July 21, 2025

Last Week's New Yorker Review: July 21

Last Week’s New Yorker, week of July 21, 2025

“the intoxicating combination of performative loucheness and cocaine-fuelled creativity”

Must-Read:

None of the full-length pieces quite rise to the level this week, but there is some delightful errata.

The best thing in the magazine is Annabelle Gurwitch’s letter (Letters from our Readers). Talk about a cover story.

As with this issue’s glowing review of JR & Son, Helen Rosner (Tables For Two) has been consistently killing it; unfortunately, the chopped-to-bits versions that make the paper edition can’t compare to the full-length reviews found online. Also, it’s very hard to say anything about a restaurant review beyond “yum, sounds good!” – but consider this your reminder never to skip Rosner.

“The Diary of Anna Franco” (Shouts & Murmurs) - Larry David has an attic-ive personality. Another very funny political riff on David’s persona.

“Experience It” (Talk of the Town) - Andrew Marantz does Service journalism. It’s the right choice not to shy away from presenting this guy as a stupid prick, but Marantz still keeps things from feeling mean-spirited.

Those hoping for something more substantial would do well to peruse two recent Weekend Essays: “How to Save a Dog” by David W. Brown, reviewed last week, and “To Be Young, Gifted, and Black at Fenway” by Michael Thomas, to be reviewed in the upcoming Weekend Special. (Both will receive three don’t-call-them-stars.)

Window-Shop:

“Serve and Folly” (The Sporting Scene) - Sam Knight puts the queue in racquet. Knight is a good writer, and though this has neither the stakes nor the pathos to merit a must-read, it’s hard to find fault with it. Whether or not British people are really that obsessed with homegrown Wimbledon champions, Andy Murray did win twice not that long ago, and men’s doubles has gone to at least one Brit three years running. (The women certainly have a better case, but that may just speak to national priorities.) So the whole framing device is a bit silly, as is the need to tie everything back to the British character. The sports scenes fare better, the rhythmic prose pulling through even though I don’t really know what “breaking” a serve means. Knight also does excellent work quickly characterizing these racketers. Murray won because he “is an extremely obdurate and literal person” who thus insisted on home-court advantage; now he lingers “like Banquo’s ghost.” Draper is “large-limbed but contained” and “grunts and gasps in a mostly private way, like someone fixing a pipe under a sink”, Norrie, meanwhile, chooses “a few raucous fans in the crowd and seeking to draw energy from them”. None of them won; there is an Italian who currently looks unstoppable regardless of court surface. Knight mentions him just once, early on, in passing. It’s not his story.

“Escape Route” (Books) - James Wood finalizes Geoff Dyer’s working-class title. Also this week in stiff upper lips: A new memoir that tracks the stifled coming-of-age of a future intellectual. Wood uses Barthes’ punctum to launch into a highly alliterative parade of plosives (“punctilious paradox”), which is pleasurable if not pellucid. Wood circles a point about latent familial resentment, the “negative egotism” in which ironic detail signposts its own irrelevancy, thus exposing the emptiness of his upbringing. It’s all very clever, and Wood’s analysis is superb. Still, the pain Wood searches for is profoundly self-contained; if you aren’t interested in the milieu, you won’t find any outreaching hand here. Ironic distance, as it is wont to do, blocks connection.

“Junk-Drawer Heart” (Pop Music) - Amanda Petrusich can’t hardly baritone. Happy to see Petrusich covering something other than chart-topping pop or huge-name indie. She does like a white guy with a twangy voice and a guitar – see also her favorite and second-favorite albums of last year – so this is right in her wheelhouse, but Ryan Davis’ music is both new to me and genuinely compelling. This bears a frequent caveat – the album isn’t out for another week so you can’t even listen to these songs yet – and Davis doesn’t drop much wisdom in the interview portion. But Petrusich’s descriptions are searching, sorta philosophical (“Nothing is exactly where or what you expect it to be, and nothing stays still for very long”) and just right for the material.

“The Counterfeiters” (Personal History) - Jessica Winter has an unstoried past. Never figures out what it wants to be about, which doesn’t keep it from being generally engaging, moment by moment. It starts as a micro-level family history, and spends quite a while in that mode, only very gradually turning into a piece about inherited trauma. When it does, Winter describes her sense that those histories mirror her present, which slips a bit into describing-your-dream territory – e.g, it’s only interesting to the dreamer. Does Winter want to debunk epigenetic trauma by pointing out how real it felt to her, thus assuming that we’ll trust her when she tells us why it should be disbelieved? It’s a strange way to go about things, and the thread peters out, giving the sense that the piece is misproportioned. Winter’s real throughline is the unknowability of the past, so it’s strange she spends so long on its possible knowability, as if to say – here is my breakthrough, which means nothing. There’s some truth to that, of course; all that carries on is no-self. We put our hands in each others’ heads, and they stay there, signifying nothing. Winter is a bit too invested in anecdote, though, to dig an analysis that can hold whole bodies in it.

“Family Practice” (Profiles) - Joshua Rothman sees Dr. Greg work for the living. It’s not often these days that the magazine profiles a non-public-figure; the last one is arguably book dealer Glenn Horowitz, but where he is irascible Dr. Greg is near-saintly, and clearly meant as a sort of role model. How much patience do you have for that sort of thing? I don’t have much; Dr. Greg seems amazing and yet Rothman’s article is sermon-like in its praise, which turns me off. Yet it’s still worth your time, for much the same reason: Dr. Greg is exceptional, but he is, more importantly, ordinary; when the piece stops being a Profile in Courage it finds time to be a portrait of everyday life. Because Dr. Greg is not a politician, he chooses his targets not for photo-ops but for stranger and more personal reasons; one might simply be that they are in front of him. It’s a good counterargument to the E.A. delusion that we can numerically determine the help we are giving: Maybe it is enough that we do the things we need to make us feel helpful, or loved. Dr. Greg’s “therapeutic workaholism” has the genuine tinge of addiction; perhaps those of us with painful callings always try to find ways to addict ourselves to that work: Else we might not do it.

Skip Without Guilt:

Williams on James (Takes) - The Scopes trial is one of the few random scenes from the American past that I think people still sorta know about (thanks, History teachers still showing Inherit the Wind) and James’ quoted stylings – “a tad hokey”, Williams admits – don’t add especially much to my understanding. For better or worse, this also lacks the personal connection that most of these Takes have had.

“The Next War” (A Reporter at Large) - Dexter Filkins drones on. Falls narrowly on the wrong side of the sweeping/scattered divide, with Filkins aiming to discuss war weaponry and tactics – just, like, in general, pretty much. In theory there’s a focus on the U.S, but Filkins’ best material involves more active fighting, and he seems to know it, spending a long while on Ukrainian and Israeli tactics, and only casually connecting their advances to American strategy. The material involving Palmer Luckey, whose mission is to leverage border-control-surveillance contracts into real-deal arms sales, is almost too dull to be revolting. The Pentagon’s broken procurement process, purpose-built to encourage expensive order over thrifty innovation, was already familiar (and I’m far from an expert); the war-games scene involving Taiwan feels largely irrelevant, a situation that has much more to do with strategy and diplomacy than weaponry, no matter how Filkins spins it. The rest of the piece – the first, fourth, seventh and eighth sections – is significantly better. The Ukrainian tactical scenes successfully explain drone warfare, something that I only really understood in theory; the IDF scenes, by not focusing on the usual frame (e.g. massacred civilians), find something new to say; namely, that Israel is on the forefront of using “A.I. systems” to lend a “veneer of legitimacy to a preconceived policy” – the “‘destruction of Gaza.’” (By holding in this argument for so long, Filkins threatens having the reader think he’s defending the IDF, but ultimately by setting the point up meticulously and without judgement he ensures that it lands most powerfully.) America is weakening on several fronts; I’m not sure military capacity is the most important. But Filkins renders this piece far more complicated than the ode to the arms dealer it might have turned into. Bombs, away.

“Baggage Check” (On Television) - Inkoo Kang thinks everything happens so Too Much. Possibly the most positive review Kang has ever published in the magazine… and I can barely tell why, as the show sounds like Dunham gone soft; we have to take Kang’s word for the “effortless chemistry” of the leads. Whether Dunham has anything left to say about the “aimless milieu” she repeatedly chronicles (she’s had to age down and recast her self-insert this time, though she still finds a part to play) is also not totally clear. I did laugh at the idea that the go-to dating apps are “Raya and Sniffies” – not sure if that’s Kang’s joke or Dunham’s – and Kang’s prose has perked up with her excitement. She still doesn’t sell me.

“Fortress of Synergy” (The Current Cinema) - Richard Brody says it’s a bored, it’s a plain Superman. Would you believe he thinks the movie is corny? Not only is that unsurprising, it suggests Gunn accomplished exactly what he set out to do: Make a fun, silly, snappy ensemble piece that critics would call lightweight but audiences would flock to. There are plenty of superhero-movie critiques I can get behind, not having enough “lonely” moments isn’t one of them. It’s “crafted for children”, huh? Maybe, after twenty years of grim gloom¹, that’s as it should be. Up, up, go away.

“Losing Loneliness” (A Critic at Large) - Paul Bloom knows phone rings, site loads, in comes company. On the one hand, this could be far worse. Bloom doesn’t get anything wrong, exactly. But the piece is thoroughly limp and gormless, in service of a broad point that I can only describe as insipid. Essentially, Bloom first – with little evidence beyond A.I. propaganda – assumes that there is truth to the idea that chatbots can now, or will soon be able to, “banish the pain of loneliness” by providing consistent empathy and care. There is a weird assumption here – Bloom critiques chatbots for being sycophantic, but he seems to assume that users will fall for the act, and that, in doing so, they will successfully rid themselves of loneliness – as if the only thing keeping us from feeling cared for is that we don’t have enough (literally) mindless yes-men. Bloom then states that this, for everyone but the elderly,² is a bad thing, because it deprives us of something we need to be human. It’s pretty funny that the first thing the hyper-rationalist Bloom wants to mourn is “the hard work of making ourselves understood” – of course a debate bro wants to keep his edge – but it’s also telling: what Bloom is secretly arguing against is the valorization of affect; he doesn’t care if we’re sucked into our chatbots, he just hopes we won’t let them be too nice to us. Like most centrist thinking, it’s secretly quite a bizarre argument, which necessitates its being communicated in the beige language of a concession speech. Ironically, that’s one thing ChatGPT is great at: Telling you how to surrender.

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Letters:

Negatory, morning glory.

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angry young men

copacetic old girls