Innholdsfortegnelse for November 10, 2025 i The New Yorker

What happened to you yesterday? If your first thought is “not much,” consider the day that the photographer Peter Hujar had on December 18, 1974. At the time, Hujar’s friend Linda Rosenkrantz was working on a book about how people spend their time. She would ask her subjects to pick a day, take notes, and then meet with her the next day and describe their activities into her tape recorder. She talked to her mother, her sister, her cleaning lady, her fourteenyear-old cousin, the artist Chuck Close, and Hujar, who came to her apartment, on East Ninety-fourth Street, and narrated his yesterday, from wake-up (he slept through his alarm) to bedtime. In between, he had chatted on the phone with Susan Sontag, photographed a grumpy Allen Ginsberg for the Times,…

Last November, the day after the election, Daniel Vance was eating lunch in his truck when he noticed something move in the trees across the road. The forecast had predicted thunderstorms in the rural town of Yemassee, South Carolina, where Vance, a land surveyor, was mapping sewage lines. Taking another bite of his foot-long sub, he figured that it must be the wind picking up. Then he saw the monkeys. Dozens of them were streaming over a tall metal fence at a compound owned by Alpha Genesis, one of the country’s biggest breeders of primates used in scientific experiments. Swinging from the overhanging branches and darting through the woods, the animals were heading toward a nearby housing project, their pink faces lit with glee. Fearing that they could be carrying…

They see everything not only from the air but from the side and rear.To help you stay invisible these tips have been compiled.There are no secrets to staying completely invisible so they are not included here.Dig in. Everything is watched, everything from buildings to trees.Camouflage yourself and your dwelling.All changes in placement, color, or design are noticed.They are above you nevertheless and will not disappear.They will notice anything of interest.There must continue to be nothing of interest about you.Make use of what you have.In the forest there are branches, turf, and grass.In the settlements there are bricks, slate, and boards.In the open, consider the time of year.Use sand, snow, or leaves typical of the season.Do not draw attention to yourself by throwing anything away.Bag, bottle, wrapper, paper, all will make…

Grief may or may not have its five stages, but the stages of dying are implacable. We witnesses know the scenes and the atrocious acts that compose them: the first signs (“I’ve been having some funny pains in my lower back”) followed by the medical sentence (a lung cancer has metastasized to the cerebrospinal canal), and then the wary measuring of the distance between sickbed and bathroom. There’s the child, now grown, who sits near the bed, pretending to read but in fact is keeping restless watch; the child’s awkwardness in front of the parent’s nakedness; the fentanyl patches, for the last stations of pain. And then the final night, as the child lies down beside his father and waits for the end: “I was seeing my father off and…

A STRONGER MILITARY As a retired rear admiral in the Navy Medical Corps, I appreciated Benjamin Wallace-Wells’s piece about Donald Trump and Pete Hegseth’s warped vision of the military (Comment, October 13th). Wallace-Wells points out many of the contradictory and troubling aspects of the remarks that Trump and Hegseth gave at the gathering of generals and admirals that took place at Quantico, in late September. One disturbing thing that he did not mention was their implicit disparagement of female service members. In my twenty-five years of active service, I witnessed firsthand how women’s contributions to the military were essential to its effectiveness. The Navy is more than just ships and combat troops—it requires diverse expertise to maintain operational readiness. History is also full of examples of women making groundbreaking contributions…

A fleet of kayaks left the south shore of Staten Island recently in search of oysters. Their destinations were a series of breakwaters a few hundred yards offshore. The breakwaters are essentially man-made islands of jagged rocks, intended to stave off beach erosion that’s been ongoing for decades. If it turns out they can host oyster reefs, too, all the better. Whales and dolphins have begun returning to New York Harbor; why not oysters, which, in these parts, once numbered in the billions? Though unsafe to eat from city waters, oysters are among the most effcient purifying devices, each adult capable of filtering up to fifty gallons a day. Mike McCann, the director of science and research for the Billion Oyster Project, was in the bow of a two-seater, and…

I wasn’t fooled by these walls of my bodybut loved them touched, like a seedthat germinates in fire; shy slide of pressure,tally of cries. I am my first and oldest system,a figment of that first imaginationset running, but I concede to your vision:that look you give me like nothingother than my throat will do. Your affairwith my ankles is legion, an emperorthumbing his ostrich plumes, a moondrawn down with string to delay a debt.You have made me an Eden, the veinsof my wrist the twin rivers of Heaven,an altar where neck meets spine. Eden,by which I mean, you will leave me.…

There are men in my house, too many men, I am being driven mad by the men who are always in my house. There is my husband, a man I can’t resent because he’s grandfathered in, and there are also the four men who have been building the bathroom addition to our bedroom downstairs, a tall and wiry Italian guy from New Jersey who talks a great deal and wears so much cologne that he seems to linger in the rooms even when he’s gone, plus three quiet Venezuelans who often have to quickly redo the things that the Jersey guy has done while he’s taking a break. In and out of the house the workmen go all day, their boots crunching on the Ram Board over my rugs. They…

The Fort Bragg Cartel, by Seth Harp (Viking). If the war on terror was “an era of cataclysmic abasement” for the United States, then, this propulsive book suggests, the U.S. Special Forces plumbed that era’s greatest moral depths. Abroad, America’s élite soldiers killed and plundered. At home, their lives could be just as lurid—perhaps nowhere more so than around Fort Bragg, in North Carolina, where the secretive Delta Force is headquartered. Harp opens his story with the killing of one strung-out super-soldier at the hands of a Delta Force operator. Soon, Harp’s aperture widens to a field of death and drug dealing, and to a conspiracy that seems to link the poppy fields of wartime Afghanistan to the U.S. military’s most dangerous fighters. We Survived the Night, by Julian Brave…

What we’re watching, listening to, and doing this season. TELEVISION “Game of Thrones” Prequel, Women’s Worlds For the past six years, winter television has belonged to “The Real Housewives of Salt Lake City,” which has revitalized the long-running reality franchise through creative insults, explorations of religious trauma, and the gloriously demented fashions of women who insist on wearing high heels in the snow. (Season 6 is currently under way; John Oliver, the host of HBO’s “Last Week Tonight,” recently said of “R.H.O.S.L.C.,” “I don’t know if there’s a funnier show on TV, and I work for a comedy show.”) Unsurprisingly, then, “Salt Lake” has inspired band-wagoners. The similarly premised—though far less satisfying—“The Secret Lives of Mormon Wives” returns to Hulu for its third season on Nov. 13, and a more…

Doors open when you’re Miss America. For instance, did you know that the famously hundred-and-twofloor Empire State Building actually has a not so famous hundred-and-third? “There’s this little ladder to get up there, and it was literally, like, a ledge,” Cassie Donegan, who was crowned Miss America in September, said the other day. “But it was really cool.” Behind another such door: the velvetseated V.I.P. lounge hidden in the St. James Theatre, in midtown, where Donegan was sipping a Diet Coke and sitting beside a bespoke Niki Lassiter handbag with a poofy pink strap. Or perhaps she’d have found another way in; the star of the night’s show, Kristin Chenoweth, is a pal from musical-theatre circles. A few months ago, Chenoweth sent Donegan, who has starred in regional productions of…

“What do I know about being a woman?” Nat said. “Sometimes I have to ask myself. The thing is, I don’t know shit about womanhood.” It was December of 2019. For most of the previous decade, I had understood Nat as a gay man, his identity blurred only by the erosion of the old rules about sex and gender that had shaped my youth. Now my twenty-sixyear-old son intended to become a woman. We were on FaceTime—I in New York, Nat in Berlin. His hair was long, the light of the laptop whitening his eyes. He wore an orange tank top, silver necklaces, and dark nail polish, and sported a tattooed eye on his biceps that seemed to study me in return. A few days earlier, Nat said, he had…

If you walk through the elegant neighborhood of Frogner, in Oslo, you may notice a house that doesn’t fit in with the understated apartment buildings and embassies nearby. It’s not that the house is ugly or run-down. Rather, it evokes a cottage from a fairy tale. Clad in dark wood with a steeply gabled roof, it has squiggles of cherry-red trim, like decorations on a birthday cake. Norwegians call such architecture dragestil, or “dragon style,” a late-nineteenth-century aesthetic recalling Viking ships and wooden-stave churches. To Joachim Trier, the Norwegian director whose new film, “Sentimental Value,” is partially set at this address, the house is “a bit like Pippi Longstocking’s. There’s a feeling of something wild and soulful in the middle of something more mannered and polite.” Although it’s a cliché…

Herod, Hitchcock, Hitler, Nixon, Picasso: pick one of history’s great softies, and there’s a good chance that he’s been played by Anthony Hopkins. Also on the list are Dickens, Danton, Freud, Yitzhak Rabin, John Quincy Adams, Pope Benedict XVI, St. Paul, C. S. Lewis, and the man who—though this is a matter of crunchy controversy—invented cornflakes. Last year, at the age of eighty-six, Hopkins appeared as the Roman emperor Vespasian on TV, in “Those About to Die,” the thrust of his performance being to treat the show’s title with scorn. Even his portrayal of a man with advanced dementia, in “The Father” (2020), which won the Academy Award for Best Actor, emitted a disconcerting power. Vital signs were rampant. Human twilight, with Hopkins in charge, became a noonday blaze. Those…

A from Martha Stewart’s publicist, informing me that Stewart had agreed to a phone interview—“tomorrow at 11:15 for ten minutes,” he wrote, in response to my request for “as much time as she is willing to give”—my heart began to pound. I’d find it disorienting to talk to any very famous person, to bring the intimate, illusory relationship between celebrity and civilian rudely crashing down to earth. But this felt like something more. The issue wasn’t only the magnitude of Stewart’s celebrity but also the nature of it. In the first two decades of her media career, which began in the early eighties, Stewart’s lavish, ruthlessly overachieving approach to the domestic arts—advanced in such austerely titled books as “Weddings” and “Great Parties,” and also in syndicated newspaper columns, a cable…

Samuel D. Hunter’s “Little Bear Ridge Road,” directed by Joe Mantello at the Booth, on Broadway, is a small, quiet drama set in a large, quiet corner of the country. We’re somewhere in rural Idaho, far from light pollution and the people who cause it—and, even if you’ve never been up among the Idaho buttes, this vision of a dark, empty world may feel familiar. Hunter conceived much of “Little Bear Ridge Road” during the pandemic, and the show’s vast stillness, more than the actors in masks brandishing sanitizing wipes, evokes that isolating era. It’s 2020, and Ethan (Micah Stock) has come back home to sell his late father’s house. Ethan can’t grieve, exactly; the two hadn’t spoken in years, their relationship shattered by his father’s decades of drug use.…