Innholdsfortegnelse for November 3, 2025 i The New Yorker

The list of figures in American history with whom Donald J. Trump has been compared since he announced his bid for the Presidency a decade ago is longer than his trademark necktie, as red as a gash. It’s taller than Trump Tower, gleaming like a blade. It has a higher turnover than his beleaguered first Cabinet. It includes even more goons, toadies, and peacocks than his current Administration. And yet the comparisons keep coming, in the daily papers, in the nightly podcasts, online, online, online. Is Trump more of a liar than Joseph McCarthy; is he slicker than Huey Long? Is he as mean-spirited as Father Charles Coughlin, more sinister than George Wallace? Is he as much of a fraud as P. T. Barnum, even more of an isolationist than…

When Nick Watkins was a child, he pasted articles about space exploration into scrapbooks and drew annotated diagrams of rockets. He knew this because, years later, he still had the scrapbooks, and took them to be evidence that he had been a happy child, although he didn’t remember making them. When he was seven, in the summer of 1969, his father woke him up to watch the moon landing; it was the middle of the night where they lived, near Southampton, in England. He didn’t remember this, either, but he’d been told that it happened. That Christmas, he and his brother were given matching space helmets. He knew that on Christmas morning the helmets had been waiting in the kitchen and that, on discovering his, he felt joy, but this…

ON FIRE Dana Goodyear’s article about the loss of her home during the California wildfires earlier this year reminded me of when my family watched the 1991 Oakland Hills fire from our living room (“Fire Season,” September 29th). I designed five new houses for families that lost their homes then, and now I’m working on one for a friend in Malibu. Thirty-four years ago, I was disappointed that the code for the replacement homes I planned required only a modest uptick in fire resistance. I find myself feeling the same way today. Not long ago, I saw a new wood-frame house going up in the Palisades. When will we stop allowing the construction of combustible wooden boxes in combustible landscapes? Future-oriented public policies are in order: the preventable loss of…

The realm of the “woo-woo” is, by nature, ineffable. There are spirits and “The Secret,” Reiki and reincarnation. Even when you host a podcast called “Woo Woo,” as the comedian and actor Rachel Dratch does, the subject might be easiest to define in self-defense. “Anything that, when you talk about it, you have to preface with, like, ‘Look, I don’t want to get all woo-woo,’” she said the other day. “That’s my little litmus test.” Dratch, who wore an all-navy outfit with a small bird-pendant necklace, was exploring Stick Stone & Bone, a West Village boutique that hawks woo-woo wares: gems, jewelry, incense. Nose-ringed clientele browsed quietly; jazzy piano twinkled softly from above. The shop had been recommended by Amy Poehler, Dratch’s close friend and podcast guest. On the show,…

The novel “Die, My Love,” by the Argentinean writer Ariana Harwicz, is narrated by a wife and new mother who is living in rural France and seems to be losing her mind. Motherhood has inserted an immersion blender into her psyche: lust, repulsion, pleasure, and doom swirl into a single mess. She calls herself a “sodomising rodent” with “bullet-wounds for eyes,” and thinks, “When I masturbate I desecrate crypts, and when I rock my baby I say amen, and when I smile I unplug an iron lung.” One night, standing in the cold, staring at her family through a sliding door, she thinks, “I’ll stop trying to draw blood from a stone. I’ll contain my madness, I’ll use the bathroom. I’ll put my baby to sleep, jerk off my man…

On his first day back at Winslow College’s climbing wall after the long winter break, Nolan checks the belay sign-up sheet and sees that someone named Heidi Lane has written her name in the seven-o’clock slot every weeknight for the entire month of January. Sure enough, at seven exactly, a short, narrow-nosed girl with a shiny brown bob hustles in through the gym’s double doors. She’s wearing bluejeans and duck boots and fuzzy white earmuffs around her neck like headphones. “I made a New Year’s resolution,” she says. “This is going to be my new thing.” “Some people find it hard to climb in jeans,” Nolan says. “I do everything in jeans.” “What else do you do?” “Like, besides school? Nothing. That’s why I made this resolution.” In the gear…

In April, 1745, God appeared to a Swedish civil servant named Emanuel Swedenborg in a London tavern. Swedenborg was no wild-eyed prophet but, rather, a fifty-seven-year-old scientist and engineer who had worked for years for the Swedish crown as an administrator of mines. However, travelling around Europe while on leave, he had begun to have intense dreams about Jesus Christ, in which everyday details were shot through with mystical bliss. In one, Jesus borrowed a five-pound note from someone, and, Swedenborg recalled, “I was sorry he had not borrowed it from me.” Finally, God showed himself while Swedenborg was at dinner, taking the form of a man who told him not to eat too much. From that night until his death, twenty-seven years later, Swedenborg devoted himself to conversing with…

The first thing you see is a horse’s ass, protruding, upside down, from the thorax of a monster. A man’s arm descends from the beast’s stomach, his gloved hand clutching the blade of a fallen sabre. There’s no sign of a rider’s face, but a head of well-coiffed hair dangles from the creature’s eyeless muzzle. Every part of the work comes from a statue of the Confederate general Stonewall Jackson that was removed from Charlottesville, Virginia, in 2021. It was subsequently given to the artist Kara Walker, who carved it up in accordance with a butcher’s diagram. The finished sculpture, “Unmanned Drone”—on view at the Brick, in Los Angeles, as part of a joint exhibition with MOCA called “Monuments”—is at once an act of carnivalesque retribution and a recognition of…

OCTOBER 29 – NOVEMBER 4, 2025 What we’re watching, listening to, and doing this week. One of the great pleasures of going to clubs in the nineteen-eighties and nineties was what you could find on a night out. Among many unforgettable performers at venues such as Jackie 60 was the great Richard Move (pictured), whose channelling of Martha Graham in all her glory—from “Lamentation” to “Clytemnestra”—was further enhanced by the interviews that Move, as Graham, conducted onstage. That melding of fact and fiction, truth and spectacle, will be on display in “Martha@BAM—the 1963 Interview,” at BAM Fisher Fishman Space, Oct. 28-Nov. 1. The show re-creates an interview that Graham gave at the 92nd Street Y with the dance critic Walter Terry, played by Lisa Kron. Move’s work is that not…

In Art Chat, Jamie was building a piece.I would offer her little scenesOf awkwardness or intimacy—At the closet-size barbershop whereThe bald man, nearly breathing on my cheek,Commented on the wave in my hair.Or at the mineral shop, where the airWas the air of eternity—redwoodsFallen to the rain-forest floor, eventuallyTo become bookends. Those momentsWhen you feel so freshly hatchedYou don’t know where to put yourself—Sorry for existing. Or the time I struckA huge pose at the cocktail partyAnd then realized I was next to thePowerPoint and had to be a statueFor the next thirty minutes. Jamie madeA small motion at the level of her chestThat was like removing every KleenexFrom a box at once and it cured—Illness, sorrow, not-being! I could seeThe song, the dance. “Here is a big egg.”My brother-in-law…

They were such innocentsThey took straight razors to clean facesSmoked and drank milk at the same timeCrammed whole junk yards with steel Nearly never touched plasticWhatever they touched was realThe TV was a box of shadowsIn the living room And if you wanted really to go crazyThere was always the bomb shelterThey were babies, comparativelyThey woke each day completely new They never had to worry about memoriesSwelling and following them like algal bloomsThrough the internet’s tides of forever—I don’t even know what starch is And have never used BrylcreemOr testified, sweating liberally,Before the Un-American CommitteeI’ll bet back then was crummy too With the same fevers and pusThough they probably let you die of colon cancerWithout making you defecate firstInto a box lab techs will scan for polyps And if you…

A Guardian and a Thief, by Megha Majumdar (Knopf). Set in the near future, in a version of Kolkata afflicted by food scarcity and dramatic global warming, this adroitly plotted novel centers on the manager of a homeless shelter who isn’t above dipping into its donations to feed her young daughter and widower father. The three are days away from flying to the United States to join the woman’s husband, when a shelter resident sneaks into their home and absconds with their food and, inadvertently, their passports. A finalist for the National Book Award, Majumdar’s unstintingly graceful political novel has the grip of a nail-biter as the woman, the thief she must track down, and their fellow city dwellers take advantage of morality’s elastic borders in times of existential threat.…

Jamar Roberts is the choreographer of the moment. His dances are in demand, with commissions from ballet and modern-dance companies across the country, including two world premières this season in New York. His work is often highly political: he has taken on gun violence, COVID isolation, and protest; now, with “Foreseeable Future,” for New York City Ballet, he addresses climate change. In a recent interview, he explained that he had read a newspaper report about climate protesters disrupting an N.Y.C.B. performance, and, although he found this “rude” to the dancers, he also felt that the protesters “were kinda right.” He wanted to “disrupt” what he sees as the escapist and perfectionist aspect of ballet with a dance about the threat of human extinction. A ballet, but also a provocation, one…