Innholdsfortegnelse for July 28, 2025 i The New Yorker

Rachel Aviv (“Second Life,” p. 26) is a staff writer covering mental health, ethics, and criminal justice. Her last feature for the magazine, on the writer Alice Munro, won a George Polk Award. John Seabrook (“The Flood Will Come,” p. 12) is the author of, most recently, “The Spinach King: The Rise and Fall of an American Dynasty.” Stephen Colbert (Takes, p. 25), the host of “The Late Show,” on CBS, has won ten Primetime Emmys. The show will end its run next season. Keith Gessen (Books, p. 55), a contributing writer, is the author of “A Terrible Country.” He teaches at Columbia Journalism School. Sadie Dingfelder (The Talk of the Town, p. 9) is the author of “Do I Know You?,” a memoir and a scientific exploration of face…

Fifty years ago, a glitchy yet terrifying animatronic shark persuaded movie audiences never to go in the water again. Luckily—for the photographer Tod Papageorge, at least—it didn’t keep people off the beaches. That same year, 1975, Papageorge was making his way across the country, from New York City, where he’d become known for his 35-mm. street scenes, to Los Angeles, where he’d shoot throngs of sun-dazed, sweat-glazed beachgoers with a clunkier mediumformat camera. He made four trips to L.A.’s beaches between 1975 and 1988, and a selection of the resulting black-and-white photographs—detail-rich, often dense, rapturous yet funny tableaux of stripped-down bodies engaged in sport or sprawled on the sand—will be on view at the Museum of Contemporary Art Connecticut through October 26th. Papageorge noted that the 6x9-cm.- format camera was…

The Washington, D.C., air clung to the skin like a damp washcloth one Saturday not long ago. But inside the Mead Theatre it was almost cold enough to see your breath. A coltish woman tightened her shawl around her shoulders and watched as her fellow federal workers—some laid off, others still clinging to their jobs like passengers on a listing ship—improvised a scene. “Your word is ‘watch,’” an instructor, Richie Khanh, called out from the audience. “I’m standing watch, I’m looking out—out for anything bad that might be coming near us,” a woman in an orange shirt said. An analyst at the Department of Commerce, she and some others who were there asked that their names not be used. “Like the pirate ship that’s right behind us?” Willis, a federal…

To my editor: Thank you for your notes on the new manuscript. I certainly take your point that death, as a theme, isn’t a traditional beach read. And I like your idea for “more lightness and fun, and less glioblastoma.” I’m curious, though, if you’re open to other types of deadly cancers. Also, will definitely “sex it up,” but still think that could include crying or feelings of profound sadness and despair while on the beach on a summer vacation. I wanted to flag your note about my note about maybe mimicking “Swann’s Way” in Chapter 2. Is that a hard pass on your part when you said, “Let’s absolutely not do that”? My feeling is that everyone loves Proust because, in many ways, he’s kind of the ideal beach…

Donald Trump’s political allies have long insisted, with more than a little condescension, that the press should take the President seriously, but not literally. Yet the people who take Trump most literally are among his own supporters, who over the years have absorbed his most hyperbolic claims as if they were settled truth: that Hillary Clinton and various Bidens were guilty of high crimes, that the 2020 election was stolen, that the circumstances surrounding the death of the billionaire Jeffrey Epstein warranted “a full investigation” and might have involved Bill Clinton. Rarely do the diehards demand proof. So earlier this month, when the Department of Justice and the F.B.I. issued a statement asserting that there was, in fact, no deeper mystery behind Epstein’s death—which occurred in a Manhattan jail cell…

The golden age of the shed—New York City’s outdoor-dining boom, circa summer, 2020—produced some impressive structures. At Carbone, the fancy Italian place, people ate rigatoni in a cabin made of navy-blue wood siding with red velvet curtains. Balthazar outfitted its shed with antique pendant lights, to make diners “feel like you’ve taken a train to Paris,” according to a restaurant spokesperson. Bookworms were covered, too. Three branches of the Brooklyn Public Library installed outdoor reading rooms, designed by the firm Aanda Architects. The Roadway Readeries, as they came to be called, were painted the bright blue of Yves Saint Laurent’s Jardin Majorelle, in Marrakech, with lyrical barrel-vault ceilings that evoked the breaking of a wave. They also had good Wi-Fi. But what went up had to come down. New standardizing…

Astroll through the Presidential-portrait wing at the National Portrait Gallery, in Washington, D.C., is, among other things, a game of Now You See It, Now You Don’t. In the beginning, not a whisper of a whisker—not on Washington, Adams, Jefferson, Madison, or Monroe. In the early nineteenth century, John Quincy Adams and Martin Van Buren change things up with fluffy muttonchops that drift like snow from ears to laugh lines. Otherwise, it’s a series of glabrous, faintly pink visages until you get to Abraham Lincoln. He adopted a beard after Grace Bedell, an eleven-year-old girl from Chautauqua County, New York, wrote him in October, 1860, urging him to let his whiskers grow: “All the ladies like whiskers and they would tease their husbands to vote for you and then you…

“Eddington” is a slog, but a slog with ambitions—and its director and screenwriter, Ari Aster, is savvy enough to cultivate an air of mystery about what those ambitions are. His earlier chillers, “Hereditary” (2018) and “Midsommar” (2019), had their laby-rinthine ambiguities, too, but they also had propulsive craft and cunning, plus a resolute commitment to scaring us stupid. Then came the ungainly “Beau Is Afraid” (2023), a cavalcade of Oedipal neuroses both showy and coy, in which Aster didn’t seem to lose focus so much as sacrifice it on the altar of auteurism. With “Eddington,” his high-minded unravelling continues. No longer a horror wunderkind, Aster, at thirty-nine, yearns to be an impish anatomist of the body politic. The times grow worse and worse; must his movies follow suit? “Eddington” cycles…

Since President Trump took office, agents from Immigration and Customs Enforcement have swarmed areas with immigrant populations, questioning people and making arrests. They’ve patrolled near schools and raided a homeless shelter. They arrested a four-year-old, two students of New York City public schools, and an Army veteran who happened to be Latino. Recently, masked and armed ICE agents descended on a baseball field in Riverside Park. They questioned a dozen or so elevento fourteen-year-olds who’d just finished batting practice, and left only after a confrontation with their coach, Youman Wilder, whom they threatened with arrest. He said, “I’m willing to die to make sure these kids can get home,” he recounted afterward. New York baseball people know Wilder. “I hold the city record in batting average to this very day,”…

On the evening of July 3rd, as the sun went down over Kerrville, Texas, a small city of some twenty-five thousand people and the seat of Kerr County, the water in the Guadalupe River was just four inches deep, according to the U.S. Geological Survey’s stream gauge there. The area hadn’t had any rain since mid-June. R.V. campers in the HTR TX Hill Country campground in Kerrville, some of whom had arrived at the sixty-five-acre facility only hours before, could barely hear the river, even though they were parked in premium spots next to it. At 3:30 A.M. on July 4th, Dalton Rice, the city manager, went out for an earlymorning jog along the sluggish waterway. The river had risen to 1.71 feet, around the average depth. Kerrville’s much anticipated…

When Mr. Remnick asked me to write a seven-hundred-and-twenty-five-word Take on Kenneth Tynan’s 1978 Profile of Johnny Carson, I said, “My honor, cher David.” (New Yorker editors love when you use foreign words. They’re weak for anything italicized. Anything.) “I write a late-night show. I eat seven hundred words for breakfast.” In actuality, I host a late-night show and have a low-glycemic smoothie for breakfast. My doctor says the words were clogging my carotid, and, after reading “Fifteen Years of the Salto Mortale,” I need a statin. That article is twenty thousand words. Let me repeat that: words. Can anyone read that much Tynan without adopting his native tongue wag? Can I possibly resist dropping in the occasional causerie, sodality, or antiphonal? While I host a show in the same…

In December, 1988, as the Soviet Union was beginning to come apart, Senator Bill Bradley, a member of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, convened a closed-door hearing with several of the C.I.A.’s top Soviet experts. These were analysts, not operatives. They did not run spies or weapons, or shoot poisoned darts at people; mostly, they sat at their desks at Langley, reading Pravda or studying photographs of Soviet military parades. The hearing found them in a melancholy mood, pondering life without the U.S.S.R. “The Soviet Union is so fundamental to our outlook on the world, to our concept of what is right and wrong in politics,” Douglas J. MacEachin, who ran the C.I.A.’s office of Soviet analysis, said, “that major change in the U.S.S.R. is as significant as some…

ACROSS 1 Some fluffy lap dogs, informally 5 Headwear for a Serengeti excursion 14 “___ shalt not steal” 15 Kitchen tools in disaster-prep kits 16 Condescending type 17 Stability-enhancing part of some sandals 18 “Stay quiet!” 20 Parsley, sage, rosemary, and thyme 21 One of five in a limerick 22 “Ha, good meme!” 23 “Alice in Wonderland” character who’s late for a very important date 28 Mai ___ (tiki cocktail) 31 Rank that requires at least twenty-one merit badges 32 Runs at a leisurely pace 33 Nineteenth-century anesthetic 34 Surgery sites: Abbr. 35 Student 36 Cockatiels and parakeets, for some people 37 Complimentary taste at a grocery store 39 Distance units on a football field, briefly 40 Sticky fall treats served on sticks 41 Income ___ 42 Group that provides…