November 6, 2025

Last Week's New Yorker Review: November 3

Last Week’s New Yorker, week of November 3

“‘She is dressed in a white gown, with green ornaments, which convinces me of what I had always supposed, that green was a favourite color with her.’”

Must-Read:

“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 control¹ 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.² 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.

Window-Shop:

“Bodies Politic” (Dancing) - Jennifer Homans thinks Jamar Roberts’ new climate change dance is full of hot air. I’m very glad I got to see Roberts’ dance, just for the sake of more fully grasping Homans’ critique, though I agree with her it didn’t come together. (My reading of the “plot”, about which I knew nothing going in, was largely wrong; I imagined it to be about queer rebellion suppressed by capitalism, but apparently it’s, even more flatly, just about nature suppressed by industry.) I was surprised Gia Kourlas dug it so much. Homans’ takes on Roberts’ past dances – the inspiring early work, the “wandering and diffuse” more recent pieces – could be cut down, just because they don’t fully relate to what makes the new dance such a misfire: Didactic messaging, “superficial” themes, overcomplicated costumes and undercomplicated movements. I’m glad that Homans doesn’t feel pressured to exclusively deliver raves, given that she’s only in the magazine about three times a year. A pointed critique is appreciated just as much. I want to read her more regularly, but I’ll appreciate what I get.

Lewis-Kraus on West (Takes) - The Janet Malcolm comparisons pretty much demand an expert reader, and they don’t really deepen the reading of West. Everything else here is superb, identifying West’s withering report on a Fascist bureaucrat sentenced to death as exemplary not only of her famous wit but of her “operatic” yet “deadpan pathos”. The connection from that resentful man to “the toadying courtiers of our era’s New Right, who fawn over despots with the same pick-me devotion” is well-stated enough to not seem obvious. The magazine’s coverage of Nuremberg, both by West and others including Janet Flanner, is the more famous and more obvious pick; I like that Lewis-Kraus went with something related but just a bit earlier, before the eyes of the world descended.

(The Mail) - Three wonderful responses to Dana Goodyear’s piece on the California fires, each its own kind of critique-slash-reparative-reading. But the third one is special. I teared up.

“Hive Minds” (The Current Cinema) - Justin Chang is Bugon out.³ Perfectly fine. The last two lines are Chang’s third or fourth time reminding us how much he hated Eddington – okay, but let’s let it rest now. He doesn’t really make sense of this film’s politics, either, and almost every paragraph here seems cut off a line or two too soon: I wanted a little more formal analysis, a little more on Stone’s performance, a bit more explanation of what is so “pleasurable” about a film that, to me, mostly sounds irritating.

Skip Without Guilt:

“Just Misunderstood” (A Critic at Large) - Manvir Singh has a question: What do all these things have in common? I predicted both Singh’s turns from the first paragraph: Monsters are less hateworthy because our society more often values empathy toward difference; we’re replacing storybook monsters with ideological ones. The sections giving a history of vampires, zombies, and Frankenstein’s monster reiterate the thesis without deepening it; the section on the “sympathetic turn” is more compelling but unfortunately reliant on a long quote from a friend’s child. And then we get into present-day politics, with one of those shallow analyses that relies on a single poll to extrapolate a moral condemnation not grounded in any actual fact. The idea that only four percent of Republicans will actively condone political violence has nothing to do with the fact that a Republican administration is currently enacting political violence against its people. Is it that our view is inaccurate, or is it that most monsters are blind to their monstrousness? That’s what made Frankenstein’s creature so ominous: He was more self-aware than his maker.

“The Natural” (Profiles) - Jia Tolentino sinks her teeth into Jennifer Lawrence’s body of work. A mostly unsurprising profile of a fairly normal-seeming woman. I didn’t fully realize Lawrence was that big of a star (apparently someone really does keep track of these things, and Tolentino’s Julia Roberts comparison, which struck me as oddball, is statistically unbeatable) as I just thought of her as a nominally quirky character actress with one blockbuster series who’s given four or five excellent performances in middling movies⁴ – about the same resumé as Kristen Stewart. That comparison suggests a really obvious answer to the question of why Lawrence keeps getting cast as young mothers: Unlike a lot of the most charismatic actresses of her generation, she convincingly reads as straight. Maybe her supposedly oddball-disheveled-cool-girl personality is not only not a put-on but is just roughly what most young straight women act like? Now she gets her mock breakdown rite of passage in the new Lynne Ramsey film (why couldn’t Tolentino profile Ramsey?) – but Tolentino is mostly concerned with her relationship to the press. “Is she being real with me?” is the operative question.

Tolentino is a good blogger, and while the moments where she peeks through as a character can be distracting, they’re often very funny. (“Slightly to my dismay — I had never previously managed to secure a table at Via Carota — we weren’t eating.”) But the only material here that’s actually illuminating concerns Lawrence’s upbringing and her untrained, in-the-moment approach to acting. It’s all in the section that begins “Lawrence was a double surprise…” – everything else can be skimmed. At some points one feels Tolentino steering the convo toward her own interests (authenticity, leftist politics, “the seemingly ubiquitous new style of facelift”) and it’s easy to wonder if the interviewee might have felt like the second-most-charismatic person in the room. That might be a relief; I’m not sure it’s good for this article.

“Reconstructed” (The Art World) - Julian Lucas builds a statue of limitations. This L.A. show of uninstalled Confederate monuments juxtaposed with contemporary art has gotten raves everywhere, and Lucas is content to progress in a celebratory-descriptive mode, with some very basic history of the post-defeat Confederate monument movement, and sometimes surface-level readings of the art on display. (Bands of shoe prints are “conveying the exhaustion of Black sailors and soldiers”.) Anyone familiar with the contemporary artists – almost exclusively very big names – will hardly need Lucas’ descriptions; anyone unfamiliar won’t really understand anyway. The work is still compelling enough that the description is readable. But for such supposedly provocative material, I don’t really know how any of it made Lucas feel.

“Information Overload” (Brave New World Dept.) - Stephen Witt says mine AIs have seen the gridlock of the coming of the cores; they are trampling out the topsoil where the power lines are stored; they have loosed the fateful lightning of a world that’s never bored; their lies are turning on. Frustratingly basic and focused on the wrong things. After an indulgent first half that is mostly a tour of a few facilities, Witt gets around to a mild critique: They’re putting pressure on the power grid, which is bad for the environment; they might lead to another Panic of 1893 (I wanted more on that! And more on various other similar crashes, panics, and pops); it could be a bubble… But, “then again, it could be that the hype is justified”, says Witt, giving as evidence… the fact that he wrote a book about Nvidia’s CEO, so therefore he better not fail! It’s quite literally too-big-to-fail logic: “If Americans want to retire comfortably, Nvidia has to succeed” – who’d root against that? Last, he briefly addresses the “copyright infringement” that all these models are built on, then handwaves it away – next they’ll start sucking up “spatial data” instead! Witt wrote the book on music piracy; he’d be the perfect person to go deep on the implications of A.I. data practices, and it’s strange and disappointing that he’d rather go all wide-eyed. Matteo Wong and Charlie Warzel at The Atlantic just put out a shorter, deeper, less euphemistic piece on data centers; you should read that instead.

“American Frequencies” (Reflections) - Jill Lepore says Trump isn’t a poster child, he’s a poster, child. “Any analogy for Trump is insufficient.” Would you like Lepore to pound this point into the ground for you? There’s some wit here, and enough brevity one can push through it. But you won’t get much in return: Just the usual admittance that the people who believe Trump’s lies believe him because, uh, because shit is fucked up and bullshit, basically. “Impoverished, homeless veterans wander legless on the streets and the children of the poor die in understaffed clinics awaiting treatment that never comes while the rich get treated in glistening spas and have their butts waxed by people who have been trafficked into the country and live twenty-three to a room with no running water.” I mean, sure. But do Trump supporters really care about any of that? And do the rest of us need to be told?

“Categorical Revolution” (Books) - Adam Kirsch serves Kant. An unaccountably basic take on Kant. Maybe his ideas aren’t that hard to understand – but I doubt that very much, having read a bit of the work. Perhaps so much has been built atop Kant – both analytic and continental philosophy rely on him for, respectively, the foundations of categorical reasoning and the basic idea of the illusory thing-in-itself⁵ – that his ideas now seem sort of obvious, but in that case Kirsch needs to make that claim and back it up; instead, he treats Kant’s ideas as if they’re still fresh and surprising. He also proclaims Kant’s biography “terrifically dull” before spending five paragraphs telling us about it. That’d all still make this a high skip, except that Kirsch ends the piece with one of the worst here’s-how-this-all-applies-to-the-present-political-moment riffs I can recall in the magazine. (And there’s plenty of competition.) Setting up a false dichotomy between authoritarian fascism and “reason”–motivated liberalism isn’t great, nor is the presentation of decay as an abberation and not a consequence of liberalism, but at least that part is coherent and in line with Kirsch’s general deal. The just-asking-questions A.I. stuff is worse, reliant on shaky definitions (“mind”, “reality”) to a degree that is totally ascientific. I can barely parse it to the point where I can critique it. If Kirsch had guts he would bring up the Gazan genocide and his continual support for Zionism. Does the IDF show respect for humanity? What would Kant have to say about all that?

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Letters:

Feh!

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peter peter

pumpkin eater