Last Week's New Yorker Review: August 4
Last Week’s New Yorker, week of August 4, 2025
“When the dental assistant sent the picture to my phone, she glanced up at me and said, ‘This is what you’ll look like when you’re dead.’”
Must-Reads:
“Word of Mouth” (A Reporter at Large) - Burkhard Bilger says uneasy lies the tooth that wears a crown. Bilger is the person currently writing for the magazine who is most able to conjure up the William Shawn years, when the magazine sought to commission the longest dissections of the most random topics imaginable, and render them compelling mostly by sheer force of will. In such a fashion: 8,500 sparkling, roving words on Mexican dentistry. The travelogue, which makes up most of the piece, is just smashing; Bilger has a genial, homespun sense of humor that still has plenty of, um, bite. (“Being a patient at Sani Dental is a bit like being a car chassis at a Ford factory.”) The winding journey of Billy and Nancy Martinez, who we track along with Bilger, is refreshingly ambiguous; each provides a distinct rhetorical view of the nature of cosmetic care, yet this description sounds weighty, and the piece reads light. There is no moralizing here, which is not to say no judgement at all – as when Bilger dissects the American healthcare system, which capitalizes on the fuzzy line between “medicine and cosmetics” to deny people needed care. That really bites.
“Gone Cold” (On and Off the Menu) - Hannah Goldfield won’t raid her cabinet. Goldfield’s hard-to-categorize food reports from across the country are intermittently fun, but her more urgent coverage of L.A. (see previously) makes me wonder if her talents would be better applied to an occasional food-related letter from the town, with a news hook. Whatever the case, while I’d have read far more of Goldfield’s both gutting and sensorially luxurious reporting on the ICE-induced anxiety and absence in L.A, it’s even bolder of her to fit a big story in this small package without seeming to hurry. Goldfield’s description of plantains (“shiny, starchy golden cross-sections branded with their own burnt sugars, served steaming in a cardboard container with soupy black beans and a thick, tangy crema”) is so appetite-stimulating it at first seems like too much indulgence for what should really be a nauseating topic. But Goldfield is paying tribute to these cultures as their people face horror and destruction. The contrast between food (beans “made creamy and yellow with lard”) and fear (“‘Normally, on a summer Saturday there’s a line out the door,’” says a restaurant owner, “fighting back tears”) creates a striking dissonance; it spotlights all that there is, which is to say, all that could be lost.
Window-Shop:
“Zones of Denial” (Letter from Israel) - David Remnick talks to some Twelve-Day angry men. I’ll start with the critiques, because I’m sure you can guess them. Remnick has written a piece about the evils of the authoritarian regime in Israel, but it’s fundamentally a piece about the Israeli psyche, one that assumes the solution must also come from Israeli or maybe American Jewish liberals, who have to change their thinking on the issue of the genocide their ethnostate is enacting. (“To look away is an act of both will and denialism...”) There is a deeply rooted rejection of structural change embedded in this framework. How much offense you take at Remnick’s implication that the reason for the moral rot in Israel is not any sort of foundational sin, but instead basically because an elite group of liberal writers has been de-centered, will determine how much you can enjoy this piece. But if you can look past all that (missus Lincoln), what Remnick has written is fairly astonishing; a sweeping portrait of a country in the grip of disinformation and moral rot, a capstone written by a true expert. The second half of the piece, which shifts focus from Gaza to Iran, is hugely psychologically lucid, making sense of a situation driven by maddeningly short-sighted thinking on many sides. The truth of the bombing campaign is basically unknowable, since it benefits nobody involved to tell that truth. But Remnick makes the case that the current wave of celebrations is hubris. It wouldn’t be the first time.
“Period Pieces” (A Critic at Large) - Adam Gopnik is a Renaissance man. For most of this piece one wonders if Gopnik said the only thing he was going to say in the first line: “With minimal ingenuity, any historical period can be made to dissolve into the ones around it.” In other words, was the Renaissance real? Gopnik says: Yeah, might as well be. The two books claiming, in different ways, that it’s not a useful differentiator, Gopnik pretty much accuses of being pedantic – a hilarious thing for Adam Gopnik to say, but I do get his point. This is more entertaining than it has any right to be, especially because Gopnik uses the “rock revolution” as the grounding metaphor, something that doesn’t really make sense (surely nobody, even the haters, is saying the Renaissance is only referring to a shift in one specific genre of art) but is, importantly, funny. Eventually, Gopnik does find a second place to take his argument, and it’s a doozy. Instead of all these historians, piddling about intellectual change, he says, they should have sent an art critic, actually seeing what he sees, to look for – or at – the Renaissance. This is the kind of genuine breakthrough one always reads Gopnik hoping for. “In the realm of the visual, the Renaissance umanisti became humanists in our sense, almost by accident: what the painters learned from the past gave them license to enliven their work with faces, bodies, and desires.” Holy cow: Exactly. Richard Brody’s excellent broadside in favor of the “traditional review” has been circulating everywhere, but for my money the end of this article is just as strong an argument for writing, progressively, about looking. It might be the only way to know whether we’re moving forward – and if so, where.
“Eating Her Words” (Talk of the Town) - Anna Russell is a modernist, more or Toklas. Great fun; romantic and whimsical.
(The Mail) - The first letter is written like a supervillain monologue; my jaw dropped. What’s wrong with that guy?! The opposing takes on the Galchen are also interesting to ponder.
McKibben on Carson (Takes) - Less about the piece than about the reaction to the piece, a story I was already familiar with. Still well written, with a (depressing) connection to the present moment.
“Check Your Bill” (Dept. of Labor) - Eyal Press gets tipped off. So totally and completely unsurprising that it is only barely worth reading, despite Press’ excellent research work. Would you have guessed that the tax-on-tips campaign is so astroturfed it could be the example in the encyclopedia entry for astroturfing? Well, John Oliver would have – it was literally the first example in his monologue on astroturfing – from six years ago! If you’re already familiar with the broad contours of the minimum-wage fight, you can skip to the very last section, which shows just how many issues the fight against the restaurant-industry lobby touches: Child labor, wage theft, “‘anything that gives workers rights’”, according to one politician. And it’s all in service of policy that is demonstrably economically harmful on the large scale. Yet somehow, politicians like Muriel Bowser keep on earning those Fell For It Again awards. Talk about taxing.
Skip Without Guilt:
“Williams in Williamstown” (The Theatre) - Helen Shaw takes Tennessee to another place. I so wish Shaw’s pertinent recent piece on the (arguable) backsliding of gender diversity in theater had been published in the magazine, instead of this slightly sleepy mixed-negative review of two Tennessee Williams revivals, shows which a carless New York City reader (such as… you know) would have a damn hard time making it out to, even if they were worth seeing. Shaw can still write; as a pure prose performance, this is up to her standard. But the most interesting-sounding play at the fest isn’t even open for review – so what are we doing here?
“The Pope’s Astronomer” (Annals of Inquiry) - Rebecca Mead knows from good heavens. Not much to say here: I was not that interested in the idea of an official papal astronomer, and after wading through a lot of his first-day-of-seminary-school “religion and science are not necessarily in opposition” speechifying, I was even less interested. I was sort of interested, on the other hand, in determining the porosity of meteorites… but Mead clearly couldn’t care less; she immediately pivots away to more mid philosophizing. Does a religious scientist find a way to reconcile the two spheres he cares about? Is the ‘scope Catholic?!
“Mind the Gap” (Books) - Idrees Kahloon takes stock… please! Poses a fascinating question, then answers it in an incredibly frustrating way. I wish this was just a book review of Mehrsa Baradaran’s Color of Money, which Kahloon obviously admires; its conclusion, that a system of Black-owned banks aimed at enfranchisement have instead codified a separate-but-equal system that is, as always, not actually equal. Baradaran’s conclusion is so powerful that Kahloon basically has to ignore it to write the rest of his piece, which basically argues that the only way to close the racial wealth gap is to work toward equalizing average household earnings across race – in practice, to ignore any state-driven solution and instead turn to private industry, via our old friend, deregulation. (In this case, specifically, housing deregulation; a cause dear to Abundance-pilled centrists.) In this way, Kahloon gradually narrows his vision of the future until it looks eerily like the present: No moral change needed, no political fight in the offing, just tweaks to make the current system of neoliberal capital more efficient. It’s a vision only an economist could hold: For it to make sense, one must think that money is all that matters. (A study he cites as the bedrock of his argument was run by a bank!)
None of Ellora Derenoncourt’s conclusions, for example, are wrong, but she’s an economic historian, and Kahloon extrapolates political solutions that are in no way natural extensions of her research. Why doesn’t Kahloon look at, say, Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor’s Pulitzer-finalist book on this very issue, in which she coins the term predatory inclusion to describe the post-redlining regime of segregated, private-sector-driven exploitative mortgages? That book uses many of the same facts to build toward the opposite conclusion: That deregulating real estate is already the norm, and, in fact, cemented the racial wealth gap as it exists today. Kahloon says we’re focusing on the wrong things, when really he’s the one who needs an eye test.
Letters:
Michael B. drops some history related to Margaret Talbot’s take on beards and barbers: “Placing your trust in barbers goes back well before the antebellum US. A book I read last year focused on daily life in ancient Mesopotamia noted the high status of barbers, who had to be entrusted not to slit the throat of kings. I'll also recommend a book I read several years ago with a slightly different angle on this topic called Plucked: A History of Hair Removal. It addresses some of the same areas of dumb race science around facial hair but also lots of fascinating insights into private spaces, the trend for removing body hair with radiation, and more.” Very neat!
What did you think of this week’s issue?