October 14, 2025

Last Week's New Yorker Review: October 13

Last Week’s New Yorker, week of October 13

“not race, not gender, not queerness, not diversity, not cancel culture, not sexual assault, and certainly not philosophy.”

Must-Read:

“Alma Mater” (The Current Cinema) - Justin Chang raises and Guadagnino goes Allen. This might be Chang’s first big positive divergence from the consensus, a (qualified) rave for a film which has – as Chang accurately predicts in the last paragraph – been critically “derided as little more than an intellectual parlor trick”. Chang agrees with that assessment and then tells us why he likes the movie anyway: It’s a story where the style and design of the tale matter far more than the politics, where the surface is the thing. Sontag’s late-sixties call for critics to consider form and appearance has been thoroughly digested by the critical apparatus, yet it remains striking when a critic has the ability to articulate how a film lands without relying on explanation. This movie is itself a “glossy lie… cleverly rigged to generate cascading waves of suspicion”, featuring a character who “withdraws into a cocoon of inscrutability as her dilemma becomes more fraught” while her husband harnesses “the puckish wit of a cuckolded diva”. This year has brought a few notable examples of formal accomplishment paired with discourse-bait window-dressing.¹ Chang couldn’t stand Eddington; he loved One Battle… for its “political mythmaking” – but the three films are each hard to pin down attempts to negotiate between sharpness and cruelty, each filmmaker declining to make sense of the near-present moment² and deciding, instead, to make movie.

“Season of Discontent” (Musical Events) - Alex Ross goes wail watching. It remains astonishing how Ross is able to effortlessly combine a trenchant analysis of the political implications of curatorial choices (from the Met Opera’s “predictable” hypocrisy, applauding artistic expression while collaborating with the Saudis, to the Philharmonic’s more sincere “pluralism and diversity… brushing against a fresh wave of repression”) with dynamic and never doting musical analysis (Dudamel’s rendition of Ives started “undercharacterized” before achieving “lustrous, amber-hued phrasing”; the orchestra at times “seemed only fitfully engaged with Dudamel’s direction — a warning sign amid hoopla”) and more broad-based analysis (Dudamel is “using his celebrity to advance the cause of contemporary music”, the Met gives ambitious topics to composers with “more proficiency than personality.”) I’m shocked that Ross thinks the Met’s boring Kavalier has gotten “a deft, kinetic production” and more shocked that this has become the consensus take on a show this visually unambitious: a show about a comics illustrator where the illustrations were both vastly different from one another in style and uniformly below-art-school-portfolio quality; where one concentration camp backdrop, conceptually nauseating to begin with, also looked pulled from Google Images; where a randomly-black-and-white Empire State Building copter photo – used, for some reason, to signify that the characters were on the building – could only bring to mind the art in an awful pizza spot; where even the most basic sets, transposed to horrid video projections, brought to mind Mafia II. I feel less bad ranting about what may be the single ugliest theatrical production I’ve ever seen because it wasn’t even credited to an individual but a “collective” of known sloppers with over 50 roles. (dots this is not.) What else have they been up to? Oh… ahh… hmmm…

Window-Shop:

“Locked In” (Annals of Justice) - Jennifer Gonnerman sees New York’s prisons HALT and catch fire. Gonnerman is consistently one of the magazine’s strongest writers, and her two recurring themes are prison reform and unionization. This story combines both, and to increase the degree of difficulty Gonnerman centers her story around the ex-convict reporter who tracked two prison murders and a strike – meaning the story is really four stories, all linked in ways that could seem tangential if not for Gonnerman’s steady hand. Letitia James provides a kind of diagetic content warning in the third paragraph, and from there the story is steadily horrifying, though never gratuitously so. A prisoner is tortured to death by guards, soon after which there is a wildcat guards’ strike; the two may be linked, but it’s less a conspiracy than a slow-rolling catastrophe. The guards’ jobs are made unbearable by extreme mandated overtime, it’s impossible to hire more guards (whatever their gender), legislation outlawing flagrantly inhumane use of solitary (or, unbelievably, dual solitary) confinement has kept guards from relying on the threat of torture to keep people subservient, which, as it turns out, was largely the only thing they had to rely on. Gonnerman doesn’t state all this as bluntly as I am, but neither does she paper over the facts. This could hardly be a more cut-and-dry case of the weaknesses of prison reform as an ideology: Even when it “works”, as in the passing of HALT, it leads inexorably to death and disarray. Nicholas, obviously an excellent reporter, keeps uncritically reaffirming the basic premise that prisons are necessary to the piece’s very end. If, after reading Gonnerman’s narrative, that strikes you as a depressing thought, there are other things you can read.

Mead on Mark (Takes) - A superb photographic exegesis. Nothing complicated.

🗣️ “Phone-Free” (IRL Dept.) - Charlotte Goddu screens for fraud. The rare recent a-bunch-of-assholes-at-a-party Talk that actually has bite and wit.

“Don’t Blame Me” (Pop Music) - Amanda Petrusich says Taylor’s new ERA is getting up there, and she also keeps striking out. …But she still bagged the gym teacher, so. Anyway, this is basically right re the (total lack of) merits of the new Swift record, a little too kind but it’s not an easy project to accurately critique without sounding like a hater. (I am far from a Swift hater³, but when the best song on your album could pass for a wordy Meghan Trainor B-side, you have a big problem.) But Petrusich just doesn’t bring very much fire, and if this isn’t the time for it, I don’t know when will be. (That the biggest pop star in the world has released a project this shockingly inept and all the really cutting criticism has come from memes and posts makes me want to don my Kelefa Sanneh mask and awkwardly fist-pump en masse.) Instead, she very clinically diagnoses Swift’s problem, a lack of nutrients going to her relatability. But as literally every commentator has pointed out ad nauseum, these are weird days for pop stars: No one has real hits, but also no one is ever vanquished. (At least, not for racism or misogyny, even when it infects the product. Being cheugy, on the other hand? I guess we’ll see.) In the absence of any new narratives beyond that stasis, critics either repeat themselves or find something new to talk about. Unfortunately, on these pages, the record is mostly skipping. Slight variations on a worn-out theme: That describes the product, but it shouldn’t describe the reaction. If you don’t have anything nice to say, you gotta be (so) mean.

Skip Without Guilt:

“Continental Dreams” (A Critic at Large) - Kelefa Sanneh is in a state, or two. Interesting but dry and a bit unformed. Sanneh’s history doesn’t quite progress to the present day (beyond some cursory Zohran references, since his dad’s book is one of the two under review). The cloudy thesis suggests an exploration of America that never arrives. Instead, Sanneh narrowly discusses two figures, Ghana’s Kwame Nkrumah and Uganda’s Idi Amin, in a sort of dual determination of the degree to which each fell short, and of how they should be thought of today. Sanneh is skeptical of a new book that positions Nkrumah as a visionary leader – perhaps he had a vision, but as a leader he was ruthlessly authoritarian, and that’s, inevitably, his legacy. Amin, meanwhile, was undeniably a tyrant, but his exile didn’t improve things. Sanneh’s discussion of Mamdani’s book is unfortunately rushed; I’m not sure why we spend so much longer with Nkrumah. Contemporary African politics is under-discussed in Western publications, and I’m thankful for any coverage. That these facts are well worth knowing is still not quite enough for me to suggest you learn them here.

“The Hague on Trial” (A Reporter at Large) - David D. Kirkpatrick questions if the Criminal is coming from inside the International Court. Thorough, thoughtful, high-quality reporting in service of a story that ends up being sort of meaningless. The Chief Prosecutor of the ICC is caught up in sexual-misconduct allegations, the truth value of which are impossible to determine (as hard as Kirkpatrick tries). Mossad is either involved or is being clumsily framed, and the mess has successfully undermined the Prosecutor’s war-crime warrants against Israeli leaders. That is, beginning to end, the entire story here, and perhaps it’s just not a story suited to long form narrative journalism. Neither Khan nor his accuser spoke to Kirkpatrick; virtually all the sourcing is on background, which means everything must be couched in caveats. Do we need to know about the details of Khan’s relationship with his accuser? There is neither any salacious interest nor any political pertinence to lines like this: “In correspondence that Khan made available to the investigators, his accuser appears to be very warm, prone to disclosure about her personal life and struggles, highly solicitous of Khan and his wife, and perhaps overeager.” Sure, and? That question comes up again and again. Kirkpatrick is clearly at least somewhat skeptical of cynical right-wing anti-Khan reporting from the Journal and elsewhere, but he ends up reproducing its reporting and finding fairly little to counter them. Whether Khan sexually harassed an employee should of course have no bearing at all upon whether the Hague prosecutes Israeli leaders. That it clearly has and will is a much larger scandal than Khan’s possible personal malignity. Adjust the focus!

“Third Act” (Profiles) - Emily Nussbaum Keris the scene.⁴ I do understand that Nussbaum is deliberately going for an is-it-an-act thing here, in which Russell’s sometimes show-offy insistence that she isn’t especially driven or put together may or may not mask a deeper drive. Unfortunately, it doesn’t come across; instead, Russell just seems evasive. (Nothing wrong with that, of course; she also seems happy and emotionally grounded. Just doesn’t make for a fun story.) Her long career breaks up neatly into signature roles, and Nussbaum doesn’t find much of interest in between them; the very long recurring examination of Russell’s motives in taking some time off in her twenties to explore New York is almost hallucinogenically dull. (“At times, Russell fantasized about applying to Sarah Lawrence and getting a college degree. …She didn’t do it, though.”) The Americans, Russell’s mid-career breakout, is not exactly a vehicle for her; she’s good, but Rhys is really the star, whatever the call sheet says. (He also comes across as absurdly charming here, out-bantering Russell even when discussing her.) The two largely evade questions about their getting together, though the story about shooting a sex scene and being too at-ease is the best thing here. If there is anything interesting to say about The Diplomat, Russell’s current semi-campy-streaming-prestige project, Nussbaum doesn’t find it; all her theses relate to Russell’s past, not her present. The most genuine emotion Russell exudes here is a sense that she is not especially interesting, and that surely this magazine’s readers have bigger things to care about. Frankly, I’m inclined to agree.

“Out of Office” (Letter from Helsinki) - Jennifer Wilson sees Sanna Marin put the finish in Finnish. Man, it’s just a really weird time to be writing a largely congratulatory portrait of a center-left Finnish Prime Minister who left office and joined the literal Tony Blair Institute. Marin basically followed the Obama path: Made a difference in the short term without thinking that much about the long term, then dipped the fuck out while the rest of the place went to shit. Obviously it’s a little different when your country is not globally significant, and Marin’s odd celebrity certainly did subject her to scrutiny and attacks beyond what’s usual in Finland (though her resentment of the media’s influence still feels petty; negotiating that relationship is just part of the job of a head of state. That Hillary Clinton comes to her defense doesn’t help me feel for her.) What’s ironic is that Wilson is almost completely uninterested in discussing Marin as a political figure, instead treating her as, wouldn’t you know it, a celebrity; there is one very late reference to a tram-repair program that really stands out as the only discussion of Marin’s political accomplishments. Marin’s history is interesting enough, especially when it serves as a way to give us the recent political history of the country, but I don’t especially care about her relationship with her husband and kids, much less whether an obscure local scandal about breakfast receipts was really just borne of sexism. There are two brief paragraphs quoting disappointment with Marin for joining with Blair; it’s good but not enough. Wilson’s treatment of Marin verges on the uncomfortably parasocial. She doesn’t owe Finland leadership, but neither is she owed protection or praise. Did she girlboss too close to the sun? Did they catch her having too much fun? Good thing she likes her friends cancelled.

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Letters:

Negatory. Sorry I’m so late. Just wasn’t flowing.

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wild

west