May 3, 2025

Last Week's New Yorker Review: 🌱 The Weekend Special (May 5)

The Weekend Special

Pieces are given up to three Boyles (for fiction), Harrimans (for essays), or Parkers (for random picks). As with restaurant stars, even one Boyle, Harriman, or Parker indicates a generally positive review.

Unfortunately, three non-recommendations this week. Can’t win ‘em all. Or win ‘em any.

🌱 Fiction

“Nocturnal Creatures” by Saïd Sayrafiezadeh. No Boyles. schedule, scare, scratching. Surely Sayrafiezadeh is too spry to already be slipping into self-parody, but this story, in which an exterminator with father issues enters a relationship with a single-mother client, skirts the edge. The trouble is not the prose, it’s that the topic of job-as-identity, which Sayrafiezadeh is always circling, is given a very literal treatment here; the exterminator is a cockroach, the titular nocturnal creature and, a la Better Call Saul, a “born survivor.” We get this almost immediately, and the story never unspools far beyond its implications. The landlord’s over-the-top rudeness is both entirely accurate and overdetermined. And the sentimentality of the material around the son is unexpected, I guess – Sayrafiezadeh is almost never sentimental – but it’s also so literal that the narrator’s lack of self-awareness around it beggars belief. “He might not draw the connection” between his discomfort around becoming close to the son and his own estrangement with his father, “but the reader is able to view all of this from above,” says Sayrafiezadeh in the interview – but in a first-person story, this tactic skirts uncomfortably close to condescension, as it did in Sayrafiezadeh’s previous story in the magazine. Don’t hit this roach!

🌱 Weekend Essay

“Will the Humanities Survive Artificial Intelligence?” by D. Graham Burnett. No Harrimans. machines, mastery, madness. I strongly disliked this, but I suspect that has more to do with how played-out the topic is, and less to do with Burnett’s approach, which is in line with the average nutty professor: A character type whose dogged insistence on discovery and curiosity thinly masks a profound intellectual anxiety. In other words, he’s well-meaning, and if he props up an industry that is, like the dot-com-boom internet, more scam than not – he’s also not wrong to say that, like the early internet, it’s a portent of something big. (Though calling it ”the most significant revolution in the world of thought in the past century” without even a qualifier is an irresponsible overstatement.) That big thing does need interpreting! But Burnett’s interpretation relies on some wild leaps of logic. Did people ever rely on “canonical scholarship” as pure informational reference, for answering questions? Wasn’t thoughtful interpretation – a thing A.I. either “sucks at right now” or “can never do”, depending on how you parse its manner of being – the point? (This seems distinctly like a technologist’s misinterpretation.) There are a million tiny things that annoy me, which aren’t worth naming. (Okay, just one: He sells his class as “a kind of bibliophilic endurance test that I pitch to students as the humanities version of ‘Survivor’” – a show which is, famously, not an endurance test; you get voted off the island, not killed off it. But I guess looking at a complex political struggle and seeing the inexorable force of mortality is also what the entire rest of the piece is doing, so.) The piece’s eeriest vignette involves a female student who sees in the machine’s default obsequiousness a rare chance to be listened to – a way of paying attention to the self by proxy that isn’t offered in our society. (Sure, it isn’t offered to women in particular, but how many men do you know with complex and carefully nurtured senses of self?) Horrifyingly, Burnett calls this “true attention” and suggests that it is the most profound breakthrough of the technology: That it can serve as an infinite mirror. Thereby, I suppose, ending history all over again – or at least divorcing history from the humanities, which can instead return to considering the nature of being and consciousness. But the truth is that we don’t just exist in our minds – we exist in our minds through time, whereas these machines are static – until the next update. While we’re waiting for that to download, the bombs will keep dropping.

🌱 Random Pick

“The Rematch” by Andy Logan (September 13, 1993). No Parkers. tuxedo, tennis, terror. Logan was a longtime City Hall reporter for the mag; I’m not familiar with her other work, but I was bothered by this piece, which presents itself as a view of both sides of the Mayoral race, then meticulously catalogues all of Dinkins’ issues – basically, he’s disengaged and possibly slightly corrupt, plus he… likes tennis too much – while ignoring or skimming past Giuliani’s. That’s the incumbent’s cross to bear, certainly, and it’s ridiculous to judge the past through the lens of the present, but it’s undeniable that this mayoral race set the stage for various grim things, and framing Giuliani as the anti-Dinkins without any actual sense of who he is means this piece serves nearly as an advertisement for his campaign. But his tuxes!

🌱 Something Extra

It’s my newsletter, I’ll geek out about awards for a needlessly long time if I want to. Also: Rheology, which will probably be my show of the year, got extended through the 17th. See it!

Pulitzer Prizes are on Monday!!! Get hype! Do you think the magazine wins anything this cycle? I won’t try to predict the journalism categories, but here are my predictions for Arts & Letters:

Fiction: James, surely…

Drama: All in for The Ally!

History: Wild guess, but The Migrant’s Jail by Brianna Nofil certainly seems timely. Or maybe Burdened, on student debt, by Ryann Liebenthal?

Biography: Perhaps The Icon & The Idealist, a dual biography of a birth-control rivalry, which Margaret Talbot liked. Also possible: David Greenberg’s John Lewis biography.

Memoir/Autobiography: Turning to Stone, that memoir-in-rocks that Kathryn Schultz liked, looks good; I’ll pick that. Lucy Sante’s transition book I Heard Her Call My Name, certainly possible.

Poetry: Forest of Noise by Mosab Abu Toha.

General Nonfiction: Challenger, on the disaster, won a lot of precursors.

Music: This category is especially a fool’s errand to predict. Alex Ross liked Sarah Hennies’ Motor Tapes and Kali Malone’s organ drones on All Life Long. I’ll say the former takes it.

And now my rooting interests (to be clear: What I want to win, unlike the above which is what I think will win) for the Tonys, Musical categories only right now – since hopefully I’ll get to Proctor and Purpose before the ceremony. I did see Floyd Collins, which wasn’t awful but didn’t really work. More on that in my review of Helen Shaw’s review. (Haven’t seen Boop or Curves or Just In Time yet, if anything changes when or if I do you’ll be first to know.)

Best Musical: Maybe Happy Ending, Mincemeat fairly close behind.

Best Revival: Gypsy, with a bullet.

Leading Actress: Audra, duh.

Leading Actor: Darren Criss very narrowly over James Monroe Iglehart.

Direction: Maybe Happy Ending.

Featured Actress: Joy Woods.

Featured Actor: Jak Malone, running away with it.

Book: Operation Mincemeat, inches ahead of Dead Outlaw, itself inches ahead of Maybe Happy Ending. After last year’s hilariously terrible selection for this prize, a big turnaround.

Scenic Design: Maybe Happy Ending

Choreography: Buena Vista Social Club

Orchestrations: Buena Vista Social Club

Score: Maybe Happy Ending

Costume Design: Death Becomes Her

Lighting Design: Maybe Happy Ending, just ahead of the awful Sunset Boulevard – surely the showier feat, but to what end?

Sound Design: Buena Vista Social Club.


And just because I’m truly a nerd and more words don’t cost anyone anything, here are my picks for the Lortel Awards for Off-Broadway, which come out Monday as well:

Play: Liberation. (Sumo was fine, disliked Blueberries and Antiquities. Seeing We Had a World, which is the only nominee I’m missing, on Saturday. If I dig it I’ll tell you next week.)

Musical: Medea Re-Versed. (Missed Jamboree and Cairo, didn’t like any of the others.)

Revival: Wine in the Wilderness. (Beckett Briefs was okay. Missed the others.)

Solo Show: Not jazzed enough about either of the ones I saw, so I’ll say Vanya although I missed it. Surely it’ll win anyway.

Director: Only caught two of these; Liberation was stronger though I wouldn’t say directing was its core strength. Maybe Vanya should take it, as it probably will.

Choreography: Caught Drag and Three Houses, preferred the latter although I wouldn’t say it was choreography-driven. Maybe Jamboree will take it?

Lead Performance Play: Paul Sparks was excellent in Grangeville; Susannah Flood was excellent in Liberation. That’s all I’ve seen. I’ll go with the former.

Featured Performance Play: Category fraud for Olivia Washington but she was fantastic in Wine in the Wilderness.

Lead Performance Musical: Sarin Monae West was extraordinary in Medea.

Featured Performance Musical: Jujubee winning a Lortel would be sort of incredible. She was one of the best parts of Drag.

Ensemble: Rooting against Blueberries, the only one I’ve seen. I’ll say Cairo.

Scenic Design: The Three Houses set was probably the best part of the show. And I stan dots.

Costume Design: Drag.

Lighting Design: Beckett Briefs was, like, a lighting-driven show.

Sound Design: I’ll go with Medea; amplifying rap strikes me as hard.

Projection Design: A least-worst-off. I suppose there was nothing egregious about its use in Here There Are Blueberries.

Sunday Song: