World
How the Academy Awards Have Adapted to Catastrophe
Until two weeks ago, Oscar pundits were describing this awards season as “weird.” Unlike last year’s slate, dominated by Barbenheimer, the new crop of contenders had been thinned out...
Should You Question Everything?
Every few months, out of curiosity, I red-pill myself. Usually, I start with YouTube. The algorithm is extraordinarily responsive: give a couple of videos a thumbs-up, and your whole...
Donald Trump Plays Church
It’s usually gauche to take pictures in church. But at St. John’s, the Episcopal Church just across a sedate Lafayette Square from the White House, photography is inevitable at...
Till Lauer’s “Flames and Shadows”
For the cover of the January 27, 2025, issue, Till Lauer captured the tragic skyline in Los Angeles. The fires that have ravaged the city—burning through some forty thousand...
Washington’s Hostess with the Mostes’
Washington still cherishes a belief that it was long a place of bipartisan comity, of after-hours socializing during which fences were leapt and mended and the gears of the...
How a School Shooting Became a Video Game
The Final Exam, a recently released video game in which you play as a student caught amid a school shooting, lasts for around ten minutes, about the length of...
Madame President: The Cover That Never Was
The portrait above, “Kamala,” painted by Kadir Nelson, would have been the cover of the November 18, 2024, issue of The New Yorker—that is, if Kamala Harris had won...
Are We Living in a Dystopia?
In a recent episode of “Silo,” the sci-fi series from Apple TV+, a character who does not have long to live puts on a virtual-reality headset. She’s spent her...
The Ghost’s-Eye View of Steven Soderbergh’s “Presence”
Although Steven Soderbergh started out as an independent filmmaker, he may be Hollywood’s last true believer. He made fine studio movies back when star-studded genre pictures were still studios’...
Ballet Past and Present, at New York City Ballet
The Cuban contemporary-dance troupe Malpaso Dance Company—skilled, sympathetic, but still searching for a strong identity—returns to its home away from home, the Joyce, for the tenth time. The most...
