Innholdsfortegnelse for July 7-14, 2025 i The New Yorker

Jhumpa Lahiri (“Jubilee,” p. 28; Takes, p. 35) won the 2000 Pulitzer Prize for fiction for “Interpreter of Maladies.” Her most recent book is the collection “Roman Stories.” Ottessa Moshfegh (“The Comedian,” p. 50; Takes, p. 55) has written six books of fiction, including, most recently, the novel “Lapvona.” Hua Hsu (“The End of the Essay,” p. 21), a staff writer, received a 2023 Pulitzer Prize for his memoir “Stay True.” He teaches at Bard College. Daniel Alarcón (A Critic at Large, p. 78), a contributing writer, is the executive producer of the Spanish-language podcast “Radio Ambulante.” Jorie Graham (Poem, p. 44) teaches at Harvard. Her books include “To 2040.” Jeannie Suk Gersen (Comment, p. 9), a contributing writer, is a professor at Harvard Law School and a former U.S.…

Recently, the Irish writer Anne Enright visited Australasia, where a bookshop clerk recommended the novel “Stone Yard Devotional,” by the Sydney-based novelist Charlotte Wood, which she loved. Here Enright recommends more books from Australia and New Zealand, which she suspects may have been overlooked because of their authors’ distance from the centers of literary influence. Her remarks have been edited and condensed. Monkey Grip by Helen Garner This book is about a woman, Nora, who is a single mother living in a communal house in Melbourne, as Garner did. And she is in erotic thrall to a guy named Javo, a heroin addict. The question of this book is, Is there no epiphany? Or is it all epiphany? There’s a wonderful sense of transparency to the world. The way the…

Jesse Eisenberg and Meredith Scardino were trying to come up with an idea for a musical, in a conference room in midtown, one recent Sunday. Inspired by a heap of props, they tossed out vague prompts. “That van Gogh vest—I was thinking about how sad van Gogh would be if he saw that,” Scardino, a comedy writer who created the sitcom “Girls-5Eva,” said. Eisenberg, whose most recent film is “A Real Pain,” yes-and-ed her: “Yes, like Beethoven being turned into a ringtone.” The two had met an hour earlier, during an orientation for the 24 Hour Musicals, a yearly creative challenge that is a bit like the Pomodoro Technique for the theatre-kid soul. The charitable event, which launched in 2006 as an offshoot of the 24 Hour Plays project, has…

I first discovered Harold Brodkey’s 1954 story “The State of Grace” in 2013, and I’ve probably read it a hundred times since. It remains, for me, one of the most charming and strangely affirming depictions of a budding artistic consciousness in fiction. In the simplest terms, it’s the story of a man recounting select dramas from his adolescence. The grownup narrator never identifies himself as a writer, but the prose is so calibrated—lyrical, emotional, intentional—that the story is easy to mistake for memoir. Perhaps it’s safe to assume that “The State of Grace” was based on Brodkey’s own adolescence, in suburban St. Louis in the nineteen-forties. The terrain of the narrator’s childhood seems to have calcified into mythology. But here’s something peculiar. Brodkey wrote “The State of Grace” in his…

COMMENT WAR AND POWER Two interrelated fears that have caused mounting public alarm with respect to the Trump Administration involve unchecked executive power and the erosion of the rule of law. These worries have intensified in debates about the legality of President Trump’s decision to bomb Iranian nuclear facilities more than a week into Israel’s war against Iran. Members of both houses of Congress had introduced resolutions to try to prevent Trump from taking such military action without its authorization. But the energy that some lawmakers had mustered for a rare attempt to assert Congress’s constitutional power against Trump seemed to dissipate, at least while they expected a ceasefire between Israel and Iran to hold. One would normally look to Supreme Court precedents to determine the constitutionality of a Presidential…

Given the alternatives—farm to table, app to front door—can the micro-wavable meal compete? Since débuting in March, a company called Crave New World has been hawking its next-gen TV dinners on college campuses, even brokering a deal with fraternities and sororities: free food to fuel a social-media competition (the prize: tickets to the N.C.A.A. Final Four). “People in the house liked them so much, we almost didn’t have enough to make the TikToks,” Jacob Avram, a University of Michigan sophomore and a Delta Chi chair, said recently. He played director for his frat brothers: “Take a bite, say ‘Mmm.’ Act like it tastes good.” “I have a lot in common with them,” Matthew Brag, the company’s founder, said of the frat guys. He was in a flannel shirt, jeans, and…

It’s hard to overstate how startled I was upon first reading Grace Paley. At the time, I’d never really given a lot of thought to stories. I didn’t come across them much during my education—aside from a few Sherlock Holmes tales and too much Somerset Maugham. My idea of the form was very distorted. Neat little British packages tied up with a tight bow. Airless. I was unfamiliar with the more formally inventive American tradition, or the fact that there were any magazines or journals that published short fiction. (The first time I saw a copy of The New Yorker was when it published me.) Reading “My Father Addresses Me on the Facts of Old Age” in the early years of a new century was genuinely transformative. No twists or…

A uniformed police officer stands sideways, his head turned to face us. His eyes are unnaturally close together, rendered by the artist as two black dots floating in the very center of his face. He has a drooping nose, a thin mustache, and a glum look, staring as if he is aware of being watched. Behind him stands a little girl, less than half his size, wearing a red dress, a red bow poking from the thicket of her heavy black hair. Her eyes are big and sad, and her index finger touches the tip of the nightstick hanging from the policeman’s belt. “You see?” she says, with a worried expression. “This is the little stick for squashing ideologies.” I probably first saw this image in the nineteen-eighties—taped to the…

From the bell tower on the island of San Giorgio Maggiore—just a third of a mile, but centuries away from the selfie sticks of Piazza San Marco—you can see nearly all of Venice. And all of Venice can see you. So activists discovered when, on June 12th, they ascended the structure and unfurled a huge banner bearing the word “BEZOS,” which had been crossed out with a big red “X.” The image went straight from the campanile to CNN. Jeff Bezos was set to celebrate his lavish wedding to Lauren Sánchez at the Fondazione Cini, a cultural institution on the island which occupies a large part of a Benedictine monastery established there in 982 A.D. The bell tower still belongs to the monks, who have lived on the island for…

In the nineteen-fifties, Joe Papp, the founder of the Public Theatre, would travel the five boroughs with a flatbed trailer hitched to a garbage truck, offering free Shakespeare to all New Yorkers. “The myth, which is sort of true, is that the truck broke down by the side of the Turtle Pond, so he just decided to squat here,” Oskar Eustis, Papp’s modern-day successor, said one afternoon in Central Park. He was standing on the site where, in 1962, Papp—after a multiyear stand-off with Robert Moses (who dismissed him as “an irresponsible Commie”)—inaugurated the Delacorte, the open-air home of Shakespeare in the Park, with “The Merchant of Venice.” “He fought that fight so that we didn’t have to,” Eustis said. The amphitheatre is now an institution, where James Earl Jones,…

“Voices Lost in Snow” ran in The New Yorker in 1976, though I discovered it almost two decades later, in a discarded library copy of “Home Truths,” a volume now out of print. I was plunged into Mavis Gallant’s vertiginous world, stunned by the way she excavated the past, shuffled narrative time, and privileged shards of perception over conventional plots. The story forms part of a semi-autobiographical sextet, often referred to as the Linnet Muir series, and is an example of how Gallant dispenses with forced (and, I would argue, fallacious) distinctions between life and art, between the novel and the short form. When I fell under the spell of her work many years ago, I was still learning to piece together my first stories; it felt like sounding out…

Out of interest, could this be the best beginning to the sixth chapter of any book, by anyone, ever? The girl with the stringy blond hair over her shoulders and the trading beads and the black turtleneck and Levi’s and the half-filled water glass of domestic wine in front of her on the bar said, “Do you like sex?” Ryan hesitated. He said, “Sure.” The girl said, “You like to travel?” Ryan said, “Yeah, I guess so.” The girl said, “Then why don’t you fuck off?” In case you can’t pin the passage down, it is not from “Mrs. Dalloway,” or even “To the Lighthouse.” In fact, it comes from “Unknown Man No. 89,” a 1977 novel by Elmore Leonard. The man is Jack Ryan, not to be confused with…

The recent reopening of the Metropolitan Museum’s Michael C. Rockefeller Wing—a spectacular treasury of art from Africa, Oceania, and the Americas—was fortuitously timed. The renovation, which cost seventy million dollars, began in 2021, as a global campaign to decolonize Western museums was prompting some institutions to repatriate looted objects, and others to engage in tortured self-critique. Four years later, an America-first cultural crackdown has freed the Met to cast off the hair shirt of reckoning and celebrate its diverse holdings in a spirit of defiance. Tahitian dancers and Senegalese drummers performed at a festival to mark the reopening, spilling out onto the plaza on Fifth Avenue. “Light” is the watchword of the renovation, directed by the architect Kulapat Yantrasast, who has transformed a dim, low-ceilinged annex into a cathedral-like…

ACROSS 1 Pass through fine mesh 5 Hop-forward brews 9 Herb in a caprese sandwich 14 “Bury My Heart at Wounded ___” 15 Word that can refer to an astronomical phenomenon or a kind of smoked salmon 16 Bring together 17 Woes 18 “Double, double ___ and trouble” 19 Get the suds off of 20 1977 erotica collection by Anaïs Nin 23 Patronize, as a hotel 24 ___ show (solo performance such as John Leguizamo’s “Freak”) 28 Animal that Winston fears in “Nineteen Eighty-Four” 30 Common fish-and-chips fish 31 Honest ___ (Presidential nickname) 32 2003 coming-of-age novel by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie 37 Regarding 38 Segment of a train 39 “The phone ___ first” (food blogger’s credo) 40 2011 historical-fantasy novel by Erin Morgenstern 45 Mo. when Cesar Chavez Day is…