What Can Conversion Memoirs Tell Us?
Eventually, Ash finds in herself a gradual attraction, not only to religious practice but to the wild disharmonies of belief. Her mother is sliding into late-stage dementia, and Ash yearns…
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Style
“No Other Choice” Eliminates the Competition with Style
Paper cuts are the worst. In “No Other Choice,” a new comic thriller from the South Korean filmmaker Park Chan-wook, You Man-su (Lee Byung-hun), a longtime employee at a pulp manufacturer…
“Waiting to Exhale,” Thirty Years On
Forest Whitaker’s “Waiting to Exhale” is perhaps the quintessential “chick flick”—and an ideal case study for all that the cinematic subgenre can do. The “chick flick” often concerns…
Is the Dictionary Done For?
He also introduces us to terms likely to be new to many readers: “sportocrat,” “on fleek,” “vajazzle,” and the German word Backpfeifengesicht, which is defined as “a face that deserves to…
The Organists Improvising Soundtracks to Silent Films
A hundred and three years on, F. W. Murnau’s “Nosferatu: A Symphony of Horror” still haunts the moviegoing unconscious. Newcomers feel shudders of recognition on seeing Murnau’s indelible…
Briefly Noted
“Daring to Be Free,” “The Second Estate,” “Best Offer Wins,” and “A Love Story from the End of the World.” Source link
The Top Twenty-five New Yorker Stories of 2025
Is reading dying? This year, as screens and social-media apps continued to fragment our attention, it felt like we finally began to grasp that there is a crisis at hand. In August, the…
The Burgled Louvre’s Stolen-Art Expert
I went to look a bit on the Louvre’s website to see the provenance and discovered the recency of the acquisitions. The absence of information about the material was interesting, like…
Ten of My Favorite Cookbooks of 2025
The year’s best culinary titles include a food history of the United States, a guide to being an excellent dinner-party guest, and a collection of recipes that people decided to take to…
What if Readers Like A.I.-Generated Fiction?
After feeding Han’s writing into GPT-4o, Chakrabarty fine-tuned fresh versions of the model on the work of twenty-nine other authors, including a close college friend of mine, Tony…
Can You Reclaim Your Mind?
Modernists like Woolf developed an attitude, which T. S. Eliot called “impersonality,” meant to reclaim their mental lives from the habits they unknowingly followed. The philosopher…
The Role of Doctors Is Changing Forever
Historically, medicine’s power rested on a specific kind of cultural authority—the ability to determine not only what diseases exist, who has them, and what to do about it, but also what…
A Graphic Novel About Rage and Repression in Montreal
“Cannon” is the second graphic novel by Lai, a thirty-two-year-old Australian who lives in, and makes art about, Montreal. Her first book, “Stone Fruit,” applied a similar visual style…
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The Year in Slop
2025 in Review New Yorker writers reflect on the year’s highs and lows. The Turing test, a long-established tool for measuring machine intelligence, gauges the point at which a…
Five Things That Changed the Media in 2025
The true-crime genre has been a cornerstone of the podcast market for years, and we could very well see a proliferation of newsletters about cold cases, wife murders, or gangland rackets.…
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Sarah Sherman Enters the Cartoon Caption Contest
The comedian tries her hand at captioning New Yorker cartoons. Source link
Luci Gutiérrez’s “Inside Story”
The cover of the December 22, 2025, special Cartoons & Puzzles issue, by Luci Gutiérrez, celebrates the particular mixture of zaniness and dedication that it takes to produce an issue of a…
Stephen Sondheim, Puzzle Maestro
Most of the book, though, is devoted to a “ludological biography” of the great man: a life in puzzle pieces, hitherto unassembled. Sondheim may not have considered his puzzles and games to…
The Best Things I Ate in 2025
Trends in restaurants are like trends in art: cumulative, ambient, much more evident in retrospect than they are in the chaos of the present. If 2024 was the year that the French…
How Nicolas Sarkozy Survived Twenty Days Behind Bars
Sarkozy is assigned prisoner number 320535. “Four days earlier, I had been Nicolas Sarkozy, the former President of the Republic, being received by President Emmanuel Macron himself at the…
A Holiday Gift Guide: Puzzles and Games Galore
For the word gamer with old-school tastes and ample storage space, consider a Monogrammed Deluxe Scrabble set ($170), paired with a leather-bound Scrabble dictionary ($105) to help resolve…
Nancy Shaver Is the Real Deal
The choreographer Marla Phelan is interested in the birth of stars—not Barbra Streisand or Lady Gaga but the cosmic kind. Working with the astrophysicist Blakesley Burkhart, she has made…
The Lovably Fragile Exes of “Is This Thing On?”
The invention, though, comes from real life. Alex’s experience is loosely modelled on that of John Bishop, a British pharmaceutical salesman who, with no standup experience, began…