Innholdsfortegnelse for June 30, 2025 i The New Yorker

Rachel Monroe (“Dead Reckoning,” p. 36), a contributing writer at The New Yorker, focusses on Texas and the Southwest. She is the author of “Savage Appetites: True Stories of Women, Crime, and Obsession.” Jay Caspian Kang (“The Descendants,” p. 16) is a staff writer and the author of “The Loneliest Americans.” Jia Tolentino (Books, p. 58), a staff writer, won a National Magazine Award in 2023 for her writing about abortion. Her essay collection, “Trick Mirror,” was published in 2019. Campbell McGrath (Poem, p. 49) most recently published “Fever of Unknown Origin” and “Nouns & Verbs: New and Selected Poems.” Sarah Larson (The Talk of the Town, p. 11), a staff writer, has been contributing to The New Yorker since 2007. Han Ong (Fiction, p. 44) is a playwright and…

Samuel Clonts and Raymond Trinh, the chef duo behind Cactus Wren, which opened in February on Ludlow and Rivington Streets, seem blessedly uninterested in capturing any sort of Zeitgeist. Their first establishment, a tasting-menu restaurant called 63 Clinton, is defined by its idiosyncrasy, its total confidence in itself, and its refusal to play the fancy-schmanciness game that seems to steer so many high-end restaurants toward a kind of anodyne, luxury sameness. Cactus Wren is similarly sui generis. It tells a bit of a story, with recurring references to the American Southwest (the restaurant is named after the state bird of Arizona), but mostly it’s a kitchen that’s doing its own thing. The menu is tight and snacky, elegant and gimmicky, high and low. In its pursuit of, well, whatever the…

American sports come with implied narratives. The story of baseball is fundamentally nostalgic, connecting us to childhood and to the country’s pastoral beginnings. Football tells a story of manly grit, with echoes of the battlefield. Basketball is the city game, as the sportswriter Pete Axthelm called it half a century ago, and its chief narrative, for decades, was about escaping the ghetto. Religious metaphors run hotter in basketball than in other sports: when Spike Lee set out to make an ode to New York City hoops, he named his protagonist Jesus Shuttlesworth, for the N.B.A. Hall of Famer Earl (Jesus) Monroe; LeBron James appeared on the cover of Sports Illustrated at the age of seventeen as “The Chosen One.” Every tall and prodigiously skilled teen-ager feels like an act of…

ACROSS 1 Champagne glass 6 Figure such as the Koch snowflake or the Sierpiński triangle 13 World capital on the Mediterranean 15 Shed light? 16 Article for a deep dive 17 Reciprocal 18 Metered celebration 19 ___ surfing (technique that makes use of Jet Skis to access big waves) 21 Lead-in to change 22 Course recommendations 24 Dances with arrastres and barridas 26 Authority 27 Mineral often found in thunder eggs 29 They’re all part of the act 31 Opposite of frío 32 Whippet sounds 33 Pro ___ 36 Fire stations? 37 “Pachinko” author Min Jin ___ 38 Hub of connectivity 40 Holiday with a Spanish tradition of eating twelve grapes as the clock strikes midnight: Abbr. 41 “Sorry to report …” 42 Ready to make moves 43 Get the…

“History doesn’t repeat itself, but it rhymes.” Whether or not Mark Twain ever really said that line, it fits and resonates loudly as President Trump shuttles between the Oval Office and the Situation Room, weighing if he should dispatch bombers on yet another American sortie to the Middle East. First, the necessary caveats. Since seizing power, in 1979, Iran’s theocracy has menaced its more than ninety million citizens and the wider region. The ayatollahs have deprived the country of a prosperous civil society, channelling resources instead into militarism and messianic fantasy. The regime relies on repression—crackdowns, imprisonment, torture, executions—to maintain control of a stifled and restive population. Many among the country’s educated élite have emigrated. The ranks of the leadership are staffed, in large measure, with satraps and mediocrities. Iran’s…

On the morning of the New York première of the new sci-fi movie “The Life of Chuck,” in which Mark Hamill plays a grizzled, alcoholic, mathloving accountant, the actor visited MoMath, the National Museum of Mathematics, near Madison Square Park. Hamill has accurately described his look in the film—white hair, walrus mustache, sweater vest—as “Geppetto.” In real life, Hamill, who is seventy-three, with blondish hair and a boyish face, looks more like a gracefully aging Luke Skywalker, as one might hope. In a gallery facing Fifth Avenue, he sipped a blueberry-and-spinach smoothie and contemplated “Topological Crochet,” an array of geometric yarn sculptures by the artist Shiying Dong. “People think about math as being numbers, arithmetic,” said MoMath’s executive director and C.E.O., Cindy Lawrence. She wore a lacy flowered top and…

The first piece I ever read in The New Yorker was by Rogers E. M. Whitaker, under the rubric “Football,” in the November 22, 1941, issue. I was ten years old. Subscribers called my parents, who were not subscribers: “Johnny is in The New Yorker and they have his name wrong. They call him Mickey.” My father—Harry R. McPhee, M.D.—was called Mickey all his life, and I was called Johnny in 1941, and Johnny only. But the little boy in the piece was definitely me, and the moment I saw it I developed a lifelong affection for the magazine. I was the mascot of Princeton’s football team, my father its doctor. At practices, held a block from my grade school, and at all games in Palmer Stadium and at places…

The virgin allegations emerged about a decade ago. Young people “are so sexually inactive that it practically boggles the mind,” a writer for Bustle proclaimed, in 2016, invoking a then recent study that suggested that celibacy had lately doubled among people in their early twenties. Two years later, The Atlantic gave this evident trend its working name, with a cover story on “The Sex Recession.” (The illustration: a bird and a bee turned away from each other, looking both sullen and shy.) The youth had stopped fucking. They were a “new generation of prigs, prudes, and squares,” a blog declared; they were “anxious, lonely and addicted to porn,” according to the Telegraph. They were dragging the rest of the population down with them, the Washington Post argued, blaming the “Great…

In “F1,” a snazzy piece of blockbuster engineering, Brad Pitt plays Sonny Hayes, a devotee of fast cars, beautiful women, and simple living. A professional gambler and an occasional speed demon for hire, he lives in a beat-up van that he hauls from one racetrack to another. Strapping himself into a car at Daytona International Speedway, he applies just the right proportions of velocity, swagger, and insider know-how to hint at a once great racing career. About thirty years ago, Sonny was an ascendant Formula 1 star—cue many hilarious, grainy video clips of a younger Pitt, with a resplendent golden mullet—until his dreams were dashed by a near-fatal accident, during an attempt to over-take the three-time Formula 1 world champion Ayrton Senna. The invocation of an actual legend and martyr…

Who will help lead the Department of Government Effciency now that Elon Musk has left the scene? News reports have mentioned Joe Gebbia, a Tesla board member and a co-founder of Airbnb, as a possible replacement. Gebbia is forty-three. Like Musk—his close friend—he is a billionaire, a resident of Austin, Texas, and the rumored recipient of a hair transplant. Gebbia formally announced his political conversion on X in January, posting that, after years of supporting Democrats, he finally “did [his] own research” and concluded that Donald Trump “deeply cares about ournation.” His feed has a MAHA flavor: Big Food exposés (“The truth about Ketchup”) alternate with digs at liberals suffering from “TDS,” or Trump Derangement Syndrome. Unlike Musk, Gebbia was trained not as an engineer but as a designer. Upon…

The year my sister Amy was invited to play Mrs. Claus in the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade was the same year Hugh had his hip replaced. “It somehow makes sense that these two things are happening within a week of each other,” I said. “Except I’m not doing it,” Amy told me. It was nearly midnight, and we were in my apartment in New York, gathered in the living room. The view from the window looked like the backdrop of a talk show—a jumble of tall buildings with thousands of lit windows, some of them winking. “How can you not play Mrs. Claus?” I asked. Amy ticked the reasons off on her fingers. “One: they want me there at 3 a.m. Two: it’s supposed to rain. And three: they’re not…

The headquarters of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, in Brussels, with eight criss-crossing glass-and-steel wings, was designed to resemble a set of interlocking fingers—a reference to what its architect called “the coming together of all nations in one common space.” Inside, the allocation of that space reflects certain geopolitical realities. The nine-person delegation from Iceland, the alliance’s only member without a standing army, occupies a half-dozen offices; France has a whole floor; Germany has two. The U.S. mission, with a staff of more than two hundred, representing a global force deployed in nearly a hundred and fifty countries, takes up an entire five-story wing. One morning this spring, on an outdoor walkway that leads to what is known as the building’s Public Square, I passed a twisted knot of rusted…

When Anna Dhody was growing up in Philadelphia, in the nineteen-eighties, her mother used the city’s museums as a kind of babysitter. “She would just drop me off at the Penn Museum and be, like, ‘Don’t touch anything, I’ll meet you at the totem poles in an hour,’” Dhody told me. One day, when she was in elementary school, her mother took her to the Mütter Museum. “I don’t think she knew what she was getting into,” Dhody said. The Mütter, a museum of medical history, is stranger and less clinical than that description implies. Its dimly lit rooms are crowded with specimens of physical anomalies and pathologies: stillborn fetuses in jars, slices of faces suspended in an alcoholic solution, a wall of nineteenth-century skulls. One display case features the…

The Green Revolution got off to a rocky start. In the fall of 1944, Norman Borlaug, who would become known as the revolution’s father, moved to Mexico to set up a plant-breeding program. Right away, he came down with a stomach crud. It was, he would later tell an interviewer, “the usual tourist thing,” except that it lasted for weeks. Though he had found his previous position, with DuPont, to be boring, in those weeks Borlaug decided that maybe it hadn’t been so bad. “If I could have gotten my job back at DuPont, I would have,” he said. Borlaug had gone to Mexico specifically to work with wheat, which was being devastated by a fungal disease called stem rust. When he got well enough to travel around the country,…