What Casey Means and MAHA Want You to Fear
If you close your eyes and imagine an up-from-the-bootstraps embodiment of boomer triumphalism—the ambitious young technocrat of a systems novel by Don DeLillo or Thomas Pynchon, sprinting…
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Ann Goldstein on Keeping English in Mind
When the translator Ann Goldstein—who has helped to bring Elena Ferrante, Primo Levi, and Pope John Paul II to English readers—works on a project, she likes to read English books to keep…
“Mission: Impossible—The Final Reckoning” Goes Hard on Valediction
“Mission: Impossible—The Final Reckoning” has a running time of just under three hours. Within those three hours, alas, I’d say that Tom Cruise has a running time of only a minute or two.…
How “Andor” Injects Contemporary Politics Into “Star Wars” I.P.
It’s rare to hear the word “genocide” uttered unequivocally on television, let alone on the streaming service Disney+. So it was a bit of a shock to encounter the term in a late episode of…
The Making of “Rust” Was a Tragedy. Its Final Form Is a Missed Opportunity
Some movies eventually become inseparable from the stories of their production. Alfred Hitchcock’s “The Birds” and “Marnie” are now inextricably associated with their star Tippi Hedren’s…
A New Wave of Cinematic Riches Arrives at Cannes
“When will this fucking movie be over with?” It’s a question that surfaces often at the Cannes Film Festival, where hour blurs into hour, movie bleeds into movie, and, by day nine or so,…
Can Sam Altman Be Trusted with the Future?
In 2017, soon after Google researchers invented a new kind of neural network called a transformer, a young OpenAI engineer named Alec Radford began experimenting with it. What made the…
Pavement Inspires a Strange, Loving Bio-Pic
I once assumed that Pavement would be forgotten by later generations, just as the knowing, sarcastic wit of the nineteen-nineties came to seem passé in the two-thousands. The band’s music…
How Barry Diller Stayed on Top
Throughout, Diller occasionally muses on the excellence of a script—“Raiders of the Lost Ark” was, he says, “perfect from the first word”—but he is, appropriately, far more preoccupied…
The Dissonant Howl of “Salome”
The Biblical figure of Salome, Princess of Judea, who dances before Herod Antipas and demands the head of John the Baptist as a reward, infiltrated late-nineteenth-century culture as an…
Kenny Smith Isn’t Going Fishing Yet
Last July, the National Basketball Association announced a new eleven-year media-rights agreement with Amazon, NBC, and ESPN, set to take effect at the start of next season. Notably left…
“The Encampments” and the American College Student
The institution has not neglected to commemorate the history of agitation against it. The year 2018 marked five decades since students occupied the halls of Columbia University, demanding…
Arrested for Singing While Female, in “My Orange Garden”
One thing is immediately clear in Anna-Sophia Richard’s short film “My Orange Garden,” and that is how much Faravaz loves to sing. She issues rich, quavering vocals—no matter whether on a…
Barry Blitt’s “Soft Landing”
For the cover of the May 26, 2025, issue, the artist Barry Blitt chose to depict President Donald J. Trump’s enthusiasm for any way that he and his family can profit from his position as a…
Dolly Parton’s Quietly Inspiring Defense of Marriage
Abelard and Heloise, Vladimir and Véra, Prince Albert and Queen Victoria: to these historic his and hers, I would add Carl and Dolly. That’s Dean and Parton, the Tennessee couple whose…
“Overcompensating” Is a New Kind of Coming-Out Comedy
Benny Scanlon, the protagonist of the new comedy “Overcompensating,” is the kind of boy mothers don’t know to warn their daughters about. Tall, handsome, and polite, Benny—played by Benito…
When a Writer Takes to the Stage
Writers who contemplate going onstage tend to fall into two camps: those who know better and those who should but don’t. Of the second kind, The New Yorker has, over its hundred years,…
Spare a Thought for the Snitch
The Boston Globe’s investigative Spotlight team has been reporting on wrongdoing for decades—before and after its stunning exposure, in 2003, of the vast Catholic Church child-sexual-abuse…
A Day in the Live-Streamed Life of Donald Trump
In Donald Trump’s first term, he reinvented many things about how the job of President was done. The strictly scheduled day of his predecessors—the rigid procession of fifteen-minute…
Rediscovering a Great Film Critic of Hollywood’s Golden Age
Sometimes there’s light at the end of the rabbit hole. When Josef von Sternberg’s film “The Devil Is a Woman,” from 1935, was recently screened, I was curious about how it was received in…
What Can We Learn from Broken Things?
In my spare time, I’m an obsessed photographer, and through the years I’ve used dozens of cameras. A while ago, a horrible misfortune befell the one that I treasure most. Arriving home, I…
My New York City Tour of Tours
I’m a sucker for guided tours. I love a CliffsNotes condensation of a place. All of Rome in ninety minutes gave me a Visigothic sense of accomplishment, untarnished even when my tour bus’s…
Why I Broke Up with New York
All this may seem to imply some deeper judgment about the city—that I think it’s wanton and unregulated, a “Where’s Waldo?” of Boschian perversion. But I will always defend New York from…