Innholdsfortegnelse for January 19, 2026 i The New Yorker

Dexter Filkins (“Power Trip,” p. 26) is a staff writer and the author of “The Forever War,” which received a National Book Critics Circle Award. Margaret Talbot (“Under Threat,” p. 20) has been a staff writer since 2004. She is a co-author, with David Talbot, of “By the Light of Burning Dreams.” Patrick Radden Keefe (Takes, p. 59), a staff writer, is an executive producer of the FX series “Say Nothing,” which recently won a Peabody Award. His book “London Falling” is due out in April. Daniel Immerwahr (Comment, p. 7), a contributing writer, teaches at Northwestern. He is the author of “How to Hide an Empire.” Richie Hofmann (Poem, p. 56) is the author of the poetry collections “The Bronze Arms,” due out next month, and “A Hundred Lovers.”…

The Jamaican patty is, I propose, a culinary avatar of New York on par with the hot dog, the pizza slice, and the bagel. Today, in at least four of the five boroughs, you’re always within two blocks of a patty ready to be bitten into, whether it’s microwaved behind the counter at a bodega, or pulled from the steam cabinet at a dedicated patty shop: a flaky half-moon filled with curried meat or fish or whatever else can be coaxed into its turmeric-stained folds. As the knish descends from the metropolitan pantheon—ave atque vale to that Eastern European stalwart, its crust filled with onion-scented potato and the ghost of another century’s promises—the patty, a dynamic distillation of South Asian, African, and Caribbean influences, should take its rightful place as…

When Miyako Bellizzi was designing the costumes for “Marty Supreme,” the new Josh Safdie movie, she spent a lot of time thinking about Timothée Chalamet’s underwear. His character, Marty, a Ping-Pong champ from the Lower East Side, might have worn a one-piece union suit, the conventional male undergarment of 1952, when the movie is set. But boxers and briefs were just coming into style, and although most of Marty’s shabby wardrobe was likely a few years old, Bellizzi opted to put him in the newfangled undies. She explained her logic: “It’s kind of like how our grandmothers aren’t wearing thongs, but we are.” (She added, “And, to be honest, the union suit is not the greatest look, right?”) In costume design, the term for clothes that accurately reflect an era…

The first WhatsApps weren’t Whats-Apps. In the spring of 2009, Jan Koum, a thirty-three-year-old computer programmer, was trying to get people interested in a product he had developed for Apple’s App Store, which had opened the previous summer. Koum tweaked his app’s name every few days—from Status App to Smartphone Status to iPhone Status—so that it would appear among the newest releases. The idea was that the app would show people what their contacts were doing before they called or messaged them. Maybe they were available, or at the gym, or sleeping. Between five and ten thousand people downloaded Koum’s app, but hardly anyone used it. They just called whomever they were going to call. Koum has a dry, somewhat brooding sensibility. “The app had no usability or functionality that…

The New York of the nineteen-eighties was, warily, a city in transition. The frightening “Taxi Driver” New York of the previous decade—steaming manholes, blackouts, riots—still hung over the town, but so did the potent downtown renaissance that had begun at the same time, stretching from punk music at CBGB to a still intact SoHo, where a genuine village of art reigned and the world crowded into 420 West Broadway on Saturdays to see what might happen next. Yuppies, as they were called, were a real phenomenon. The idea that young professionals might build their lives in the city rather than flee it was still a novelty, with the “consumption benefits” of urban living now outweighing the “production benefits.” You came because this was where the life was, not because…

The Manhattan Theatre Club revival of Tracy Letts’s funny, ultimately heartbreaking psychological thriller “Bug” opens with Carrie Coon—who plays Agnes White, a lonely waitress holed up in an Oklahoma motel room—standing in front of a half-open door and holding a wineglass upside down, radiating isolation. Soon, someone picks up her signal: Peter Evans, a sad-sack drifter who has tagged along with Agnes’s honky-tonk buddy R.C. and then sticks around. Peter is a weird guy and a bit younger than Agnes, but he’s polite and willing to keep her company, to drink her wine and smoke some crack. (He won’t snort powder cocaine, though: that stuff is bad for you, he explains.) And then he wakes up with a bug bite. When Agnes can’t see a bug that he points at,…

There aren’t many moments in Donald Trump’s political career that could be called highlights. But one occurred during the 2016 Republican primary debate in South Carolina, when Trump addressed the prickly issue of the Iraq War. It had been a “big, fat mistake,” he charged. And the politicians who started it? “They lied.” The audience hated this. Trump’s fellow-debaters Jeb Bush and Marco Rubio argued that George W. Bush—Jeb’s brother—had kept the country safe. Trump plowed on loudly through the booing. It was as if an “angry Code Pink-style protester” had crashed the Republican debate, the journalist Michael Grunwald wrote. Trump hadn’t stood against the Iraq War from the start, as he has frequently claimed. (When asked, in the run-up to the invasion, whether he supported it, he replied, “Yeah,…

A complaint for negligence, recently filed in the District of Columbia, describes what it calls “The Longstanding Hole in the Sidewalk in front of the IRS building.” The document offers a capsule history of the six-inch-deep, eight-inch-wide circular void in the tax agency’s sidewalk. Around September of 2011, the hole was filled with cement. By the summer of 2015, the cement had been removed. Orange cones subsequently appeared around the hole. That November, D.C.’s Department of Transportation determined that the hole needed to be filled, “contingent upon funding and weather.” A month later, the department referred the hole-filling job to the feds. Cones remained around the hole, off and on, through 2017. Years passed. The cones disappeared, along with Presidential Administrations and the Bed Bath & Beyond franchise. The hole…

Mom, Dad, thanks for being on time this year. Dad, I can see by your T-shirt that it was a challenge. So you’ve already exceeded expectations. Remember, performance reviews are not about criticism. They’re about nurturing an abundance mind-set. Let’s start! Benchmarks We all accomplished a lot in 2025. Mom, you made partner at your firm and—per last year’s review—solutioned out of skinny jeans. Jordan continued his onboarding (i.e., potty training) just in time for pre-K. I started seventh grade and quit cello. And, Dad, shaving again was a brave step on the strategic staircase! So was coming up the actual staircase from your “office” on weekends. Congratulations all around! Key Learnings Mom, having three glasses of wine (“because of the pandemic”) doesn’t mean it’s O.K. to loudly sing Charli…

When we first glimpse the explorer Ferdinand Magellan in the stunning new film that bears his name, he is lying on a corpse-strewn beach, looking near death himself. It’s 1511, and he has just participated in the Portuguese conquest of Malacca, a historic state in what is now Malaysia. “Magellan” was written and directed by the Filipino filmmaker Lav Diaz, who composes this scene—and many others that follow—as a kind of tableau vivant, presented at a remove that places equal emphasis on characters and environments. Diaz’s technique allows you to relax into the frame and absorb every detail: the bodies scattered along the shore, the tide running red with blood. It takes a moment to register Magellan’s presence at all, and to see that he is played by Gael García…

ACROSS 1 Someone from Granada or Vigo, e.g. 9 Like someone from Granard or Sligo, e.g. 14 Seal’s furry predator 16 ___ powder (bitter ingredient in a smoothie) 17 Plot trope exemplified by the romantic arcs in “Pride and Prejudice” and “You’ve Got Mail” 19 Grungy bars 20 Chili peppers that are often orange when ripe 21 Insects that communicate by waggle-dancing 22 Birds symbolizing peace 23 Yearn (for) 24 Fashion-house initials 25 Alexandre Dumas’s “Les ___ Mousquetaires” 26 Features of a mouthpiece purchased at Spirit Halloween, maybe 27 “Metropolis” director Lang 28 Reads in a forum without posting 29 Navajo family groups 30 Pre-Easter periods 31 Verge 32 Rhyming synonym of “shaky” 33 Lets loose 34 Favored by fortune 35 [Just reprinting the mistake here] 38 Dowsing sticks 39…

Whatever else you think about invading a country and capturing its President, there’s no getting around the inconvenience of imprisoning Nicolás Maduro in New York City. Maduro is being held at the Metropolitan Detention Center, near Industry City, in Brooklyn. He’ll be tried at a courthouse in downtown Manhattan. Industry City is already a transit headache. The bus doesn’t run between boroughs. The R train is hit or miss. The B.Q.E., one of these days, is going to collapse. The U.S. Marshals typically transport high-security defendants in a van or an armored convoy. But this tends to ruin everyone’s rush hour. For part of the trial of El Chapo, the city shut down the Brooklyn Bridge; his lawyers tried to move the proceedings to Philadelphia, because the jury pool was…

One recent weekday morning, the British painter Peter Doig arrived at a bonded warehouse—a cavernous brick building—about a mile south of the River Thames, but not subject to the import taxes of the United Kingdom. He buzzed through security and entered a windowless white room, where he settled in for a long day. Awaiting him were a series of etching prints that had been brought over from the United States to be signed by Doig before being put up for sale. David and Evelyn Lasry, who run the printmaking house Two Palms, in New York, and who had printed the works and brought them over, were there to assist. Thirty-two prints in editions of twenty-eight each. Eight hundred and ninety-six signatures in total. “We think four hours, maybe five,” Evelyn…

Some Danes offended by Trump’s claims on Greenland are boycotting U.S. goods. Once upon a time—before the U.S. began threatening to take over Greenland and treating European democracies as enemies—the Danish politician Ida Auken was a deep admirer of America. Hanging on the wall of her office at the Folketing, the Danish parliament, where she has served since 2007, are framed photographs of two U.S. Presidents, John F. Kennedy and Barack Obama, both seated in gently curving Danish-modern chairs. The images stand out in a setting that otherwise resembles a Scandinavian mood board: a boldly striped black-and-white couch, modular bookshelves stocked with texts on climate change, red snow boots standing sentinel in a corner. Auken, a gregarious forty-seven-year-old, visited America for the first time as a teen-ager, attending school for…

America’s busiest national park isn’t Yosemite or Yellowstone; it’s the Great Smoky Mountains, which straddles the heavily forested border of North Carolina and Tennessee. Half the country can drive there in a day. The park measures 522,427 acres, nearly the size of Rhode Island. The terrain is choked with rhododendron and dog hobble, ground cover that makes it easy to get lost and hard to be found. There are eight hundred and forty-eight miles of trail, and countless manways, which masquerade as trails. The many waterfalls are fed by rain on par with that of the Pacific Northwest. The rivers rise and boil with astonishing speed. There’s little to no cell service. Every year, the park logs more than twelve million visits, some of which go poorly. From the annals…

In 1972, on “The Tonight Show,” Johnny Carson asked Truman Capote about capital punishment. Capote had written, in unsettling detail, about the hanging of two killers, Dale Hickock and Perry Smith. Carson said, of the death penalty, “As long as the people don’t have to see it, they seem to be all for it”; if executions occurred “in the public square,” Americans might stop doing them. Capote wasn’t so sure. His hands laced together professorially, he murmured, in his baby-talk drawl, “Human nature is so peculiar that, really, millions of people would watch it and get some sort of vicarious sensation.” Capote’s book “In Cold Blood,” which began, in 1965, as a four-part series for this magazine, was preoccupied both by the peculiarity of human nature and by the vicarious…

It is the afternoon of the fawn. Everywhere you turn, in workplaces and households alike, yearlings with saucer eyes, brown felt noses, and stilt-like legs are wondering if you’re mad at them. The fawn response, as it’s known in some precincts of social media, bundles various forms of ingratiating, people-pleasing behavior. It can manifest in threatening situations, where expressing authentic emotion could elicit a powerful person’s wrath or cruelty, or it might be more banal: laughing at a vindictive supervisor’s unfunny joke, saying you love a gift when you don’t, laboring over the perfect string of whimsical emojis to append to an opinion that you’ve expressed over text. In a new book, the clinical psychologist Ingrid Clayton recalls hearing about the concept and feeling that she’d found a skeleton…