Innholdsfortegnelse for June 2, 2025 i The New Yorker

Evan Osnos (“Oligarch-in-Chief,” p. 32) is a staff writer and the author of, most recently, “The Haves and Have-Yachts: Dispatches on the Ultrarich.” Sarah Beckwith (“By the Canal,” p. 18) is the author of “Shakespeare and Loss: The Late, Great Tragedies,” forthcoming in December. Louise Erdrich (Fiction, p. 48) received the Pulitzer Prize for her novel “The Night Watchman.” Her latest book, “The Mighty Red,” came out last year. Ada Limón (Poem, p. 37) served as the twenty-fourth U.S. Poet Laureate. “Startlement: New and Selected Poems” will be published in September. Teddy Wayne (Shouts & Murmurs, p. 25), a novelist and a screenwriter, is the author of “The Winner,” among other books. “The Au Pair” is due out next year. Caitlin Reid (Puzzles & Games Dept.) began constructing crosswords in…

On a morning in May, Mordecai Johnson, the president of Howard University, testified before a congressional subcommittee about the prevalence of far-left ideas among his faculty and students. Given that the federal government has historically provided funding for the university’s budget, through an annual allocation, Johnson had a difficult choice to make. He could respond to representatives’ questions with a defense of the free exchange of ideas (and risk them holding up the allocation) or take the safer path of conceding their criticisms and promising to work to insure that the thinking on campus better aligned with putatively American values. Johnson’s dilemma will be familiar to anyone who has observed higher education in this country during the harrowing academic year that is now coming to a close. Spring is typically…

Hollywood loves edifying tales of male friendship. Woody saves Buzz. Harold and Kumar go to White Castle. Bill and Ted excel on their adventure. For his début feature, a dark comedy with “Friendship” as its very title, the writer and director Andrew DeYoung wanted to manage expectations. The film’s tagline: “Men shouldn’t have friends.” “It’s funny and dumb, and it’s not cute,” he explained the other day, in Greenpoint. “I was, like, ‘We can’t let this be cute.’” DeYoung, wearing clear-framed glasses and a navy button-down over a T-shirt, was spending a beautiful afternoon indoors, at Sunshine Laundromat and Pinball. In “Friendship,” Tim Robinson stars as the sort of pariah familiar to fans of his Netflix series, “I Think You Should Leave”—socially maladroit and desperate, prone to cataclysm. His character,…

The previously unreported existence of a second Signal chat in which Mr. Hegseth shared highly sensitive military information is the latest in a series of developments that have put his management and judgment under scrutiny. —The Times. School drop-off HEGSETH: Here you go, champ. Work hard, behave yourself, and first missiles launch at oh nine fifteen hours in Orange Zone 4. CHILD: What did you say? HEGSETH: All affected personnel are to be on heightened alert for the Hellfire launch at oh nine fifteen hours. CHILD: Ah. I thought you said oh nine fifty, which was yesterday’s Harpoon launch, and you always say— HEGSETH and CHILD: “Never repeat launch times on consecutive days, because it confuses Grandma in the family group text.” Hegseth ruffes his child’s hair. Starbucks HEGSETH: Venti…

At the beginning of the N.B.A.’s Eastern Conference Finals, Knicks fans of all varieties were ready once again to risk emotional ruin: “Lawd have mercy we are goin’ to da promise land. Us in six.”—Spike Lee, film director. “For the next month, I am a sincere convert, bowing before the greatness of these Knicks. The Knicks are simply the most dynamic, passionate team left standing. This is a team any sports fan has to love. Knicks in six.”—Bill de Blasio, former mayor, Celtics fan. “I was at both series when the Knicks won their championships in 1970 and ’73. Particularly the first time they won, with the lineup of Frazier and Willis Reed and DeBusschere and Bradley and Dick Barnett, that was the most selfless, brilliant team. I get that…

The singer and guitarist Annie Di-Russo was recently back in Crotonon-Hudson, the sleepy Hudson River town where she was brought up. Di-Russo, who is twenty-five, was preparing for an appearance on “Jimmy Kimmel Live!” and trying to rework the lyrics to “Legs,” a new single, so that it might be suitable for network television. Much of the pleasure of DiRusso’s songwriting is in its frankness. “My favorite music is always when I’m, like, Wow, I’ve had that exact thought before, but never in my life would I have said it out loud,” she said. She was leaning on a picnic table near the New Croton Dam, a three-hundred-foot, hand-hewn structure that, upon its completion, in 1906, was the tallest dam in the world. She had on a faded black off-the-shoulder…

The January 31, 1983, issue of The New Yorker carried the first installment of a two-part article titled “Overdrive.” The piece was autobiographical, written in the form of a journal covering a week in the life of the author, who was William F. Buckley, Jr. It began: Monday Gloria Cervantes, our Mexican-American cook, brought my lunch in on a tray: two pieces of whole-wheat toast, each topped with tuna fish and then with a cheese something that my wife, Pat, read about somewhere; a salad; a half bottle of Côte Rôtie (I remember the name of the wine only because it’s the one I have in half bottles), and coffee. Thus deliciously launched, the article proceeded, over many pages (it was the age of print; magazines had many pages), to…

“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. For those of us who’ve grown fond of Cruise the cardio demon, this is dispiriting news: what a letdown after “Mission: Impossible—Ghost Protocol” (2011), in which he raced heroically through the blinding fury of a Dubai sandstorm. And who could forget the blissful London chase sequence from “Mission: Impossible—Fallout” (2018), in which Cruise spent a whole seven minutes tearing up the geometric staircase at St. Paul’s, then sprinting, like an unusually stiff-backed cheetah, across one rooftop after another? Cruise does go for another brisk London jog in “The Final Reckoning,” and, although he’s had tougher workouts, he…

The searing, funny “John Proctor Is the Villain,” which has been nominated for seven Tonys, including Best Play, centers on five boisterously articulate teen girls reading “The Crucible” in an honors English class in rural Georgia; a key moment features cathartic dancing to “Green Light,” by Lorde. The rare non-musical Broadway show that inspires rapturous teen hollering, “John Proctor” can seem to generate a giddy, righteous energy loop among the actors, the much discussed Salem-witch-trial girls, and the audience. Offstage, young fans flock to the play’s author, Kimberly Belflower, hoping to connect. (“She’s our Tennessee Williams,” Natasha Katz, the play’s lighting designer, observed one night, watching a line form.) On a recent sunny day, Belflower, who is thirty-seven, headed to a favorite old haunt: Tiny Doll House, a shop on…

A woman is running. In the path, a man appears as if from nowhere. He is masked and he holds a knife. What are her choices? On one side is the canal and on the other a high, impassable fence, aluminum and concrete. She can run back to where she came from, but he will be faster and quicker. Perhaps she will be lucky, and some cyclist or walker will show up and the man might vanish as quickly as he had appeared. She calculates her chances of surviving. At this moment, they don’t seem good. Perhaps he wants to rape her without taking her life? Perhaps her desire to live will lead her to undergo whatever the man wants, hoping it will be short of death. Would a struggle,…

The literary Profile comes into the world facing a double skepticism. Most people don’t care enough about books to read about authors—unlike, say, pop stars or tech titans. And those who do care often look down their noses at the genre, which Roland Barthes mocked as a relatable fantasy for middleclass readers anxious to be told that the great novelist enjoys “his pajamas and his cheeses,” too. Fiction, of course, is already based on ransacking everyday life. But poetry is supposed to come from the soul, tradition, and psychic tremors too minute and particular to be grasped by a journalist on assignment. Or so I thought in college, when I took a break from annotating Derek Walcott’s “Omeros” to read Hilton Als’s 2004 Profile of its author in this magazine.…

“The new wine has burst the old bottles,” the playwright August Strindberg wrote, in a bullish preface to his 1888 play “Miss Julie,” setting out a catalogue of revolutionary theatrical principles. Outdated conventions needed to be cleared away, Strindberg said. To make modern, naturalistic plays, there could be no more immense proscenium spaces, painted backdrops, or intermissions. The playwright needed intimacy to ensorcell his audience, and intervals between acts might allow theatregoers to escape the “suggestive influence of the author-hypnotist.” In this manifesto, and in his spate of character-driven master-pieces written in 1887 and 1888—“Miss Julie,” “The Father,” “Creditors”—Strindberg essentially invented the small-cast, ninety-minute psychosexual slugfest. Earlier this year, the actor Hugh Jackman, the producer Sonia Friedman, and the director Ian Rickson returned to that hundred-and-forty-year-old experiment—the less-is-more, small-stage ethic—by…

ACROSS 1 “The West Wing” creator Sorkin 6 Like a not very cushy mattress 10 Knock ’em dead 14 It’s a small world! 15 “Finally!” 17 More than just tickle 18 Reading material for a fortune-teller? 19 Fizzy drink 20 Reasons for some R or X ratings 21 Spot for a watch 23 Sound of something landing heavily 24 Empty a suitcase 27 Seattle’s ___ Place Market 30 Possess 32 Microscopic shape-shifting organism 35 Africa’s longest river 37 “Stay right there!” 40 Picked up a card 41 Person on one side of a transaction 42 Beer barrel 43 Scans performed in a large tube, briefly 45 Chars a bit 47 Word before dunk or poetry 50 Flaws in a fender 52 Superheroes’ secret identities 56 Numbered area in an airport…