Last Week's New Yorker Review: June 23
Last Week’s New Yorker, week of June 23, 2025
“seafoam-green Gatorade-and-Midori slushies”
Must-Read:
“Ladies’ Night” (On and Off the Menu) - Hannah Goldfield says this round’s on her. A trends piece that has identified an actual trend – rare enough – and, even better, doesn’t turn it into anything more than it is. As women’s sports have finally gotten a foothold in popular culture, the bro-ish nature of sports bars, along with their unwillingness to screen women’s sports (Goldfield credits the latter more; I’m inclined to think the former factor is bigger) has created a market for women’s-sports bars, which also serve as a place for lesbians (who often don’t have bars of their own) to have their hangout spot subsidized, basically, by sports fans who are non-sapphic (for now). Gay men have long allied with the bachelorette-party community for similar purposes. I’m being slightly facetious; Goldfield’s admiration, though, is obviously sincere, and sweet. Thankfully, she doesn’t try to make the story about girl power triumphing over evil; her more casual, fun, human approach wears its feminism with joy, not defensiveness. Unlike escape rooms or ghost kitchens, these bars are a new-business trend that actually serves their local community, and reduces atomization instead of profiting from it. Cheers to that.
Window-Shop:
Fischer on Singer (Takes) - A lot of these Takes columns have been exercises in proclaiming personal significance; I prefer Fischer’s approach, which is a little more zoomed-out and political. An issue on women from the Tina Brown era serves as a chance to meditate on Brown’s relationship to raising kids while running a magazine, which “defies mommy-wars fatalism”, as well as a really thoughtful take on Singer’s story, which succeeds because its ex-career-woman mothers are “not avatars of a dubious trend; they’re psychological case studies, too vivid and human to serve such an argument.” No kidding.
“Move Fast and Break Things” (The Political Scene) - Benjamin Wallace-Wells tries to DOGE the question. This dropped alongside what is instantly the defining piece of early Trump 2 journalism, Kerry Howley’s jaw-dropping evisceration of the Pete Hegseth Pentagon, and in comparison Wallace-Wells has less inside information and fewer vivid anecdotes, mainly reporting out a story a relatively plugged-in reader will already know: Elon prioritized cuts over everything else, largely got his way, inflicted massive damage for no particular reason (see also…), then skedaddled. That you already know the story, though, doesn’t make it less fucking insane, and having it laid out chronologically makes it easier to grasp. The U.S.A.I.D. story (chronicled in the section that begins “Every incoming…”) is easily the most outrageous and horrific part, and Wallace-Wells also finds the best story, of stranded diplomats avoiding disaster thanks only to other, more sane countries, and of a vengeance-driven Pete Marocco whose thuggery, along with Musk’s, can only be seen as mass murder. Plenty of the people Wallace-Wells reviews are outraged, but a lot of them are libertarians and apolitical techies who get the Fell For It Again Award. I’m not interested in them having any say in where the hell we go from here.
“Early Warnings” (Annals of Medicine) - Siddhartha Mukherjee gets too much cancer-screen time. This is excerpted from a new edition of Mukherjee’s landmark book on cancer, and he remains a superlative prose stylist. This takes a very long time to get going, though; the technology central to the piece doesn’t come into play until the fifth section, and everything before then is an extremely granular, somewhat repetitive description of a concept I feel is widely understood – that overtreatment can be more harmful than undertreatment, and that telling the difference requires exorbitant amounts of time and testing. (Atul Gawande wrote the piece on this phenomenon, a full decade ago.) The discussion of Grail’s technology, which might be able to detect cancer more widely and efficiently than current methods, is very well-balanced; Mukherjee doesn’t merely feign toward caution, he’s actually cautious, which is so often not the case with articles on new medical technologies. I wasn’t quite invested enough in the narrative to need the beat-by-beat description of the journalism needed to get past non-answers and to a confirmation that the UK government’s Grail test had not met all the needed criteria; still, in the Ira Glass “this happened, then this happened” tradition, journalistic anecdote is inherently gripping even when it’s not riveting. The magazine’s best recent piece on the tricky moral conundrums of medicine trials remains Gideon Lewis-Kraus’ fantastic article on A.L.S. patient-advocacy groups… but this is good if you need another dose!
Skip Without Guilt:
“Special People” (Books) - S.C. Cornell says ouch, that smarts. I never want to think about Helen Lewis again, and if her new book is merely the usual sort of dumbass popular nonfiction in which a commonplace idea is reified by way of its halfhearted rejection… well, at least it’s not overt bigotry like much of her writing. I’m glad that Cornell takes a paragraph to point out that Lewis is “probably best known for her part in bringing British-style trans-exclusionary feminism to the United States”, and to question its tenets. Mostly, though, this is a teardown of a dumb idea which is dumb in obvious ways; Lewis has written an entire book on genius as a “dangerous idea” and can’t even pin down what genius is let alone whether we should actually get rid of it. As Cornell says, Lewis’ argument boils down to one in favor of magical thinking – and delusion. This book really didn’t warrant a review in the magazine, and while Cornell does a perfectly fine job of dissecting it, they don’t have space to go further than dismantling Lewis’ framework; their own solution to the conundrum of genius is just to enjoy exceptional people without declaring them transcendent – which is fine, but totally unremarkable, and doesn’t even begin to address the actual issue, which is that “genius” is another word for “star”, and when you’re a star, they let you do it.
“Help Wanted” (Popular Chronicles) - Merve Emre is full of inherent advice. Strangely, this doesn’t feel at all like Emre’s usual writerly voice; if I read this blind, I think I’d guess it was Jill Lepore. It’s not bad, it’s just a little basic; the beginning is a very student-essay take on advice columns, the section long section on 1600s advice is more charming than surprising, brushing past the golden years of the advice column and on to the present is an odd choice, as is highlighting the phenomenal Ask Polly without mentioning that it’s still running independently as a newsletter. Finally, a section on reddit’s Am I The Asshole also doesn’t advance far past an explanation. The reader who is generally familiar with advice columns – which, I have to imagine, is most of the people who are still reading magazines in 2025 – won’t find anything that memorable here, and the piece is oddly joke-light for the relatively trivial subject, ending on a note of almost discomfiting sincerity. On the other hand: Who asked me?
“Headphones On” (Pop Music) - Amanda Petrusich is quicker than a Rae of light. Petrusich compares Rae’s new album to pretty much every big name in pop except the one whose influence I hear most clearly, ‘90s Madonna, who she even cites in a lyric. That’s a very fun pull – melodic trip-hop may be ready for its comeback; what are Massive Attack up to? – and I quite enjoyed the new album, though Rae’s verse lyrics are so much more awkward and diary-esque than her chorus lyrics that you can feel the gearshift – part of a weird, possibly Antonoff-inspired pop trend which some divas pull off better than others. Did I find Petrusich’s commentary added anything to the experience of listening to the album? Not so much; her descriptions of sounds and personas (“gasping, libidinous”… “seductive” … “debauched”) are perfectly fine, but they’re never surprising. The connection to normcore is bizarre, nonsensical, and a decade late. Addison Rae is not ordinary just because she’s an ordinary pop star; an “ordinary” red-carpet dress is not normcore.
“Solo Flights” (The Theatre) - Helen Shaw hopes it’s just a stage. Demoralizing to see Shaw reviewing these misbegotten, empty, not-even-expensive-looking efforts in selling shows on star quality, when there are so many more interesting plays on right now. I’m not excited, and Shaw can’t muster much energy, either. Izzy isn’t “fully dimensional” (Jackson McHenry went harder) and Alan is not “particularly sharp.” Shaw seems too tired to get upset at this lazy material. I want some fire. Recommit!
“Tariff Men” (A Critic at Large) - Daniel Immerwahr tariffs Trump a not-so-new one. I’m approaching anything Immerwahr writes with a heavy dose of skepticism after his disastrous attempt at whitewashing anti-science. On its surface, this piece looks rational, though its history is very, very dry; an (over-)patient examination of “liberal internationalism” – but by presenting only two sides of the story, Trump’s bloodthirsty and incoherent nationalism and the comparatively reasonable yet ultimately incredibly problematic course of liberal internationalism (“its economic underpinnings are eroding and its political costs are mounting” is as far as Immerwahr will go), the narrative ultimately ends in the proposition that we take “a more modest approach: building alliances to address tangible threats like wars, pandemics, and climate change.” This reads innocuously, but really Immerwahr is still promoting a liberal-internationalist (imperialist) status quo – and doing so at a pretty ridiculous time. What world does this fundamentally reactive viewpoint hope to shape? What can “addressing” climate change possibly look like under disaster capitalism? The wolf has blown our straw house down and Immerwahr is trying to sell sticks. We can do so much better.
Letters:
I meant to mention last week, but forgot, that Laurie Gwen Shapiro, who wrote the wonderful piece on Amelia Earhart two weeks ago, was kind enough to highlight my newsletter on her personal Facebook. She says: “The book goes well beyond the flight. It’s really about who Amelia Earhart and George Putnam were. For me, the mystery was never how Amelia died—it was how she lived, WHO SHE REALLY WAS, and what she risked, and why.” I did want to clarify that I certainly wasn’t discouraging you readers from reading the Earhart biography, which looks excellent; I was trying to say that the piece stands alone, and fleshes out its dynamics so well that one doesn’t feel the loss of that additional material.
She also added paragraph breaks to my blurb, which I find hilarious. What can I say: I like a big chunk!
dokian