May 27, 2025

Last Week's New Yorker Review: 🌱 The Weekend Special (May 25)

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.

I usually send out two editions of the weekend special for double-issue weeks but because there’s no new Fiction and I put the Weekend Essay in the regular edition, I’m gonna just skip a week.

🌱 Fiction

“Fairy Pools” by Patricia Lockwood. Three Boyles. language, landscape, later. Embodies the beginnings of a breakdown of internal communication, sparked by an unreliable gut – a condition I’ve experienced myself – in such an unassuming way one assumes at first it is style, or affect. (Well, and maybe there’s no difference.) This is less likely to make you sob than Lockwood’s astonishing previous effort in the magazine, but this story’s simultaneous restraint and fractal relationship to meaning-making lend it a wide and sonorous quality. The feeling that identity formation is a fragile thing, tipsy on a sandy foundation, is possibly encouraged, or at least rendered hallucinatory, by the conditions of contemporary life. But Lockwood’s ability to render this definitionally incommunicable state by strange proxy, putting together words that don’t say what they do say, makes her one of the very few writers who actually earn the tag postmodern. And it’s very funny, too; not in the self-consciously dry way of so much contemporary writing but instead in a loopy, smiling-at-no-joke way that is far more intriguing. Having just emerged from a silent meditation retreat at which I continually struggled to make meaning from the chaos of internality, rereading this story filled me with breath.

🌱 Weekend Essay

“The President Who Became a Prophet” by Manvir Singh. Two Harrimans. messiah, media, merge. Some of the best Trump coverage the magazine has produced, because it has a specific and historically informed point of view – Singh has written a book on messiahs, and while I’d be perfectly content to just read an excerpt, this take on Q as part of a long lineage of “mythic structures” that justify various sorts of harm and death-bringing makes much more sense than the often technologically deterministic suppositions that it’s a threat without any precedent. Was I surprised by any of what Singh says here? Not really, no, but given how many wrongheaded or incomplete explanations there are of the conspiratorial thinking surrounding Trump (one of which is a piece I’m seriously dreading having to write about in the soon-to-be-reviewed edition, a deeply misguided effort from the generally reliable Daniel Immerwahr) it’s good to get a thoughtful take on all that thoughtless cruelty.

🌱 Random Pick

“Unique New York” by Nancy Franklin. (Nov 15, 1999). Two Parkers. information, infinity, indifference. I can’t believe that the week of the New York issue, random numbers pulled up this piece, a review of Ric Burns’ epic public-television documentary series on the city. Franklin’s review is mostly notable for the paragraphs taking issue with some of Burns’ rhetoric regarding the city: “…the idea that the city is dedicated to anything, that it has intention of any kind, is ridiculous… [the city] is not a ‘cause,’ and it’s not a tragedy. The story of New York, repeated over and over again throughout its history, is basically: out with the old, in with the new.” Two years later, no one would be willing to say such a thing, of course; weirdly, these days, we still have trouble saying it. But it’s true, and it’s a bracing thought, after a sometimes nostalgic double-issue, that the city is only what we make of it, and that we are not only what it makes of us.

🌱 Something Extra

A poem.

Childhood

Spit it out. Hunger is sweet,

silent, manic,

heaving air, doubled over,

an injured poet gripping a fresh wound.

a wound clock is a child to time,

breath doubled, seen-not-heard,

stuck forward, tracing past.

a word’s a fast train, blurring past pain

points unknown, 

new moon,

fresh cup.

Sunday Song: