellectual-property-rights issues in the fashion and modelling business. (It also makes one shudder to think of just how powerless the models who don’t have Ratajkowski’s platform are. Ratajkowski seldom seems to consider these women.) ... Not all of the other essays in My Body are quite as effective as \'Buying Myself Back.\' The collection whipsaws between childhood, early adulthood, and present day, trying to forge connections between concrete memories and ambient sensations—all adding up to a pervasive sense of internal conflict that Ratajkowski experiences over commodifying her own physicality ... The broad concept of \'the body\' is applied quite liberally, and the reader can lose the thread ... She struggles to draw out any insights or observations between these hazy experiences, and often defaults to blanket justifications ... As much as she alludes to being in control, Ratajkowski seems incapable of making a decision that doesn’t actively reinforce the things that make her feel bad. She confesses to still being \'addicted\' to the sensation of being loved on Instagram. Of course, all of these contradictions are valid, and the questions she poses are meaningful ones, but Ratajkowski often fails to cut through them with insight.
Joe Coulombe
RaveThe New YorkerCoulombe, who died last February, at the age of eighty-nine, was one of the very few business leaders who could make minor discounts on the price of eggs feel monumental on the page. He tells plenty of these kinds of fun-fact-laden business tales in Becoming Trader Joe...an unusually colorful and sensible business guide that refuses to glamorize entrepreneurship ... For anyone who has visited a Trader Joe’s and experienced its dazzling array of foods, its bargain-basement prices, and its cheerful and hyper-competent staff, and wondered, What’s the catch?, Becoming Trader Joe provides many of the answers, most of which are satisfying and delightful. The book is a sort of Kitchen Confidential for the grocery business, but without the drugs or rage. In the age of Jeff Bezos and an endless stream of news about worker exploitation and corporate imperialism, it’s nice to go behind the scenes of a beloved national chain without uncovering insidious forces at work ... we gain plenty of insight into Coulombe through how he describes the trajectory of his company ... Coulombe’s rudimentary, instinct-driven business philosophies can feel like revelations ... Parts of Becoming Trader Joe are too relentlessly focussed on intricate economic principles to be interesting to anyone outside of business school, but even these sections offer up entertaining details about Coulombe’s decision-making.
Heather Havrilesky
PanThe New Yorker[Havrilesky] spends most of her columns giving her readers unwavering permission to feel their feelings. One imagines that this advice would come as a relief to the person on the receiving end—akin to visiting an extraordinarily animated therapist who deems every emotion worthy of being pored over. To a reader, however, Havrilesky’s maximalist approach can become wearying. Her columns sometimes take thousands of words only to arrive at breathless platitudes... One gets the sense that Havrilesky’s explosive verbal performances are less about the specifics of what they say than about letting her readers get swept up in her fist-pumping, self-reckoning mood.
