A Forgotten NYC Neighborhood, Bambi's Jewish Roots, and a Horse-Breeding Eugenicist
Things got weird in this week's reading.
No moralizing this week. Just a list of some good stuff I’ve read:
“Living in New York’s Unloved Neighborhood,” by Rivka Galchen. There’s been a run lately of some of my favorite New Yorker journalists turning the lens back on themselves. I still think about Peter Schjeldahl’s haunting “The Art of Dying.” Jill Lepore’s “The Lingering of Loss” is one of the best things I’ve ever read. Add to that list Rivka Galchen’s beautifully written article about her (admittedly) shitty Midtown West micro-neighborhood.
I particularly enjoyed how she captured what it’s like to travel with a small child in a neighborhood lacking in them:
Because there are so few babies or children in this neighborhood, when you travel with a baby or a child you and the child are treated like a majestic presence, almost like tigers. My daughter is celebrated at the grocery store, at the pizza place, at the deli, and even on the street. In this neighborhood, crowded with mentally unwell people, and with drug dealers and panhandlers, and with tired office workers and sex workers and fruit venders and psychics and police officers—all these people, nearly to a one, say something tender to a child, whether you want them to or not. I remember once journeying to the idyllic family neighborhood of Carroll Gardens, in Brooklyn, where there were more babies and children than pigeons, and no one seemed interested in my baby at all, and I felt like a pigeon.
One other thing I appreciated about the piece was the absence of the words “H*dson Y*rds,” which abuts her soot-covered stomping grounds. Having worked there for about a year, I often felt that HY was a rare New York City place without a neighborhood — I think I remember one critic saying it was as if a spaceship bearing luxury goods had touched down on the far West Side. This piece was a glimpse into the heart of the area where it landed.
“Bambi’s Jewish Roots” by Paul Reitter. Yeah, I fully acknowledge this is a weird one. My toddler has been getting really into watching what he calls “Nature” and after a particularly grisly episode of Our Planet, I decided to show him the so-called children’s film, Bambi. In addition to the famously traumatic moment of Bambi’s mother’s death (it happens off-screen and he’s too young to understand), there’s also a terrifying fire and an entire scene that can only be summed up as “horny animal montage.”
As I was searching for “Is Bambi actually a kids movie?” I got an autosuggest for “Why was Bambi banned?” and I figured there must be some kind of racist depiction in it. But what I actually learned is that the novel Bambi, a huge blockbuster in its own right (and an early environmentalist work), had been burned by the Nazis because it could be read as a “political allegory on the treatment of Jews in Europe.” The author, a Jewish Austrian named Felix Salten, wrote a profile of Herzl and a book on Zionism. And if that weren’t enough, consider this passage:
One of the deer uses the loaded verb verfolgen to ask whether humans and deer might get along: “Will they ever stop persecuting us?” When another deer answers that “reconciliation” with humans will eventually come about, Old Nettla, a third deer with vastly more experience of the world, will have none of it. Indeed, her response foreshadows a line from Salten’s Zionist book Neue Menschen auf alter Erde (loosely translated, new people on ancient ground), which expresses impatience with the enduring “dream of full integration.” Old Nettla seethes that humans, “have given us no peace and have murdered us for as long as we’ve existed.”
The Rich Fool and the Race Scientist, by Gabriel Rosenberg. So I know, you’ve read your fair share of 33-minute long deep dives into turn-of-the-century rich playboys, horse breeding, and eugenics, but this one just hits different. I do think it’s interesting that its subject, W.E.D. Stokes was once one of the most famous men in New York City’s tabloids and he’s virtually unheard of today. It doesn’t take long for this born-rich asshole to find his way to race scientist Charles Davenport, whom he funds for years before writing a book of his own that’s so crazy even Davenport’s publication distances itself from it to avoid discrediting the eugenics movement. It’s a wild read, but a long one.
Silicon Valley’s Safe Space, by Cade Metz. Speaking of rich assholes, I came across this piece about the Silicon Valley blog Slate Star Codex because of the reaction to it on Twitter. The site (which is now a Substack, of course) was a place where the tech community’s “Rationalists” came to talk about how much smarter they were than everyone else (in the language of the piece, “a group that aimed to re-examine the world through cold and careful thought”). That might be a surface reading of a culture I don’t know too much about, but the story did bring up two threads I find particularly distasteful:
1) The misguided notion that one’s personal success, be it earned or inherited, in one sphere confers wisdom in others (see the previous story).
2) The tendency for thoughts that begin with “logic” and “rationality” to inevitably wind their way towards racist ideas (see previous story, and many others). Turns out that removing things like, “context,” “culture” and “morality” from your way of thinking can lead you down some slippery slopes.
More fun stuff:
Stan Lee and the Dot-Com Disaster, by Abraham Riesman. Riesman is one of my favorite people to follow on Twitter, so go check out his new book.
Megan Rapinoe and Sue Bird Are Goals, by Emma Carmichael. Great subjects. Great writer. Great article.
The Delicious Secret Behind Your Favorite Whiskey: The Best Spirits from MGP. I had no idea that so many of the popular new craft whiskeys I’ve been enjoying are actually made at the same distillery in *gasp* Indiana.
‘I Miss My Mom’: Children Of QAnon Believers Are Desperately Trying To Deradicalize Their Own Parents. When I started this, I thought for a minute that I’d already read this piece, but turns out the experience is just that common now.
We wiped out the flu this year. Could we do it again? I find the secondary effects of the pandemic to be endlessly fascinating.
Brazilian butt lift: behind the world's most dangerous cosmetic surgery. Who doesn’t love a good butt surgery story?