Ryan Davis’s Junk-Drawer Heart
On Easter Sunday, the Louisville-based singer-songwriter Ryan Davis opened a matinée show for Bill Callahan in the assembly room of a former Catholic school in Kingston, New York. Indoor…
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Joost Swarte’s “Sunny-Side Up”
For the cover of the July 21, 2025, issue, the artist Joost Swarte portrays how New Yorkers have been feeling in the midst of a heat wave. “The part of a hot, sunny day I like best,”…
Teaching Men Who Will Never Leave Prison
It’s 2018. I am, for the first time, in a classroom at Great Meadow Correctional Facility, in Comstock, New York, a men’s maximum-security state prison. There are sixteen students in the…
An Adolescent Crush That Never Let Up
John Updike’s professional relationship with The New Yorker began in 1954, when he was twenty-two and the magazine published his poem “Duet, with Muffled Brake Drums,” but his personal…
“Too Much” Remixes the Rom-Com
Starting over in New York is a cliché for a reason; so is starting over by leaving it behind. Lena Dunham, who became the poster child for a certain kind of Brooklyn millennial during the…
Remembrance of Scents Past
But Marks argues that smell is one of the most potent ways to give museum visitors a visceral sense of the past, and to help them remember what they read or saw in an exhibit. Among the…
Amy Bloom’s Favorite Family Novels
Amy Bloom’s latest novel, “I’ll Be Right Here,” tells the story of a single family across more than eight decades. The span of the book renders it, almost by definition, a portrait of how…
Are You Experiencing Posting Ennui?
The breakfast photo is the ur-text of the narcissistic internet, a bit of content that no one else is necessarily interested in but which the poster feels the need, or even the…
A Thrilling Italian American Joint Points Backward and Forward
JR & Son is a new-old establishment that conjures the past while deliciously disrupting expectations. Source link
Lorde Strips Down to Start Over
Lorde is contemporary pop’s greatest demystifier, and also its greatest mystic. This contradiction has animated her music from the beginning. “We aren’t caught up in your love affair,” she…
Donald Trump, Zohran Mamdani, and Posting as Politics
On June 24, at 6:50 A.M., Donald Trump posted a message on Truth Social that might otherwise have been reserved for a diplomatic cable or at least a highly secure phone line: “ISRAEL. DO…
Finding a Family of Boys
In 1981, I was a student of art history at Columbia University. I was twenty-one and worked to support myself at a variety of jobs. Columbia was an all-boys school then. Old oak desks and…
Elmore Leonard’s Perfect Pitch
Out of interest, could this be the best beginning to the sixth chapter of any book, by anyone, ever? The girl with the stringy blond hair over her shoulders and the trading beads and the…
What The New Yorker Was Reading in 1925
Several months before the first issue of The New Yorker appeared, Harold Ross’s fund-raising prospectus promised, along with much else, that “Judgment will be passed upon new books of…
How Eva Victor Reimagined the Trauma Plot
At one point in “Sorry, Baby,” a new film written, directed, and starring the actor and comedian Eva Victor, the main character, an English professor named Agnes, has an anxiety attack…
An Enduring Archive of Queer Writers’ Portraits
Giard grew up in a working-class family in Hartford, Connecticut. When he entered public high school, he was shunted onto the remedial track, because, as he wrote, “it was simply assumed…
“Prince Faggot” Sends Up Kink and Country
On a blue-lit stage, a naked man—blindfolded, trussed, and gagged—hangs like a deer from a pole. Pale and gleaming, he looks like a painting of St. Sebastian, rapturous in martyrdom, or…
The Shrewdly Regenerative Apocalypse of “28 Years Later”
Perhaps because cannibalism comes with the territory, the zombie movie has proved uncommonly immune to a certain strain of critical attack: the kind that instinctively finds fault with the…
A.I. Is Homogenizing Our Thoughts
In an experiment last year at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, more than fifty students from universities around Boston were split into three groups and asked to write SAT-style…
Glory and Gore in “Afternoons of Solitude”
You don’t have to like bullfighting to watch “Afternoons of Solitude” with fascination, any more than you have to like crime to enjoy a film noir. Full disclosure: I squeamishly watch…
“The Gilded Age” Is a Poor Man’s Period Drama
In the HBO drama “The Gilded Age,” the characters are keenly aware that they live in interesting times. Early in the series, which is set in the eighteen-eighties, an estate lawyer…
Ben Shahn, the Lefty Artist Who Was Left Behind
From the late nineteen-forties through the mid-fifties, Ben Shahn was one of the most in-demand artists in America. Whether you were mailing a package at a post office, flipping through a…
Are Young People Having Enough Sex?
The virgin allegations emerged about a decade ago. Young people “are so sexually inactive that it practically boggles the mind,” a writer for Bustle proclaimed, in 2016, invoking a then…