Innholdsfortegnelse for December 15, 2025 i The New Yorker

On an overcast Saturday in September, a group of travellers gathered for dinner at Jopenkerk, a brewery inside a converted church in the Dutch city of Haarlem. They’d come from Texas, Iowa, and Pennsylvania, and they planned to spend the next week visiting the Netherlands. The purpose of their trip was neither business nor pleasure. These Americans were there because they wanted out of the U.S.A. Debi and Bane, a couple from Denton, Texas, sat at a long table on the mezzanine level, admiring the space’s stained-glass windows. Debi is a forty-two-year-old project manager with an easy laugh and dark bangs that frame her heart-shaped face. “It hasn’t hit me yet that we’re here, to be honest,” she said. Bane, thirty-seven, works as a freelance photographer and manages social media…

What is it I will have left when I leave, little but the milkweed silk,My inky fetishes, my spirit-papers and my urns, like the simpler Despot in Afghanistan—whose only leavings were a small herdOf mostly still unrusted Land Rovers with linen songbooks holding All Islamic hymns and some antique Americana(Judy Garland, Andy Williams, Bing), And just a few blond-gold effgies of self, in the gnarled gardenWhere he had spent endless hours petting his favorite cow. The half-life of neptunium is 2.1 million years. My momentIs over—the most velvet of the annuals live far less than a year. Regarding loss: I had been its isotopeFrom the youngest age. Not momentous, Just the small bunkers of a child’s lack of long-term memoryAnd its greenest lengths of moss. A pet green turtle expired…

“Everyone thinks they’re on this big journey now,” Debbie said, refilling her glass. “I’ve had it with the journey. I’ve had it with you people.” “I don’t think I’m on a journey,” Burt said. “Self-discovery,” Debbie added. “What a joke. Life’s too short to find out who we really are.” It was the first time the six of them had got together for dinner in more than a year (since Maria’s diagnosis), and after such a long time (and in celebration of Maria’s remission) they’d expected to have more interesting things to tell one another, deeper things, but they were entering dessert territory now, a cake was on the table, and only superficial topics had been broached: Ervin’s promotion, Jane and Burt’s move to the suburbs, Katherine’s recent purchase of…

In Ryan George’s wonderful “Pitch Meeting” series, on YouTube, the excitable producer character, relishing the eager screenwriter character’s ability to load a conflict with life-or-death consequences, always enunciates “stakes!” with shivering excitement. Similarly, when we read non-narrative scholarly books, what we want in exchange for all the minutiae is a sense that something significant, something we might call stakesy, is on the line. When scholars debate the dating of the Gospels, the time difference may seem small, but the stakes are obvious: Were these texts written by contemporaries of Jesus or not? Another book, say, on eighteenth-century musket design, may take many pages before it reveals that nothing less than the proper interpretation of the Second Amendment is in play. Matthew D. C. Larsen and Mark Letteney’s “Ancient Mediterranean Incarceration”…

On a recent Friday night, the indierock band Geese—which formed in New York City in 2016, when its members were still a couple of years short of the legal driving age—played the final date of its North American tour. The show, at the Brooklyn Paramount, a baroque nineteen-twenties movie house turned concert hall, was a jubilant homecoming. (Even Mr. Met was in attendance, paying respects, perhaps, after the band’s bassist, Dominic DiGesu, told a reporter, “If there are going to be billionaires in the world, the Mets are the only thing worth funding, in my opinion.”) In the months since Geese released its third studio album, “Getting Killed,” the band has been rhapsodically heralded as the redeemer of a certain kind of noisy, lawless rock and roll. Critics love making…

FOUNDATIONS Adam Gopnik is right thatTrump’s demolition of Roosevelt’s East Wing violates the democratic process (Comment, November 3rd). But the White House building itself is not exactly a paragon of democracy. Gopnik’s piece sent me back to John Ruskin, whom he cites as “the greatest of architectural critics.” In “The Stones of Venice,” Ruskin insists that buildings record not just the ideals of those who commissioned them but also the conditions of those who built them. The East Wing was grafted onto an original structure that was built in part by enslaved people. Its neoclassical form proclaimed republican ideals; its production betrayed them. Trump’s wrecking ball is crude, but the gap between democratic symbolism and democratic practice is not new. Dylan Mulvaney Brooklyn, N.Y. BETTER MEN As a feminist, a…

We know some things, man, about somethings, Bob Kaufman said, strutting downanother San Francisco street on his wayfrom there to whatever’s here. His pocketswere turned out to their linty partslike a magician’s mid-trick. He had a dullpencil tucked between his ear& his preternatural Afro. I followed,up roller-coaster hills, past misbegottenalley kisses, hummingbirds everywherehitchhike-thumbing California’s daylight.Bob Kaufman loved San Francisco’sgentle malaise, long views of bay& insistent bridge, the ocean right after.I’m from Indiana, where dirt roadslead to other dirt roads that alwayslead to fields of blondly tasselled stalkswafted by local infidelities. Whenthe wind kicks up, crops stammer secretsrecklessly as the gnats cloud in buggydoubts above those lazy farmers in repose.Just like the poets in San Francisco—chez lounging-it in silk kimonosfor their gorgeous, sun-slicked photos.Everyone stays skyward out here.Just then, Bob Kaufman…

Peacemaker, by Thant Myint-U (Norton). In 1961, U Thant, a soft-spoken Burmese diplomat, became the first non-European to head the United Nations. His decade as Secretary-General would be a time of emergencies. During the Cuban missile crisis, the United States and the Soviet Union came dangerously close to nuclear catastrophe; across Africa and Asia, post-colonial states plunged into bloodshed. This biography, written by Thant’s grandson, focusses on his tireless efforts to defuse the conflicts of his era—above all, America’s disastrous adventure in Vietnam. Thant’s frustrated attempts to end that war tarnished his reputation in Washington and, this book suggests, may have helped deprive him of his rightful place in history. Leading the U.N., Thant once remarked, was “the loneliest job in the world.” The Running Ground, by Nicholas Thompson (Random…

The photographer Guanyu Xu, born in China, based in Chicago, creates densely layered images of installations in domestic spaces that make them look like exploding scrapbooks. In 2018, he began a playful and powerful series of large-scale color images of his parents’ house in Beijing, queered with a dizzying array of appropriated photos reflecting Xu’s otherwise unacknowledged life as a gay man. Xu’s new series, “Resident Aliens,” was made in the apartments of immigrants who are hoping to become U.S. citizens but are still making their way through the legal process. (“RK-08282018-01142022,” from 2022, is pictured.) By combining their family photos with pictures he made in their homes, Xu helps them stake a claim on a space that looks as fragile as a house of cards.—Vince Aletti (Yancey Richardson; through…

This week, Cynthia Nixon—star of “Sex and the City,” “The Gilded Age,” and, to many, the 2018 New York gubernatorial primary—makes her fourteenth Broadway début, in “Marjorie Prime,” at the Hayes. The play, by Jordan Harrison, centers on themes of family stories, aging, and memory (June Squibb, ninety-six, plays her mother), and, one recent morning, Nixon, a lifelong Manhattanite whose stage career began at fourteen, in 1980, went to the theatre district to reflect on some memories of her own. She headed from her home, in midtown, where she lives with her wife and two of their sons, to the subway, wearing a gray wool jacket, an autumnal plaid scarf, and a Wonder Woman backpack. Transferring to the 1 at Times Square, she admired a pair of subway-themed mosaics evoking…

When Oliver Sacks arrived in New York City, in September, 1965, he wore a buttercolored suit that reminded him of the sun. He had just spent a romantic week in Europe travelling with a man named Jenö Vincze, and he found himself walking too fast, fizzing with happiness. “My blood is champagne,” he wrote. He kept a letter Vincze had written him in his pocket all day, feeling as if its pages were glowing. Sacks had moved to New York to work as a fellow in neuropathology at the Albert Einstein College of Medicine, in the Bronx, and a colleague observed that he was “walking on air.” Every morning, he carefully polished his shoes and shaved. He adored his bosses. “I smile like a lighthouse in all directions,” he wrote…

The other day, while shopping for dried figs and pink, plum-soaked sesame seeds at the East Village spice store SOS Chefs, I asked the baker and cookbook author Bryan Ford where in the city he’d go for a baguette or a croissant. “I wouldn’t!” Ford, who is thirtysix, barrel-chested, and bearded, with a propensity for four-letter words, said, laughing. “That’s just not what I crave.” Born in the Bronx and raised in New Orleans, Ford specializes in breads that can be harder to find in New York: sourdough pan de coco (soft, sweet dinner rolls made with coconut milk, a staple in his parents’ native Honduras); conchas and other Mexican pan dulce; pan chapla, an anise-scented Peruvian loaf that is leavened with chicha de jora, a fermented corn beverage. I…