Innholdsfortegnelse for October 20, 2025 i The New Yorker

Eren Orbey (“A Brother’s Conviction,” p. 38), a contributing writer, has been writing for The New Yorker since 2016. Emma Green (“Degrees of Hostility,” p. 12) is a staff writer who covers education and academia. Jeannie Suk Gersen (Comment, p. 7), a contributing writer, is a professor at Harvard Law School and a former U.S. Supreme Court clerk. She received a Guggenheim Fellowship in 2009. Maggie Doherty (Books, p. 64) is the author of the book “The Equivalents: A Story of Art, Female Friendship, and Liberation in the 1960s.” She teaches at Harvard. Bruce Headlam (Shouts & Murmurs, p. 25) is the editorial director of Aventine, a nonprofit research institute, and a host of the podcast “Broken Record.” Adam Green (The Talk of the Town, p. 8), a contributing editor…

In Albuquerque, New Mexico, where I grew up, cowboy boots are arguably as ubiquitous as tennis shoes. Boot-cut jeans were never a passing trend in the desert Southwest; they are considered timeless, the ideal marriage of fashion and utility. For many of my classmates, the zeal for riding gear seemed to be less about raw functionality and more about flair; there was a deep yearning to be part of a dusty tradition, even if you spent more time ambling through the mall than tending to the stables. It was a teen-age rite of passage to visit Dan’s Boots & Saddles, a Western-wear emporium that has been serving the Albuquerque area since 1953, where hundreds of boot varietals, from snakeskin to ostrich leather, line the walls. I had a pair of…

At Greg Cope White’s interview for the Marine Corps, a handsome recruiter asked him if he’d ever had a homosexual thought or experience. It was 1979, years before “don’t ask, don’t tell.” White lied and answered that he had not—“even though I was having one right there,” he said the other day, standing outside a military-recruitment center in Times Square. Cope White is the author of “The Pink Marine,” a spirited memoir, published in 2015, about his time in basic training, which forms the premise of the new Netflix series “Boots.” He was in town from L.A., and he’d stopped to look at the recruiting station, which sports a wall-size L.E.D. American flag. He rang a buzzer, and an unkempt man in Army fatigues (known as utilities) opened the door.…

Scott Johnson was found dead at the base of North Head, a sandstone promontory in Manly, Australia, that looms two hundred feet above the craggy shore of the Tasman Sea. A pair of spear fishermen were walking along the water on a humid morning in December, 1988, when they came upon his body, which was naked and badly disfigured. A storm had swept the coast the night before, washing away most of the blood, but seagulls were picking at bits of innards strewn across the rocks. One of the men left to call for help; the other waited for the police to arrive and hiked with them to the top of the cliff. Thirty feet from the edge, they spotted a neatly folded pile of clothes and a pair of…

The militarization of American cities, including Los Angeles, Portland, and Chicago, has brought home a perverse irony. Throughout the history of the United States, immigrants have come here to escape authoritarian governments. But, in the twenty-first century, it is Donald Trump’s crackdowns on immigration, and on the protests against them, that are giving him momentum in the direction of ersatz dictatorship. The President has also threatened to deploy troops in more cities, such as San Francisco, Baltimore, and New York, against the will of the states’ governors. At the nation’s founding, James Madison warned that “a standing military force, with an overgrown Executive will not long be safe companions to liberty,” because of the temptation to turn soldiers into “instruments of tyranny at home.” The Constitution divides power over the…

His Excellency the Reverend Patrick McCollum, a peace activist from California—who, according to an Indigenous South American prophecy, will unite all the people of the Amazon in order to save the region (and thereby the world) from destruction— was near the Battery Park City ferry landing the other day when he got a call with sad news. “Jane died,” he reported, a little teary, after he hung up. “Jane Goodall, one of my closest friends.” McCollum and Goodall happen to star in a documentary that comes out this week by the director Gabe Polsky, “The Man Who Saves the World?,” which details McCollum’s efforts to fulfill the prophecy. In the film, Polsky seems unsure whether to view McCollum as a saint or a wack job. (An investigator Polsky hired found…

Dogs with pessimistic personalities are better than more optimistic dogs at detecting cancer.—Scientific American, August 12, 2025. Scene: The morning break room inside a busy metropolitan hospital. Two doctors and a dog sit around a table reviewing patient files. DOCTOR A: That brings us to Mr. Henderson, who came in last week. Still weak, blood pressure low. It’s a mystery. DOG: Henderson’s got cancer. The only mystery here is what Sylvia in radiology sees in you. DOCTOR A: What makes you think there’s something between Sylvia and me? DOG: C’mon, I’m a dog. We sense these things. I give it two weeks. DOCTOR B: Why do you think Henderson has cancer? DOG: Smelled some organic compounds on his breath. Picked up traces of blood in his stool. It’s either cancer…

ACROSS 1 Bit of face jewelry 8 The Three ___ (slapstick comedy team) 15 South American country named for its latitude 16 Something poked for ventilation 17 Wood-chomping insect 18 Like last-ditch measures 19 “In the beginning the Universe was created. This ___ made a lot of people very angry and been widely regarded as a bad move”: Douglas Adams 20 Hanukkah toy whose sides include gimel and nun 22 Devoured 23 Water, in Spanish 25 Culminated 26 Scooched down a bench, say 27 Bloodsucking worm 29 Huge amount 30 Just around the corner 31 Group of witches 33 “U.S.A.! U.S.A.!,” for one 34 Civilian-defense practice employed by the Black Panthers 36 Leads in a mystery 37 “___ It Be I’m Falling in Love” (Spinners song) 38 Leg parts covered…

A few days before Heather Christian was announced as one of the recipients of this year’s MacArthur “genius” grants, she wandered through the glass cube of the Rose Center for Earth and Space, expounding on supernovas, dark matter, and Oort clouds. With her bleached hair, elfin frame, and oversized sweatshirt, not to mention her ease with the niceties of the cosmos, she could have been mistaken for an Astronomy 101 teaching assistant, but in fact she is a forty-four-year-old composer, librettist, and performer, whose ineffable musical theatre (not musical-theatre) pieces have won her a cult following. Christian, who had been given a heads-up about the MacArthur Fellowship, said, “I always held hope in my heart that one day this would happen. But that ‘one day’ to me was, like, when…

It’s easy to forget how bleak January, 2021, felt for conservatives in Washington. Donald Trump had lost the election. The January 6th Capitol riot was seen as an irredeemable scandal. The pandemic was raging, and the country was still reeling from the George Floyd protests. “Republicans had been run out of town,” one Trump Administration official told me. “I thought, I’ll go to Texas, where I might still be able to get a job with a scarlet ‘T’ on me. It’s like, this city, and the federal government—it’s over.” Those who stayed in D.C. hunkered down in think tanks, preparing for a long winter in the opposition. Some were convinced that Trump’s first term had been a missed opportunity. The Administration had been slow to hire, and many staffers were…

When I am stuck on a sentence or trying to wrestle an idea into shape, I turn to Joan Acocella. As a critic, I admire the sophistication of her thought; as a reader, I love the funny, unpretentious plainness of her language. Criticism can be gruelling to write—all that explication! all that judgment!—but it should be a pleasure to read. This may be one reason that Acocella, who got a Ph.D. in comparative literature, left academia for magazines, arriving at The New Yorker in 1992, at the start of Tina Brown’s tenure as editor. It may explain, too, why one of my favorite Acocella pieces is “The Frog and the Crocodile,” which takes pleasure, and the practical and moral complications it creates, as its subject. Acocella’s essay deals with the…

I read George Eliot’s “Middlemarch,” sometimes hailed as the greatest British novel, in a rain forest in western Indonesia. I was there as a graduate student, spending my days slogging through mud and interviewing locals about gods and pig thieves for my dissertation. Each evening, after darkness fell, my research assistant and I would call it a night, switch off the veranda’s lone bulb, and retreat to our separate rooms. Alone at last, I snapped on my headlamp, rigged up my mosquito net like a kid building a pillow fort, and read. Those were good hours, although, honestly, little of the novel has stuck with me—except for Casaubon. The Reverend Edward Casaubon is Eliot’s grand study in futility: an aging, self-important, faintly ridiculous clergyman who has dedicated his life to…

Leave it to Richard Linklater to see how, in art, the fundamental things apply. In his two new movies—“Blue Moon,” about the lyricist Lorenz Hart, and “Nouvelle Vague,” about the director Jean-Luc Godard’s making of “Breathless”—the central conflicts involve time. Linklater has made two dozen features in a career now in its fourth decade; having learned to work the clock, he finds pathos in the idea of two artists at risk of being late. “Blue Moon” and “Nouvelle Vague” are being released two weeks apart (on October 17th and 31st, respectively), a happy accident highlighting their connections in Linklater’s cinematic universe. “Blue Moon” is set in New York, mainly in the bar at Sardi’s, on March 31, 1943—the night of the première of “Oklahoma!,” the musical that Hart’s longtime collaborator,…