Innholdsfortegnelse for January 26, 2026 i The New Yorker

On the Friday before Mother’s Day, LaMonica McIver, a first-term Democratic congress-woman from New Jersey, spent the morning handing out roses in the maternity ward of a hospital in Newark. Her next stop, a visit to Delaney Hall, a federal immigration jail in her district, promised to be a more sombre affair, but she was “on a high note,” McIver told me. “We thought it would be a smooth day.” McIver arrived at Delaney Hall just before one o’clock. She was joining two other New Jersey Democrats—Bonnie Watson Coleman and Robert Menendez, Jr.—to tour the facility. Members of Congress are allowed by law to make unannounced visits to detention centers as part of their oversight responsibilities; the three lawmakers planned to look around inside, then hold a press conference. As…

My friend P. and I agree to have lunch at a restaurant equidistant from our respective homes. A nasty rumor about P. has reached my ears. I’m not going to mention it to P., of course. That would be hurtful. But the rumor prompted me to instigate the lunch, out of a solidarity that cannot be revealed. P. turns up in what looks like a safari suit. Everyone’s deep into their forties these days and getting touchier by the minute. I must choose my words carefully. “Looking sharp,” I say. “Pants, jacket, the whole thing—twelve bucks,” P. says. A thrift store has recently opened in his neighborhood. Everything there fits him. He’s an XL and everything in the store is XL. “I realized something,” P. says. “Everyone dies when they’re…

Donald Winnicott, a British pediatrician and child psychoanalyst who wrote extensively and compassionately about the relationships between mothers and their infants, is best known among a general readership for coining the expression “the good-enough mother.” Winnicott started using the term to distinguish his observations from the theories of Melanie Klein, whose work held great sway among analysts in the mid-century. Klein had conceptualized a distinction between the “good breast” and the “bad breast” as a way of understanding the drama of an infant’s early experiences of omnipotence and frustration. In a letter to a colleague, from 1952, Winnicott noted that Klein was describing objects within the infant’s psyche; he himself, however, was concerned with real women and real babies. “I always talk about ‘the good-enough mother’ or ‘the not-good-enough mother,’…

JANUARY 21 – 27, 2026 What we’re watching, listening to, and doing this week. In her roles with Nature Theatre of Oklahoma, including the brilliant “Romeo and Juliet,” from 2009, Anne Gridley has always been a standout. Gridley’s comedic stance—part purveyor of nonsense, part paragon of common sense—put her squarely in the tradition of comedians who made mental pratfalls a thing. Now she appears in her show “Watch Me Walk” (presented by Soho Rep), about Gridley’s hereditary spastic paraplegia, a condition she shares with her grandmother and her mother. Directed by the talented Eric Ting, the show is about many things, including what happens to the performer’s primary asset, her body, when it is no longer the body that wanted to perform in the first place.—Hilton Als (Playwrights Horizons; through…

in spite of love, the history of is or is not. Toward dread,darkness though dawn could be my guess, snow morphingto hardship, delight, mindless over and over. You forget but I forgot so long ago. What does a single flake knowof its big/little fate? A very cold microscope mightseek out each never-the-same beauty. Snow’s only choice: freeze. Or melt and flood. But falling meansright now back to prehistory where human isn’ta thing yet, nor glass born of fire. The making’s done, a canvas rolled up, flown across an ocean that shares itsinfinity of vivid, all blues, reds, shadow, light, and wow—look at that!—I’m stunned. Genius opens its very few colors, the body bent to paint that way,the arm no longer knows itself, nor the handa hand, nor the brain how…

Bernie Sanders was just a skinny, gap-toothed kid from Brooklyn in the autumn of 1953, when Vermont opened an information bureau at 1268 Avenue of the Americas, next door to Radio City Music Hall. The Green Mountains beckoned! Under a shop sign that read “VERMONT,” a wide storefront window exhibited seasonal dioramas that trapped pedestrians like chipmunks in a sap bucket. Inside, you could find out about snow conditions and fishing holes, inspect a woodstove, get advice about the best time to go leaf-peeping, pick up a train schedule, and buy a jug of maple syrup. A year after the center opened, Alfred Hitchcock went to Craftsbury, Vermont, to shoot “The Trouble with Harry.” People in that little town, population seven hundred and nine, brought the crew blueberry muffins and…

The ray-finned saltwater fish known as the bonito is also called, by some fishermen I know, the tiger tuna—a nickname that refers to its taxonomy (bonito and tuna are in the same family) and to its iridescent blue-green stripes. Early one morning in late December, the sky was overcast on the waters off the coast of Dana Point, in Southern California’s Orange County, and still the scales of a thrashing six-pound bonito, reeled in by the chef Junya Yamasaki, shimmered brilliantly. Yamasaki, who is fifty years old, tall, and slender, with long black hair that he wears in a bun, detached the fish from the line. Then, with practiced ease, he used one hand to hold it by its gills and the other to drive a small metal stake between…

In 2019, it seemed possible that the next big country star would be a Navy aviation ordnanceman from Oklahoma named Zach Bryan, who recorded scruffy videos of himself hollering fervent lyrics about nights that lasted forever and relationships that didn’t. “I put as much thought as I could into, like, writing the songs,” he told the country critic Grady Smith, in a YouTube interview that summer. “And no thought into how I was going to put it out there.” Listeners found him anyway—helped, no doubt, by social-media algorithms that can spot a new viral hit long before human gate-keepers catch on. “Heading South,” one of Bryan’s first songs to draw a large audience, had a refrain that served as a declaration of regional pride. “Don’t stop headin’, headin’ south/’Cause they…

This is nota good year.But it haswitnesses. When you see them protest the powerful,since who else does,they standlike flagpoles outside the courthouseafter a northeaster. They came withthe wrong shoesfor revolution.Still,they showed up. Comfort, Lord,their bodies—each a question markdoing timeas a coatrack,hung with borrowed jackets. They are your legionof bent spoons.They are the only oneswho showed up—with their orthopedic flair. I saw my people lean—not toward hope but toward each other.They chant off-rhythmand mean it. These are my kind of people:no tears—juststeam from a kettlethat never quite boils. In times like these, don’t forget us:the lopsidedleaning on one another,like sodden paperbacksleft out on the stoop—Nobody opens them.But they still insiston carrying the plot. Comfort us standing up—half scarecrowhalf saxophonewith a squawk.While stiffness becomes state policy,comfort us sitting—in that collapse called calm.…

I was in a yellow cab in high summer when I saw it. Twenty-three at the time, I sometimes skimmed articles about politics on my clunky BlackBerry while cruising through Central Park to my first real job, fund-raising for Barack Obama’s 2008 Presidential campaign. Usually, the ride was placid. This time, I opened a link to an article in Politico (still an upstart outlet at the time) about a quickly growing controversy. Apparently, the latest cover of The New Yorker was a doozy. Barry Blitt’s already infamous illustration, which graced the July 21st issue, shows Barack and Michelle Obama in the Oval Office. The rug in the room, flat and ornate as a coin, looks proper to its setting. So does an insouciantly drawn old chair. But look at the…

Scavengers, by Kathleen Boland (Viking). In this riveting novel of madcap adventure, a woman named Bea leaves New York City for Utah, where her mother lives. Bea has recently been fired from her finance job and is recovering from the end of a romance—upheavals that, she feels, she can’t tell her mother about. When she arrives, she learns that her mother has also been keeping something to herself: she has become a devotee of the Conversation, an online forum about finding a treasure allegedly worth a million dollars. Soon enough, Bea and her mother decide to go on the hunt. What ensues is a journey that involves questionable characters, inclement weather, break-ins, a broken nose, and death—and that ultimately evolves, for each woman, into a search for the self. Some…

It’s 1917, and you’re Finnish. (Lucky you.) After six centuries of Swedish rule, and more than a hundred years as a grand duchy of Russia, your nation is finally on the brink of independence. To the south, Europe is tearing itself to bits in the First World War; to the east, there’s the Russian Revolution. Most of the art you’ve seen at this point is either second-rate or beats a patriotic drum—lakes and forests and scenes from the “Kalevala,” a national epic featuring some cosmic eggs and a drowned girl who turns into a fish. One afternoon, in the heart of Helsinki, you stumble into an art gallery and see a retrospective of a painter-named Helene Schjerfbeck. It all feels familiar, but not. Here is a world where people read…