Last Week's New Yorker Review: August 11
Last Week’s New Yorker, week of August 11, 2025
“‘TUMMY — to dream of one’s tummy as great and large predicts a fair and large estate. Play numbers 10-11-22.’”
Must-Reads:
“City of Luck” (American Chronicles) - Adam Gopnik raises a racket. Hugely enjoyable. Right from the start, Gopnik nails the thrill of the die-roll; it tethers one to the present moment with a numbing chemical blast, the dark twin of meditation, but with no risk of pain and no chance for growth. Gopnik gestures at four eras of NYC gambling, with corny but catchy nicknames (consecutively, “high-stakes gambling, high-hopes gambling, back-room gambling, and big-room gambling”); this structure helps the reader follow his roving eye. Arnold Rothstein, “more raptor than rabbi”, whose key innovation was to hedge his bets through arbitrage at a greater scale than any before, leaps off the page as a New York antihero. The section on Black numbers games repeats some of Kathryn Schulz’s convincingly moralizing take from a few years ago, but his noir lighting means the same outrageous story, in which white Mobsters “effectively redlined” the game, whose runners then descended into cultish mysticism, comes off less “How dare they?” and more “Forget it, Jake.” Gopnik has time for two more tales; he summarizes a gambler’s seedy memoir, and interviews the other Molly Bloom, who ran a high-stakes poker game then sold a book about it. (Bet I said bet I will bet.) Then he delivers a little monologue on the merits of debasement, at least as compared to quant degeneracy. This isn’t as convincing as his histories – we all know how darkly entrancing a percentage chance can be – but at least it’s unexpected. Gopnik is a master croupier; when he spins a tale, it’s worth betting on.
“Sense and Sensibility” (Books) - Dan Chiasson was looking for a mind at work, and found one in James Schuyler. Thrilled to have Chiasson back in these pages, after he took four years off to write six hundred pages on Young Mr. Sanders. His probing intelligence and impeccable craft are inimitable. (Though there’s been so little poetry coverage in his absence, nobody’s had a chance to imit.) Of course, Nathan Kernan has apparently been working on the biography reviewed here for three decades, so everything is relative. Right away we dive into exegesis: “Though the actual ‘clover, / daisy, paintbrush’ weren’t gathered that day… “Salute” preserves them in Schuyler’s proprietary solution of pert melancholy stirred into gloomy sweetness.” The context, though, is the disjunction between the writing and Schuyler’s mental turmoil; these troubled but productive years, where his work was itself biographical, comes first and last, and sandwiched in between is the past: Schuyler’s upbringing, queer adolescence, and eventually acceptance into the so-called New York School, where he was Frank O’Hara’s “‘seriousest’” pal. (There is a capsule bio of O’Hara wedged in here; perhaps not totally necessary, as it crowds out Schuyler’s view of the scene.) Across a long book, “orderly narrative” might be an imposition, but Chiasson balances its demands well enough with quotation and analysis that we feel we know a bit about Schuyler’s ins and his outs. I’ll salute to that.
Special Section:
Three excellent Talk of the Towns this week!
Also: ever since I started including the section names with the titles of the pieces, I’ve been annoyed that I can’t highlight the Talk section names – which are often really clever. I just decided to do something about it. Talks will now be labeled with a special emoji, plus their listed sections. They’re redundant here, but they won’t be, usually. If you love or hate this, let me know. If it’s a hit, maybe I’ll put matching “general category” emoji before everything (Features, Critics pieces, etc.) – any suggestions?
🗣️ “Power Trip” (On the Water) - Adam Iscoe steals away to Governor’s Island; it’s allowed, it’s ferry use. A wonderful infrastructure story; great if you’re a nerd for such things, but fun enough even if you aren’t. Come for the “Schottel azimuth thruster propellers powered by twenty-two lithium-ion battery packs”, stay for the homing pigeon. I am now excited for my next trip to the island.
🗣️ “Sign Here, Please” (Dept. of Tourism) - Ben McGrath won’t censor autographic language. Oroslavje might not be New York, but they got their young hip mayor before we did. Whether paved roads should have come before arts and letters is an open question, but drawing tourists is important, and to be honest if I found myself in Zagreb (and who wouldn’t?) I’d probably make the day trip to see a giant book of historical signatures. On the other hand, I could just go to “The Denver Alfalfa Milling and Products Co.” and tread the same storied ground as Mikulec.
🗣️ “Neighborhood Watch” (How-To Dept.) - Madeleine Wulfahrt gets Low and beholds. I keep a close eye on new developments in microcinema, so I knew all about Low; still, this is fun: Cozy, gentle, a little whimsical but not at all contrived. You must be the screen you wish to see in the world.
Window-Shop:
“Sterling Character” (On Television) - Vinson Cunningham sees Brown in Black. I love a portrait of an actor, and while I really only know Sterling K. Brown from American Fiction (he’s phenomenal), Cunningham expertly conveys his signature look of “high emotion”. Is it overstepping to cast him as a representative of public Black masculinity writ large? Or is that just Cunningham explicating a public role in which society has already cast Brown? I’m unsure. Cunningham is obviously less interested in the show at hand than in Brown’s performance; the second section sags a bit. But Cunningham successfully provokes, which, in just a few poetic paragraphs, is no small thing.
“Romantique” (Musical Events) - Alex Ross gives opera a French kiss. The heirs to the “effervescent tablet” fortune have funded an institute which tries to preserve some French operas that have proved rather effervescent themselves. Ross has listened to hundreds of hours and selected a few highlights (some of which you can sample here, if you don’t mind a Spotify link) and while I don’t vibe with all of them, the “eerie study in dissonant minimalism” by Marie Jaell is alone worth the price of admission. There is so much previously unknown material to sift through one imagines Ross in the obscure-French-music equivalent of the Criterion Closet, gasping out for just one more pick. With so much material to praise, pointing out just one less-than-stellar performer, toward the end, is frankly a rude move. Mostly, though, the chance to sample obscure works picked by an expert is fun, as Ross proves lesser can be more.
“Crime Scene” (Portfolio) - Mark Peterson and Jordan Salama court disaster. A small handful of photographs of ICE in courthouse hallways, in the magazine’s signature saturated, flash-lit black and white. It’s hard not to do the agents’ jobs for them by making them look propagandistically intimidating, as Peterson admits in a quote. The focus on human faces dwarfed by outfitted agents makes clear the imagined audience is the outraged liberal, cringing at injustice; not the immigrant, whose rightful terror could only be cemented by seeing these snapshots. But it’s only three pages: It’s still worth looking.
Mayer on Hersey (Takes) - Mayer does an excellent job situating the political import of Hersey’s story, which is easy to lose sight of when one is reading it decades later, and mostly for its groundbreaking “literary craft”. He seems to have been a pretty nasty professor, something Mayer ought not to valorize quite so much. And another reminder to read Hiroshima is certainly not a deep cut. Still, it’s historic for a reason.
Skip Without Guilt:
“Death to the Shah” (A Critic at Large) - Daniel Immerwahr bombs away out of no way. With Iran back in the news, Immerwahr presents a dry but essentially reasonable précis of its revolution and early post-Shah era. According to the official description of the book under review, one of its essential themes is “the jaw-dropping stupidity of the American government”, which Immerwahr doesn’t dispute but doesn’t really emphasize, either; instead, he charts the general human fascination with counterfactuals, at length and for somewhat unclear reasons: He eventually pivots to wondering whether the revolution was accidental and idiosyncratic, but what the counterfactual alternative is, exactly (the continuation of rule by a dying Shah? A power struggle won by the leftist forces of the revolution?) is not articulated. There is a “fluid dynamics”-style randomness to historical events, but Immerwahr spends far too long proving this point, which is practically a given. If a narrative view of history weren’t just an illusion, an oversimplified map drawn over a hazy photograph, then we could all stop living: Everything would already be written. It is not; we must act, therefore, and keep writing.
“Live Long and Prosper” (Brave New World Dept.) - Tad Friend includes supplementary material. Friend is always funny, and always, on at least the surface level, a pleasure to read. Here, though, training his sights (at frankly excessive length) on the malignant pricks who aim both to add a few years to their lifespan by taking lots of pills, and also, more importantly, to run an endless press campaign in which they attempt to push the story that their brand of fascist capitalism enables eternal life, is inevitably counterproductive and tiresome. This despite Friend’s cocked brow and willingness to critique and satirize, albeit somewhat gently, the profit-motivated ridiculousness of the quest. Because so much space is given for Diamandis to bloviate, and pushback is largely limited to scientific rather than political skepticism, Friend launders the fundamental idea that life is a purchasable commodity. It might be coincidental that Diamandis’ group is called Abundance, but deregulation goes hand in hand with Diamandis’ technofascist fantasy of “‘well-meaning wealthy leaders guiding humanity with pure intent, giving top scientists the capital to take tenfold actions.’” It’s hard to disentangle what is genuine delusion here and what is a Tony Robbins sales pitch; Friend, who’s recently covered motivational speakers and door-to-door salesmen, is presumably compelled by that very thing, yet somehow he doesn’t nail down an answer, despite the article’s indulgent length. Do the twenty-three mentions of “A.I,” used invariably as a meaningless buzzword, suggest bullshit artists or just people high on nitrates? Well, if you sell fertilizer for long enough, you get the same result regardless. Send not to ChatGPT for whom the bell tolls. It tolls for thee, you stupid fucks.
“Enemy of the Good” (Annals of Psychology) - Leslie Jamison is picture-something. I’ve really liked some of Jamison’s previous pieces on psychological phenomena, but this one is unaccountably muddled, un-fun, and impersonal. I suppose Jamison is writing against the glib use of ‘perfectionism’ by those who aren’t aware of how awful the condition really is, whether that’s because they’re profoundly compartmentalized or because they aren’t actually perfectionistic. What’s really odd about the piece is that Jamison never actually articulates what a person without perfectionism looks like; more broadly, amidst all this discussion of how destructive an unhealthy relationship to achievement can be, there is no model or even discussion of what a healthy relationship to achievement might look like. The closest we get is a weird hypothetical about a man with chronic pain “reading in bed or sharing an ice-cream sundae” with his kids, if only he weren’t such a perfectionist as to demand the specific experience of playing on the floor. Because it’s so unclear what perfectionism isn’t, it’s thus unclear what it is, exactly; Flett and Hewitt’s Perfectionism Scale test is public, but its language is so recursive as to render it, I think, useless; entirely reliant on a shared definition of concepts around “perfection” that I highly doubt we hold. (My personal response to nearly every question on that assessment is the same: How the hell am I supposed to know?!) Surely people are not being tortured by the word perfect1 so measuring their identification with the term measures merely their associations, not their experiences.
As the piece goes on, it gets into other, allegedly related ideas that are more compelling but also so far off track from the idea I thought Jamison was presenting that I grew more and more confused in my desperate, possibly overly literal quest to understand her point. (Black people are pressured to be model citizens, which possibly causes hypertension; Scandinavians, meanwhile, are pressured to be prosocial, but that’s a good thing.2) Perfectionists are uncomfortable with vulnerability, prone to midlife crises, generally afraid. Well, sure… Is this definition useful, though? If the purpose of using it is to help people become more comfortable with failure or, as the last section gestures toward, more accepting of the idea that they are worthy and matter noncontingently, why is a pathological category needed to do this work? Is this advice not universally applicable? Sure, maybe some people and some cultures need to hear it more than others, but it’s not medicine, it’s just mindset. Maybe there is not a particular type of person that can be usefully called a perfectionist. Look at any core fear from a certain perspective and it looks a lot like a fear of imperfection. So the question remains: What, exactly, are we so afraid of?
Letters:
Me last week re Burkhard Bilger on teeth: “There is no moralizing here, which is not to say no judgement at all.” Michael B.: “You missed your chance to pun that there certainly is molarizing.” HA!
Also from Michael: “Is it just me or has the magazine demoted its art coverage to ‘every once in a while’ since Arn got fired? I was reminded by seeing the first poetry review in forever in this week's issue.” It’s actually really interesting – they’ve been publishing much more arts coverage online, for some reason. Here’s Hilton Als about town on bodies, Als downtown on Beauford Delaney’s drawings, Leslie Camhi from Paris on dresses, Julian Lucas from Chicago on gays, Zachary Fine uptown on Ben Shahn, Max Norman from midtown on Diane Arbus, and Vinson Cunningham uptown again on Rashid Johnson. These are all from the past two months (in that same span there have been only two bits of art criticism in the magazine), and if you aren’t closely following the constant stream of newsletters, or checking the website obsessively, you probably missed them. That’s a real shame, and I think an inexplicable waste. Possibly Remnick is testing different folks out and will eventually fill the slot; possibly he or someone has decided criticism’s sort-of-local coverage is better left online. Regardless, the newsletters could, at least, improve. Even I miss shit, and, uh…