November 12, 2025

Last Week's New Yorker Review: November 10

Last Week’s New Yorker, week of November 10

“A four-page spread gives instructions for a ‘midnight omelette supper for thirty,’ featuring a pound of herb butter, an array of pastries with homemade jams, and two quarts of chocolate mousse.”

Must-Read:

“Tableau Vivant” (On and Off the Menu) - Hannah Goldfield asks, may she entertain you? You know it’s a lackluster issue when the best piece in it isn’t even the best thing the magazine has put out about Martha Stewart this year. That’s to take nothing away from Goldfield, who does very good work contextualizing the early-Martha book that’s being reissued, and examining her influence: It’s such that those not making themselves in Stewart’s example have to make themselves in her negative example, promoting mess and ease and inevitably being dubbed the anti-M.S. The second half here is Goldfield’s mildly gonzo attempt to mount a dinner party of her own; it’s diverting, though it doesn’t have much to do with Martha, really. And the food sounds only okay. Even the use of Ritz crackers on the crab dip is not very Marthaworld. She’d make toast points, no?

Window-Shop:

“Last Harvest” (Books) - James Wood is a тато’s тато. Wood is one of the most sensitive readers alive. This piece is just a review, there is no hook; you have to stimulate your own interest in a Bulgarian guy writing autofiction about his dead father. Push through and you’re rewarded with a very elegant analysis of the uses of afternoons, quest narratives, and the garden metaphor in Gospodinov’s book. Formally, this is top-notch. I can’t say I was riveted, but perhaps you will be; let a hundred flowers bloom.

“Youthful Convictions” (Musical Events) - Alex Ross plays the full ninety. A bit frustrating that Ross focuses only on Riley’s work from the 1960s, since his career is extremely long and his current piece The Holy Liftoff is hugely ambitious and fascinating. The material on Pärt is far better, outlining how even his most audience-friendly work contains “inner tensions and hidden furies”, and how his religious subject matter had him exiled from the USSR, showing the personal stakes behind subject matter that might otherwise seem commercially motivated. Whether Pärt and Riley are actually outliers, I’m not sure; perhaps minimalism itself is generally stranger and more prickly than its popular conception assumes. But here’s to another near-century of nothing/much.

Caesar on Paumgarten (Takes) - I do not fully buy Caesar’s Brit-out-of-water act here – he’s a Londoner, not exactly a country mouse (or pig) – but his appreciation of Paumgarten’s “playful” piece (“his narrative structure, too, contains tensile strength”) has verve.

“Reality Show” (The Theatre) - Helen Shaw looks into the dark. “Ambivalent autobiography” is not much of a connecting thread; that must apply to nine out of ten pieces of theater. The Hunter review is perfectly serviceable but not revelatory; the performance theater piece at Powerhouse (I bought tickets but my date was sick and I couldn’t bear to go solo) short-circuits her, for good reason: complicity is perhaps too small a word for the response that artist, Bianchi, provokes, and I’d love to see Shaw probe her uneasy reaction further. (That is the only self-probing I want to see.)

🗣️ “The Mobster on the Ceiling” (Bling Dept.) - Susan Mulcahy puts ‘maybe’ in a corner. Good fun. The devil is in the details!

Skip Without Guilt:

“Cage Match” (A Reporter at Large) - Ava Kofman spots a macaque-up. It’s probably inevitable that this story would have some tonal whiplash, and to a certain degree, this magazine lives for such things. But I just think opening this story as a lighthearted tale from the South then quickly pivoting to extended graphic descriptions of monkey torture is… a bit rude. So be warned: After the first few paragraphs’ small-town whispers and novelty T-shirts, there is virtually no pleasure to be found here. Kofman would like us to be shocked by the strange alliance between MAHA and PETA, but both groups combine culty vibes with bleeding-heart save the innocents rhetoric; I’m nonplussed. Kofman’s research is impeccable, and she scores an interview – with the monkey-looser – that seems impossible until it happens. The segment on the inefficiency of animal testing is especially compelling. Still, there is a bit of an Upton Sinclair gross-meat issue here. Kofman points out that eliminating animal testing in America would shunt it off to China, where oversight is almost nonexistent; the real solution would be – as usual – meaningful and thoughtful regulation. But it’s hard to read about these poor animals’ gruesome treatment and not turn into a NIMBY – that is, an advocate for No Injured Monkeys Being Yoked anywhere the hell near my house. That’s in line with the view of the alt-right dumbasses at White Coat Waste, who take a scorched-earth approach to the animal-testing issue that’s in line with the current fascist scorched-earth approach to both government and also the literal earth. As Kofman points out, their efforts will have the opposite effect of what they claim to intend, as the removal of public funding will just lead to private funding with less oversight. That’s a grim place to end this grim piece, so Kofman gives us one last look at the monkeys, clumped on their island. They aren’t my neighbors; my anger and frustration can do nothing for them. Man was made to mourn; monkey was made to monkey.

“Heart to Heart” (Profiles) - Margaret Talbot says Norway, Joa-sé. Trier is a thoughtful director, but he’s clearly uninterested in being in front of the camera, and as such he’s a fairly dull person to spend an hour with. His films traverse the philosophical and emotional problems of youngish, well-off Norwegians; a perfectly good project but not one with any great mystery as to its source: Would it shock you to learn that Trier was born into a “sophisticated, creative family” and now has a partner who is also a collaborator? He says it himself: “‘The biggest tragedies and complexities I’ve seen in human life have been of a quite intimate and internal sort’”. Journalism is a tough place to explore the intimate and internal, and Talbot doesn’t try, instead skimming Trier’s surface and hoping it suffices. Not every subject demands psychoanalysis, but Trier is practically begging for it – Talbot even mentions an argument about Freud versus Jung! We are told, but never shown, that Trier is deeply in touch with his emotions and has no trouble talking about them; instead we hear a lot about skateboarding and film nerdery as touchstones (those are hobbies, not a personality). As for Trier’s new project, Talbot gives little away (though it’s already premiered at fests and is about to get a large limited release), spending more time on a cursory recap of Trier’s past films, skimming so hastily past the relative flops she may as well not have mentioned them. The new film is, surprisingly, getting mixed reviews in the U.S.(including in the just-released edition of this magazine) despite its largely rapturous reception at Cannes; Talbot might have been able to do something interesting with that gap – if there’s a thesis to this piece, it’s that Trier is a definitionally Norwegian director; he’s not moving to L.A. – but it’s too late, alas. So, Sentimental? Not sentimental, no…

“The Player King” (Books) - Anthony Lane has an old friend for dinner. A quick little pan of Anthony Hopkins’ new biography, “oddly seized with touchiness and frosted over with regret”. Lane doesn’t have anything very interesting to say about Hopkins; he runs through his work, highbrow and low, and declares him the highlight of most of it – true enough. Lane skips past most of the childhood material, which seems to be a lot of the book. There’s not much reason to read this, but there’s not much reason to watch Solace, either, and this will be over faster.

“Transitions” (Personal History) - James Marcus is estrogenerationally wealthy. Excruciatingly well-intentioned. I’m not going to scold Marcus for writing about his daughter’s transition; it’s a perfectly fine subject. But he doesn’t achieve much depth here, and his put-on obliviousness gets tiresome fast. If he’s writing about transition, wouldn’t it make sense to research the subject? But the trope of queerness as a black box only accessible to the self-identifying persists; Marcus writes with the privilege of someone whose speech act doesn’t require context.¹ Maybe that’s politically useful, but it isn’t enjoyable; the essay descends rapidly into teary-eyed dullness, full of agita and performative mourning, and it’s only very late in the day that Marcus manages to express any delight in the experience. The story grows most interesting when it strays from the usual stages of grief, as in an interlude concerning an ad-hoc wedding that is funny and quite sweet. There is also… so much discussion of Nat’s sexual life, which does seem to reflect her actual conversations with Marcus², but arguably still feeds a narrative of Transness as fetish. It’s obvious Marcus has two goals for this piece – he wants to write an essay about his relationship with his daughter, but he also wants to show transphobic people that they don’t have anything to be afraid of; if he can understand this Trans stuff, anyone can. Ultimately the aims are at cross purposes; no matter how much Marcus claims to see his daughter, it never feels like he’s looking at her; he’s looking past her, instead, to the ignorant audience he’s trying to convince.

“Open Mind” (Annals of Artificial Intelligence) - James Somers gets brain from an LLM. Incoherent and irresponsible. There is a category error at play here; to a neuroscientist, of course everything will look like a brain. What an LLM actually is is a linguistic point cloud; as such, the operative field is, naturally, structural linguistics. But because the companies creating LLMs have set the terms under which they’re discussed, it’s easy to assume they have more in common with science than Saussure; this is the trap Somers falls into. This slippage starts early – note how thoughtlessly Somers adopts the term “neurons” – and continues throughout, until at last Somers is so entangled he has to spend the next-to-last section gesturing toward skepticism; he successfully points out why his framing device is ludicrous without actually proposing a more sensible framework. There is a failure of imagination at play – perhaps the result of too much time spent with GPT? Whatever it looks like, ceci n’est pas un chat.

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Letters:

Michael O. sent an excellent tab on criticism, which praises Alex Ross’ work as a representative example of how to do it right, something he largely credits to this magazine’s ethos, compared to the Times’. (For what it’s worth, I rather liked Woolfe, but Corinna da Fonseca-Wollheim has turned in a few absolutely smashing opera reviews since his departure; I’m happy for her to become the main voice. The theater section, on the other hand, post-Jesse Green, has become increasingly reliant on a small handful of freelancers who I’m not an especially big fan of, while other seriously excellent writers like Maya Phillips, Brittani Samuel, and Alexis Soloski are given comparative scraps. For all I know, this is just a matter of availability; I am not shouting for anyone’s head, just being picky.)

James responded to the song I linked in the weekend edition by pointing out its immaculate engineering has much to do with Blake Mills (who is also up for a Producer of the Year award for work with Perfume Genius, Japanese Breakfast, Lucy Dacus and Haim): “He basically makes stuff sound like an updated Laurel Canyon. I'm not sure I dig it, because all of those artists except Haim are not great with ‘smoothness.’ They all sound better rough. But Palladino sounds great smooth.” I agree with his take!

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