September 28, 2025

Last Week's New Yorker Review: September 29

Last Week’s New Yorker, week of September 29

“‘cheery sing-song voices, as if addressing a pre-school class.’”

Must-Read:

“After the Flood” (Books) - Katy Waldman cheats at cards against the humanities. The first line got a laugh – a good start. The rest of the review implies the book is worth reading without really stating it outright; while the downside is that at least half of the plot progression is revealed, the upside is that this synopsis leads directly toward Waldman’s clever analysis of McEwan’s stark treatment of the climate crisis – that we are each “homewreckers” in denial of our adulteries. The book sounds really interesting (Dwight Garner adored it) and while it’s a bit dismaying that all the books covered in the Books section of the Fall Books issue are written by old white dudes with firmly established reputations, I guess I’ll take what I get.

Window-Shop:

Briefly Noted (Books) - On the other hand, reading these four fascinating blurbs – a Japanese novel on surrogacy, a novel-in-snippets on journalism now, a history of encoded manuscripts, and, especially, a memoir of music and Baltimore by the wonderful Lawrence Burney – makes me wish that the magazine could have reviewed each one. It’s called Fall Books – surely they could spare the leaves. (Failing that, these blurbs could at least come with credited writers!)

🗣️ “Upside Down” (Locals Dept.) - Dan Greene helps to pilaf a layer of Mahmoud Khalil. Khalil and his family are so likeable. All power to him; thank goodness he can cook again.

Galchen on Carver (Takes) - As I said in the Weekend Special, Galchen’s story is genuinely inspired by Carver’s, both thematically and formally linked. As such, she has more to say about the connections than any of the previous fiction authors in this series.

“Don’t Say It Like That” (A Critic at Large) - Ben Yagoda throws a Fowler ball. It’s somewhat strange to write this piece without mentioning The Elements of Style, originally predating Fowler’s text but later updated and published by E. B. White (who is mentioned here), which is even more infamous than Fowler’s effort. Is it possible that the false accusations Fowler gets of specific kinds of prescriptivism (citations “‘unaware of Fowler’s strong condemnation of their pedantry’”) are in fact just due to a case of mistaken identity? Knowing that this magazine closely followed the advice of a certain southeast Londoner when it comes to grammar tells us only that the magazine is as arbitrarily strict as it is strictly arbitrary, which may as well be on the cover; a more obvious connection, between Fowler’s constant quotations of “poor usage” and the magazine’s noted newsbreaks, which are much the same thing, is not directly made. Most of the interest here is strictly anecdotal, but Yagoda acquits himself well in that department; the close and tragic relationship between the Fowler brothers is oddly moving, the list of “bugbears” helpful for those of us newsletter writers who agonize, in the absence of a professional editor, over matters of usage. Don’t worry, Yagoda intimates – all that is eccentric may also be idiosyncratic.

Give a Glance:

(A very occasional section when there are a number of pieces that might be worth reading despite major structural or conceptual issues.)

“You People” (Books) - Ian Buruma pricks us. None of this came as a surprise – except for one very weird detail, which is that the Japanese government apparently read one of the most virulently antisemitic texts ever written and thought “we gotta get them on our side!” That’s pretty great, if so directly related to Buruma’s interests one wonders if he isn’t inflating the story. Otherwise, this is essentially one of the exact sorts of articles many on the left have loudly accused the free-speech warriors of a few years back (a group that includes Buruma) of not writing; while it’s certainly to Buruma’s credit that he wrote it, it’s two years late and hundreds of billions of dollars short. Still, taking the piece on its own terms, it’s almost impossible to quibble with the extremely solid and thoroughly temperate estimation of the abuse of antisemitism accusations by the right wing and the ridiculousness of calling terminology like “‘settler colonialism’” antisemitic, and Buruma does an excellent job speedily providing the basic historical context, if (somehow) you don’t already know it. That he tells it almost entirely from the American Jewish perspective is telling – Arabs here are cast as the watched, not the watchers – and if, on this specific subject, that’s arguably fitting, it’s worth considering that Buruma chose a framing which lets him avoid some harder questions. The Mediterranean is beautiful if you don’t turn your head.

“No Way Out” (Books) - Kathryn Schulz is a Pynchon hitter. Good justification of an iffy thesis. (It’s faced some mockery already, though perhaps that’s due to the semi-misleading pull quote the magazine posted. The quote out of context implies “Nothing!” as a response in a way the piece does not.) Even as Schulz describes the book, its critique of current-day U.S. culture seems pretty evident; Schulz’s continual exasperation at the zaniness is frustrating if what you’re looking for from lesser Pynchon is, you know, lesser Pynchon, not the bad Kim Stanley Robinson impression that Schulz sometimes seems to be hankering for. Pynchon is not merely about a “profusion of details”, the slide-whistle zaniness is also part of the thing, and probably the part that makes it resonate with our triple sabotage present moment. The American public is not kind to affect in service of ambiguity.¹ That’s all the more reason why Pynchon’s lack of evident meaning shouldn’t frustrate the close, critical reader: He’s indicating exactly why your attention matters.

“On the Impersonal Essay” (Life and Letters) - Zadie Smith has a sixth-paragraph sense. A defense of a mode of thought which promises fullness and balance, then delivers repetitious conclusions based on prior frameworks, ending exactly where it began. If that sounds like Smith’s rejoinder to Andrea Long Chu calling her a liberal… well, it sort of is, but maybe not how you’re thinking. The institution Smith is defending is actually, allegedly, the rigidly structured essay as a thinking tool. Smith claims to be writing a simple letter of recommendation for structured writing as thinking out loud, but while it’s true that constraints breed creativity, Smith’s actual process is more specific: She envisions a pure font of negative capability, generally penned in by the belief systems she holds dear (as the closing metaphor suggests), but not strictly beholden to them. The line Chu draws between “ethics” and “politics” is evident here, and one doesn’t even have to resort to metaphor to take this piece as a fetishization, by Smith, of a preexisting structure. Smith presents that structure as symbolic of “the commons”, opposed to “the landowner”, but it’s notable that debate and rhetoric seem to be the only things she has faith in. Even the imaginary proposition Smith imagines in this field involves the expansion of suffrage – in other words, reform of what exists. Where, in Smith’s landscape, is action? Kett’s rebels did not publish their grievances in Harper’s and wait for the king to give up. They tore down fences – or, really, they died trying.

“Cinema Paradiso” (Onward and Upward with the Arts) - Anthony Lane reels in the years. Apparently Lane, denied his previous outlet, spent the last year and a half jonesing to make bad film jokes and, having finally found an excuse, set his fire hose to “exterminate”. There is an often-laborious punchline at the end of every single paragraph, describing, for example, how one print had only a few seconds used in a new restoration: “the lone anchovy, so to speak, that you lay atop your spectacular sandwich, having raided the fridge for every possible ingredient”. That metaphor is totally inapt – it’s more like a restored piece of furniture with a single knob you bought on Amazon – and so are most of Lane’s clunkier-than-I-remembered bits. There is a sense of inexpert enthusiasm (Lane, who calls himself a “lay intruder”, assesses the sticker on a film reel as if it’s a novel tool of the trade and says digital retouching software names sound like “cheap perfumes”) that partly spoils the fun, because his obviously performative bafflement comes across as dismissive. I’m glad that Lane enjoyed his European vacation, but I’d rather not be made to feel silly for actually being interested in the “often obsessive environment” he presents. The piece held my attention, and I wouldn’t feel right telling you to skip it just because I’m nerdier than Lane². And at the end, Lane just seems to start deriving nostalgia from first principles, which is, at least, genuinely funny. (He implies that one can’t be nostalgic for something they didn’t experience, which, tell that to tiktok.) Lane has had decades to tell us about movies. I’d decline this remarriage, Italian style.

Skip Without Guilt:

“Up for Debate” (The Theatre) - Helen Shaw turns a whiter shade of pale. Shaw’s weakness remains the pan; veins pop out as she strains to find something worthy in a vapid exercise not worthy of her reparative reading. I saw Wild Duck, meanwhile, before reading Shaw’s review; her read of the Laanstra-Corn performance, the obvious high point – verging on the purpose – of the production, is compelling (“only the audience seems to be able to see how the adults’ toxicity is building up inside her mind”), but her too-brief thematic precis avoids the self-referential weirdness of the text, and, unlike poor Hedvig, misses the heart.

“Prompt Diagnosis” (Brave New World Dept.) - Dhruv Khullar turns on the monitor. I’m thankful, at least, that Khullar lands on a note so skeptical it retroactively shades the rest of the article as probing a position for weaknesses. That said, the position is weak, and I’m not sure Khullar correctly diagnoses the main issues with LLM as a doctor’s helper. He makes the valid point that the tool is likely more useful as that sort of helper than it would be looking to diagnose, something that’s easier to test but far less useful in practice. But so much of what Khullar seems to want is a way for doctors to offload the parts of their job involving patient explanation and steering. I think that in the long run – maybe even the short run – that practice would prove disastrous to not only patients but also doctors, who need to consistently practice exactly the sort of empathy in which patients are viewed as people, not entrants into an opaque and dehumanizing system. That the healthcare system is largely failing at this now does not mean that a deeply flawed alternative, which quite literally does not care, would necessarily make things better. Besides my quibbles with the content, Khullar is weirdly bad at connecting anecdotes to analysis, which makes this a bumpy read. Too much time is spent trying to figure out what he meant by what he said. That reminds me, unfortunately, of the doctor’s office.

“Fire Season” (Letter from California) - Dana Goodyear hopes for humanitarian Palisade. My biggest issue with this story, arguably, is just its section header. If this were billed as a personal history, I’d find it a bit repetitive, probably not especially illuminating, but certainly heartfelt and unobjectionable. But as a feature piece that purports to encompass the story, it scans as remarkably blinkered, focusing so intently on Goodyear’s extremely affluent, oldish, white pocket of the world that the inequity of their “fight for rebirth” doesn’t seem to register at all. Along with Goodyear’s family, we’re introduced to their neighbors, those Deschanels, after which the first two-thirds of this quite long article are just a beat-by-beat retelling of the escape, complete with a central anecdote about the missing family silver. In the next-to-last section, Goodyear finally talks to an actual source, a horticulturalist, and the piece immediately springs into journalistic life – just in time for things to wrap up. The Deschanels’ house is being rebuilt by Zooey’s fiancé, who happens to be a Property Brother. Good for them. At least Goodyear mentions climate change, though that section closes the piece when the whole story might have been built around it. If this all feels sort of familiar, maybe you’re thinking of a more removed longread by Nancy Walecki in The Atlantic or a more real-estate-focused longread by Jesse Baron in the Times, or maybe you mistook it for one about Altadena – a similar personal-essay longread by Joshuah Bearman in New York, or a personal-interest multi-writer longread in the Post. You could easily spend a day comparing notes without having to depart from well-financed narrative journalism. One doesn’t have to be cynical about an immense and preventable disaster to think of reasons why, unlike so much climate news, this has been such an easy story to assign.

“A World Apart” (The Current Cinema) - Richard Brody doesn’t a door it. This movie sounds dire, but Brody is such a grump about it I almost want to come to its defense. The “lack of specificity” charge arrives on cue, with a Nietzsche quote-drop just to make the point that… it matters what people’s jobs are? Brody is not beating the pretentiousness allegations. For good measure, the very same paragraph ends with a Shakespeare reference that doesn’t parse. (What does the shallowness of these characters have to do with fate? Is Brody just attempting wordplay, and if so, huh?) Then he has his cake – the not-mad-just-disappointed act – by reminding us that he did like Kogonada’s first movie, but eats it too – the I-had-the-correct-opinion-first act – by reminding us that he was among the handful who did not like Kogonada’s second movie. The last two lines are the sort of whiff that just makes you sad. The same vibe as I would like a Bond, a savings bond. Richard Brody go on On Cinema challenge.

“Hard News” (On Television) - Inkoo Kang will sit alone and talk, and watch a Hawke. Sometimes I wonder if my issues are actually with Kang or if scripted narrative television is just an eternally awkward fit for the magazine’s column-length, narrative-hook-forward reviews. This show, where only the first five episodes were available, is a prime example; Kang reviews it almost as if it’s a movie she only watched the first half of. The show “seems more focussed on visual flair” than substantial politics – but what show doesn’t start with the aesthetic and then deepen the meaning over time? Watch the first five episodes of the Watchmen miniseries Kang cites and you’d get only the faintest hints of its eventual message. This show is just not a fully-formed statement, ready to be critiqued, quite yet; Kang skirts incoherence trying to view it as one. She also implies that Fargo is a “traditional crime drama” – no! – and begins the piece with the idea that Ethan Hawke is a variations-on-an-archetype sort of actor – definitely not!³ I can’t say I get any idea, from this review, what the series looks like, or even, really, what it feels like. That’s what I’m here for… so I’m out.

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Letters:

Nope.

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