Katy Waldman

New York

Staff Writer at The New Yorker

writer @newyorker. formerly @slate. moves like ice on a hot stove. sorry for tweeting this, I don’t have instagram!

Articles

Is “Thunderbolts*” Marvel’s Attempt to Salvage the Superhero Genre?

2 weeks ago | newyorker.com | Katy Waldman

In the run-up to the première of “Thunderbolts*,” on May 2nd, Marvel earned some light mockery for the art-house vibe of one of its trailers. Over an edgy E.D.M. beat, closeups of the Academy Award-nominated cast members Florence Pugh and Sebastian Stan were interspersed with strobing text that conjured various prestige offerings from the indie studio A24.
Colum McCann’s Limp Novel of Digital Life

2 weeks ago | newyorker.com | Katy Waldman

Have novels left anything unsaid about the internet of the past fifteen years? It feels as though they’ve exhausted the terrain, but perhaps they’ve just made the same points over and over, their fragmented forms conjuring a user experience of broken attention, malaise, outrage, envy, and boredom. They have evoked the texture of e-mail exchanges; they have barged into the group chat; they have skewered the rhythms and argot of apps such as Hinge and Slack.
Trump Is the Emperor of A.I. Slop

1 month ago | newyorker.com | Katy Waldman

On February 19th, Donald Trump logged onto Truth Social to congratulate himself on vanquishing congestion pricing in his home state. “CONGESTION PRICING IS DEAD,” he posted. “Manhattan, and all of New York, is SAVED. LONG LIVE THE KING!” The message was amplified by the White House’s official X account, which tweeted it with an A.I.-generated image of Trump, golden-haired and golden-crowned, blotting out the New York City skyline.
The Trump Show Comes to the Kennedy Center

2 months ago | newyorker.com | Katy Waldman

On the evening of March 23rd, the Kennedy Center honored Conan O’Brien with the 2025 Mark Twain Prize for American Humor. The ceremony, which attracted a mix of comedy stars and arts-adjacent members of D.C.’s beau monde, was the biggest event held by the center since February, when President Trump purged eighteen members of the nonpartisan board of directors and installed himself as chairman.
Goings On Newsletter

2 months ago | link.newyorker.com | Rachel Syme |Katy Waldman |Fintan O'Toole |Justin Chang

Plus: Steven Soderbergh’s spycraft in “Black Bag”; Jonathan Larson beyond “Rent”; and overheard at the Eavesdrop bar. View in browser | What we’re watching, listening to, and doing this week.
How “Severance” Makes a Fetish of the Office

Mar 6, 2025 | newyorker.com | Katy Waldman

When “Severance” premièred, in 2022, it felt like an absurdist parable about the alienation of labor—a moody, eerie critique of technocapitalism that seemed in keeping with our age of “upskilling” and A.I. The four main characters worked at Lumon, a cultlike biotech company. Their division was “Macrodata Refinement,” so they spent each day sorting numbers into folders based on what kind of creepy feeling the numbers emitted—a Graeberian “bullshit job” by way of Stephen King.
How “Severance” Makes a Fetish of the Office

Mar 6, 2025 | flipboard.com | Katy Waldman

NowCan reprogramming our genes make us young again? A breakthrough in longevity research may be nearing its first human trials. For those hoping to cure death, and they are legion, a 2016 experiment at the Salk Institute for Biological Studies in San Diego has become liminal — the moment that changed …
"95% of vampire novels take place in Alaska, New Orleans, or Las Vegas"

Jan 8, 2025 | metafilter.com | Katy Waldman

Article by Katy Waldman in The New Yorker about an allegation of plagiarism in a romantasy series. Archive link. Unpublished novelist Lynne Freeman thinks that Tracy Wolff's Crave has used elements from Freeman's Blue Moon Rising, with involvement from her editor and publisher. Waldman discusses the difficulty of establishing plagiarism when the books are different in tone but have many similar details, particularly within a genre which uses tropes extensively. Via Smart Bitches, Trashy Books.
Did a Best-Selling Romantasy Novelist Steal Another Writer’s Story?

Jan 5, 2025 | newyorker.com | Katy Waldman

A few months after she’d finished, in December, 2010, Freeman signed with an agent, Emily Sylvan Kim, the founder of Prospect Agency, a small firm based out of Kim’s home, in New Jersey. Kim, a slight woman with a youthful aura and a bright, clenched smile, struck Freeman as a kindred spirit—she’d launched her own business, just as Freeman had, and she’d even briefly attended law school. For the next three years, Freeman and Kim worked together to expand and refine the manuscript.
A Novelist’s Unnerving Memoir of Disordered Eating

Nov 20, 2024 | newyorker.com | Katy Waldman

“My Good Bright Wolf,” a new memoir by the novelist Sarah Moss, begins in dishabille. A narrator is speaking to herself in the second person, and she’s using language recognizable from fairy tales and old poetry.