June 4, 2025

Last Week's New Yorker Review: June 2

Last Week’s New Yorker, week of June 2

“for migraines an unguent of roses, applied to the temples and forehead.”

Must-Read:

“No-Pain Gains” (Annals of Medicine) - Rivka Galchen is in the hurt blocker. An unassuming but solid and thoughtful piece on a new drug that could provide pain relief without targeting opioid receptors. The anecdote about finding the pathway to be targeted through observation of communities certainly suggests that a more functional healthcare system, in which people are treated and assessed with more thoughtfulness and regularity, would create a virtuous cycle in which more novel pathways could be discovered and exploited. (The origin of Lidocaine, meanwhile, suggests that Swedes should be given free reign to get wacky with it.) Do I entirely understand what a “sodium channel” is? Nah. (Do I think you could get me to understand with a three-times-longer article? I doubt it!) But Galchen’s focus, after the anecdote of the drug’s discovery, is on its cultural meaning – while it isn’t that powerful, it serves as a proof-of-concept that non-opioid pain medication is safe and possible. Galchen could write a very different piece that’s entirely focused on the cultural meanings of pain (for more on that, see one of my very favorite experimental documentaries, Lého Galibert-Laîné’s “Watching The Pain of Others”) but this just gestures toward that material as a framing device for a briefer, slightly newsier story. It’s a choice that serves the subject. Read six sections and call me in the morning.

Window-Shop: 

“The Last Broad” (Profiles) - Michael Schulman steals the secret formula to the crabby Patti. The first show I ever saw on Broadway was Lupone’s watershed Gypsy – she can do whatever she wants and I’ll be a fan. She’s obviously an incredibly defensive and self-absorbed person; you don’t need Schulman to tell you that, it’s practically on her business card. What you’re here for is catty quotes and only catty quotes; Schulman delivers a truckful, making this perhaps not the most replenishing reading – but perhaps affirming, if you can tolerate or even relate to needless rudeness. Of course, the only thing anyone really cares about here is the very end of the piece, where Lupone aggressively insults Kecia Lewis and, gasp, AUDRA. Well, Momma’s got to let go: After an open letter that was both generally spot-on and, in places, overblown (comparing Patti to Dan Snyder, a sexual harasser billionaire, is just not fair) she did the unthinkable and posted a white-on-gray Instagram apology. The rest of the piece aims at less troublesome targets, though Lupone’s wit is all in the delivery; on the page, her grievances mostly just read as sadnesses. (One doesn’t read “‘Why do I have to fight? …What am I learning in this life that I’m atoning for from the last one?’” and think Mother is mothering!) Schulman does his best, describing drawn-out ‘Z’ sounds and such; it sometimes works. When a reporter notices a star is not press-trained, maybe he’s obliged to try to get them to say something awful. (Good authors, too, who once knew better words, now only use four-letter words writing prose…) I’m not suggesting Schulman entrapped Lupone, by any means. But people with one hundred times more power say things one hundred times as awful to Isaac Chotiner on any given Friday. Lupone should know better, but the fact that she doesn’t mostly just makes me wonder why nobody is looking out for her. And as for fortune, and as for fame… they are illusions, they’re not the solutions they promised to be. Don’t cry for her.

“By the Canal” (Personal History) - Sarah Beckwith takes the crime scenic route. A gutting exploration of the aftermath of sexual trauma for the victim, this is most compelling when Beckwith explores our bizarre and troublesome language around sexual violence, and its effects on a victim’s ability to act autonomously in the world. I’d heard explanations of this effect before, but I’m not sure I’d ever fully connected why this specific crime so often has that specific effect. It’s not merely an increased perception of danger – as Beckwith carefully outlines. In her view, the rapist wants to take the place of God. “To be raped is to confront this particular evil, a staining, ineradicable harm that is not reducible to physical, or even psychological, trauma.” I’d be interested to know how often victims who know their rapists personally also feel this evil is at the heart of their violation. I’d expect many of them to compensate in different ways, but perhaps using Beckwith’s framework can deepen our understanding of the harms of rape more broadly. The section on Simone Weil is also fantastic, extending Weil’s argument to Beckwith’s concerns elegantly and accurately. I have less interest in the account of the Railway Murders more broadly, material which doesn’t feel needed to get to the crux of Beckwith’s argument. At times it approaches the granularity of a police report. The last three sections mostly stand on their own.

“Strong Opinions” (Books) - Louis Menand can’t Buckley trend. Menand doesn’t really have an overarching point to make about Buckley, but his beat-by-beat insights are astute and while the piece moves slowly, it’s never boring. The magazine likes to review books that expose their fascist subjects accurately while still essentially using the framing of the biographies under review, which handle them with more complicity. A review of an authorized biography of a loathsome, bigoted theocrat might do more to challenge the book’s structure, but there isn’t much love lost for the subject on Menand’s part. Part of the trick of fascism is to continually rewrite the past to present itself as rational and popular; it’s good to remember that National Review isn’t just an intellectual veneer, it’s an intellectual veneer atop a fundamental project of hate and bigotry. The fascists really have no need for the veneer anymore, but as Menand points out, the project is unchanged. 

“No Place Like Home” (On and Off the Menu) - Hannah Goldfield is in the flour of youth. Goldfield’s food reports work better when they function as mini-profiles, I think. She’s found a compelling protagonist in Ruben Leal, who brought Sonoran tortillas to Tucson. It’s basically a business story – the first half is practically a testimonial – but with enough unexpected detail not to feel (too much) like an advertisement. (Leal divorced his wife, presumably not over tortillas but Goldfield certainly doesn’t discourage that reading; his chorizo guy says “‘“I’d love to have a girlfriend, but I have so much chorizo drying in my apartment right now that I wouldn’t have anywhere to bring her.”’” How to succeed in the tortilla business? Get comfortable stretching.

“Games People Play” (The Theatre) - Helen Shaw plays Strindbergesque Who? Very elegant, moving from a thesis about Strindberg’s influence to, basically, a negative and then a positive example (though of course it’s complicated – the latter show is a production of a Strindberg play, but one that wildly departs from his presumed intent. Perhaps subversion is the truest form of flattery.) Like the plays under review, it’s moodily restrained; there are no laugh lines, and Shaw seems quite angry at the first show’s gender-relations nihilism, though she doesn’t come right out and say it. Shaw last reviewed Hugh Jackman himself in the February 10th issue; her last lead review of a show starring a woman was in the February 3rd issue. Yowch.

Lucas on Als (Takes) - The last two lines feel rushed-through; Lucas dismisses Barthes’ point a bit too easily. Everything else is good, exploring a piece, its subject, its writer, and Lucas himself, in roughly equal proportions. There is more to be said about why Lucas found Walcott’s “proud, brittle masculinity” so alienating – but some things can be saved for the memoir.

“High-Life Lowlife” (On Television) - Inkoo Kang funds hedges. Kang plays the curmudgeon reasonably well, pointing out the “cognitive dissonance” invoked by the series’ both relishing in and moralizing against luxury, then extrapolating this point out into what is basically an Andy Rooney monologue about the pointless cynicism of rich-people-suck media that caters to, basically, rich people. Not a very deep point, but well-made.

Skip Without Guilt:

“Entity Crisis” (The Current Cinema) - Justin Chang doesn’t have a Reckoning ball. Interesting to see what Chang looks like when bored by pulp – a mode that famously rendered Anthony Lane especially tiresome and glib. Chang just sounds depressed, verging on whiny, especially when the last paragraph turns into a literal list of things he wanted from the movie that it didn’t deliver. Disengagement: When the movie’s juice is missing, should we choose to respect it? (If the pun is good enough for Chang, and also good enough for me last week, then it’s good enough for, uh, me again.)

“Oligarch-In-Chief” (The Political Scene) - Evan Osnos makes America graft again. Can essentially be read as a “we told you so!” update to Susan Glasser’s long piece from October 2024 about billionaires cozying up to Trump in the hopes of becoming oligarchs. Osnos doesn’t find much to add to that story, really; corruption is a very old trick, and I’d seen on Bluesky almost all the anecdotes Osnos brings up. The combo of “resentment and aspiration” Americans hold toward the very rich is, similarly, a really tired point by now. The solution to oligarchism, apparently, is another group that’s been covered in the magazine before, the Patriotic Millionaires, whose goal to raise taxes on the wealthy is generally admirable, but who are awfully quick to throw literally every other progressive tenet under the bus, and reluctant to advocate for any broader solutions. There are plenty of people who want to raise taxes on the wealthy and are not otherwise, you know, awful. And it’s weird that the only reason we’re listening to these people is… because they’re rich. Osnos has written what is basically a trends piece – the “trend” toward, basically, extreme economic inequality as a wedge issue – but that’s less a “trend” and more a “catastrophe.” The solutions he points to are almost laughably small-scale, and I’m ultimately not sure who this piece is written for. Perhaps Osnos just intends to encourage the smugly anxious in their smug anxiety. There’s plenty to worry about, yeah, but if your vision of the future is one defined solely by what it is not, you’ll go nowhere fast.

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Letters:

Michael B. says Zach Helfand’s piece on parking “is probably in my top 3 this year, although I did also read and enjoy the Henry Grabar parking book mentioned within it. I like that the magazine can still do these in depth local features and give me something I wouldn't find elsewhere even though I have no personal stake in them not living in New York.” Worth noting there’s also an excellent Adam Gopnik piece reviewing the Grabar book from a couple years ago.

Michael was also intrigued by the sections of Barry Diller’s book, reviewed by Adam Gopnik last week, covering his time at QVC: “I lived in the dreary suburb described in the review. I drove past the QVC headquarters on the way to high school. One of my best friends spent a few years as a QVC customer service rep. And my reclusive neighbor who always yelled at kids cutting through her lawn to go to the pool was a QVC anchor.

I started listening to the audiobook this week and it's better than it has rights being. I'm sure there's a bunch of bullshit in here but I've been happy to take a tour through made for TV movies and shady contracts at Paramount in the 70s. Eager to learn if there's any new-to-me Simpsons stories in the later chapters.” 

Emily says: “I work as a clinical research nurse – mostly on HIV related studies funded by NIH.... I was getting angrier and angrier while reading [Daniel Immerwahr’s piece on expertise] but I was afraid I was feeling defensive or something!! I could not have articulated how insulting [the article] is the way you have. One of the most disgusting things I've ever read in the magazine is right.”

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