October 2, 2025

Last Week's New Yorker Review: 🥐 The Weekend Special (October 6)

The Weekend Special

Pieces are given up to three Knapps (for fiction), Downeys (for essays), or Fords (for random picks). As with restaurant stars, even one Knapp, Downey, or Ford indicates a generally positive review.

🥐 Fiction

“Amarillo Boulevard” by David Wright Faladé. One Knapp. judged, jumped, Juneteenth. Wright Faladé is a super thoughtful writer whose own complicated lineage obviously informs his take on class and race relations. All of his fiction is, to various degrees, historical – but he started this story, which is set in a very precise 2005, in the nineties, complicating that already vague tag. This narrative is extremely kind to its protagonist Jean, which makes sense when you hear she’s a stand-in for Wright Faladé’s sister; her family seems close but they don’t understand her deeply, her boyfriend is fairly awful¹, the glimpses we get of her everyday friends aren’t painted with much kindness, and the back-home friends she meets up with and, in Nia’s case, runs into and then runs back for, don’t actually display much understanding, either, though Jean feels protective of them. Indeed, Jean spends just about every scene here protecting someone, suggesting, to me, sublimated aggression. (Obviously toward her cheating boyfriend, but also toward just about everyone here; one feels, in every scene, her stifled scream.) That’s an astute portrait, if not always a narratively propulsive one; Wright Faladé keeps things moving, but the story struck me as profoundly sad in ways that he perhaps did not fully intend: Any hope of true love for Jean – even self-love – must be found extratextually. When Wright Faladé keeps things character-centered there is plenty of nuance here to discuss – my reading partner and I had a lengthy conversation about whether Wole’s dismissal of Jean’s country friends had more to do with respectability or race – though at other times, the narration verges on overexplaining. (I’ll refrain from saying “mansplaining” as the story does.) Wright Faladé seems worried the reader will miss things, but as with friendship, a little trust goes a long way.

🥐 Weekend Essay

“Putting ChatGPT on the Couch” by Gary Greenberg. Two Downeys. Casper, careful, captive. This is one of the deepest and most well-thought-out AI-skeptic pieces I’ve read, and it gets there using the therapist’s usual trick of presenting as open and welcoming (not just toward the bot, in this case, but toward the reader) while building their aggressively humanistic argument on the sly. Unfortunately for the reader, Greenberg gets there – again, like a therapist – by mostly just paying attention to what the subject is saying, thus requiring that we read reams of the most hideously constructed GPT text in order to grasp his point. Your tolerance for this strategy depends, as GPT might say, not on your fervor but on your forbearance.² His ultimate point is not an uncommon or unique one; the corporate control of GPT makes its simulated intimacy suspect, the sociopathic lie of love we can’t help but take from a magic mirror on the wall telling us we’re beautiful is “immensely dangerous” to that very idea of love. Greenberg’s trick is not³ getting the bot to repeat this back to him – anyone could do that – but articulating the precise differences between LLMs and the human faces they wear, and never condescending to us; Greenberg was perhaps not as sucked in by the bot as he claims to have been, but by posing as fallible, he doesn’t raise the hackles, as many self-righteous A.I. refuseniks have a tendency to do. The Voight-Kampff test, after all, is really a test for us. How does that make you feel?

🥐 Random Pick

“Seven Days’ Wonder” (Musical Events) by Nicholas Kenyon. (Aug 25, 1980). Two Fords. furthest, fantasy, farrago. I swear to God I’m not doing this on purpose. The random gods just want me to write about classical music in this space, almost every week. Far be it from me to deny them – especially when the columns are this compelling. Kenyon takes a look at Stockhausen as he begins his sprawling opus; he’s a fan, but a skeptic of the newest piece, something time would… not exactly clear up. (The helicopter string quartet is not beating the “arresting ideas [but] metaphysical pretensions” allegations.) The rest of the new-now-old pieces at the Holland Festival are skimmed through, but I was especially interested in the thirteenth-century music performances, as I sort of thought the early music revival was a more contemporary phenomenon. But Sequentia was there already, and the “weird pieces by Jehan Lescurel” that Kenyon calls “engrossing” certainly are, especially when one imagines the partly improvised small room setup Kenyon vividly describes. Does it give a “real feeling of what it might have been like to encounter thirteenth-century music and drama in a thirteenth-century setting”? Or is it impossible to reach what Anthony Lane so… memorably… called the “mind’s ear” last week? Songs of innocence and experience may seem to be disparate, but that’s just a matter of time.

🥐 Something Extra

A pair of excellent already-closed experimental plays on identity, Blackness, and the things that can’t be bought: We Come To Collect at the Flea (zany, multivalent, participatory – though it has an identical climax to Mounsey & Mills Weiss’ Open Mic Night) and The Essentialisn’t at HERE (harmonious, heartfelt, vibrant – with an especially committed supporting performance by Jamella Cross). The former felt a bit more “of the now” but both were successful.

I also saw the disastrous Kavalier and Clay opera opening the Met’s season, a mortifyingly generic take on one of the most original books of the century. Truly hideous art direction which made me question if A.I. was involved. (How are you going to have a show about comic books where the drawings look that bad?) At least that distracted a bit from the generically pretty but entirely derivative and shapeless score and the hacky-as-hell libretto. Profoundly frustrating.

---

Sunday Song: