Last Week's New Yorker Review: July 28
Last Week’s New Yorker, week of July 28, 2025
“Forty chefs showed up for her funeral, all in white toques.”
Must-Read:
“The Case for Lunch” (Dept. of Gastronomy) - Lauren Collins lounges in her caftan. Structurally, as simple as soda bread: An opening anecdote (delightful), a brief history (beginning with a charming flashback all the way to “early humans”), then the main story: A review of a London restaurant that combines lunch-only hours, pro-Irish leftism, affectation, homey food at three-dollar-sign prices1, an insistence on leisure, and a worker-first approach to customer service. In other words, a powder keg in the shape of a beef pie. Having already taken the side of lunch, of course Collins likes the food, and if her jokes are a little slap-happy they still work. (“A piece of chocolate tart so dense that it resembled Ultrasuede” – why not suede? Because that’s not funny.) Whether she gives Corcoran enough latitude to get his political points across is more debatable. The final section delves deeper into the politics of lunch, but here Collins is not totally convincing; lunch is a powerful symbol, but I’m not sure it stands for fellowship, or anything else. It’s a floating signifier – though you shouldn’t float the check, Wimpy.
Window-Shop:
“Second Life” (A Reporter at Large) - Rachel Aviv is not autoimmune to prosopagnosia. Aviv is always worth reading; this is, as ever, fascinating, searching, empathetic… but some structural weirdness makes it one of her weaker pieces. Aviv has two stories to tell about the central case, in which a woman, Mary, recovers from her schizophrenia-like delusions. The first is a medical story about the recovery, which connects to a growing body of research which suggests “schizophrenia” as a category is too diffuse, and many cases could be better treated with immunotherapeutic neurology than psychology. The second is a philosophical story about Mary and her family coping with delusions which no longer hold power over Mary, but which she is reluctant or unable to disavow. While Aviv’s project often involves pushing against the limits of psychiatry as it is currently practiced, the new developments she chronicles here are tentative, and the straightforward advances-in-medicine piece this becomes for long stretches is just not the best use of her skills. Spending longer on the difficulties of the DSM would be one solution, but the magazine has addressed that topic again and again and again and again, with diminishing returns. (And there may be too much nuance there for even the longest longread.) The second story’s main flaw is that it starts so late – by the time Aviv gets into it (in the section beginning “After reading…”, which truly feels like an intro), we’re five thousand words in (that’s five pictures!) and my attention was starting to flag. Still, the conflict between delusions and identity formation is perhaps the central American theme of the decade, and Mary’s story provides an unexpected window into a topic that can be so polarizing it’s easy to forget its foundation is pain and the perception of disenfranchisement. The most fascinating thread concerns Mary’s dreams; “uncharacteristically pleasant” dreams were, for her, not just a leading indicator of a better mental state but actually a cause of that state, as she perceived it – a reflection of a mind no longer alienated from itself. Mary’s daughters, who clearly brought the story to Aviv, receive their own share of focus, especially early on; they handled both their mother’s condition and its remission in very different ways, and they’re interesting speakers, but whether they’re ultimately pertinent enough to Aviv’s narrative to justify so much novelistic characterization, I’m less sure. There were many witnesses to Mary’s madness, yet none of these women is quite sure what she saw.
“Foul Ball” (Talk of the Town) - Zach Helfand protects the plate. Pretty grim for a Talk, but such are the times, and Wilder is the face of true courage.
“The Whisker Wars” (Books) - Margaret Talbot gets away clean-shaven. The presidential intro is pretty hokey – the Lincoln beard letter is an elementary-school story – but Talbot wisely admits right away that she’s mining a “serious academic book” for its “delightful anecdotes”. Those anecdotes are fun, indeed – sure, everyone knows about Public Universal Friend (right?), but who knew that beards were popular not only as a symbol of white supremacy (one expertly roasted by Frederick Douglass) but probably as a literal result of white men’s apprehension at lying submissive before razor-wielding free Black barbers? The last section, in which Talbot discusses lock-of-hair keepsakes but finds nothing to say about them except “ew”, peters out – so the piece could use a trim, but hey, who couldn’t?
“The Flood Will Come” (Annals of Disaster) - John Seabrook meanders. An interesting one, because the unspoken story-behind-the-story is incredibly obvious: Seabrook was clearly writing a piece about Vermont’s new approaches to flood management, a Really Big One-esque warning combined with a optimistic new-approaches story. And then… the Really Big One hit, albeit not in Vermont, and Seabrook had to quickly pivot. I wonder if Seabrook would have been better served by outright telling us this, and presenting the piece in the order in which it was written; instead, he has to shift back and forth, with audible clunks, between already-in-the-can scenes in Vermont and newsy summaries of the Texas disaster. The Vermont material is compelling; Seabrook’s explanations of the hubris of the previous disaster-management system (sound familiar?) are easy to understand, and while Kline’s advances are anything but an instant fix, at least they’re sane. The horrific Kerr County flooding material, which ends up being more than half the piece, is less compelling. Mostly, Seabrook recaps others’ reporting; my suspicion is that he was never even in Texas. If you’ve kept up with that awful story, just skim. No need to step in the same river twice.
“Money Talks” (The Political Scene) - Antonia Hitchens sees Trump take the Howard’s way out. A well-written, well-reported hour spent with perhaps the most malodorous creature ever to come from Long Island. Whether you can stomach such a thing will entirely determine your experience; Lutnick is not a psychologically nuanced character – he’s a rich asshole who likes the taste of leather and the scent of dung – and his appeal to Trump is obvious; they’re in the same folder at Central Casting. The piece gives Lutnick a lot of blame/credit for the big dumb tariff plan, though Trump has been talking about it for a very long time. Lutnick’s stupid riffs aren’t as inexplicably striking as the president’s; he’s easier than most of Trump’s lackeys to dismiss as a stooge, and perhaps that’s exactly how he’s stuck around so long.
Colbert on Tynan (Takes) - Deliberately and delightfully overwritten, with Colbert doing a surprisingly good impression of a magazine writer high off his own fumes. It’s also possible he just is high, but does it really matter? His analysis, which he’s not sure whether to turn into a review (you and me both, Stevie), is fantastically astute. (“Tynan has a style so antithetical to Carson’s that, when we get a joke from Johnny’s monologue or a conversational one-liner, it sticks out like a Popsicle in a Pavlova.”) A reminder of his abilities, and a reason to be excited for whatever he, you know, does next.
“The Secret Keepers” (Books) - Keith Gessen knows Central is a nervous system. I of course knew about the C.I.A’s early-aughts torture regime; I had not heard the story about an associate who first told us everything he knew, and was only then tortured nearly to death. Damn. Similarly, the bulk of this is the usual story: “Was the mission to use tradecraft to gather intelligence, or to use money, propaganda, and violence to shape events? …Increasingly, as the decades passed, the answer tilted toward the latter.” There’s also an overview of the dangers of a Trump with power over the agency that boils down to this tweet. Still, the details are interesting, if not especially new. Little to no actual reviewing of the book goes on, and it mostly sounds like an addendum to its longer, juicier predecessor. But you can get the scoop here, and save yourself four-hundred-some pages.
“That’s the Way Love Goes” (On Television) - Vinson Cunningham sees Island on a stream. A cute-enough unpacking of this season of the show, but Cunningham misses a trick by turning the mention of America into just a closing riff. Surely far more interesting than the show itself – which is just one of many variations on a theme (Hot Dummies On Islands), is the fact of its extreme popularity despite everyone sort of agreeing that this season was not very good. Has the monoculture returned from the dead, in a cutout bikini and slides?
Skip Without Guilt:
“Masking for Trouble” (The Current Cinema) - Justin Chang is in the diss Aster zone. Whipped up into a lather by the film’s apparently reactionary politics, Chang forgets to tell us anything about whether it works as a movie. Richard Brody is very insistent on reading every film through the lens of its political implications, but he still always addresses how their formal qualities express (or challenge) those implications; from this review, Chang may as well have seen a staged reading. I haven’t seen the film, so I can’t judge its politics, but I can think of plenty of reasons why Aster may have wanted to “tether such a film” to the perspective of a “sociopath” – and I wonder if Chang isn’t judging content as message, a bit. But I liked Emilia Pérez, too; I think partially-brain-dead political provocation is practically the point of American middlebrow filmmaking. (See also Barbie, Gone Girl, The Last Jedi.) So don’t trust me.
“Jersey Boy” (Pop Music) - Amanda Petrusich does Mc.gee’s electric slide. I listened to the Mc.gee album from last year that Petrusich liked so much; it was very nice, if not quite revelatory. I can’t stand Petrusich’s flattening of its affect into “the internet” and “sounds like Phone” and “the disorientation that comes from scrolling Instagram for a little too long”, though. The description is both overdetermined and inapt. There’s also very little about the artist as a live act, which is strange for a review that’s purportedly about that. Really this is just a chance for Petrusich to highlight one of her favorite albums from last year, in case people missed her end-of-year list. I’m glad she’s excited; I’m not even unconvinced. I just don’t hear what she’s hearing. (And again… lotta white dudes with guitars lately.)
Letters:
Dan Duray felt the Larry David satire I praised crossed a line: “I really don't know who could laugh at these deportations. Trying to do so in a publication so firmly aligned with the Democrats, who may or may not be that opposed to them, leaves a pretty bad taste in my mouth, personally. Also this is the same basic premise of taking in the Black family after Katrina, on Curb, so it's pretty unoriginal on top of everything else.”
Heather Peterson couldn’t fathom why Inkoo Kang raved about Too Much: “Lena Dunham’s show is so awful that I’m tempted to think Kang wrote this review as an elaborate prank… I can’t for the life of me figure out what she liked about this show—its tone is all over the place it gave me motion sickness, it has no idea what to do with its characters, it almost ruined Meg Salter for me, and she and Will Sharpe have so little chemistry that when they stayed up all night talking I found myself wishing they’d just go to bed!”
What do you think?
Though really when you factor in the lack of service charge, it’s very affordable for a restaurant in central London. I can see why he’d sort of insist you get some booze as well – there can’t possibly be great profits in nine-pound desserts. ↩