September 14, 2025

Last Week's New Yorker Review: September 15

Last Week’s New Yorker, week of September 15

“Tattoos, which fall under the ‘Symbolism’ category, constitute four points”

After a refreshing summer break, I’m beginning work as a substitute teacher next Monday.¹ But I don’t anticipate that being an every-day-of-the-week thing, so if you have (or know of) a good opportunity, please reach out (you can reply to this email). I can do, and have done, freelance writing and editing of many sorts; I also have an MFA in media arts so stuff that goes beyond text is good too. No job too small or large, too weird or boring.

Must-Read:

“Enemies of the State” (A Reporter at Large) - Jonathan Blitzer finds the Administration’s policies are patched with abduct tape. These abductions will be the defining story of early Trump 2, yet the information on them has trickled out piecemeal, bits of horrifying information attached to no narrative. Here’s Blitzer to fill in those gaps, speaking to the abducted Venezuelans and their families, and telling their stories with just enough background information to give context. (It is worth reading up more on the political situation in Venezuela, as there’s more complication there than Blitzer allows.) Thankfully, Blitzer finds enough narrative threads to follow here that the piece does not become a series of brutal descriptions of injustice and mistreatment. There is some of that, but the banal bureaucracy of the procedure that allowed for such things – points systems, apps – is more striking and, in some ways, more horrifying. Blitzer also presents a miniature real-estate drama in which Haredi landlords deliberately let their slum be taken over by Central American gangs, then painted themselves as the victims. It’s a narrative strangely reminiscent of the Bronx fires covered recently, and one doesn’t need to label it “racial capitalism” to see an obvious attempt to profit off xenophobia. Elite fascists subsequently spun a story that the entire city had been taken over by the gang, and used this as thin justification for mass illegal deportations. The prison conditions, when Blitzer gets to them, are horrifying, but he finds more shades by telling the whole story.

“There’s the Rub” (Letter from Copenhagen) - Sarah Larson spots a rare medium well-done, and the medium is the massage. Is there anything more wonderfully human than an arbitrary, esoteric competition? From Christopher Guest movies to county fairs, we love that shit! Larson does an exceptional job balancing outré detail and genuine appreciation, without the performative skepticism (or starry-eyed boosterism) that often clouds pieces about fields that verge on woo. She also finds some time to show us the basics of Danish culture, with all its matter-of-fact supremacy. What really elevates the piece is its final section, where Larson is massaged by the prize winner, whose non-show-offy care and specificity is hugely effective and affecting, even, ironically, when it comes to winning awards. (It’s interesting that he focuses on legs and feet, since washing of the feet is so associated with Christian humility. Perhaps there’s something to that.) To be clear, though, if you’re here to laugh lovingly at the strangeness of this small world – if you want the Christopher Guest experiece – that’s here, too. There are mallets and cups, goths and Cuban rum… there is pretty much everything but prize money. After all, they want to feel the squeeze!

Window-Shop:

🗣️ “Dumpster Diving” (Back to School Dept.) - Ben McGrath values both dorm and function. The ideal contemporary Talk: A witty, class-conscious, just barely acerbic glance at what’s ultimately a worthwhile, if weird, idea.

“Take Me Back” (On and Off the Menu) - Hannah Goldfield accepts all cookies. This sweet treat comes with a sudden bitter chaser – something is rotten in the state, if not yet in the state fair. Before that, it’s all charm, bliss, and butter.

Gourevitch on Peress (Takes) - Stunning photo, good quick writeup; apt.

“Gulf” (Shouts & Murmurs) - Ian Frazier plays gulf-ish. (Got any kings?) I should probably cringe at the out-of-date Trump-baiting, but the absurd linguistic play already has me smiling. I like that Frazier finds ways to escalate the scenario that aren’t limited to saying the phrase more and more.

“The Chameleon” (Musical Events) - Alex Ross falls deep in Bohuslav. I so appreciate that Bard musters the effort to elevate the deep cuts of comparatively obscure composers instead of just playing the canon. Even listening along with Ross’ commentary, though, it’s hard to really get a sense of Bohuslav’s apparently distinctive style just from hearing a couple pieces (he mixed influences… sure, who doesn’t?), but I suppose at least now I know the name.

Skip Without Guilt:

“There’s Something About Marlowe” (Books) - Anthony Lane asks if this is the face that launched a thousand iambs. Lane’s only thesis concerning Marlowe is that he was one of the few writers to both have a crazy life and write as he experienced it, and that in lieu of evidence proving that he was any one thing, we may as well assume he was everything. Neither point is especially convincing, and the piece largely becomes a list of raised possibilities: All the things Marlowe might have been doing, something inherently of interest only if you already care about Marlowe. His prose is ahead of its time technically but his stories are repugnant politically; his raffish life doesn’t wildly deepen the meaning of his works, as far as I can tell. As to his art, Lane veers toward special pleading / and so the reader wonders why they’re reading.

“Talking Cure” (Onward and Upward with the Arts) - Rebecca Mead commits insecurities Freud. Bella Freud uses her great-grandfather as an aesthetic (she hasn’t read his work, and she claims to have benefited from therapy but Mead doesn’t even say if it’s analysis or – my guess – just CBT, which is only barely Freudian) and her father as an idol, despite his bad behavior; she herself barely emerges from this piece, which is too much and not enough. Freud the youngest has a fashion career and a podcast interviewing her famous friends; both rely on her name and her resources, which is no inherent strike against them, but is perhaps why I find both efforts so deathly dull. Women’s suits and Kate Moss on a couch? (I listened to that episode and it put me right to sleep.) If you’re interested in the troubled life of Lucien, there’s more than enough of that here, with plenty of details that need unpacking but don’t receive it. The continued justification and celebration of Lucien allowing her a vodka and cigarette at fourteen is quite extraordinary, and makes me wonder if her alienation from her mother was in some way facilitated by Lucien. Mead gives Bella lots of time to speak and offers very little commentary, a tactic that might have worked wonders for one Freud… but this is journalism, not analysis.

“Comedy of Errors” (Pop Music) - Amanda Petrusich would never label Carpenter square. Maybe Sanneh’s call for edgy music crit last week is coming from inside the house, because Petrusich soft-peddles her stance on this album so heavily she ends up saying nothing. We do not need a breakdown of Sabrina Carpenter’s public image, whose very advantage is that it’s both meaningless and easy to grasp. And her new album is a big disappointment, one clever novelty song² extrapolated out in a variety of effortful, corny directions. Petrusich gives it a smattering of labels that suggest positivity while remaining neutral, even a bit arch (“bright, effervescent”, “twangy, ribald”), which at first lead me to suspect that a takedown was around the corner. Instead there’s just this: Nothing “quite surpasses” the “buoyancy” of Petrusich’s favorite from the last album, “Espresso”. And this is virtually all we hear about the music, because Petrusich then devotes the rest of the article to negotiating the gender politics of Carpenter’s raunchily submissive cover art and its stuck-up detractors. This is really just a take on the latest social-media discourse, the sort of thing the Times covers in ‘conversation form’, what we oh so briefly called ‘fake news’³ – in other words, the very last thing I want from this publication. Here it feels only like filler, perhaps to avoid too much discussion of the music. Petrusich’s favorite song on the record is a dull ballad that barely resembles anything around it. She comes here neither to praise or bury Carpenter, but just to add another flashbulb to her very shiny surface. What’s the point?

“Bot Meets Girl” (Brave New World Dept.) - Patricia Marx makes a token effort. Oh, brother. It’s clear Marx knows nothing about LLMs – some of the early bots she interacts with here can’t reasonably be called LLMS – and this mostly felt like someone in, like, 1955 asking if movies can tell an interesting story, then watching Roundhay Garden Scene and concluding they can’t. I am no booster of these technologies, but the worst possible approach is Marx’s blithe, goofy, shrugging skepticism, which can only convince experts that the haters don’t know what they’re talking about and convince non-experts that it’s probably not worth knowing about this stuff at all. It adds insult to injury that Marx includes the barest-bones explanatory sections, as if she’s claiming to have done the reading, and is here to inform us all that A.I. is a series of tubes. I’m not trying to spoil the fun (Marx does that herself, constantly returning to real-world death and delusion before pivoting back to long quotes of doggerel) but the question Marx raises is a potentially interesting one – why are people so drawn to these poor simulations of connection? – and answering it as Marx does is essentially to say, “I have no idea, but we’re better than those people.” Careful, Patricia, of what you’re confessing. Say ten “Hail Derrida”s and consult the Garfield image.

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Letters:

Meaghan points out that Carina Chocano jumped on the celeb children’s book beat before either Sloane Crosley in the magazine last week or Emily Gould in The Cut. Chocano’s piece is solid, but it’s more of an investigative trend-watch article than the cocked-brow book survey both Crosley and Gould produced versions of, and I stand by my supposition that Gould wins that battle because the countdown listicle form fits the subject better than any essay could.

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distrust all in whom

the impulse to punish is powerful