Last Week's New Yorker Review: August 18
Last Week’s New Yorker, week of August 18, 2025
“‘He invited everyone for a cup of coffee. But we didn’t have a coffee maker. We had this antique hand grinder, and one French press, so we could only make half a pot at a time.’”
Must-Read:
“The Last Indie Rock Star” (Profiles) - Amanda Petrusich tends to Mac’s homesteaDeMarco. Mostly consists of Petrusich following DeMarco around while he does home reno, which is unexpectedly fun. He’s a down-to-earth guy, especially now that he’s sober, and his new album feels like an excitingly serious effort from someone whose last few projects have been deliberately tossed off. Of course, with DeMarco, nothing is ever entirely serious; that’s basically Petrusich’s central theme: He has to do a funny voice to say something sincere, but for a public figure that may be a wise approach. A good friend of mine went to DeMarco’s house and filmed a cameo with him for her B-horror movie, which eventually got him in a bit of trouble with his label – an anecdote I wish were in the piece, because it shows that he’s not just a doer of bits, but someone happy to go along with others’ bits. (Also because it would be good press for my friend. Come to Videodome, officially sponsored by this newsletter!) Importantly, though, while DeMarco’s affect isn’t necessarily sincere, Petrusich frames him as a force counter to the move away from “intentionality or even truthfulness” in art. For a musician who privileges a tossed-off demo feeling, that may seem surprising, but the impulse behind DeMarco’s improvisational zen and the belabored meaninglessness of fellow white-dude guitarists like those atop the Billboard charts couldn’t be more different. (Am I iffy about Petrusich’s insistence on covering so much of this music, good and bad? Yeah. But that’s not DeMarco’s fault, and she nails the assignment here.) And his insistence on having a positive attitude, even when he’s getting giardia in the Forbidden city, is really winning. Look out: old Mac, he’s back!
Window-Shop:
Marantz on Flanner (Takes) - I really appreciate Marantz’s unforgiving take on Flanner’s soft-pedaling of Hitler and the Nazis; so many of these Takes revive the magazine’s high points, but it’s well worth covering, and learning from, the low. Marantz himself has often covered the far right; with such things, it’s just as important to have examples of the kind of work you want to avoid; lest you promote the thing you’re trying to unveil.
“The Messenger” (A Critic at Large) - Louis Menand wonders what put out the fire last time. I don’t know if Baldwin’s supposed single central message is as ignored or misunderstood as Menand makes it out to be – the toxic falsity of identity is pretty much what I’d have guessed – and this is largely just a compelling straightforward chronology of the figure, an essentially loving one, even if Menand’s fact checking can be pretty biting. (On a the dismissive quote about Africans in Paris: “…he may have been hoping to obscure the fact that most of the people he knew during his nine years in France were white.”) Mostly this piece makes it clear there won’t be a truly definitive Baldwin biography for at least twelve more years, when his unredacted correspondence is released. It’s maybe slightly anachronistic to call Baldwin an “enemy of identity politics”, only because that term has nowadays been stretched so far beyond any cogent or reasonable definition; it would at least be useful to point out just how fervently Baldwin opposed capitalism, as well. This points to a deeper flaw: Was Baldwin’s message really just to “live your life”? I thought that was Rihanna’s message; Baldwin’s was more like: “Power is the arena in which racism is played out… For power truly to feel itself menaced, it must somehow sense itself in the presence of another power — or, more accurately, an energy — which it has not known how to define and therefore does not really know how to control.” That quote is from an excellent Blair McClendon piece in a journal on social change1, which warns against reading Baldwin as “some soothsayer of America’s darker entanglements… Such reductionism is a common historical fate for black intellectuals.” Is Menand indulging in this reductionism, or disputating against it? I’m of two minds – but who, then, is ever really single-minded?
Skip Without Guilt:
“A Screaming Skull” (Books) - Jerome Groopman goes against the migraine. Devolves into rather banal memoir – I just don’t really care about Groopman’s personal pain-management routine. Somewhat better in the first half, though none of the historical anecdotes are especially compelling. I would certainly have read a whole piece, though, on the “‘migraine personality’”, an idea, probably borne of sexism, that sufferers were usually neurotic and withholding. Groopman barely touches on it. There are many directions Groopman could have taken this piece in, and didn’t; at least, as a result, it passes quickly. Unlike some other things…
“Coming of Age” (Annals of Medicine) - Dhruv Khullar is pro-social progeria. A soft-focus human-interest story, pleasant but pretty inessential. Khullar insinuates that curing progeria could lead to general advances with aging; maybe he didn’t read Tad Friend’s piece, last week, but I wouldn’t put too much stock in those mouse-study claims. Curing a disease ought to be its own reward, anyway, and the advances in this case are heartening and admirable; still, the amount of public interest shown in people with progeria feels pretty prurient; Khullar mentions his protagonist’s successful TikTok only in the most glowing terms, and I’m sure it’s a net positive for Kaylee, but is being a supporter “to the point that they go after the haters” on Kaylee’s behalf really a healthy use of these strangers’ time? Should a child (not a child anymore, but was when she started posting, at twelve) have a fanbase? Or, for that matter, a magazine profile that spends a lot of time just discussing what she does all day?2 Obviously there are differences between Kaylee and the average teen star, but I’d say all the same things if the magazine ran a glowing profile of Jacob Sartorius. That’ll be the day…
“Seeing Red” (On Television) - Inkoo Kang clings to guns, god, and TV Guide. The opening section on King of the Hill repeats the central point of a recent Weekend Essay, and is less compelling because Kang has no personal investment. From there comes a muddled mix of examples of the supposed tilt to the right on T.V; they range from the genuinely evil (corporations kowtowing to fascism) to the questionable (Kang liked The Connors [why?!] and Taylor Sheridan’s Landman [huh?!!] despite their arguable and/or complicated rightward slant) to the completely irrelevant (apparently Ginny & Georgia, a show set in Massachusetts about a mixed-race teen which my ninth-graders in Harlem all loved, is somehow a sign that Netflix is turning to stories of the American heartland, and therefore the political right??) I’m not at all convinced, but I don’t mind the broader framing; Kang is helped by a structure more capacious than a regular review.
“The Number” (A Reporter at Large) - David D. Kirkpatrick hands us Trump’s bill – yes, it’s only his bill, and he’s siphoned it from Capitol Hill. Are you interested in finding out, very very slowly, a vague approximation of an answer to a question that nobody asked? What if I told you there were separate discussions of all five of Trump’s crypto schemes? This is desperately boring, but there’s also the obvious issue that Trump’s power matters far more than his wealth; indeed, his entire career is built on the idea that wealth and fame are the only meaningful source of power (when you’re a star, they let you do it), a lie Kirkpatrick might not agree with, but still reinforces with his framing. It does matter that Trump is a crook and a con artist, and that he’s doing a lot of shady shit in as brazen a fashion as possible; but how much does it matter that Trump has a billion-dollar bitcoin stash he made by selling snake oil? The outrageous thing is not that he’s doing it but that he’s getting away with it, aided by a regulatory environment he’s killing. Why write a piece that focuses so intently on what Trump’s done, at the total expense of exploring how he’s done it? Which is more outrageous: That a criminal is president, or that a criminal was allowed to become president? The coup worked; getting mad about the con now is like yapping to the refs at a Harlem Globetrotters game. Put the ball down and fight!
“The Curse of Horror” (The Current Cinema) - Richard Brody loses sensation. If you start your review of two horror movies by declaring the entire genre fatally flawed because it’s trying to scare the audience, you simply leave yourself nowhere to go. Indeed, the review of Weapons is mostly an exercise in praising with faint damnation: the movie achieves only “superficial effect” because, you know, it’s a horror movie. This is so grumpy it’s perverse. The other flick is apparently more intellectual and political, but doesn’t focus enough on the “physicality” of place – one senses that Brody wishes he could critique the film for not being scary, but finds himself trapped by his own prior rhetoric. Whoops: Next time, don’t go in that door!
Letters:
Zip.
Doncha
Imagine being one of the best freelance writers in the game and ALSO one of the best film editors in the game?! ↩
Just to be really clear I am NOT saying that this woman should not be posting. She has a naturally compelling presence regardless of the progeria, and is quite good at posting. I just think fame is a fucked concept. (That site doesn’t work anymore but I’m still linking to it.) ↩