Last Week's New Yorker Review: August 25
Last Week’s New Yorker, week of August 25, 2025
“no matter how you slice it, selling fire insurance to arsonists is a terrible business model.”
Must-Read:
“The Roof Is on Fire” (A Critic at Large) - Daniel Immerwahr firebreaks his lease. Immerwahr, who has lately turned into the magazine’s most frequent contributor, is someone whose overarching style I’ve only recently come to understand. He reads the latest in history, admires it, then finds things to nitpick – not punching, just poking. How annoying this is depends pretty much on two things: Whether the history under review is compelling enough to be worth learning about even if it doesn’t get everything right, and whether Immerwahr’s nitpicks hold any water at all. His worst pieces tend to make excuses for the American right wing by elevating a certain kind of imaginary elegiac hillbilly to a national symbol: It’s understandable, even admirable, if these types fetishize the past, cling to private militarism, distrust scientific progress, or obsess over Qanon. Obviously it is worth understanding these tendencies, but Immerwahr’s explanations always toe (and sometimes trip) the line of excusing and even sympathizing with these positions, and he sometimes gets the story wrong in the process. Immerwahr’s more historical pieces are also often contrarian, as when he pokes holes in the pirates-as-radicals theory or essentially proposes that the center of Reagan’s belief system was his personal laziness. Because Immerwahr is always poking, when he reviews leftists he pokes left and when he reviews liberal-conservatives like Steve Coll or Max Boot, he pokes right.
All this setup is to say that while I don’t totally trust this new piece ideologically, I do think its argument is basically sound, and more importantly, I think the history it describes is so worth hearing about it’s more than reasonable to negotiate Immerwahr’s nitpicking. The story is about the Bronx fires of the late 1970s, which a new history proposes were set mainly by landlords in a profit-motivated system of insurance fraud that stands as an example of racial capitalism, and these fires were then blamed on the very residents that were being taken advantage of. Immerwahr counters, reasonably, that many of these fires – probably more than half – were actually set by tenants or scavengers, and also that those profiting off the neighborhood’s pain were mainly con-artist middlemen (“hustlers” including “slumlords, corrupt brokers”), while the financial élite gained little. He then uses this to propose, a bit more tenuously, that the whole model of racial capitalism tends toward oversimplification; that, in fact, these poor city-dwellers were more the victims of abandonment than of exploitation. Once powerful people finally noticed the Bronx fires, they were quickly put out – and the neighborhood was eventually (partially) gentrified, which Immerwahr is rightfully sickened by, though it seems more for aesthetic reasons than economic ones. It’s odd that Immerwahr, who consistently grants so much tender latitude to the rural white poor, empathizes with the urban Black-and-brown poor but has trouble seeing them as systemically victimized. Maybe that’s preferable to the more-often-seen liberal converse, in which people of color are condescended to and seen as needing rescue, while rural whites are viewed as political agents to be respected and feared. I’m not sure! Immerwahr is a deep thinker, but one with blind spots. Where there’s fire, there’s smoke.
Window-Shop:
“Some Funny Things about Getting Old” (Shouts & Murmurs) - Jack Handey shot the messenger. A comic, cosmic poem. Totally delightful.
“Money Ball” (U.S. Journal) - Paige Williams cuts her sleeves off for an Unnecessarily Nasty Coach. Two fairly different pieces, neither vital but both fun. One is a mild character assassination of Bill Belichick, a widely hated coach whose stoic anti-celebrity could at least be begrudgingly admired until he betrayed it by dating a twentysomething who has, apparently, been acting something like his agent, butting her head in where it, arguably, doesn’t belong. How much of this is sexism and ageism and how much is just accurate description isn’t quite clear; having sympathy for the sugar baby isn’t nearly as misguided as saying we should “Save Melania”, and because I couldn’t care less about U.N.C.’s image (the college which recently hired Belichick, giving this piece its hook) I say so much the better if she makes them look bad. To the extent that he was hired as part of a push by the administration to frame U.N.C. as a fascist-friendly college, something I can’t totally discount, I’d be happy to see them get their just deserts by any means necessary. This is really the lowest of low gossip, though, and it’s sort of embarrassing that Williams covers it without a mea culpa. The other piece is more in Williams’ usual wheelhouse; she travels around Chapel Hill, getting quotes from locals. What’s surprising, and pretty funny, is how little most of these people have to say about the Belichick situation, and how much they’d rather be talking about something more substantive. Williams claims everyone wants to talk about Jordon, “‘the girlfriend’”, but here are some of the things she actually quotes them saying: A local sportswriter is outraged by Trump, an economics professor is upset about the lack of funding for academics, a sports and history professor says many people think “‘we waste a lot of time talking about football, and that football is a symptom of many problems’”, a screen-printer at a local bar waxes poetic about “‘the freaking real-estate market’” and how “‘hundreds of Latinos, at every single construction site, are getting shipped out of here, arrested… Where are all the white people lining up to pick lettuce and rutabagas and shit?’” This is a fun piece, but the more everyone yells at the reader to care about other things, the more one wants to read anything else.
“Dumpstruck” (Local Critters) - Eric Lach looks up and down in the dumps. Hard to beat a positive urban nature-conservation piece, and Ramírez-Garofalo is a charming spokesman.
“Missed Connections” (Annals of Inquiry) - Jennifer Wilson isn’t the spitting image. I knew that so many people had been startled by unexpected genetic-test results that a cottage industry of specialized therapists had popped up; I did not realize just how rooted in a particular kind of race-victim mindset much of it was, and how many political goals it shared with the right-wing, inadvertently or not. Something more is clearly going on with Kara Rubinstein Deyerin; frankly, it raises major alarms that someone would convert to a new religion entirely because of their genetic-test results; given malignant groups like Jews for Jesus there is an especially freighted history in converting to Judaism to push political messaging, so I was profoundly suspicious of Rubinstein Deyerin from word one. And this was basically confirmed by her beliefs, which include promoting at-birth paternity tests, adding surrogate names to birth certificates, “dispersing” genetic-determinism pseudoscience, and even promoting the theory of ‘genetic sexual attraction’. All of these are bad ideas, and Wilson ably unpacks each one; she still grants a lot of latitude to the movement, though, assuming good intentions past the point where I think it’s reasonable. By painting the battle as between LGBTQ folk and Right to Know, she also underestimates, I think, how many people not in the Queer community would be harmed by these policies. Because Wilson can’t decide if she should write a personal essay or ring an explanatory alarm, the piece feels torn; outrageous facts are interspersed between enigmatic open questions. (“Right to Know can at times rely on nascent, controversial theories within the world of genomics”, then, one paragraph later, “Will our roots always tug at us, even if we don’t know they’re ours? Who or what, exactly, determines our destiny?”) The highly expected sidetracks (Henry Louis Gates’ TV show, Sarah Polley’s movie, some very dumb quantitative science from Michael Slepian) pad out the narrative without deepening it. When Wilson focuses on the uneasy political story she found instead of the lighter social story she thought she’d be telling, this sparks to life.
Gopnik on Mitchell (Takes) - So knotted up in framing devices one has to read quite carefully, and still might get lost, especially since Gopnik is obviously more invested in prose-craft than plotting. (I can’t really tell you who Joe Gould even is.) As a capsule bio of Mitchell, more than a review of any particular piece, this is strong, and fittingly enigmatic.
“Power Play” (The Political Scene) - Ruth Marcus says no, Ms. Bondi, I expected you to divest. Marcus fled the Post just before the walls fell down, and after a string of online pieces she’s written this for the magazine. This is a straightforward political profile; it’s very well-written, but runs out of steam two-thirds of the way through. The Epstein story, which has been totally mismanaged by Bondi (perhaps as a result of desperate contortions to protect the man she’s built her career on contorting desperately to protect), is the most compelling material Marcus has, and dispensing with it in the first two sections – without drawing the line to Trump nearly as forcefully as she could – is an odd choice. I figured the piece would become a history-up-to-now piece, and after recapping just how gratuitously sycophantic she’s been toward Trump, we do get some of that backstory; I’m always interested in considering how these people’s lives curdle into malignancy, and a profound belief in the justice system as it currently operates is definitely a gaping wound that fascism will happily infect. Bondi’s politics only make sense, though, if one sees Trump as fascist; she obviously doesn’t care about the free market, she’s in it for the dominance of success, the little militarist inside the mind that views every battle as zero-sum. This explains why she fought to keep that rescue dog and why she tenaciously strategizes on behalf of positions she doesn’t necessarily even hold. Marcus can’t quite see this; she still essentially presents Bondi as an extreme-conservative tactician. Meanwhile, Marcus’ main argument, that the White House is essentially controlling the Justice Department, is so obvious that Bondi’s right-hand man openly admits it. This becomes more of a problem in the last two sections, on Bondi’s “figurehead” nature and focus on purges. Marcus has to present this information as if it’s shocking, when it’s actually just the logical result of a fascist Trump ally running the department. “…what happens when a Democrat is elected President. Does one purge beget another?” she asks. This is a question worth asking, but proposing it as a hypothetical at the end of a long article means assuming the answer should be no. To decline to pursue justice against politicians who have broken the law is not “breaking the cycle”, it’s enabling fascism. Have we learned nothing?
“Me, Myself, and I” (Books) - Katy Waldman is seeing septuple: forty-nine young women nebulously sharing a name and life! Not sure how they pick one out of every seven or eight of Waldman’s “Page Turner” novel reviews to run in the magazine; maybe they’re reluctant to publish pans, but I prefer Waldman in that mode. This is perfectly alright, but the quotes from Oyeyemi do very little for me, and while I appreciate Waldman’s focus on the formal qualities of her writing as a way to understand what she’s doing with plot, Waldman can’t make much of the plot; Butler’s text with a similar name “lampooned” its subject, but Oyeyemi is merely “pushing” a “logic”, as if a book were the result of a formula – it “simply depicts a process”. That reading feels a bit like a way to not review the book. Surely Oyeyemi’s writing is doing some kind of work, even if it’s not doing so didactically or straightforwardly. I’d like at least seven ways of looking at this blackbird.
Skip Without Guilt:
“Ransom Notes” (The Current Cinema) - Richard Brody gets 2 High on Spike Lee’s joint. Man, if you’re gonna give away the whole plot you could at least do so for a better reason than asserting that, because Lee is an oldhead about Black music, preferring jazz to rap, his movie is “fundamentally conservative”, and, apparently, that he pulls off the diatribe? But also this is a late-career pivot to more “personal” films, but also it’s a movie about “the underlying notion of owning the means of production”? One has to read into this review so much that it’s tiring to just read the review. What, precisely, does Brody think this film’s politics are? He spends too long on his characteristically hard-to-follow plot synopsis, and there’s no space left to tell us.
“The Achiever” (Onward and Upward with the Arts) - Hua Hsu knows the sky’s the limit for star pupil R.F. Kuang. It is a very odd choice to focus this intently on a writer’s work ethic. There’s some background information on Kuang and her life (and her apparently not great taste in pizza), and each of her books gets namedropped; what there isn’t, though, is any substantive attempt to analyze the meanings of her works or her (apparently very versatile) stylistic choices. At one point she says, about her past work Yellowface, “‘I hate the style of the sentences in that book’”. What does she mean? Well, there’s not a single sentence from Yellowface here, so I really don’t know. Hsu means to illustrate her strategy of self-improvement through self-critique, though whether this is actually a strategy or just the characteristic neurosis of a highly accomplished 29-year-old, I’m unsure. Kuang is personable enough, though she has the reserve of a bookish nerd, something Hsu is content to let lie. A considerate choice, though I don’t know if it serves the piece: I felt I was only ever seeing the face Kuang chose to present, which is subject to change with her next book, and her next one after that.
Letters:
Michael O. agrees with my positive assessment of Adam Gopnik’s piece on gambling, and adds: “As a graduate of New York State's yeshiva education system, I knew many Jewish educators that were more ‘raptors than rabbis.’”