Innholdsfortegnelse for June 23, 2025 i The New Yorker

The word “advice” comes from two Latin words: the prefix ad, which implies a movement toward something, and vīsum, “vision,” a distinctly vivid or imaginative image. To ask for advice is to reach for a person whose vision exceeds yours, for reasons supernatural (oracles, mediums), professional (doctors, lawyers), or pastoral (parents, friends). It is a curious accident of language that “advice” contains within it the etymologically unrelated word “vice,” from the Latin vitium, meaning “fault” or “sin.” Yet the accident is suggestive. Alexander Pope seized on it to warn poets away from the royal court in a 1735 satire: “And tho’ the court show vice exceeding clear/None should, by my advice, learn virtue there.” The couplet, contrasting the speaker’s good advice with more nefarious influences, reveals the danger of outsourcing…

Rossi’s Auto Repair and Full Service Gas had been there for as long as Maureen had been a resident of this New Jersey town. It was the last business along the only thoroughfare. Past it, the street shed its name and was called a highway, even though it was the same street, now lined with residential blocks. On the curb near the gas station was a bench, installed by whom Maureen did not know, and she seemed to be the only beneficiary. A green metal statue of Bruce Springs-teen, a tribute by a local artist to one of the greatest New Jerseyans, had been a recent addition, and it stood next to the bench. Maureen remembered the years before Bruce’s arrival more clearly than the time after. She was eighty-eight,…

Let’s say there’s another pandemic. This time, a lethal disease spreads through contact with other people’s fecal matter. Precision toilet cleaning becomes a matter of life and death. In the wake of this pandemic, an aptitude test—call it the T.I.Q.—is developed to measure one’s ability to rotate brushes three-dimensionally inside holes. Kids who score highly are trained for the Toilet-Cleaning Olympiad, meant to keep the citizenry battle-ready and internationally competitive. Eventually, the world crowns a toilet-cleaning champion—not surprisingly, someone with an off-the-charts T.I.Q. This person is the very best at a skill that is crucial for the survival of humanity. Are they a genius? The question is hard to answer because our definition of genius is so inconsistent. Generally, we want geniuses to be good with their minds rather than…

FITTING ENDS Antonia Hitchens concludes her report on Trump’s Washington with an appropriate quote from Shakespeare (“Follow the Leader,” March 28th). A memorable line about imperial Rome by the historian Tacitus is equally apt. In his Annals, he wrote that when Tiberius succeeded Augustus, in 14 A.D., the governing and upper classes eagerly accommodated themselves to the new regime: “But in Rome a headlong rush into servitude by consuls, senators, knights.” The original, whose epigrammatic power no translation can match, is worth knowing: “At Romae ruere in servitium consules, patres, eques.” Martin M. WinklerFairfax, Va. DRAWING A LINE A recent Briefly Noted item on Dan Nadel’s new biography of Robert Crumb cites the cartoonist’s “racist caricatures” (April 28th). These certainly exist—the cartoon sequence titled “Angelfood Mc-Spade,” a typical example, is…

There was a door between the men arguing and meIn the small-town hotel when I returned late to my room.Then they went quiet, which can be more dangerous.I became stealthy in my mind.Bad spirits find doorways in stupor.I used to seek lift from the overwhelmIn drink.I’d ride over the meadow of doubt flowersTo the field of miracles where anything was possibleIn the blur.I never drank alone. It was the circle that drew meFrom the haunting to the waters.We remembered songs that we thought we had forgottenAnd we were beautiful beyond belief.The profane danced wildly with the sublime.How ridiculous now to think we were happy in the quick shelterWe sought from truth.I now understand how a whole country can drinkFrom the waters of illusion and go down.And how easy fury can…

When I leaned over this morningto get a closer look at the antscircling the edge of the sinkin the usual ant parade,I realized they were much too tinyto slip on a bathrobe,read a magazine, or wear a wedding ring. A dog, on the other hand,will sometimes allow itself to be dressed upwhenever its owner indulges in a bitof anthropomorphic skylarking. Yes, the same creature knownto bolt through a screen dooror dig up a bed of petunias with its nose may sit still on occasion,playing doctor in a white lab coat, or pose chin-strapped to a birthday hat,candles dancing in the background. In Colorado, I once saw a dog in a tuxedowalk down an aisle and give the bride away. But dogs are happiest on their own,stepping on their water bowls,staring…

Apple in China, by Patrick McGee (Scribner). This scrupulously reported book traces how one of the world’s largest companies “bound its future” to China. By 2015, Apple was investing fifty-five billion dollars a year in the country; it had also trained tens of millions of Chinese workers—a transference of technological expertise that, McGee argues, should be considered a “geopolitical event.” Drawing on interviews with hundreds of current and former employees, McGee delineates the series of imperfect decisions that led the company to concentrate its manufacturing in a single country, whose government has, since the ascension of Xi Jinping, in 2012, increasingly dictated how Apple operates. The Last Supper, by Paul Elie (Farrar, Straus & Giroux). Elie’s cultural history of the nineteen-eighties examines how a generation of artists borrowed the language…

In 2021, the TikTok star Addison Rae released her début single, “Obsessed.” It’s a whispery electro-pop tune about either unapologetic narcissism or chirpy self-confidence—it’s hard to say which. “I’m obsessed with me as much as you/Say you’d die for me, I’d die for me too,” Rae pants on the chorus. The track, co-produced by Benny Blanco, was a great big dud, even despite Rae’s colossal fan base. Back then, TikTok seemed more like a provisional gimmick than a bona-fide rocket launcher; it was harder to imagine an app-born phenom finding genuine purchase on the pop charts. That Rae’s vocals were processed into bloodless oblivion didn’t help. “People weren’t ready to receive that, or me as an artist, which is completely understandable,” Rae, who is twenty-four, said in a recent interview.…

JUNE 18 – 24, 2025 What we’re watching, listening to, and doing this week. If a dance isn’t performed for a long time, it starts to disappear. People’s memories of it fade, and choreographers’ notes can be confusing. So reconstructing old dances isn’t easy—but it is inherently interesting. This is what the Paul Taylor Dance Company has been up to, as it revives two Taylor pieces from the nineteen-sixties, “Tablet” (1960; pictured) and “Churchyard” (1969), for its weeklong run, in rotating programs, at the Joyce (June 17-22). “When I go back into the vault of Paul Taylor’s repertoire,” Michael Novak, the company’s first leader since Taylor’s death, in 2018, said recently, “I’m amazed at how avant-garde some of the work is.”—Marina Harss ABOUT TOWN OFF BROADWAY | Aishah Rahman’s colorism…

Tina Johnson never had much. She grew up in the sixties, outside of Gadsden, a hilly city in the green mountains of upper Alabama. Johnson’s mother, Katherine, couldn’t read or write, but she knew how to make money. She would leave the house with ten dollars and come back with a hundred, because she had bought a gallon of paint and painted someone’s house. She worked as an electrician—it was a mystery how she’d got her license—and drove diesel trucks. Sometimes she would go to a local warehouse and collect a truckload of potatoes that had been nicked and wouldn’t sell. She’d store them in the basement with lime on them, and the family would eat potatoes for months. “I don’t want to say it like this, baby, but I’m…

On March 27th, Sahil Lavingia walked into the Secretary of War Suite, in the Eisenhower Executive Office Building, to attend an all-hands meeting of the Department of Government Efficiency. Lavingia had been a DOGE employee for two weeks, part of a small team embedded at the Department of Veterans Affairs. So far, it had been an unexpectedly isolating experience. Lavingia communicated over the messaging app Signal with another member of the V.A.’s DOGE team, but there didn’t seem to be a Signal channel where he could interact with the rest of DOGE. Instead, Lavingia would watch Elon Musk, who led the initiative, engage with his allies on X. Lavingia told me, “You’d see where the dolphins were swimming—like, now we’re looking at D.E.I. contracts—and so you’d swim there, too.” Before…

The discovery began, as many breakthroughs do, with an observation that didn’t quite make sense. In 1948, two French researchers, Paul Mandel and Pierre Métais, published a little-noticed paper in a scientific journal. Working in a laboratory in Strasbourg, they had been cataloguing the chemical contents of blood plasma—that river of life teeming with proteins, sugars, waste, nutrients, and cellular debris. Amid this familiar inventory, they’d spotted an unexpected presence: fragments of DNA drifting freely. The finding defied biological orthodoxy. DNA was thought to remain locked inside the nuclei of cells, and not float around on its own. Stranger still, these weren’t whole genomes but broken pieces—genetic flotsam cast adrift from an unknown source. Mandel and Métais weren’t sure what to make of it. The scientific community, equally perplexed, largely…

As a historical figure, Donald Trump is oddly hard to place in time. He was an icon of the nineteen-eighties, yet he’s also the defining figure of the post-Obama era. His politics oscillate between knuckle-dragging conservatism and manic accelerationism. He longs for a time when America was “great,” though when that was is unclear. His historical enthusiasms include the America First movement of the early nineteen-forties, Andrew Jackson, and Abraham Lincoln (“Most people don’t even know he was a Republican, right? Does anybody know?”). “I am a Tariff Man,” Trump tweeted in 2018—another puzzling archaism. His adviser Peter Navarro explained it as “an homage to one of President Trump’s favorite Presidents, William McKinley” (who had, indeed, described himself as “a Tariff man, standing on a Tariff platform”). Trump’s veneration for…

When Jenny Nguyen was in her twenties, working as a chef in her home town of Portland, Oregon, she became a regular at pickup basketball games organized by a group of “lawyers, plumbers, women from all walks of life,” she told me recently. “The only thing we had in common was basketball.” Some of the women became her close friends, and one became a longtime girlfriend. When they weren’t playing, they got together to watch women’s games at sports bars—or tried to. Persuading a bartender or a manager to turn one on was a “constant situation,” Nguyen, who is now forty-five, recalled. On April 1, 2018, the group got lucky when they met at a bar to watch the final of that year’s women’s N.C.A.A. tournament, in which Notre Dame…

This has been the season of the star. For months now, possibly because the film and television industries spent 2024 in disarray, New York theatre has been a kind of buffet of mostly male A-listers playing limited theatrical runs. On and off Broadway, audiences—as long as they can afford the tickets—have been able to catch what could be an entire Oscars seating chart: Robert Downey, Jr., Denzel Washington, Kieran Culkin, George Clooney, Adam Driver, Paul Mescal, Jake Gyllenhaal, Liev Schreiber, Hugh Jackman. (Sarah Snook was the rare Hollywood visitor who won a Tony this year.) We’re now in the lame-duck season: the last of these high-wattage engagements finishes in June, just in time to point one’s yacht toward Portofino. But two incoming stars do still plan to work through summer…