Innholdsfortegnelse for May 5, 2025 i The New Yorker

Jelani Cobb (“The Road to ‘Sinners,’” p. 36) is a staff writer and the dean of the Columbia Journalism School. He is an editor of the New Yorker anthology “The Matter of Black Lives.” Jill Lepore (“In Case of Emergency,” p. 12), a staff writer, is a professor of history and law at Harvard. Her most recent book, “The Deadline,” won a PEN America award for the art of the essay. Saïd Sayrafiezadeh (Fiction, p. 44) published the story collection “American Estrangement” in 2021. Kathryn Schulz (Books, p. 56), a staff writer, won the 2016 Pulitzer Prize for feature writing. She published the memoir “Lost & Found” in 2022. Ivan Ehlers (Sketchpad, p. 11) has contributed cartoons to The New Yorker since 2018. Jena Friedman (Shouts & Murmurs, p. 25),…

The important thing to know about Danny & Coop’s—the new Phillycheesesteak restaurant in the East Village co-owned by Bradley Cooper, of the piercing blue eyes and the considerable acting-directing chops—is this: the cheesesteak is good. It’s very good. It’s a hefty twelve-incher, the roll split lengthwise and filled with a glorious gloop of cheese (smooth and saucy Cooper Sharp, no relation to Bradley) and sliced rib-eye steak (tender, velvet-soft, paper-thin) run through with sweet ribbons of griddled onion. It’s the best cheesesteak I’ve had in New York, which isn’t saying much; it’s just as good as the best one I’ve had in Philadelphia, which is saying plenty. Cooper’s partner at Danny & Coop’s is the chef-cum-baker turned restaurateur Danny DiGiampietro, of Angelo’s Pizzeria, which opened in 2019, in Philadelphia, and…

As any freegan, gleaner, or dumpster diver knows, there is an art to picking through trash. On a recent rainy morning in Bushwick, Thomas Crespo, a second-generation sanitation worker, was elbow-deep in a residential trash bin, searching for coffee grounds, eggshells, dead houseplants, orange peels—any organic material that might fall under the purview of New York City’s new composting law. “As soon as you open the lid, you get hit with the smell,” Crespo said, describing one giveaway. He wore a yellow safety vest over a green Department of Sanitation uniform. One thing he was not wearing was gloves. “I’m so used to it,” he said. “Soap and water will do.” On every shift, Crespo, who is forty, with broad shoulders and slicked-back hair, inspects the trash cans outside more…

On the twentieth of January, the year of our Lord 2025, Donald Trump’s one hundred days began. Thank you. Thank you very much, everybody. (Applause.) Wow. Thank you very, very much. I read his second Inaugural Address early the next morning in bed, curled, bent to the glow of an iPhone in dark mode, a morning ritual that always feels like sin. From this day forward, our country will flourish and be respected again all over the world. Then, dutifully, I scrolled through the Day One executive orders: A full, complete and unconditional pardon … offenses related to events that occurred at or near the United States Capitol on January 6, 2021 … … the privilege of United States citizenship does not automatically extend to persons born in the United…

The nonfiction best-seller list in early 2018 included “Trumpocracy: The Corruption of the American Republic” and “It’s Even Worse Than You Think: What the Trump Administration Is Doing to America.” The cover of the former was emergency-alert red; on the latter, a map of the United States was bursting into flames. By comparison, the cover of another book, “How Democracies Die,” was somewhat muted—white capital letters on a black background. The word “DIE,” though, did loom large. The anti-Trump books were received the way most information about Donald Trump is received. Those who hated him felt apoplectic, or vindicated; those who liked him mostly tuned it out. But “How Democracies Die,” by two political scientists at Harvard, was about a global phenomenon that was bigger than Trump, and it became…

In 1999, Oliver Sacks, the eclectic neurologist who was dubbed the “poet laureate of medicine,” received a letter from a pianist, Anna H. “My (very unusual) problem, in one sentence, and in non-medical terms, is … I cannot read words, and music gives me the same problem.” Sacks was known for handwritten correspondence, but he called Anna—“this seemed to be the thing to do”—and invited her to his clinic. Her vision was fine, yet her condition, “visual agnosia,” was worsening. She soon struggled to recognize objects and even faces. Like many of Sacks’s other stories, “The Case of Anna H.,” published in The New Yorker in 2002, explored a cognitive anomaly. (He also wrote about the near-photographic memory of an artist with autism and a middle-aged sailor who thought that…

1. “The History Podcast: Invisible Hands” (BBC), about the history of capitalism and the “free-market revolution,” turns out to be one of the zestiest series I’ve listened to this year. The eighty-six-year-old British broadcaster David Dimbleby is a shrewd guide to a surprising narrative that includes a Sussex chicken farmer, a wartime parachuting tragedy, and a vomiting conservative M.P. Rare is the podcast host in 2025 who can casually weave socioeconomics together with personal memories of the Second World War. 2. Hosted by the lawyer turned podcaster Nicolo Majnoni, the hair-raising true-crime series “Shadow Kingdom: God’s Banker” (Crooked Media and Campside Media) tells the story of Roberto Calvi, a banker who worked closely with the Vatican and who, in 1982, was found dead, hanging from London’s Blackfriars Bridge. Majnoni is…

Nigel Smith, an Australian architect, first went to Fire Island Pines in 2004, when he was twenty-eight and newly out of the closet. “It was heaven,” he said, not long ago. He spent days in a Speedo and met people at “tea,” the roving party where gaggles of gay men dance, drink, and flirt. He started visiting every summer. One time, a friend took him to see the drag queen Porsche in Cherry Grove, and along the way Smith got so drunk (screwdrivers) that he lay down in the ocean and his friend had to yank him out. “I remember Porsche singing, and she’s, like, ‘Who’s that hot guy in the back?’” he said. “As everyone turned around and looked at me, I just started quietly vomiting.” More recently, Smith…

America sees itself in a young boy who learns—but not too much—and whose story ends with his eyes on an open horizon, a stretch of land claimed by the nation but not yet bound to it. That’s where, in the collective imagination, he remains. Even his creator believed that following the boy into adulthood would ruin the image. And yet he once imagined doing just that, laying Huckleberry Finn to rest alongside his companion: Huck comes back, 60 years old, from nobody knows where—& crazy. Thinks he is a boy again, & scans always every face for Tom & Becky &c. Tom comes, at last, 60 from wandering the world & tends Huck, & together they talk the old times; both are desolate, life has been a failure, all that…

ACROSS 1 Body-horror director David who made an N.F.T. of himself kissing his own corpse 11 Setting for L.A. winters 14 Dance moves that might make use of braids or a ponytail 15 Intl. body of Western Hemisphere nations 16 The “A” of long-distance hiking’s A.T. 17 M.L.B.’s Guardians, on scoreboards 18 Deadly sins, e.g. 19 U.S. naval craft used in the Second World War 21 “The Green Hat” novelist Michael 22 They may come with a flashlight or a remote control 24 “Un Señor Muy Viejo con ___ Alas Enormes” (Gabriel García Márquez story) 25 Mind 26 Process that culminated in 476 A.D. 29 Tally 30 Laundry-day garment, perhaps 31 3, 4, and 5, commonly 32 Home of China’s Terracotta Army 33 They may be travel-sized 36 Agency under…

Eight years ago, in this space, a survey of the first hundred days of the initial Trump Presidency described just how “demoralizing” the Administration had already proved for any citizen concerned with the fate of liberal democracy. In both rhetoric and action, Donald Trump had undermined the rule of law, global security, civil rights, science, and the distinction between fact and its opposite. As we noted, The hundred-day marker is never an entirely reliable indicator of a four-year term, but it’s worth remembering that Franklin Roosevelt and Barack Obama were among those who came to office at a moment of national crisis and had the discipline, the preparation, and the rigor to set an entirely new course. Impulsive, egocentric, and mendacious, Trump has, in the same span, set fire to…

Welcome to the United States of America. As part of our continuing efforts to insure public safety, protect national security, and suppress the free flow of ideas, which are now pretty much illegal (even though ICE deleted its April 10, 2025, social-media infographic explicitly stating so), we at U.S. Customs and Border Protection kindly ask that you fill out the following survey upon reëntry into the Fatherland. (We’re assuming you live here, otherwise why on earth would you be visiting the U.S. right now?) Are you a U.S. citizen? A. Yes. B. Good, because there’s no other option. What was the purpose of your trip? A. Business. B. Pleasure. C. I am one of those insufferable people who always say “Both.” D. I binge-watched all six seasons of “The Handmaid’s…

The decade-long dominance of Marvel Studios in American popular cinema has insured that, among other things, we all recognize an origin story when we see one. To the extent that such neat inception points exist in real life, an afternoon at an aging movie palace on the corner of Lake Park and Grand Avenues, in central Oakland, California, provided one for the filmmaker Ryan Coogler. The Grand Lake Theatre, which opened in 1926, to showcase vaudeville acts and silent films, still retains a neoclassical majesty—a crystal chandelier, frescoes, a Wurlitzer organ that is played on Friday and Saturday nights—that’s a holdover from the era when theatres were meant to project the grandeur of Hollywood itself. Coogler’s formative moment at the Grand Lake came at a different time for the movies,…

Ezekiel was an exile. Born in the kingdom of Judah, he survived the siege of Jerusalem, in 597 B.C.E., but afterward was banished with his fellow-Jews to Babylon. While there, he had an arresting vision: He saw himself in a valley filled with human remains, as if a terrible battle had taken place there long ago and the vanquished still lay where they were slain. Then God spoke to him, and the bones reconfigured into skeletons, the skeletons filled out with flesh, and the wind began to blow toward them from all directions. All at once, the Book of Ezekiel records, “the breath came into them, and they lived, and stood on their feet, a vast multitude.” To restore the dead to life: that is the prerogative of gods, but…