November 18, 2025

Last Week's New Yorker Review: 🥐 The Weekend Special (November 24)

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.

First of all… I stand with Jasper Lo, a fact checker for the magazine, and all the other Condé employees who have been unlawfully fired or placed on administrative leave for, uh, trying to ask questions to the head of Human Resources. Given context, this is obvious union-busting. Here’s the best full explanation. Solidarity!

🥐 Fiction

“Lara’s Theme” by Madhuri Vijay. Two Knapps. silence, silk, singe. An extremely well-crafted and fully thought-through story that I have to admire even while admitting it isn’t my cup of tea. An Indian family each seeks to cement their own special place in the unit, playing a power game that ends up hurting all of them – not in an abusive sense but in the very ordinary sense of all families. The length of this story – at almost 8,000 words, it’s really a novelette – means we have time to grasp the psychology of each individual and the ways they interlock, as well as the ways the introduction of a withholding stranger casts their dynamic in different lights. The handful of more overtly violent visuals feel a bit overdetermined; the scene when the narrator feels his helmet-slamming is what makes his father perform the solo perfectly is especially over-the-top, shifting the tone of the story in ways it never totally recovers from, especially as, over its length, it ends up landing in a more humanistic, grounded place. The earlier moments feel more out-of-place once one understands what the story is building toward. Vijay has an exceptional grasp of her characters’ psychologies, though – her interview is required reading, illuminating her process and her perspective on the story without insisting on a single thematic thrust – and she allows the narrator’s selfhood to make itself known very gradually, to quite compelling effect. There is, generally, a degree of ambition and narrative fullness here that I don’t think has been matched in the magazine this year.

🥐 Weekend Essay

“The Mystery of the Political Assassin” by Margaret Talbot. No Downeys. havoc, hatred, hazy. A cursory review of a book that sounds interesting followed by a more detailed review of a book that sounds frustrating. Surely the “Modern History of Assassination” has more to tell us about the motivations of political assassins than a book specifically about Luigi Mangione, one which was written despite the author getting essentially no access to information not available to the general public? So the third section, on that Luigi book, can certainly be skipped; but the previous two hardly bother asserting anything, beyond, I suppose, that assassins exhibit various degrees of organization, and that the portrait of an assassin may or may not have changed in various directions over time. “What do assassins want now? It’s a case-by-case question, but one worth asking” – but is it? Can anything really be drawn from the question, or is it a way of getting away from the actual issues (gun deregulation, police militarization) that make it more and more difficult to prevent disgruntled-fanatic assassinations in America? The author of the modern history makes the smart choice to focus mainly on the shift toward state-sponsored assassination, but Talbot immediately shifts back, for no apparent reason other than that the recent assassinations she’s heard of tend to be American and not state-sponsored. Far be it from me to ever suggest a little quantitative analysis is warranted, but…

🥐 Random Pick

“Letter from the East” by E.B. White. (Nov 3, 1956). Two Fords. parochial, political, pollution. Always worth reading White, and always interesting to get a sense of the shape of the political arguments of the past. Denuclearization both was and was not a great international success story; there was a pretty good online-only Rivka Galchen piece in the magazine about this. Deterrence has been technically successful – nuclear weapons haven’t been used in war since Hiroshima and Nagasaki – but rhetorically less successful; the narrative of permission is increasingly tilting away from disarmament. (There’s also a new Kathryn Bigelow joint about this.) White’s piece starts as a narrative essay and eventually becomes a bloggy broadside, examining all the reasons why we ought to fight the acceptance of nuclear warfare. His wit and clarity would make any speechwriter jealous, but perhaps the most interesting thing is how much of his language, which centers around the risks of “pollution”, applies one-to-one to the issue of climate change, not a blip on the radar in the mid-fifties. There are certain issues that demand we work together, as nation-states, individuals, and every size group in between. “We cannot escape it with collective security; we shall have to face it with united action …largely because of events beyond our control, we are able to sniff the faint stirring of a community ferment – something every man can enjoy.” A sensible argument is sensible in many different directions.

🥐 Something Extra

Seven Bridges, a dance-theater premiere at Japan Society, was quite delightful and subversively wholesome – not what one might expect from a Mishima adaptation! One Man Ferryman, a three-and-a-half-hour collective hallucination at the Brick Aux, was truly unique. Infamous Offspring, also dance-theater, at Skirball, was a jaw-dropping miscalculation; sometimes a gesamtkunst doesn’t werk.

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