Is something going on with lettuce in NY being rotten?

“According to the spokespeople of grind culture, the choice is clear: your individuality can make money for you or it can make money for somebody else,” Katy Waldman writes.

Today’s self-help books for working women abandon the pretense that they have anything to do with feminism, or even work. Instead, everything is content. https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2025/10/27/how-corporate-feminism-went-from-love-me-to-buy-me

Wrote about the state of corporate feminist self-help! www.newyorker.com/magazine/202...

You know what bsky.app/profile/blip...

For the fall books issue of @newyorker.com, I reviewed Ian McEwan's excellent new novel, which features city-drowning floods, "the famous group Radiohead," and a metric ton of adultery. www.newyorker.com/magazine/202...

“What We Can Know,” Ian McEwan’s 18th novel, takes place in the 22nd century, after a nuclear disaster. “Much of the novel’s charm lies in its re-creation of our era as seen from the future,” Katy Waldman writes.

Seeing ice cream cones during their spawning runs really takes your breath away. They’ll only do this once in their entire lives.

Monday version of me here to re-up this post for all of your Monday selves!

I reviewed Helen Oyeyemi’s new new novel, in which a character divides herself by seven — one identity for each day of the week (Should we all try this?) www.newyorker.com/magazine/202...

While I’m self-promoting, this piece is in dialogue with an earlier piece about MAGA aesthetics and how Trump is a LLM regurgitating signifiers without understanding them www.newyorker.com/culture/crit... bsky.app/profile/xwal...

With media such as “28 Years Later” and “The Last of Us,” 2025 has been a bacchanalia of zombies. Katy Waldman writes about our cultural fixation on the walking dead.

Zombies are reactionary babies, tell your friends www.newyorker.com/culture/crit...

Really enjoyed spending time with the film Sorry Baby and with its singular creator and star Eva Victor www.newyorker.com/culture/pers...

I snuck a few of my "Anora" gripes into a piece about "Materialists" and the rise of the anti-Cinderella story www.newyorker.com/culture/crit...

Does Prince Charming still exist? A spate of media scrutinizing the one-percent—including “Materialists” and “Anora”—attests to the difficulty of romanticizing wealth and love.

Subbing in for the inimitable Naomi Fry on this week’s critics column, I wrote about Hollywood’s new anti-Cinderella plot www.newyorker.com/culture/crit...

“I have wrestled with a Frey-like dread through the writing of this review—I’m afraid that I’ll describe his book and no one will believe me.” Read @xwaldie.bsky.social’s review of the cancelled author’s attempt to rebrand.

Reviewed James Frey’s new book somehow www.newyorker.com/books/page-t...

Love Marvel, hate Marvel, all I know is that they put the New Yorker in their closing credit sequence alongside a David Brooks joke that deserves its own Oscar www.newyorker.com/culture/crit...

“Twist,” by Colum McCann, centers around the cables that relay computer data around the world, and what happens when a cable off the Ghanaian coast is severed. But the book doesn’t establish the human stakes of the repair, Katy Waldman writes.

In an interview with Slate's Mary Harris, the New Yorker's Katy Waldman stated that nothing is going well at John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts since Donald Trump took over the venerable Washington D.C. institution.

Donald Trump loves posting A.I. images of himself. On a new episode of The Political Scene podcast, the staff writer @xwaldie.bsky.social talks about how she sees these often bizarre representations as the “statements of intent” of a budding authoritarian. Listen here.

Donald Trump and A.I.-generated imagery are well matched, Katie Waldman writes. “It makes sense that a man who yearns for a reality untroubled by other humans would be drawn to art that is untouched by anything human.”

I subbed in on “Critics Notebook” this week and wrote about Trump’s AI aesthetic! www.newyorker.com/culture/crit...

Things fall apart; the Kennedy center cannot hold. www.newyorker.com/culture/the-...

A well-known romantasy author is being sued for copyright infringement. But the genre’s reliance on tropes makes proving plot theft tricky. Romantasy novels “express the longing to be unique, but they pour that desire into imitative forms,” Katy Waldman writes.

This is really good, and goes beyond the plagiarism angle. I shouldn’t give away what happens when authors working in an iterative genre featuring protagonists of revelatory specialness stare into the abyss of Kindle Direct Publishing. www.newyorker.com/magazine/202...

this excellent feature from @xwaldie.bsky.social, on a case that pushes at the boundaries of what constitutes plagiarism in a genre based profoundly on tropes, is a truly wild and fascinating ride www.newyorker.com/magazine/202...

Hi! Some-time lurker, first time poster. For this week’s @newyorker.com, I dove into a romantasy plagiarism lawsuit that raises deeper questions about tropes, authorship, and the grubby imperatives of selling books in a post-literate world. www.newyorker.com/magazine/202...