How the Kennedy Center Has Been Transformed by Trumpism
Employees told me that the new hires “don’t understand the basic vocabulary” of arts administration. They have questions. Things like, what is “capacity”? What is an “arena show”? What is…
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Instagram’s Favorite New Yorker Cartoons in 2025
What’s in a like? That which we call a heart by any other name would be a retweet. (I am so sorry, mostly to my college Shakespeare professor, but really to everyone reading this.) On…
Trump’s World and the Real World
In service to his vision of the world, the President has spent the year undoing every environmental law he can find. The zeal of his lieutenants—Lee Zeldin, at the Environmental Protection…
The Best TV Shows of 2025
Fourteen years ago, Emily Nussbaum, one of my esteemed predecessors in the TV-critic chair, notoriously titled her Top Ten list “I Hate Top Ten Lists.” I’ve seldom felt the same. I’m not…
Oliver Sacks Put Himself Into His Case Studies. What Was the Cost?
As Sacks aged, he felt as if he were gazing at people from the outside. But he also noticed a new kind of affection for humans—“homo sap.” “They’re quite complex (little) creatures (I say…
Pierre-Emmanuel Lyet’s “Christmas Avenue”
Last year, the Paris-based artist Pierre-Emmanuel Lyet did a residency at Villa Albertine, which gave him the opportunity to experience the bustling energy of the Big Apple. For the cover…
A New Afghan Bakery, in New York’s Golden Age of Bread
As the city’s bakeries have grown increasingly culturally specific, representing far-flung cuisines and styles—see Librae, in the East Village, which deploys Danish techniques and Middle…
The New Studio Museum in Harlem Is a Landmark in the History of Black Art
I had to wait for the next generation—my older sister—to break through that uncertainty and introduce me to the political, social, and aesthetic significance of Harlem. In my sister’s…
Two New Movies Revivify the Portrait-Film Genre
Documentaries about individuals are ubiquitous, but “Suburban Fury” and “Put Your Soul on Your Hand and Walk” explore the filmmaker-subject relationship in ways that recall classics of the…
Chloé Zhao Has Looked Into the Void
How did this book make its way to you? I was driving through New Mexico to the Telluride Film Festival, and that’s when Amblin called me about this project. The reception was in and out,…
Olga Tokarczuk Recommends Visionary Science Fiction
The Nobel Prize winner Olga Tokarczuk’s fiction is known for its interest in the porosity of boundaries—between nations, between ethnicities, between fiction and reality, consciousness and…
A Greenlandic Photographer’s Tender Portraits of Daily Life
The stark Greenlandic landscape is a persistent presence in Storch’s photos, and low, horizontal sunlight is everywhere. In one of Storch’s pictures, an old man on a wooden porch angles…
“The Beast in Me” Is at War with Itself
Aggie Wiggs, a famous Pulitzer Prize-winning writer, is living in a home that is far too big for her in Oyster Bay, a wealthy enclave on Long Island. The home is too big for her because…
Are We Getting Stupider?
For nineteenth-century writers like Gustave Flaubert, the concept of stupidity came to encompass the lazy drivel of cliché and received opinion; one of Flaubert’s characters says that, in…
Building a State of Fear in “Extremist”
On November 16, 2023, Sasha Skochilenko, a thirty-three-year-old artist, poet, and musician, stood in court to give what is known in the Russian judicial system as the “last word”—final…
The Composer Making a Hip-Hop Musical About Anne Frank
A few years ago, Andrew Fox was struck by a transcendently bad idea. He would turn the story of Anne Frank into a satirical hip-hop musical: intersectional, inclusive, and inane. Fox was a…
The Best Podcasts of 2025
Ah, 2025—yet another heck of a year! In the audio realm, as elsewhere, inventiveness is essential during challenging times—so when video-chat podcasts predominate, celebrity-hosted…
Now Watch Me Read
Performing personhood has perhaps never been as panoptical, and top of mind, as it is today. Social-media platforms prioritize the fastidious maintenance and monitoring of online personas,…
What Makes Goethe So Special?
On his return to Frankfurt, he found it: the life of Götz von Berlichingen, an early-sixteenth-century knight with a prosthetic iron hand, whose autobiography Goethe had stumbled upon in…
Klaas Verplancke’s “White House of Gold”
For the cover of the December 8, 2025, issue, the cartoonist Klaas Verplancke wanted to capture how, as he put it, “shiny gold pales in comparison to the charm of Christmas lights.” The…
Tim Robinson Finds Humanity—and Tests It—in “The Chair Company”
In this outline, “The Chair Company” could be a sketch premise: “guy loses it after embarrassing himself at a big meeting.” This was the problem that bedevilled “Friendship,” an A24 movie…
How Noah Baumbach Fell (Back) in Love with the Movies
It was somewhere on a deserted highway in Ohio at about 4 A.M., with a rain machine, while I was shooting “White Noise.” I think I felt, Oh God, I don’t know that I like doing this. That…
The Offices Only a Newsperson Could Love
There is something inspiring about an ugly building. I don’t mean high-concept ugly, like a brutalist tower, but rather a place that’s provisional, and purely functional, if barely—your…
My Mother’s Memory Loss, and Mine
My cat, Harriet, is curled up on the TV console when I walk into the living room. She blinks at me, slowly. Cats blinking at you is supposed to be a sign of affection. I blink back. “Look…