Last Week’s New Yorker: End-of-Year Edition

Below you'll find the Top 25 Pieces Review, a special Letters Section, and at the bottom my 10 Favorite Pieces of the Year.

Year In Review: The Top 25 Pieces Review

The magazine’s list of its top 25 pieces is always compelling, because they’re ranked in order of total time people spent reading them – which produces a far more surprising list than mere pageviews might. Here are my recycled blurbs (for those taken from the magazine; some are website-only) along with what I thought of the pieces.

1. “A Further Shore” (Personal History) - Tatiana Schlossberg has no immunity, so she won’t be diplomatic. Low window-shop. Rest in peace to the recently passed Schlossberg. As I said originally, while this sort of thing (brief, essayistic, not especially poetic) isn’t what I come to the magazine for, there’s a place for it and this is well-executed.

2. “Open Secret” (A Reporter at Large) - Ronan Farrow overhears that what’s been overlooked without oversight is overwhelming and overt. Made my top ten. (Scroll down to see its placement.) Grim, fascinating, hard to forget.

3. “The Chinese Adoptees Who Were Stolen” by Barbara Demick. No idea why this didn’t make the magazine, beyond, I suppose, that the bar is often considerably higher for book excerpts than for original reportage. The excerpting job here is maybe better than the writing, finding a frame story that’s intensely moving – I teared up – and giving the right amount of context in the middle. To be fair, that context is pretty dry and could mostly have been inferred from the framing story; impatient readers can skip the fourth and fifth sections without missing much. But this would certainly have been a must-read, probably somewhere around my twelfth or thirteenth-favorite of the year. A fascinating, pertinent heartstring-tugger.

4. “How Joe Biden Handed the Presidency to Donald Trump” by Jake Tapper and Alex Thompson. The whole idea of the book from which this is excerpted is pretty vacuous, relying on a supposedly unspoken truth that was extremely fucking spoken; this segment, in which George Clooney gets spooked by a whispering Biden, is pretty memorable, though. I hadn’t realized this was excerpted on the website.

5. “Still Processing” - Dhruv Khullar eats food, not too much, mostly this one particular brand of ravioli. Worst of the week, would make my bottom-ten-of-the-year list. A thin justification of disordered eating.

6. “Second Life” (A Reporter at Large) - Rachel Aviv is not autoimmune to prosopagnosia. Very high window-shop. Oddly structured, but fascinating, as Aviv always is.

7. “Autocracy Now!” (Profiles) - Ava Kofman breaks the moldbug. Low window-shop, because I think it’s sort of unhealthy to read, but undeniably finely crafted.

8. “The Best Books of 2025”. Not an article. Fine with it!

9. “The Last Broad” (Profiles) - Michael Schulman steals the secret formula to the crabby Patti. High window-shop. Schulman earned the viral moment of LuPone rudeness that caps this piece; the rest of the piece was generally quite good, too.

10. We Might Have to ‘Shut Down the Country’ by David Remnick (interviewing Anthony Romero). Cogent interview with the ACLU’s head guy; I don’t agree with about half of what he says, but I’ll certainly accept him under the big tent. We’ll see how that Supreme Court case turns out!

11. “A Matter of Facts” (Personal History) - Yiyun Li makes a way out of no good way to say this. Very high window-shop. Morally agitating; in terms of pure prose, hard to do better.

12. “What Did Men Do to Deserve This?” by Jessica Winter. My third-favorite Weekend Essay of the year. Clever as hell. Extremely glad this found an audience.

13. “Go Big and Go Home” (Annals of Business) - Molly Fischer is a Costco guy: Of course she’s going to recount the business’ history, and its future. Middle-skip. I felt Fischer had little to say, but apparently readers disagreed!

14. “Phantasia” (Annals of Inquiry) - Larissa MacFarquhar is the apple of my inner eye. Made my top ten. (Scroll down to see its placement.) Phenomenal!

15. “The Portal Opens” (Profiles) - Amanda Petrusich goes to Phish for compliments. High window-shop. Vibey!

16. “The End of Children” - Gideon Lewis-Kraus populations the question. Middle window-shop. Strong writing, just not always convincing.

17. “Why Biden’s White House Press Secretary Is Leaving the Democratic Party” by Isaac Chotiner (interviewing Karine Jean-Pierre). The most fun, most scorched-earth Chotining of the year!

18. “Leaning Tower” - Eric Lach asks whose misalign is it anyway? A must-read. I see this building a few times a week out of my subway-car window and every single time I think “Shaped like a banana!”

19. “‘Wicked: For Good’ is Very, Very Bad” by Justin Chang. I was pretty stunned nobody brought the knives out for the first film in the series, which added an hour of dead air to a perfectly good musical for no damn reason at all. The sequel, luckily or un-, couldn’t pull off the same trick; at the box office, of course, it still had wings. Chang’s review was perhaps the harshest, so it circulated; his swipes are spot-on, catty fun; no cowardly lion is he. (“It’s as if the picture were so cowed by its iconic predecessor that it could only respond with a petulant urge to destroy the classic it could never be.”) Excluded from the magazine only because Chang had excellent reviews of various other flicks running week-in and week-out; I’m glad that he’s increasingly publishing reviews at a clip far more rapid than any print schedule would allow.

20. “The Irishman” (A Reporter at Large) - Ed Caesar Dubais low, sells highs. High skip. Didn’t understand why I was supposed to care. I guess others did!

21. “Will the Humanities Survive Artificial Intelligence?” by D. Graham Burnett. Got no points in the weekend edition. No idea why, of all the many good, bad, boring, and repugnant A.I. pieces the magazine published, this one caught on. It’s awful, and not even awful in an especially compelling way. Just a complex way of yelling about death. Read this one instead.

22. “Goodbye to All This” (The Weekend Essay) - Lena Dunham would prefer to make it anywhere, if it’s all the same to you. Middling and clickbaity, but better than that might sound. It’s not about leaving New York, it’s really just a lightweight little essay about how much Dunham hated growing up in the city.

23. “The End of the Essay” (Annals of Education) - Hua Hsu writes his own conclusion. Middle window-shop. Better than its subhed suggests; just doesn’t dive as deep as it could.

24. “Power Houses” (Portfolio) - Gillian Laub and Naomi Fry want to be in the living rooms where it happens. Middle skip. Don’t really care, didn’t really ask. A riff on a far better portfolio, all the magic stripped away so as to (apparently successfully) attract clicks.

25. “Make Him Laugh” - Susan Morrison unmasks the Lorne ranger. Low window-shop. Largely meaningless; fun.

Year In Review: My Favorite Feature Pieces of the Year

Below, find my top ten feature pieces of the year, in reverse order, along with their original blurbs.

10. “Strongmen” (Letter from Brazil) - Jon Lee Anderson knows history has its de Moraes on the country’s Supreme Court. Man, Anderson can write; his surveys of the political environment in various Central and South American countries have been, for years now, one of the best recurring features in this magazine. If nothing is special about this one, in the sense that there’s no particular twist on the formula, its degree of difficulty is still far higher than usual; Brazil is such a massive and multivalent country that Anderson could start anywhere. He starts with political violence and the descriptor “febrile”, portraying a fight over the “political reality” of the situation; he focuses on the role of tech in shaping that febrile mood. The digital environment, of course, facilitates the spread of misinformation; Anderson does a good job alarming us without being alarmist, portraying Brazil as the earliest clear battleground in a digital fight for political power. (At least their left is putting up a fight.) While de Moraes is nominally the subject, the piece is just as much about Bolsonaro, but Anderson makes the wise choice to expand the frame to encompass many other parts of the picture of digital extremism in Brazil: Especially good is the mini-profile of a crusading reporter who was harassed by the Bolsonaristas and sued them. No survey can be comprehensive, but Anderson’s frame is intelligent: Brazil is very online (Please, come to Brazil), very turbulent, and has a very powerful judiciary; these three things are connected (though Anderson knows better than to imply causation). You don’t have to be a Brazil nut to benefit from reading. 

9. “The Story Part” (Personal History) - Hilton Als tends to an altar ego. A tender piece of memoir, published in the Fiction issue as though asking us to read it as literary nonfiction with the downbeat on literary. Als’ books tend to blend memoir with criticism, his previous Personal History was of the George Floyd moment but went beyond it; it’s rare for him to deliver the unalloyed thing, remembrance with no occasion. Of course he’s a damn pro at it, delivering a queer coming-of-age narrative that emphasizes the heartbreak and loss of navigating oft-irreconcilable worlds (“I could not bear the derision I heard in the world, or at home, when something interested me or made me feel tender or curious”) and the more tangible heartbreak and loss so central to queer life – the story is in large part a tribute to one of “our AIDS dead”, a “letter” to those of “the living who want to hear”. The narrative tension of the piece, surprisingly potent despite not really being central, is whether Als and this “boy from Connecticut” will partner up, or whether he’ll remain Als’ “first true and truly beloved” with an unspoken distance that measures, in negative, their closeness. This is itself a spoiler, but… don’t invest too heavily in learning the answer! Als’ great theme is love, especially a certain kind of love which is all the deeper for centering around knowing and looking, instead of anything more active. (“Tristes Tropiques”, which makes up about a third of Als’ book “White Girls”, features a character named K who may or may not be the boy from Connecticut but shares a few features; as far as I can remember it’s not explicit there, either, exactly the contours of their relationship. I suppose such a thing requires two voices, and Als hesitates to speak in the absence of the partner.) Along with these obvious sadnesses, there’s also the (perhaps more trivial?) sadness surrounding developments at Columbia, where Als and his friends thrived. It’s probably foolhardy to think any institution supports the new lives of their students with any force other than happenstance, but the brutal confirmation, as the institution openly negotiates with our fascist government, is still sickening. Our hearts may be the one thing the elite can’t capture.

8. “The Sunken Place” - Julian Lucas wades in the water, children. Could easily settle for the heartfelt poeticism of its early sections, but Lucas continually swerves, introducing enough material for a book. (Each boat could be a chapter.) This does mean that things are rushed past, at times, but the effect is a miniature with a sweeping view. Lucas does well to focus on small details, often landing on a quote (“‘The black stayed on my hands for a long time’”, “The energy of the wreck called all of us’”, “‘I see myself in the artifact’”) that’s used less to sum up what came before than to leave us with an echoing, associative koan. (Perhaps the best of these, which had me near tears, is the one I’ve pulled for the out-of-context quote up above. In context, it mixes poignancy, strange humor, and raw loss.) Neither is Lucas merely boosterish on the subject of these wrecks; the next-to-last section is an excellent consideration of various complications and points of friction in the process of turning the American Clotilda wreck into a touristic spectacle. (I think of Ben Marcus’ unsettling short story about memorial designers, and of the 9/11 Museum’s corporate, tourist-thronged wound. But maybe a diasporic gathering place is distinct from the ordinary monuments to loss.) Lucas stirs up the silt; particles go in many directions, and you may feel the image is less clear than before – but perhaps more honest. 

7. “Open Secret” (A Reporter at Large) - Ronan Farrow overhears that what’s been overlooked without oversight is overwhelming and overt. Small town cop corruption comes as no surprise, but this is still a jaw-dropping tale, in part because Williams’ crimes are so horrifying and egregious, and in part because the ways he was helped went well beyond the usual blind eye. (Given everything else, it seems very plausible that the cops were involved in facilitating his escape and hideout.) Farrow’s broader point, which he makes pretty lightly, is that while getting away with police corruption is already pretty easy, Trump destroying the regulatory and investigatory environment will make things far worse. What’s really grotesque about this story is the way that the line where regular blithe dismissal of sexual-assault claims ends and outright corruption starts is hazy; indeed, these cops may have plausible deniability because the department handled all rape cases in a manner designed to protect the perpetrators, whether they were paid off or not. This is mostly a standard twisty-turny true crime story, with all the stomach-churning horror/thrill that suggests; Williams has a Boyd Crowder-esque anticharisma, but his story suggests that the Western ethics Elmore Leonard portrayed are dead and buried, and what remains is a country in a manic, druggy delirium state, with no social contract and no paths to justice. It’s downright apocalyptic.

6. “Disappeared” (Annals of Immigration) - Sarah Stillman says Trump’s taking any deport in a storm. There is a general ambient awareness amongst the populace, I think, that Trump has been deporting people to foreign countries. I’m not as sure whether the most disturbing and unprecedented details have been the ones most widely distributed; the beatings administered by ICE, in particular, are disturbing even outside their context, indicating at the very least an Abu Ghraib-esque unofficial-official endorsement of abuses – on top of, you know, the offical unspoken endorsement of ethnic cleansing. The brazen international lawlessness of the Ghana scheme, meanwhile – apparently an attempt to dump prisoners, have them shuttled across a foreign border by middlemen, and then wipe our hands of them – may not beggar belief in its cruelty but does in its sheer ramshackle ridiculousness. Stillman is always worth reading; the relative brevity of this piece is especially to its benefit, as one doesn’t really need to aim for pathos or even deep characterization when the material is this outrageous. Notice just how many paragraphs here end with a quote that states an obvious truth in a punchy manner. From the first two sections: “In matters of life and death, it is best to proceed with caution.” ““I’ve started to have a phobia that ICE will come and break down my door.” “It’s them saying, ‘I have the power to destroy you.’” “We are wondering if we will ever see him alive again”. “I hope we can stop this train.” Things continue in that vein, accumulating force, forming a monument that, God willing, proves impossible to ignore.

5. “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.

4. “The Alien Eye” (Profiles) - Elif Batuman enters a marriage of convenience store with Sayaka Murata. Batuman approaches this as a piece about a big weirdo encountering a much bigger weirdo, and reconsidering her judgement of alienation as a result. That allows the profile to expand beyond Murata’s work or her personality, and to consider more deeply what it means that a person like her exists – yet because Batuman comes at this from a place oriented toward transformation, it never feels like we’re gawking at Murata. Murata and Batuman share a gendered pain, but they also share a response to it that transcends mere compensation – a deliberate “defamiliarization” which may initially have been a defense mechanism, but is ultimately the thing that makes both of them such potent writers. Everything is prodded and turned about, including the self. (Murata makes a diagram of writer-self dissecting a separate human-self and separating out each organ, an extremely Deleuzeian concept.) This characteristic curiosity, which Batuman suggests is opposite to anger and resentment, has revolutionary potential; if “current norms” are manufactured, part of the societal “‘experiment’” which Murata is awake to, then one can extract them (like organs) and consider from a distance what is fascism and “genocide” and what is love. (Murata softly rejects these ideas by saying she doesn’t want to let any “human thoughts” into the aquarium; understandably the artist’s prerogative, who can’t risk inserting a lens of ideology, though certainly not an indication that the critic ought not to go there either.) Murata finds a sexual charge toward the idea and the object, she writes to recover something related to a “childhood unhappiness” from writing, but even terms like “ace” or “queer” or “traumatized” or “female” project so much human detritus onto Murata. We live in this world, and still must project; she, the writer without organs, surely shouldn’t. 

3. “The Behemoth” (Letter from Barcelona) - D.T. Max says for God’s sake get me the church on time. Delightful from beginning to end, as Max considers what others have made of Gaudí’s unfinished opus. Pairs well with Rebecca Mead’s piece on the touristification of Barcelona, as I can’t think of another architect so closely associated with one city. Thus his crowning achievement is both a bizarre outlier – an expression of an utopic religious ideology that was already out of favor and is now (sadly) completely marginalized – and the crown and center of a major city. It’s as though the Baha’i Temple were right in the middle of Chicago, and as mobbed as Cloud Gate. Thus it’s no wonder that politics and aesthetic arguments have thoroughly muddled the work, which is now being completed in a fashion both meticulously faithful to the extent possible and, at the same time, so literal it is in some sense hard to see as an expression of Gaudí, a king of whimsy. The reason to read is less for this overarching narrative, though, and more because Max finds a constant stream of strange anecdote (“After the looting of 1936, Gaudí’s disciples had risked their lives to sweep up the master’s workshop, saving whatever they could”) and telling juxtaposition (“A nearby crane was, eerily, lifting a portable office cubicle” – as though acting out the reverse of the beginning of La Dolce Vita). In other words, it’s a classic example of what this magazine does so well. Let Max take you to church.

2. “Phantasia” (Annals of Inquiry) - Larissa MacFarquhar is the apple of my inner eye. It was impossible to have a normal or “critical” reading experience of this piece, because I had the slow-dawning realization that this condition is one that affects me, at least moderately. It’s hard to find language to describe the inner condition, but because I have a fair-to-middling kinesthetic memory (similar to the “echolocation” MacFarquhar describes) I just assumed that was what people meant by “visual” memory. I can rotate an apple in my mind, I just can’t see the apple. (If I focus very hard I can make basic shapes and numbers appear faintly, but it doesn’t feel connected to memory.) My auditory memory is very strong; in part, I think, because I can voluntarily flex my tensor timpani muscle with a high degree of control something I assumed was universal until… just now when I looked it up. (I don’t need to flex the muscle to recall sounds and notes, but it certainly helps.) I even identified with some of the features of hyperphantasia – reading about the person who imagines their hand burning “to the point where it’s painful” made my hand start burning.

As with all extreme traits, the heights and depths tend to coexist; in a certain sense, aphantasics have far more in common with hyperphantasics than with the general population: They both have non-normative sensoria. I’ve seen memes describing aphantasia, but they always frustrated me because I still assumed they were being metaphorical about “seeing” an apple (e.g, with how much detail and specificity do you imagine the concept of ‘apple’?) – it took MacFarquhar’s patient unpacking for me to understand that there’s no metaphor involved at all.

MacFarquhar is ultimately more interested in SDAM, “severely deficient autobiographical memory”, which is a frequent consequence of aphantasia; I wouldn’t call my deficiency severe but it’s definitely notable, and caused some “holy shit” moments while reading, especially relating to my determination to live in the present moment and lack of “sense of self” or interest in autobiographical narration. (Even writing this, I’m having to convince myself every line that I’m not going to alienate my entire readership by making things about myself.) Her first few sections jump around between combinations of faulty senses and between case studies in the effect different manifestations have on different lives, which can get a bit confusing, but fits to some degree with a condition that is possible to confirm but nearly impossible to describe. (Our metaphors for lack are lacking.) One thing that’s especially strange, which MacFarquhar doesn’t address, is that a lack of a certain type of memory now may also change your memory of what sensorium you possessed in the past. Am I sure I never had a decent visual memory? Not at all: How am I supposed to know?! I can tell myself stories about my past; I can recall these stories as I’d recall any story. I can even summon the feelings connected to the story. But the story isn’t there. I don’t recall being discouraged from daydreaming; I also don’t recall daydreaming.

Anyway, I’m just reiterating things MacFarquhar addresses. It’s a very compelling piece. I honestly can’t say if it’s formally cohesive, or if it would work without the ego’s insistence on comparing others’ experiences to your own. Luckily, each of us has an ego; if you find the article boring or disjunctive, you can feed yours; after all, it’s plain to see you have more sense than I do.

1. “Hospitals in Ruins” (Letter from Gaza) - Clayton Dalton says ICU, IDF. One of the smaller travesties of the Gazan genocide is that the IDF’s deliberate targeting of journalists inside Gaza and total suppression of outside journalism has successfully limited coverage of the war from many traditional outlets. (Obviously, there has been substantial first-person documentation of some of the destruction.) That’s kept this magazine from having any substantial coverage of the situation; as I’ve noted, everything has been secondhand, which has often hampered the pieces. The brief ceasefire, though, allowed a few outsiders to visit, including Dalton, a medical doctor who, in the absence of a critical need for emergency medicine, decided instead to tour the destroyed hospitals of Gaza. What he found there is perhaps so unsurprising in its sickening barbarity that it’s easy to dismiss the article as unneeded – I can see these pictures on my phone. But fascism relies on warping and hiding the truth, and reportage counters this not just with authority but with a sort of deliberate attention that’s impossible to achieve when the genocide is happening to you. Dalton delivers a very short piece – Hersey’s Hiroshima this is not – that captures a brief glimpse with horrific precision. The detail of deliberately shot medical equipment is somehow more gutting than any quantity of guts – it captures a dry and precise inhumanity, and makes clear that Israel’s desire is not for brutality but extermination.

Year In Review: My Favorite Critics’ Pieces of the Year

Below, find my top ten critics’ pieces (reviews plus A Critic At Large – anything after the Fiction in print order) of the year, in reverse order, along with their original blurbs.

10. “Home Again” - Helen Shaw makes a Signature move. Which Way Western Man? Upstairs at the Signature, a bleak but reparative miniature, and steps away, a pessimistic epic – both informed by the masculine travails of the American West. Shaw’s choice is easy: The Hunter is “deft” while the Shepard revival “collapses in its first few instants and then drags itself painfully along for two hours and forty-five minutes” – yowch! Shaw’s prose is at its snappiest, whether describing Paul Sparks (a “foxlike comic presence with a wheedling drawl”) or a telegraphing Christian Slater (“If Weston is tired, Slater rubs his face. When Weston’s hungry, Slater rubs his stomach.”) – but what’s special here is the elegant reading of Grangeville. (“With a diorama, the artist’s hand can always come down into the shoebox, to move and adjust the figures inside.”) She deepens that show’s darkness. As for the Shepard – has any actor in a poor production received more unanimously glowing reviews than the onstage sheep? Maya Phillips says she “nearly steals the show”: “Truly, some of Lois’s bleating fell perfectly in pace with the dialogue opposite Slater and Flockhart.” Jackson McHenry says she’s “a star with big dewy eyes, a melancholy turn of her mouth as she chews, and ace comedic timing… How could you compete with a stage presence like that?” And Shaw raves: She’s “a full-sized ewe so immaculately fluffy and confidently vocal that she keeps the audience chuckling in admiration. (Her name is Lois, and she is a diva!)” Truly, if the Obies aren’t cowards, they’ll commend this nonhuman person.

9. “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.

8. “Banging the Drum” - Alex Ross has a case of the Monday Evening Concerts. Ross continues his extended winning streak with this haunting tribute to a burning Los Angeles. It certainly helps that (in distinct contrast to the top piece in Window-Shop) one can find a record of the art under review; I listened to the gloriously eerie Czernowin piece while I read both Ross’ article and the Jon Lee Anderson piece elsewhere in the issue; the soundtrack elevated both subjects. The history of the concerts, which tends toward a concise batch of past highlights, is appreciated; the Czernowin review could be longer, but it’s beautiful, and as with the Knausgård, it helps that Ross isn’t afraid to use the first-person: “I felt as though I were on unfamiliar, unstable terrain, yet each sonic flicker seemed to land exactly where it had to… But the score is really about fostering a space of contemplation… I began listening in the right way when, toward the end, a recording of a downpour made me think of the thousands of L.A. homes that might have been saved had it rained over Christmas. I remained in the grip of that fantasy, bordering on prayer, until a ritualistic pinging of crotales brought the music to a close.” Ross brought me to the verge of tears – no small feat for a one-page classical music review. That’s why he is who he is.

7. “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.

6. “On the Market” (Books) - Katy Waldman brings her down-the-rabbithole self to work. The targets may be pillow-soft, but this is so much fun I don’t care. The freakish result of a corporate culture that has absorbed feminism without understanding it is a parade of books that purport to teach women how to turn themselves into perfect professionals. Thus: combat “‘imposing syndrome’” and “‘presence dysmorphia’” by manifesting a self-image of successfulness; emerge from being fired with a stronger personal brand (a “vision of collectivism” as “a faux sisterhood of similarly branded selves”); and achieve financial independence by, uh, finding inspiration in some lady’s delusional stories about being pandered to by female service workers. The same thing is wrong with all three of these books; each “portrays the self as a stock to be invested in, grown, and used to generate wealth”, captured by a “financialized society”. But the examples Waldman finds are so laughably overt that they can serve as a negative example; something to dissect at your next consciousness-raising group. You’re still going every week, right?

5. “Bad Dads” (The Current Cinema) - Justin Chang knows it’s like auteur like daughter. I am usually pretty against the double movie review, but if Chang can do them with this much detail-density and genuine connection between the films, I’m all for it. The mixed-negative take on the “zonked out” new Trier does excellent work praising fine craft while explaining how it doesn’t serve the story or its aims. Too many critics assume that every thoughtful film is a successful film, but if the philosophy is basic, no amount of window-dressing will make it profound. Chang also gets to the heart of Baumbach’s recent project, which is to find “the sharp edges in soft material”. This is meant to be a criticism, but I think it’s quite deliberate; I’m the world’s biggest White Noise defender, a film that brilliantly reconfigured the visual language of a Disney family movie to comment on the linguistics of mass culture as potently as DeLillo’s original text. It seems the new film is also metatextual, but Chang doesn’t find that aspect overwhelming or distracting, because the performances are dialed in. Especially Adam Sandler, who may finally get that Oscar nomination his whole career has obviously been leading to.

4. “On Y Va” (The Theatre) - Helen Shaw has a Tartuffe ache. An excellent sendoff for Shaw (one or two more pieces might come out, but this ending feels to me like a capper), who’s moving to the Times. Her tenure at the magazine ended up rather short, and whether for reasons of editing or something more opaque, I sometimes sensed a reluctance to stretch her legs which was not in evidence during her New York tenure. I remain a huge Shaw fan, though, and she’s still a master of the popping-boba phrase (here, the leads are “studies in otiose passivity”, while Emily Davis’ “arrangement of topknots… bounces on her head like a prize curly lamb”) and, more generally, the mixed review which does not sink into sullenness or rush past points of failure, but treats both a show’s failures and successes with a lively critical eye. The critique of Hnath’s clunky rhymes, probably hard to avoid, still sings, since Shaw is able to link it to the text at hand: Both involve discernment of the real deal. Shaw closes things out by beckoning us forward, willing us to engage in places we have no formal welcome. As a largely untrained critic who nitpicks the professionals without solicitation every week, suffice it to say I’m pushing, Helen!

3. “Mean Time” - Justin Chang works Hard Truths, plays Hard Truths. The best thing Chang’s written for the magazine, and a pretty perfect summation of the strengths of his style, which centers a review around a movie’s place in its director’s bigger project – in this case, Leigh’s “great subject… the elusive nature and uneven allocation of happiness”. (It helps when the director has a project as distinctive as Leigh’s.) Here, the new film is a kind of sister project to Leigh’s Secrets & Lies, a connection pretty much every review of the film has gestured toward, but only Chang bothers actually articulating. (For instance: “Another cemetery scene looms at the midpoint.”) Chang’s approach might be dryly auteurist if he wasn’t so humanist, concerned less with form than with feeling – how Leigh finds moments of sly humor in Pansy’s acidity, and the “integrity” with which Leigh and Jean-Baptiste “believe, and respect, the character’s dearth of self-knowledge.” That line alone rearranged the film in front of my eyes – it was a sort of rejoinder to the trauma-informed, therapy-inflected character study: “psychology and exposition have their dramatic limits” – not every woman is Promising and Young. (Or, to name a movie I actually like – a Lady Bird.) I appreciate, too, that Chang finds time to praise some of the film’s stranger and more distinctive scenes, like the dramatically unnecessary workplace moments – though neither he nor anyone I can find has asked what to me might be the film’s subtlest mystery: Who the hell is feeding the pigeons?!

2. “Extra, Extra!” (The Wayward Press) - Vinson Cunningham is a New York Poster child. Wonderful, and makes one think the magazine really ought to have a regular media criticism column! Cunningham, whose current, Pulitzer-finalist beat is, roughly, television-beyond-the-scripted, would be the perfect candidate, as evinced by this funny and surprisingly heartfelt look at the city’s roguish rag. As Cunningham says, the void of metro coverage has largely been filled by the Post, in their heavily biased but essentially competent manner – though mention should be paid to the upstart blog Hell Gate, which is generally less lascivious, but just as enterprising and entertaining. I’m glad Cunningham doesn’t try to make the Post stand in for the city – they share long, strange histories; that doesn’t make them congruent. There is something indelible about the image of a young Cunningham riding the subway and “scrutinizing with a sociological interest my fellow-riders’ reading material”, and while he doesn’t make too much of this, his mother’s talented-tenth-tinged rejection of the Post and his subsequent guilty devotion to it renders the magazine an unexpected and generatively ambiguous synecdoche for Black culture in America. That’s deepened even more when Cunningham points out the magazine’s often blatant racism. If The Post has a message, it’s that the front page really does matter. Amidst the infinite scroll, the print media can feel like a Headlineless Body In Topicless Bar. 

1. “Interiors” (Books) - Alice Gregory signifies nothing. A fairly perfect little book review, and while, yes, Bookforum publishes some forty of those a year, and this magazine’s usual remit is more fleshed-out takes, a small book called Perfection is served well by the finely honed. Because this is a sort of cover-book, or transposition, Gregory has the challenge of summing up both the old book and the new one, plus telling us what they mean and how they do their work. She pulls it all off, and although I’m a bit skeptical of the Latronico book– its block-quoted internet-scroll litany feels less like a clever update of its inspiration and more like half-baked Patricia Lockwood – I understand completely why Gregory loved it, especially when she explains how a second reading revealed its beating heart. She expertly identifies the critique embedded in Latronico’s project – that our social media anomie might really “be more enduring than we imagine”, and less novel, and that “one’s frustrations and thwarted fantasies are, in the end, proof of private agency, however outwardly constructed it may seem.” It’s hard to reveal a book’s “magic trick” without killing the magic, but Gregory manages it. Now watch me pull a houseplant out of my hat!

I still like what I wrote the year before last, so here it is again: Thank you so much for reading this newsletter, whether you've been here since the beginning of the or just joined last week. I have no plans to go anywhere or change anything. I'll keep this train a-chugging till the wheels come off the track.