Innholdsfortegnelse for August 25, 2025 i The New Yorker

Ruth Marcus (“Power Play,” p. 38), a former columnist for the Washington Post, joined The New Yorker as a contributing writer in June. She is the author of the book “Supreme Ambition,” about Brett Kavanaugh. Hua Hsu (“The Achiever,” p. 32), a staff writer, received a 2023 Pulitzer Prize for his memoir “Stay True.” He teaches at Bard College. Miriam Toews (Fiction, p. 60) has published eight novels. Her memoir “A Truce That Is Not Peace” comes out later this month. Adam Gopnik (Takes, p. 29) is a staff writer and the author of, most recently, “All That Happiness Is.” Jack Handey (Shouts & Murmurs, p. 31) has written for The New Yorker since 1987. His books include “My Funny Cowboy Dance.” Cate Marvin (Poem, p. 44), a former Guggenheim…

Tourists who came to Washington, D.C., last week—tromping from one Smithsonian collection to another, eating ice cream on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial—witnessed a bit of history that they surely had not anticipated: the beginning of President Trump’s takeover of the District. At a press conference that Monday, Trump had vowed to bring order to a place that he said was beset by “total lawlessness,” and by “bloodshed, bedlam, and squalor.” Within days, D.C.’s police force had been federalized, the National Guard had been mobilized, and hundreds of troops had shown up, many in drabcolored Humvees. Few tourists, and fewer locals, would recognize the nightmarish place in Trump’s depiction. D.C., like virtually every American city, has crime and homelessness; in 2023, it experienced a notable spike in carjackings. But…

A typical Metropolitan Opera production employs at least nine high-A definition cameras for the company’s “Live in HD” and “On Demand” streaming series. The other day, as the opera’s softball team, the Pitch Hitters, readied for an evening game in Central Park, a bespectacled, bearded opera employee stood on a red plastic box affixing a GoPro camera to the backstop. “I videotape all the games, for quality assurance,” Mike Panayos, who oversees the opera’s titles (similar to closed captions) and coaches its softball squad, said. For this game, he was shooting three cameras in 1080p resolution at sixty frames per second—“So I can do a little slow motion,” he said. He spends about three hours editing the multiple angles into a single cut, complete with a score overlay, that he…

Children run alongside and taunt you, because you’re old, but you don’t care, because your hearing is shot! Your hair falls out, but you can’t tell, because your eyesight is shot. You brush your bald head with a stiff bristle brush, but you can’t feel it, because the nerves in your scalp are all shot! A rattlesnake bites you on the leg, but the poison doesn’t go to your heart, because your veins are all shot! You have a dream that your eyesight is perfect and your hearing is perfect, but when you wake up you can’t remember it, because your memory is shot! You get out your old mug shot and laugh at how much younger you look than in your recent mug shot! Your bones turn brittle, and…

ACROSS 1 Yellow ingredient in a cake, perhaps 5 What Cordyceps is a genus of 11 Tuning leaders for orchestras 13 “Pure ___” (2013 Lorde album) 14 Polymer in some Ping-Pong paddles 16 Try to reproduce 17 Opening for a thread 18 Stelliform parts of some moles 20 N.F.L. quarterback Smith 21 Trail of information left by an internet user, so to speak 24 Moving targets? 25 Ad infinitum 26 Exec concerned with budget allocation 29 Hot-tub features 30 Actor Wallach 31 Become less frigid 32 Texting abbreviation 33 Native people also known as the Nakota 37 Birds of prey seen in old-growth forests in the Pacific Northwest 38 Second most densely populated U.S. state 39 Places with exhibits 40 Put back to the default 41 ___ au vin 44…

One humid afternoon in July, José Ramírez-Garofalo drove his large Toyota truck through the lush new hills, valleys, and meadows of Freshkills Park, a twenty-two-hundred-acre green space that the city is constructing on Staten Island. Ramírez-Garofalo, a young man with dark hair, large forearms, and the beginnings of a goatee, drove and talked fast. “It’s an impermeable geotextile membrane,” he said, referring to the thick plastic that was used, starting in the midnineties, to cap the four giant trash mounds of the old Fresh Kills landfill. “On top there is playground soil.” The process of capping and terraforming the four mounds that once made up the country’s largest dump is complete, but the park won’t be fully open until at least 2036. This means that, most days, Ramírez-Garofalo and a…

Lily Wood is forty-three years old but considers April 9, 2019, to be her “rebirth day.” That was the date she received her results from Ancestry, the direct-to-consumer DNA-testing company. A self-described biohacker, Wood had been curious to see whether she had a genetic predisposition to diseases like Alzheimer’s. “I wanted to get ahead of things,” she told me. It was actually her second time testing. The first time, Wood had used 23andMe, but the results had seemed off to her. “The ethnicity was wrong,” she said, before correcting herself. “I thought it was wrong.” Her heritage, as she’d always understood it, was French on her father’s side and Norwegian on her mother’s. And yet the 23andMe customers who had come up as genetically close matches had Italian names. Wood,…

On the morning of December 12th, Bubba Cunningham, the athletic director at the University of North Carolina, in Chapel Hill, sent the football team’s equipment manager to pick up a U.N.C. sweatshirt with removable sleeves. He asked his wife to go to Goodwill and buy a suit jacket. Cut the sleeves off, he texted her, then added, “(Seriously).” Sixteen days earlier, U.N.C. had announced the retirement of its football coach, Mack Brown. This had come as news to Brown. Cunningham was now preparing to reveal his replacement: Bill Belichick, who led the New England Patriots to a record six Super Bowl victories before leaving the team in January, 2024, fifteen wins shy of breaking Don Shula’s record as the winningest head coach in N.F.L. history. Colleges had hired former N.F.L.…

Few fantasies are harder to wipe away than the romance of a clean slate. Every January, when we’re twitchy with regret and self-loathing, advertisers blare, “New Year, new you,” urging us to jettison our failures and start fresh. In fiction, self-reinvention is a perennial theme, often shadowed by the suspicion that it can’t be done. Lately, novelists have put a political spin on the idea, counterposing hopeful acts of individual self-fashioning to the immovable weight of circumstance. Halle Butler’s “The New Me” (2019), a millennial office satire, finds its temp heroine, Millie, trying to life-hack her way out of loneliness and professional drift—buy a plant, whiten her teeth, make friends, think positive. The trouble, Butler suggests, is that Millie can’t begin anew until the world does. It’s a vision steeped…

The Swedish hard-rock band GHOST appeared on “The Tonight Show with Jimmy Fallon” last month. When the group formed, in Linköping, in 2006, its members were anonymous, and their devotion to Satan was deep and jubilant. On a track from GHOST’s first album, the vocalist Tobias Forge offered up a demonic mandate: “Believe in one God, do we? / Satan almighty.” Since then, GHOST has cooled it a little with the devil worship, though it has not exactly gone soft: the song “Mary on a Cross,” from 2019 (“You go down/Just like Holy Mary”), was decried as blasphemous, and the band’s American tours are still protested by wild-eyed church groups, who encircle venues and wave signs reading “Satan Has NO Rights.” These days, Forge’s identity is known, though he continues…

Joseph Mitchell was at once the most lucid and the most mysterious of the great mid-century New Yorker writers. Lucid in its clean, limpid minimalism, Mitchell’s prose was like a beautiful, clear river, its bottom not muddy but sparkling—sparkling with what might simply be gravel catching the light or, perhaps, diamonds worth diving for. Whichever it was, in each of his sentences there was always the mysterious sense of something more left unsaid. “Joe Gould is a jaunty and emaciated little man who has been a notable in the cafeterias, diners, barrooms, and dumps of Greenwich Village for a quarter of a century,” begins Mitchell’s Profile “Professor Sea Gull,” from 1942, the foundation for his masterpiece “Joe Gould’s Secret,” from 1964. The slightly winking sobriety of the inventory is made…

It’s fascinating when filmmakers make drastic late-career shifts, as Martin Scorsese did with “The Wolf of Wall Street” and Francis Ford Coppola recently did with “Megalopolis.” Now it’s Spike Lee’s turn, and in his new drama, “Highest 2 Lowest,” he shifts in a surprising way. The film is a remake of the Japanese director Akira Kurosawa’s 1963 drama “High and Low,” among the greatest police procedurals. Lee turns the story into what is one of his most personal films, both emotionally and intellectually. Often, directors’ self-transformations involve changes in modes of production: Scorsese broke away from the studios and found independent financing; Coppola self-financed. Lee, who has had his own production company throughout his career, makes “Highest 2 Lowest” a film about his particular modes of production, one that focusses…