Innholdsfortegnelse for August 18, 2025 i The New Yorker

David D. Kirkpatrick (“The Number,” p. 26), a staff writer, is the author of “Into the Hands of the Soldiers,” about the Arab Spring. As a reporter at the Times, he shared three Pulitzer Prizes. Amanda Petrusich (“The Last Indie Rock Star,” p. 18) is a staff writer and the author of “Do Not Sell at Any Price: The Wild, Obsessive Hunt for the World’s Rarest 78rpm Records.” Jerome Groopman (Books, p. 64), a professor at Harvard and a staff writer since 1998, writes primarily about medicine and biology. Lorenzo Mattotti (Cover), an illustrator, a director, and a novelist, first contributed to the magazine in 1993. Parker Henry (The Talk of the Town, p. 11) is a graduate student in the philosophy department at Stanford. Deborah Garrison (Poem, p. 52)…

In its nearly sixteen years on the air, “WTF with Marc Maron” has recorded more than fifteen hundred episodes, with guests ranging from RuPaul to Robin Williams to Barack Obama. This fall, “WTF” will end its run, after which Maron plans to spend more time acting and doing standup. (His new special, “Panicked,” is out on HBO Max.) He joined us to recommend a few books. “I wouldn’t say I’m an avid reader, and when I read I mean business,” he said. His remarks have been edited and condensed. No One Left to Come Looking for You by Sam Lipsyte This novel is about young people who are living through a moment of transition, when both the Lower East Side and the music associated with it are becoming gentrified. These…

In 1996, Leslie Gordon, a biologist and a pediatrics resident at a hospital in Rhode Island, gave birth to a son, Sam. For a few months, Sam seemed healthy. But Gordon and her husband, a pediatric emergency physician named Scott Berns, soon started to feel that something was wrong. Sam’s skin looked tight, shiny, and veiny. He lost hair and was hardly putting on any weight. Doctors couldn’t explain why. “It was driving me crazy,” Gordon said. “They’d say, ‘Oh, he’s small, but you guys are small, too.’” One evening, a colleague of Berns’s, Monica Kleinman, came over for dinner and looked across the table at Sam. “Something just clicked in my mind,” Kleinman told me. She’d seen features like Sam’s in a textbook. A few days later, she told…

Beatles lyrics updated for their contemporaries, on the occasion of RingoStarr’s recent eighty-fifth birthday. ListenDo you want to know a secret?Do you promise not to tell?Whoa, oh, ohCloserLet me whisper in your earIt’s the left one that still hears?Now I’ve forgotten what I wantedto sayOoh-ooh-ooh-ooh ooh. Anytime at allBefore 9 p.m.Anytime at allBefore 9 p.m.Anytime at allIf I’m not in bed just callAnd I’ll be there. All the lonely peopleWhere do they all come from?All the lonely peopleYou’d think some of them would’veat least sent food for Eleanor’swake. Doctor RobertYou’re a new and better manThough he’s off most Medicareplans Pay out of pocket if you can Doctor Robert. When I get older, losing my mindNot that long from nowWill you still be sending me a valentineBirthday greetings, hydralazine?If I keep…

Horror is an accursed genre. Because it promises to deliver a specific sensational effect, its stories are obliged to fit into preordained patterns. Its popularity depends on predictability, and the task of providing the expected thrills renders the genre even more formulaic than superhero blockbusters. Zach Cregger’s new movie, “Weapons,” is, in this regard, an exemplary horror film—reducing social complexity and elaborate fantasy to a narrow outcome. The action starts at 2:17 A.M. on a week night, in a middle-class suburban neighborhood somewhere in Pennsylvania, when seventeen (of eighteen) students in a local elementary-school class get out of bed, leave their homes, and vanish. A voice-over narration briefly recounts the departure and sets up the subsequent investigations by police, administrators, parents, and the teacher, Justine (Julia Garner), whose students these…

COMMENT POWER PLAY The Texas legislature meets every two years for a hundred and forty days, but there’s an old joke that the state’s governors, who never object to less legislative deliberation, would prefer that it meet for two days every hundred and forty years. Early last month, Greg Abbott, arguably the most powerful governor in Texas history, called a special session of the legislature and added an agenda item at the behest of the only Republican who’s more dominant in the state than he is. Donald Trump wanted his party to gain five seats in the U.S. House of Representatives in next year’s midterm elections, and he had a plan: Texas legislators should redraw the state’s congressional maps. “We have a really good governor, and I won Texas,” Trump…

At the Bergen Performing Arts Center, in Englewood, New Jersey, the singer-songwriter Ben Folds sat at a piano and picked out the opening bars of “Kristine from the 7th Grade,” a delicate, mordantly funny ballad about a former classmate turned MAGA troll. (“The misspellings, they must be on 10 THE NEW YORKER, AUGUST 18, 2025 purpose / We went to a good school, Kristine.”) Then he swiftly ran his fingers down every key, pointer over thumb, hard, testing for trouble. “Two keys are sticking,” he announced. Offstage, a sound engineer yelled to him, wondering if the piano sounded “bright”—too brassy for the sound system. “Icepick!” Folds, a slight figure in bookworm glasses and with haystack hair, called back. It was musician code: he suspected that a technician had applied lacquer…

The musician Mac DeMarco recently bought a rambling, hundred-year-old farmhouse on an island off the coast of British Columbia, deep in the Salish Sea and accessible only via boat. A ferry runs a few times a day from Tsawwassen, near Vancouver; the trip takes about two hours. In late June, DeMarco picked me up from the ferry terminal in a vintage Land Cruiser, its halogen headlights covered by yellow smiley faces. The house came with some eighty olive trees, in varying states of vibrancy or decline. De-Marco had been pruning dead branches, attempting to conjure what’s known as the “open vase” shape, gutting the brittle center growth to promote air circulation. During my three days on the island, he was messing around with the trees more or less constantly, hacking…

At a press conference on January 11, 2017, President-elect Donald Trump explained for the first time how he would handle the many conflicts of interest that his business empire posed for his new role. His company, the Trump Organization, collected money from all over the world for luxury condos, hotel rentals, development projects, and club memberships, and he had made deals that put his name on everything from mail-order steaks to get-rich-quick courses. Could citizens trust him to put the common good ahead of personal profit? How would he assure Americans that payments to his business weren’t doubling as payoffs? A journalist asked Trump if he would release his tax returns, as Presidents had done for decades. Trump said no, and then explained just how unconstrained he felt by such…

ACROSS 1 The Duck, for the University of Oregon 7 “Conclave” Oscar nominee Fiennes 12 Flattens, so to speak 14 Wildcat similar to a margay 16 Legendary city of gold sought by conquistadores 17 Road-sign word indicating an alternative route 18 Overcast 19 Undesirable thing to find in one’s bed? 21 I.D.-checking group at an airport 22 Clark ___ (Superman’s alter ego) 23 “Shoot!” 24 Storage spot for yard tools, maybe 25 Analogue of “Apt.” in a business address 26 More than disliked 28 Breadth 29 Mister, in Mexico 30 Bamboozled 31 Tackle something that’s unpleasant but unavoidable 34 Dried flower parts in tea or potpourri 35 Diminished 36 Takes a breather 37 Schmucks 38 Suffix for an ideology 41 Notable stretches of history 42 Not seen very often 43…

Unless you’ve been living under a rock submerged in Norway’s Alta River and have gills, you probably missed the news announced in a press-releasestyle note last month. “Largest Atlantic Salmon Landed in 2025,” the headline read. Underneath, the note elaborated that “250 miles inside of the Arctic Circle at around two o’clock in the morning with a still tall midnight sun overhead, Edward L. Shugrue III feels a slight touch at the end of his fly-line.” The toucher: a fifty-two-pound Atlantic salmon, one of the largest ever caught. The touchee: Shugrue, a fifty-nine-yearold mutual-fund guy. The correspondent? “I wrote it,” Shugrue said recently, in the living room of his apartment on Park Avenue. “It took, like, a week to process, but I was flying home and I thought, Holy Christ,…

Emma Roberts loves the chase. “I’m a treasure hunter at heart,” Roberts said the other day, eying a box of rare baseball cards inside a glass case. “I collect dolls and vintage books. I’m always on the hunt for first editions.” The actress’s latest fixation is sports cards. Until recently, she hadn’t been able to indulge her obsession while at her house in Sag Harbor. “The closest card store used to be in, like, New York City,” she said. “Which sucked, because, when my fiancé and I come out to the Hamptons, we’re always wanting to rip cards, and there’s been nowhere to do it.” In May, a store called CardVault by Tom Brady opened next to the Brunello Cucinelli boutique in East Hampton. (The local paper described Brady’s appearance…

Janet Flanner’s job was never easy, exactly, but for the first decade it wasn’t all that morally freighted. Beginning in October of 1925, using the pseudonym Genêt, she mailed her editors at this magazine a fizzy bimonthly column under the rubric Letter from Paris. Instead of telling readers what they needed to know—that was what newspapers were for—she focussed on what they might want to know: the new fad of backless dresses in the cabarets, the rising cost of champagne. “She thought of herself as a high-class gossip columnist,” Brenda Wineapple writes in her biography “Genêt.” Striving for an “unflappable, ever-ironic” style, “she did not predict outcomes, take sides, or search for causes. Obviously, this itself was a side, but Janet was not yet willing to admit that.” The New…

An interviewer once asked James Baldwin if he’d ever write something without a message. “No writer who ever lived,” Baldwin said, “could have written a line without a message.” This is true. People write because they have something to say. Baldwin had something to say, and he spent his life saying it. But many who thought they got his message didn’t get it at all. Baldwin was high-strung and emotionally labile. He wasn’t exactly charismatic—there was a strangeness about him which he did nothing to conceal—but he was magnetic. The poet Richard Howard described him as a “rather silly, giddy, predatory fellow who was extremely unattractive-looking. There’s a famous eighteenth-century person who used to say, ‘I can talk my face away in twenty minutes.’ And Jimmy could do that.” He…