Innholdsfortegnelse for October 13, 2025 i The New Yorker

Jennifer Gonnerman (“Locked In,” p. 26), a staff writer, was a finalist for the 2015 Pulitzer Prize for her story on Kalief Browder, who was wrongly jailed for three years on Rikers Island. David D. Kirkpatrick (“The Hague on Trial,” p. 20), 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. Catherine Lacey (Fiction, p. 48) is the author of four novels. Her latest book, part fiction and part memoir, is “The Möbius Book.” Joy Harjo (Poem, p. 42) is a three-term U.S. Poet Laureate. Her memoir “Girl Warrior” is out this month. Alyssa Brandt (Shouts & Murmurs, p. 19) has contributed humor writing to the magazine since 2023. Wyna Liu…

Sasha Bonét’s matrilineal memoir, “The Waterbearers,” examines the ways in which mothers can pass on both grace and grief. Not long ago, Bonét joined us to discuss four other books that examine complex mothers. Her remarks have been edited and condensed. Beloved by Toni Morrison “Beloved” centers on a formerly enslaved woman named Sethe, who killed one of her daughters to keep her from becoming enslaved. One day, years later, the daughter she killed, who has been lingering in the novel in spirit form, shows up as a physical being, Beloved. One of the great things about the book is that, over time, we see everything Sethe has gone through, so we get a kind of understanding of why a woman would do this to her own child. She’s essentially…

At a Chelsea night club one recent evening, under spinning disco balls and big screens flashing the command “LOG OFF,” Andrew Yang sheepishly slid his phone from his pocket. The former Presidential candidate was hosting the fifth in a series of “OF-FLINE” parties, phoneless gatherings that he has organized for people to connect IRL. But this night’s event was celebrating the launch of Yang’s new phone plan, Noble Mobile, which is designed to reimburse users for their leftover data, and Yang needed to demonstrate. “I guess I shouldn’t bust my phone out and show you,” he said. “But I will.” The attendees—a mix of hopeful Luddites and dogged Yang Gangers—had been issued black plastic bags emblazoned with the Noble logo, not unlike the mandatory phone pouches one might encounter at…

In June, 1952, Ebony announced that a new era was dawning. “Africa is rather quickly awakening from its 1,000-year slumber,” the magazine proclaimed, and it named one figure as the personification of this revival: Kwame Nkrumah, of the Gold Coast, a British colony in West Africa, who had “one of the most illustrious titles held by any Negro anywhere in the world.” He was the colony’s first Prime Minister—and, people were realizing, its last. The Gold Coast was on its way to becoming an independent nation called Ghana, owing in large part to Nkrumah, whom Ebony hailed as the leader of a “bloodless revolution” transforming Africa. When Ghana declared independence, in 1957, dignitaries from around the world descended on the capital, Accra. Two especially high-profile visitors came from the United…

For someone openly campaigning to get a Nobel Peace Prize, Donald Trump has been going about it in an unusual way. Early last month, the President proclaimed in a press conference that the Department of Defense would thereafter be known as the Department of War. At the same briefing, the presumed new Secretary of War, Pete Hegseth, promised that the armed forces will deliver “maximum lethality” that won’t be “politically correct.” That was a few days after Trump had ordered the torpedoing of a small boat headed out of Venezuela, which he claimed was piloted by “narcoterrorists,” killing all eleven people on board, rather than, for instance, having it stopped and inspected. After some military-law experts worried online that this seemed uncomfortably close to a war crime, Vice-President J. D.…

The Blue Note Jazz Club, in the Village, is not known for its legroom. But the other afternoon the joint was nearly deserted. A lonely employee was rolling forks into navy-blue napkins by the bar. The thirty-three-year-old pop star Charlie Puth, headlining his first jazz residency, was due for a sound check with his band. Fans had already lined up outside for the 8 P.M. show. “Hey! Hey! One, two!” a stagehand barked into a mike, maneuvering past a Roland Jupiter-80 synth keyboard. “Guest vocal! One, two!” Members of the band started taking their spots on the tiny stage. Snare hits rang out like paintball shots and bass riffs bounced off the mirrored walls. An engineer sat down behind a soundboard; suddenly, a few seconds of music burst from the…

When the photographer Mary Ellen Mark arrived in New York City, in 1966, one of her strategies for finding arresting images was to attend parades and other large gatherings, seeking out subjects not in the main flow of the action but on the periphery. Mark shot street protests, Pride marches, and Thanksgiving parades—showing how the city’s diverse cultures and identities are replenished by the demonstrative joy of belonging, and how the city at large is enriched by its variety of communities. After Mark’s death, in 2015, the journalist Adrian Nicole LeBlanc wrote of her, “Common humanity wasn’t a revelation but a clear fact that she wanted to document.” Mark’s warm engagement with the individuals she encountered reflected a genuine openness that invited a reciprocal trust, LeBlanc noted: “Her assumption allowed…

If there is a truth that holds firm beneath the wickedly slippery surfaces of Luca Guadagnino’s movies, it’s that presentation counts. No sartorial decision is made lightly, and no design element is arrived at by accident. The opening titles of his new drama, “After the Hunt,” should have you on high alert. They’re elegantly rendered in what looks to be Windsor Light Condensed, widely recognizable as Woody Allen’s onscreen typeface of choice. A Thad Jones jazz standard on the soundtrack more or less confirms that we’re watching a borderline trollish act of homage. Are we about to enter an enclave of attractive, privileged, hopelessly self-involved intellectuals, as in so many Allen movies? Or will Guadagnino’s art imitate Allen’s life, with a tale of grim allegations, firm denials, and he-said-she-said dialectics?…

An old letter from President Lyndon Johnson has been making the rounds on social media in the wake of ABC’s nervous-gulp suspension of “Jimmy Kimmel Live!” and CBS’s more definitive cancellation of “The Late Show with Stephen Colbert”—decisions noisily lobbied for by our current President, whose minions contributed some Paulie Walnuts-style arm-twisting. The Johnson letter was addressed to Tom and Dick Smothers, the comedians whose hit CBS variety show, “The Smothers Brothers Comedy Hour,” took shots at the President’s stewardship of the Vietnam War in the late nineteen-sixties. L.B.J. offered magnanimity: “It is part of the price of leadership of this great and free nation to be the target of clever satirists,” he (or a secretary) wrote. “You have given the gift of laughter to our people. May we never…

Tonatiuh, a one-named actor who is thirty years old, six feet tall, and genderqueer, stood outside Bergdorf Goodman, on Fifth Avenue, gazing at a Schiaparelli window. “This worldal ways felt inaccessible to me,” he said, soaking in the weekend shopping frenzy. “It’s great, though, to escape into it, right?” Despite his professed fashion ignorance, his look evoked Cary Grant on a European holiday: black cashmere sweater tucked into highwaisted chinos, chic sunglasses, gelled hair. He considered the window display, in which an ink-black mannequin in a denim jacket posed in front of a gilded bull and some cacti. “The gold bull freaks me out,” he said. “It gives Biblical—like God’s about to smite us.” Glancing down, he added, “But the shoes are fab.” In “Kiss of the Spider Woman,” a…

The International Criminal Court, established in 2002, in the aftermath of the carnage in Rwanda and the Balkans, was designed to hold accountable future perpetrators of war crimes or crimes against humanity. It got off to a slow start: during the court’s first two decades in operation, it issued fewer than forty public arrest warrants. Most targeted African strongmen or warlords; the court almost never took on the major international powers or their closest allies, and critics complained that it effectively punished the weak while sparing the strong. (A hundred and twenty-five states are party to a treaty recognizing the court, but the United States, Russia, China, and Israel aren’t among them.) The court is governed by an assembly of the participating states, and in 2021 it elected anew chief…

ACROSS 1 The appearance of a villain in a bathroom mirror and the inability to start a car, in horror movies 8 Robert De Niro’s “You talkin’ to me?” in “Taxi Driver,” for example 13 Anticipation-building words 15 Funny bone? 16 B.Y.U. part 17 Game played with gelt 18 Pings on social media, briefly 19 Squeezed (out) 21 Shakespearean verb 22 Husked unit 24 Frothy order 26 “Outta sight!” 29 Utterly incorrect, so to speak 32 Aggression caused by P.E.D.s 34 Gardener’s supply 35 Like some Chardonnay barrels 37 Characters in binary code 38 Sci-fi space-weather event that might feature blasts of charged particles 40 What something going “down the hatch” goes down 42 Cornelius or Dr. Zaius, in a 1968 film 43 Election-night visual 45 Nickname for Maureen or…