July 8, 2025

Last Week's New Yorker Review: June 30

Last Week’s New Yorker, week of June 30, 2025

“many female friends who, before settling down with men you’d go to Pottery Barn with, enthusiastically bedded d.j.s and floor-mattress degenerates for years.”

Must-Read:

“Sex Bomb” (Books) - Jia Tolentino mastered the blockchain when you were having premarital sex, and now that the world is on fire and the barbarians are at the gate you have the audacity to come to her for help. The magazine has a growing problem of running reviews of books that are well beneath it; I’m not sure if this is due to some misguided editorial mandate or if popular nonfiction is just dumber and more evil than ever – or, you know, both. It’s a bigger issue when the reviewer pulls punches so as not to seem extreme or biased (see Kolbert’s article in this very issue for one not-especially-egregious example); thankfully, Tolentino isn’t shaken, immediately flagging Louise Perry’s deal (she works “to present reactionary conservatism as simple common sense”, suggesting we ought to assume “a defensive crouch against the very worst that could happen.”) It’s still embarrassing that Tolentino has to dissect these obviously specious arguments; when Perry starts ranting that the inevitable endpoint of sexual liberalism is “child sex” one wonders if she’s feeding a troll. (If you’re too-online and want to jog your memory on Perry: She was the debate partner who Anna from Red Scare immediately abandoned at that jejune Bari Weiss exhibition game.) The piece gets better (if less slap-happy) when Tolentino moves to a book with a more nuanced view of the same terrain, and focuses her sights on the dismantling of already-paltry sex-ed, which, paired with an hypersexual online world, are doing their part – along with everything else in the world – to leave young people anxious and stranded. Tolentino is frustrated by both books’ lack of interest in “desire, and pleasure, and connection” – and, ultimately, in the unknown and unknowable. That’s a good point, but it applies to most popular nonfiction, which wants to make its case unassailable, as well as most smut, which tends to aim for happy endings in a few respects. Where’s the ambiguity? Stop the world – I want to get off!

Window-Shop:

“Bach’s Colossus” (Musical Events) - Alex Ross has Mass appeal. Huzzah for a positive review of two recorded pieces, both of which you can consume from the comfort of your own home – though my failed attempt to listen to all two hours of the Bach before publishing is largely why this edition is belated. Both pieces are stark; the Bach is very loud and the new-music piece by Timothy McCormack is very quiet. Ross handles them in straightforward and detail-oriented fashion, dissecting intriguing moments with his usual note-by-note approach. You already know I’m a fan; I don’t need to beat that drum – or, as the case may be, repeatedly press those piano keys. 

“Dead Reckoning” (Letter from Philadelphia) - Rachel Monroe thinks there’s something hard to swallow about the Mütter Museum. Monroe comes to us with a yarn, and despite the complex issues it raises around curation and respect, she’s largely decided who her heroes, villains, and more complicated forces are; we’re along for the ride. Expanding the piece – giving lots of history about those very issues – would certainly risk deadening its thrill, just as expanding the Mütter seems to entail a lot of raising of lights and drawing-aside of curtains. But in the end there’s not a ton of room for actual ambiguity here. Kate Quinn, the executive director, was quickly villainized online (as was C.E.O. Mira Irons, who left before Monroe started writing and thus dodged a bullet); she certainly doesn’t acquit herself here, coming across as exactly the frightened, vision-free bureaucrat that the opposition imagined her to be. But she was, conveniently, fired shortly before press time (I wonder if the impending critical magazine feature had anything to do with that?) and replaced by Erin McLeary, who seems to have been Monroe’s main point of contact at the museum, and who Monroe continually lauds as a thoughtful scholar who balances a love for the museum’s mission with a clear-eyed understanding of the ethical improprieties its collection is built on. One does start to wonder: Is this a setup? It’s very convenient how perfectly the “‘secret third way,’” combining ethics and “morbid fascination”, falls into place at the end. In a movie, we’d cut to Larry Kaiser, the profit-oriented big boss, smiling slyly as his plan to win the favor of the fans without walking back the needed changes goes off without a hitch. Or maybe there is no conspiracy, and Kaiser has lucked into a good choice just by listening to the museum’s fervent advocates, who were never really asking for an ahistorical or reactionary institution, just a thoughtful and proudly spookie-ookie one. After gesturing toward high stakes and then diffusing them with minimal damage done, Monroe suddenly pivots, at the very end, to a really gorgeous and poetic two-paragraph meditation on bodily difference. It doesn’t fit with anything else here, but I’m happy she includes it. Is the Mütter Museum “‘offensive and trite’”? My taste in museums tends toward the self-serious, so I’m inclined to think so, a bit; still, it’s a part of Philly culture – unlike a certain spot that practically defines trite offense. At least the Mütter hasn’t turned a whole chunk of Philly into a bizarro trauma mall. 

“Past Lives” (Talk of the Town) - Dan Greene thinks punk-rock comptroller candidate Justin Brannan is bae, Ridge. Gotta rep my new neighborhood; plus, Brannan is a good egg with good stories. (He lost, though; ah well.) 

“The Descendents” (The Sporting Scene) - Jay Caspian Kang blocks hoop dreams at the rim. Annoying to find a number of intelligent and very well-articulated assertions welded to other really dumb and sometimes contradictory arguments. Kang’s broad point is one I’ve been making since at least 2018, which is that the U.S. pro-basketball pipeline is not working very well at all, and the next generation of stars will therefore mostly be European, which will have knock-on effects regarding the N.B.A. and its place in American culture. I don’t think that’s entirely a bad thing; Kang implies non-Americans have a lack of “charisma”, which is untrue and slightly xenophobic – Dončić has loads of charisma (albeit spiked with spoiled-prince villainry); Jokić is an astonishingly unique player and a fascinating person (though more jester than hero) and Giannis is immensely likeable (though his time may already have passed). The weird thing about Curry and James was that they were both able to dominate in such different ways at the same time while staying narratively heroic; that’s the anomaly. I think Kang’s argument against the professionalization of youth sports is legitimate insofar as that the system certainly isn’t benefitting those kids – even the ones who grow into stars will have personal deficiencies, and the vast majority are basically grist for the mill. Kang implies that overprofessionalized training also creates more boring and less adaptable players, but I chalk up the deficiencies partly to a rigid and hidebound American youth assessment regime (are the children of sports stars succeeding solely because they’ve gotten more training, or does the last name perhaps come into play?) and even more to Europe’s focus on development of consistent basics across a long season, compared to America’s heightened competition, forced psychological lessons, and “facsimile of the pro game.” I don’t think there’s even a shred of legitimacy, though, to the ultra-hokey answer Kang gives, which is basically that a lack of “real-world instruction” hasn’t fostered "resilience" in these supposedly coddled youths – Kang doesn’t literally say “participation trophies”, but one can hear the phrase echoing. That Kang makes something so silly out of something so sensible is itself a replication of the American failure: Too much storytelling, not enough conditioning. 

Skip Without Guilt:

“When to Quit” (Pop Music) - Amanda Petrusich bums a cig from Haim. I quite enjoyed the record under review, although it’s uneven; Rostam’s left-field sound leavens the sisters’ formally clever but often borderline glib lyricism. Petrusich doesn’t add a ton to the experience of listening; the interview segments are funny but never revelatory; her analysis reveals more about her headspace than the sisters’. It’s a gentle and bright little review, with a spot-on Modest Mouse pull, but it never feels necessary. What’s to figure out?

“Seeds of Doubt” (A Critic at Large) - Elizabeth Kolbert refreshes her feed. Kolbert reviews two books that pair insightful research with insipid analysis and merely gestures at her disagreement instead of actually articulating it. That’s frustrating, but her synopses of the work at hand are interesting enough, at least.. The wonky Michael Grunwald awkwardly points out that a number of technologies advanced, with varying degrees of credulousness, by this very magazine have totally faceplanted: Vertical farming; corporatized and/or lab-grown fake beef. Fair enough! But Grunwald’s solutions are astonishingly myopic in that think-tank way: Organic farming isn’t any better for the environment, so let’s double down on factory farms; biofuel is evil and a fake solution (as we’ve known) but if Grunwald advocates for any better alternate fuel source, Kolbert doesn’t say. Vaclav Smil’s book is more quantitative and thus, predictably, more obviously evil; he correctly points out a few more things that won’t work, then suggests a solution is… raising the price of groceries?! Holy ecofascist necropolitics, Batman! Predictably, Smil thinks he’s “‘more interested in science than politics’”, and Kolbert offers just a half-assed rejoinder (“How realistic is it, though, to leave politics out of the calculation?”) before moving on. Screw realism, how about morality?

“Wreckage” (The Current Cinema) - Justin Chang says Sorry, Baby, you can drive his car. Well, a year and a half later, the two-film review is back, baby – its return a more damning indictment of F1, which doesn’t have enough identifiable features to fill two pages, than is Chang’s wishy-washy assessment. I wish he’d just covered the smaller indie movie, which he loves; it’s only in metro areas for now but given its rapturous reception A24 will likely stretch its screen count. Unfortunately, Chang slips into a weirdly press-releasy mode regarding the film, hardly commenting on its formal characteristics at all and mostly just praising its maker for her bravery. Good for her, I guess – but how’s the movie?

McPhee on McPhee (Takes) - If you enjoy John McPhee’s occasional late attempts at achieving a certain purity of substance-free style, you’ll like this a lot. A haiku of empty nostalgia.

“Care and Feeding” (Personal History) - David Sedaris is hip and with it. A higher floor but a lower ceiling than much recent Sedaris; this mostly idles in a weightless, first-draft-feeling mode. The usual aggravating moments of privilege are here (he basically brags about easily affording a hired car), but not central and totally forgivable. Less hard to overlook is the deliberately sardonic sourness of his relationship with Hugh. I know very well that bickering is a love language, but it reaches such heights of simulated loathing here that reading becomes like watching another couple’s fetish play – pretty revolting, even if you’re into that sort of thing. That could all be overlooked if there were any really good jokes here, but there just aren’t. 

“Collective Punishment” (A Reporter at Large) - Joshua Yaffa is on a NATO-know basis. Not at the bottom because it’s especially bad, but just because, unless you are inherently invested in the workings of NATO or such things as “the continuation of international political norms”, Yaffa never really gives you a reason to care or be interested. The leaders he interviews express mild anxiety over Trump’s apparent disdain for the NATO project, but ultimately everyone seems to understand exactly the stakes: Europe will have to pay more, largely because the war in Ukraine has necessitated it, but also because Trump wants them to. Yaffa goes to some lengths to explain that, in fact, this idea has been percolating for a long time; if Trump is generally insane, his usual, purely transactional logic has backed him into a relatively cogent position on this issue, it seems – at least, one that doesn’t egregiously undermine U.S. interests. But Yaffa doesn’t give the reader a very broad perspective on the issue – we hear from NATO people, Trump’s people, and basically nobody else. Obviously it’s not gonna be possible to get the Russian government on (or off!) the record, but how about any anti-militarization voices? (Or, for the opposite perspective, how about some arms manufacturers?) Yaffa takes the war machine pretty much for granted, but never really puts this argument in human terms. It’s all very theoretical – pieces moving on the game board. There is no bombshell.

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Letters:

There’s a hole in the bucket, dear Liza, dear Liza.

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everything’s

gonna be