Last Week's New Yorker Review: July 7 & 14
Last Week’s New Yorker, week of July 7 & 14, 2025
“One reason those queens loved Barthes, I think, without entirely understanding structuralism as a discipline, was that he was so elusive about being queer.”
Must-Read:
“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.
Window-Shop:
“Pride and Provenance” (The Art World) - Julian Lucas won’t give a standing renovation because he needs a restitution. Lucas strikes an excellent balance between full-throated appreciation of the look of the new wing (“a cathedral-like hub”) and the beauty and importance of its objects, and a criticism of its politics. It would be easy to just repeat the line that displaying ill-gotten goods is morally troubling, but Lucas is specifically critical of the way the Met “signals sympathy with restitution efforts even as it mounts an implicit case against them”, targeting contemporary hypocrisy with specific critique, including close-readings of wall text. Lucas articulates a nuanced perspective very quickly; in the rush, his language never gathers much poetic momentum, but that’s a quibble. This is precise and informed writing that clarifies the meaning of the word ‘critical’.
“Easy Music” (Books) - Anthony Lane tries not to lose Elmore Leonard’s cool. If you like Lane in bubbling-over, full-throated mode, there is no better subject than Leonard, who the man clearly idolizes. Here, he even squees at the prose styling of personal correspondence from teen Leonard – and to be fair, the quote is pretty great. (The Philippines: “‘the only place in the world where you can walk into a bomb crater and walk out drunk with half your money gone.’”) There is not a ton about meaning, here; Lane spends the piece mostly just gushing over various lovely passages, with a beat to dissect Leonard’s misadventures in L.A, as befits an ex-film-critic. I may not be as smitten with Leonard as Lane, but who could possibly be? Enthusiasm is not a crime.
Smith on Paley, Lahiri on Gallant, Moshfegh on Brodkey (Takes) - All three add much to the experience of reading the short stories they’re attached to; only Smith’s works as a brief essay all on its own. (See the Weekend Special for my reviews of the stories themselves.)
“The End of the Essay” (Annals of Education) - Hua Hsu writes his own conclusion. Significantly less annoying than it sounds. Hsu avoids alarmism meticulously, though in its stead he writes a piece so invested in the day-to-day reality of teaching that I wonder how interesting non-academics will actually find it. Do you care whether professors, say, go back to blue-book exams? Do these micro-level practical considerations matter much at all, when the higher-ed administrative class is so determined to destroy liberal arts education by hook or by crook? Actually, maybe they do. I’m personally very skeptical of the neuroscience research that so many professors use as writing-by-hand propaganda; I could type before I could write legibly by hand, and typing natives like myself and plenty of (far) younger people have not been substantially studied – but anecdotally, typing feels much more “embodied” than hand-writing for me. But other changes Hsu discusses may be more pedagogically productive: Less focus on rote standardized-essay form, less focus on the pursuit of a good grade, more oral exams, ideally, ultimately, less focus on achievement and more on conscientização. That’s the very optimistic outlook. Hsu lands somewhere cloudier, guessing that profit-driven institutions will inevitably embrace these new technologies. It’s increasingly clear, on a number of fronts, that the tension is not between students and teachers but between admin and everyone else. Is the solution reform – better administrative systems – or revolution – new forms of higher-ed? Well, that’s an interesting essay prompt.
“Is It The Phones?” (Books) - Molly Fischer doesn’t cell us a bill of goods. Richtel’s prose style, which Fischer calls “the voice of an overcaffeinated social-studies teacher straddling the back of a chair”, fills me with revulsion, so even though his ideas generally seem reasonable they’re somewhat hard to take. Fischer’s analysis is always fair but never mind-blowing; the research is partial and inconclusive (what research isn’t?) but even the most phone-positive middle schooler would admit to substantial negatives. I wonder, though, if Fischer gives enough credit to the kids; the adults seem enthused to take on this battle, but a recent survey found that the number of 12- to 15-year-olds who say they self-enforce breaks rose from 18% in 2022 to 40% in 2025. Maybe this isn’t just a moral panic, but there are still a lot of people panicking about morality; meanwhile, the kids are just trying to touch grass together, in a world where that’s never been harder. The best thing parents can do? It might just be focusing on something else.
“Exit Pursued by Raccoon” (Talk of the Town) - Michael Schulman finds much matter to be heard and learned from the Delacorte’s conversion. The anecdotes are well-worn but charming; the reno has me excited! (Also my friend from college did some of the electrical work, which kinda gets mentioned; shoutout Parker Damm.)
Skip Without Guilt:
“The Magic of ‘Mafalda’” (A Critic at Large) - Daniel Alarcón is the Quino speaker. I greatly enjoyed hearing about this comic strip, starring a six-year-old who looks like Nancy, talks like Charlie Brown, and thinks like Che Guevara. I already know the basics of recent Argentinean political history – some of it from this very magazine – and Alarcón doles it out with little style and not-always-convincing connections to the comic strip. (“Quino was not religious, but he might have appreciated Pope Francis’s progressive leanings.”) I want to read Mafalda now, but this piece works only as a letter of recommendation. Alarcón doesn’t tie a bow on it.
“By the Book” (Books) - Thomas Mallon lists backwards. A fun idea given an unfortunately and unaccountably dry treatment. Mallon briefly re-reviews the books covered in the magazine’s first-ever issue, finding the newborn institution’s taste to be less than forward-thinking, and not always trustworthy. (One book is a “pillar of bygone, or bygoing, conventionality,” another is a “piece of claustrophobic escapism, a yarn of the most tangled synthetic fibre.”) Mallon tries to situate these books in their historical and literary contexts, but mostly does so by bringing up the same handful of referents (the Great War, Joyce, Henry James) again and again. Mallon tries to jab at the less successful books, but the targets are obscure and his quips never especially funny. (“So many sentences begin with ‘But’ that the novel seems to develop a stutter.”) Mallon never really finds a take on the early magazine, its oft-baffling concision aside. It was halfway stodgy, halfway pleasure-seeking, halfway populist but with notes of disdain; it “would quickly and steadily improve”… but what does this column, Tell Me, tell us? What do the magazine’s first steps say about its development and its future? Maybe the first issue was just too natal to say much. But give me a periodical when it has seven issues, and I’ll show you the institution it will grow up to be.
Letters:
Gabe was frustrated by Jay Caspian Kang’s take on youth basketball, but points the distinguishing reader elsewhere: “The expose book ‘Play Their Hearts Out’ was a great look at AAU ball and all the bad things that go with it. It would make sense that the kids of athletes are some of the few who can pay to play but also afford good training and build some better habits from the start (and have the profile to already be A Name that people will notice).”
Gabe adds: “Having now read the Jia Tolentino piece [on youth sex], definitely a good one. I, er...wonder if the word bukkake has ever appeared in [the magazine] before.” I can answer that! The answer is: Not quite. Here it is as the iffy punchline of a wobbly Bill Manhire poem from 2009!
A comment that slipped through the cracks from a few months back, re my comments about Ezra Edelman’s shelved 9-hour Prince documentary: MC Kimberly recommends “the episode of Pablo Torre Finds Out where he interviews Edelman about the demise of the Prince doc – infuriating stuff. I think the NYT article is the closest any of us will ever get to seeing it, which feels like losing Prince all over again.”
bad decisions