May

16

2025

David Klion (contributing editor): I’ve had a little more than two years to settle into the identity of special needs parent, ever since a geneticist sat me and my wife down and explained to us that our daughter has an extremely rare (one in 32,000) genetic condition that neither of us carry and that would permanently alter the course of our lives. Though things have gone about as well as they could have relative to the expectations set at that moment, and our daughter is thriving and charms everyone she meets, it was a traumatic moment and one I’ll likely spend many more years processing. At one point I tried to write about it for publication, but it didn’t come together. I still haven’t figured out exactly what I feel comfortable saying, or how to write about it in a way that anyone else might find helpful.

It’s in this context that I read Amanda Hess’s debut book, Second Life: Having a Child in the Digital Age, which was released last week and which movingly describes the experience of special needs parenting. Hess’s older son was diagnosed with Beckwith-Wiedemann syndrome (one in 15,000), whose possible symptoms include an increased cancer risk and a prominent tongue that often requires surgical correction. While the specifics of our situations are very different, no one I’ve read has done a better job conveying the shock and terror of receiving a diagnosis like this, or the awe of seeing your child grow and develop in defiance of your worst fears.

I am not impartial here; I’m friends with Hess and her husband, I know their sons, Hess and I share a book editor, and I’m quoted on this exact subject in Second Life. Specifically, there’s a passage where I tell Hess that people kept asking me: Did you know before she was born?—in what I interpreted as an ambient obsession with choice and control in our professional class demographic. “The real tragedy, these interactions seemed to say, was having a baby with traits you did not personally select,” Hess writes. “Babies don’t work like that, and that’s part of what makes parenting meaningful: You do not get to choose.” Much of the public discourse on parenthood, and in particular the recent and unsettling vogue for natalism, strikes me as naively celebratory and saccharine; by contrast, I found this passage, and many others in Second Life, refreshingly honest. Hess writes about her children with ferocious love, but she never denies or minimizes the sacrifices or anxieties that accompany the decision to reproduce, and she is bracingly real about her own self-doubts.

I don’t want to make Second Life sound solemn, though; Hess is a tremendously funny observer, and her son’s condition is only one aspect of the book (much as it’s only one aspect of raising any special needs child). The bulk of Second Life is concerned with the way the internet, and particularly fertility apps, mediates the experiences of pregnancy and child-rearing. Hess has a singular talent, often on display in her cultural criticism in The New York Times, for capturing the quotidian experience of browsing the internet and being manipulated by its algorithms without ever judging or trivializing the emotional impulses being thus manipulated. In the current moment, when it can feel as though technology is rendering writing obsolete, there is something hopeful about reading such careful and precise writing about the humanity that all our technology is built around.

Nathan Goldman (senior editor): This past weekend, I ventured out to downtown St. Paul not once but twice, to see The Magnetic Fields perform their 1999 magnum opus 69 Love Songs over the course of two consecutive nights. These shows—part of a tour pegged to the iconic record’s 25th anniversary, which has now extended well into year 26—were not my first foray into that particular kind of retrospection. In fact, all but one of the shows I’ve seen this year were similar events: I also caught Frank Black celebrating his 1994 alt-rock classic Teenager of the Year and The Hold Steady commemorating their 2005 indie bar band epic Separation Sunday. (I’ve got two more coming up: Of Montreal doing their 2005 synth-pop extravaganza The Sunlandic Twins and Frank Black again, this time with his better-known act the Pixies, paying tribute to their early-’90s records Bossanova and Trompe Le Monde.) As the critic Peter C. Baker has noted, this practice, once “intriguingly novel,” has become ubiquitous—a testament, he argues, to the “acceleration of a culture industry that is unsettlingly dedicated . . . to monetizing our nostalgic attachment to media from the past.” Baker examines the perks of these “nostalgia exercises”—both for ardent fans and for artists scrambling to make ends meet in an inhospitable environment—as well as their aesthetic limits, principally the devaluation of variety and surprise. As he writes, these concerts largely abjure “the simple pleasure . . . of never knowing what song is coming next.”

Of the album-based shows I’ve seen, these ones honoring 69 Love Songs were the most immune from Baker’s critique, not because of the performances themselves but because of the band and album in question. For one thing, even when the setlist isn’t known in advance, spontaneity has always been minimal in Magnetic Fields shows, which tend to unfold less like indie rock concerts than recitals, with the band members seated and staid, performing faithful renditions with little commentary and no chaos. But more importantly, 69 Love Songs, whose title functions as a literal description of the offering, is not so much a record in the traditional sense as it is a durational formal experiment, a test of the songwriter’s prowess and the listener’s patience—the songs feel most fully realized as part of this absurd, ungainly whole. The project is also inherently performative, embracing artifice over authenticity: Stephin Merritt, who composed each of the 69 tracks, dons character after character, never singing confessionally and regularly routing the emotions at hand through clever wordplay and trope-laden genre imitation spanning everything from electro-pop bangers to country ballads. (Indeed, Merritt has said the album was initially conceived as “a theatrical revue with four drag queens,” a premise that survives in his choice to outsource vocal duties on a number of songs to a quartet of other singers.)

The band did not disappoint, proceeding dutifully but energetically through the mammoth tracklist. (“After this song,” Merritt quipped before the night one closer, “there will be a 22-hour intermission.”) For the most part, they fulfilled what Baker calls the “implicit promise . . . that old songs will sound like old recordings.” Still, certain structural limitations called for rearrangements and other alterations: Of the original vocalists, only Merritt and Shirley Simms were present (tragically, LD Beghtol, who performs my favorite song on the album and also wrote a charming little “field guide” to the record, died in 2020), so the two split singing with latecomer Anthony Kaczynski, who also took on some of the parts that Merritt does on-record, presumably to give his singularly beautiful bass voice a break. And in a delightful counterpoint to the band’s sedate reputation, they did indulge in occasional jokes and wry witticisms, sometimes injected into the music, as when they transformed the cheerleader-style chorus of “Washington, D.C.” into a laconic lament. But while many of the shifts and flourishes were welcome, they weren’t necessary; the true star was the songs themselves. Hearing one after another, I was awed anew at the achievement of the album—dozens upon dozens of truly brilliant tracks—and at Merrit’s peculiar genius. There are songwriters who mean more to me, but none I know who can match his uncanny ability to wring real feeling from a formalist exercise, unlocking the eros latent in the very structure of the love song. In his hands, the rote and well-trod become sublime.

Mitch Abidor (contributing writer): The Norwegian director Dag Johan Haugerud’s LOVE, now showing in New York and coming soon elsewhere, is a jewel of a film. In this perfectly controlled work, every element—the acting, the writing, the direction, the cinematography, even the music—is perfectly in balance, each augmenting all the others. The film revolves around the sexual dilemmas of Marianne, an oncologist at Oslo University Hospital, and her nurse, Tor, who has no interest in a relationship; he’s satisfied with the joys of cruising and casual sex, and spends insomniac nights riding the ferry to a nearby island in the fjords, using Grindr to alert him to any possible partners. But a meetup on the ferry soon gives way to a sexless emotional entanglement. Meanwhile, a friend has set Marianne up with a geologist who lives on that same island. The shidduch takes, and Marianne finds herself drifting into a relationship she doesn’t really want. Through these two figures, LOVE meditates on the role of chance in modern romance.

Though the film is so emotionally and aesthetically rich it nearly bursts from plenitude, it also benefits from a narrow focus. The intimate plot involves a limited cast—these two main characters, the partners they attract, and a friend of Marianne’s who’s organizing a cultural event for the Oslo 100th birthday—and a contained setting. (The entire locale, from Marianne’s hospital to city hall to the islands in the fjords, can be covered in ten minutes.) In Haugerud’s hands, this small world contains more than enough. We’re inexorably drawn into the stunning beauty of the fjords at night: the lights reflected in the water, the city itself glimmering in the background. Even the docks’ loveliness feeds the film’s wistful mood. While this melancholy splendor—and the unhappiness and ill health the characters suffer—conspire to create an atmosphere of gloom, it’s often playfully punctured by the leads’ knowing smiles.

The film’s formal harmony, as well as the intelligent conversation at its center, puts one in mind of the best of Éric Rohmer. (The two directors also share a taste for putting calendrical context at the beginning of a scene.) Even the ambient quiet that envelops the words spoken in the romantic scenes is stunning. And while LOVE ends on an unresolved note, this too is a thoughtful choice, reflecting a deep understanding of how people actually live, and sometimes love.

LOVE is the first film in Haugerud’s “Oslo trilogy,” whose other two entries—SEX and DREAMS—will be shown later this year. Though the three linked movies are meant to function independently, it still feels almost inappropriate to review this one on its own. Given the cinematic mastery on display, the three movies will surely work together in some way that enhances the meaning of each. But for now LOVE is what we have, and so it is LOVE that you must see.

In this week’s parshah, Emor, the Torah interrupts its enumeration of the Jewish holidays with a strange interlude. Just before instructing the Israelites to observe Rosh HaShanah, God commands, “And when you reap the harvest of your land, you shall not reap all the way to the edges of your field [pe’at sadcha] . . . you shall leave them for the poor and the stranger.” The Rabbis, always sensitive to surprising textual juxtaposition, ask about the relationship between this agricultural law of pe’ah and the penitential holiday of Rosh HaShanah. In response, they cite a divine prophecy from the Book of Jeremiah: “I will make an end of all the nations among which I have dispersed you; but I will not make an end of you. [However] I will not leave you unpunished, but will chastise you in measure.” The Rabbis note that the phrases “you shall not reap all the way” (“lo tekhaleh”) and “make an end of” (“e’aseh khalah”) share the root “kh-l-h” (“destroy” or “finish”), and argue that this similarity indicates a causal relationship: It is because the other nations harvest the corners of their fields that God will destroy them, whereas the Israelites will be spared the full force of God’s punishment—determined on Rosh HaShanah—in recognition of their observance of pe’ah and other agricultural laws.

The logic of the midrash can be extended even further by considering another aspect of the holiday. Rosh HaShanah is not only a day of judgment; it is also the holiday on which we acknowledge God’s sovereignty over the whole world. It is by virtue of that sovereignty that God can command the observance of pe’ah, and harvesting the entirety of one’s field is accordingly an act of hubris: In doing so, the powerful nations among whom the Israelites are exiled suggest that they alone own the land on which they find themselves—a pretension that directly challenges God’s claim to “the earth and all that it holds.” By contrast, in refraining from a full harvest, the Israelites declare that they are mere stewards of the land. It is therefore no coincidence that pe’ah is to be left for the poor: To recognize God’s sovereignty and the limits of our territorial dominion is simultaneously to acknowledge others’ claims to that land—particularly the claims of those who need it most—and our attendant obligations to them as co-stewards.

Of course, the Israelites just as often evince a hubris and moral turpitude similar to that of the nations chastised by Jeremiah. In the Book of Isaiah, for example, God decries wealthy Israelites for driving their brethren off of the land so they can accumulate more and more territory, condemning those who “add house to house and join field to field, until you dwell alone in the land.” The 18th-century Jerusalemite Rabbi Chaim Yosef David Azulai, known by the acronym Chida, offers an incisive psychological interpretation of God’s words. The verse, he argues, should be read backwards: In order to repress the knowledge that each of us will “dwell alone in the land” when we die—that we leave the world with nothing but the “four cubits of earth” in which we’re buried—we endlessly seek wealth, power, and property while we yet live. As the philosopher Judith Butler argues in their book Precarious Life, we try to deny the terrifying awareness of our own inescapable vulnerability through “a fantasy of mastery”—the belief that enough power and violence can conclusively ensure our safety. And yet, as the midrash implies, it is that very search for security—in metaphorical terms, reaping the edges of one’s field in order to have as much as possible—that often undoes us, our relentless pursuit of mastery setting in motion the very forces that undermine the safety we sought.

But, as Butler notes, this destructive fantasy of mastery over our physical environment is related to an even more deeply-rooted fantasy: the notion that we alone form and control our own selves. “The very ‘I’ is called into question by its relation to the Other,” they write. Each of us is, at least in part, created and constituted through the desires, impingements, demands, and vulnerabilities of the Other who is, in turn, partially determined through yet other Others, ourselves included. We can only imagine ourselves to be fully self-made and independent by turning away, psychologically or materially, from those Others who form us.

Butler thus provides a framework for radically reinterpreting the symbolic meaning of pe’ah: The Other whom we would seek to exclude in order to shore up our own safety and sense of self is already within our boundaries, whether we admit it or not. And it is our acknowledgement of their unsettling, strange, and terrifying presence among and within us that is also simultaneously our acknowledgement of God. Pe’ah, as the Mishnah teaches, is one of the mitzvot that has “no fixed measure.” Though the plain meaning of the passage is that there is no maximum amount of pe’ah that one can give, we might also read it in light of Butler’s words: There is no clear, precise way to determine just how intertwined we all are, and there is, accordingly, no obvious limit to our obligations to each other.

Aron Wander is a rabbinical student, organizer, and writer. More of his writing can be found here.