Innholdsfortegnelse for July 21, 2025 i The New Yorker

Dexter Filkins (“The Next War,” p. 26) is a staff writer and the author of “The Forever War,” which received a National Book Critics Circle Award. Joshua Rothman (“Family Practice,” p. 38), a staff writer, writes the weekly column Open Questions. He has been with the magazine since 2012. James Wood (Books, p. 58), a staff writer since 2007, teaches at Harvard. His most recent book is “Serious Noticing: Selected Essays, 1997-2019.” Larry David (Shouts & Murmurs, p. 18) created, co-wrote, and starred in “Curb Your Enthusiasm” and is a co-creator of “Seinfeld.” He has contributed to the magazine since 2011. Inkoo Kang (On Television, p. 64), a staff writer, has been a television critic for the magazine since 2022. Kim Addonizio (Poem, p. 32) is the author of the…

JR & Son 575 Lorimer St., Brooklyn JR & Son, in Williamsburg, seems on the surface to be a potent exercise in summoning the past. It occupies the former home of a bar of the same name that dated to the seventies, having itself taken over from a venerable bar called Charlie’s, established in 1934. Now under the ownership of a restaurateur duo, Michelle Lobo and Scott Hawley, and the restaurant designer Nico Arze, the place has been newly restored but still looks preserved from some long-ago heyday. There are red leather booths and checkerboard floors, and the air smells dark and sweet, like oregano and red wine. You’d expect to have a certain kind of meal in a room like this: red-sauce Italian, fairly insipid but not without charm.…

You are an entrepreneur who has achieved the impossible. You have disrupted an entire sector of the economy and practically invented a new one. Most startups fail, but you have built yours into a billion-dollar company—a genus so scarce that it’s called a unicorn. Your brand has become a transitive verb. What do you do now? Stop growing? Stop disrupting? Of course not. Winners don’t quit. They find new ways to win. Brian Chesky, the co-founder and C.E.O. of Airbnb, was in SoHo the other day, standing near the cash register at the Housing Works Bookstore. In addition to being a forty-three-year-old multibillionaire, he is among the swolest of the swole C.E.O.s, with a swoop of dark curly hair and lats that make Jeff Bezos look like a feather-weight. There…

On the first Tuesday of Wimbledon, with hot evening sunshine lighting up the deuce court, Jack Draper, the fourth seed in the gentlemen’s singles, was playing disconcertingly well. He was on serve in his opening match and, as he said later, “I was getting my tennis together a little bit.” Draper, who is twenty-three, was the No. 1-ranked British player in this year’s competition, which is not an uncomplicated place to be. Britain is a nation that ignores professional tennis for fifty weeks of the year and then focusses, raptly, on the beauty and skill on display at the All England Lawn Tennis and Croquet Club, as if the event were an extremely successful garden party to which not everyone has been invited. The great British public, in floral dresses…

Late this spring, I was led into a car in Kyiv, blindfolded, and driven to a secret factory in western Ukraine. The facility belongs to TAF Drones, founded three years ago by Oleksandr Yakovenko, a young Ukrainian businessman who wanted to help fend off the Russian invasion. When the war started, Yakovenko was busy running a logistics company in Odesa, but his country needed all the help it could get. Ukraine was overmatched—fighting a larger, wealthier adversary with a bigger army and more sophisticated weapons. “The government said to me, ‘We need you to make drones,’ ” Yakovenko told me. “So I said to my guys, ‘You have four hours to make up your minds. Leave or stay—and, if you stay, promise me that you’ll do your best to help…

These days, everyone seems to have an opinion about A.I. companions. Last year, I found myself joining the debate, publishing a paper—co-written with two fellow psychology professors and a philosopher—called “In Praise of Empathic A.I.” Our argument was that, in certain ways, the latest crop of A.I.s might make for better company than many real people do, and that, rather than recoiling in horror, we ought to consider what A.I. companions could offer to those who are lonely. This, perhaps unsurprisingly, did not go over especially well in my corner of academia. In the social sciences and the humanities, A.I. tends to be greeted less as a technological advance than as a harbinger of decline. There are the familiar worries about jobs—ours and our students’—and about the ease with which…

Tropical Storm Barry developed in the Gulf of Mexico, as this magazine still calls it, on the morning of June 29th. It was the second named storm of the season and, as such, it arrived unusually early; historically, tempests with names like Bonnie or Bob didn’t form until mid-July. Later that day, Barry made landfall near the city of Tampico, on Mexico’s east coast, and weakened to a tropical depression. Its brief life span made it the butt of weather-related jokes: “Blink and you missed it,” a pair of meteorologists wrote. But, it turned out, Barry was far from finished. Its remnants continued to wend their way north, carrying with them moisture from the Gulf. This moisture helped supercharge the rains that fell in and around Kerr County, Texas, in…

On an unseasonably hot Thursday, Martha Stewart presided at the head of a long patio table (from one of her furniture collections) at her estate in Katonah, New York. She was sorting through a tub of gifts made and brought by twenty-nine social-media “superfans” whom she had invited over for the day. The items included a giant potted fern, which had been driven from Wisconsin; a jar of “Martharita” jelly; and a tea towel printed with the same sycamore tree that Stewart uses as her estate’s logo. “Who made this?” Stewart asked. “Right here, Martha!” a woman said, shooting her hand in the air. “These look familiar—from my magazine,” Stewart said, inspecting cookies garnished with sugared flowers. “They’re made with the ponderosa lemons you like!” a man with dots of…

The world may be going to hell, but the writer and director James Gunn has graced it with a sunshine “Superman.” The most recent installments in the franchise—Zack Snyder’s diptych “Man of Steel” (2013) and “Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice” (2016)—had a hectic, howling, near-apocalyptic sense of tragedy, but Gunn’s vision is bright, chipper, and sentimental. Admittedly, there’s a blast of grimness right at the start, but it’s only a ruse. A title card announces that Superman has endured his first defeat, and the hero (played by David Corenswet) is shown tumbling from the sky and slamming with a sickening thud onto the surface of a frozen wasteland, where he lies prostrate, spitting red blood on the snow. Fear not: no sooner does the wounded combatant put his lips…

Occasionally, you might find yourself hungry in Somerset County, New Jersey, on, say, a Monday at around lunchtime. Where to eat? A couple of local establishments have recently gotten a lot of buzz. One, Trump National, the President’s golf club in Bedminster, made headlines for receiving a healthinspection grade of thirty-two, out of a possible one hundred. (Violations: expired milk, improperly stored meat, and a manager who “fails to demonstrate knowledge of food safety.” Also, no bins in the ladies’ room for used sanitary products.) This was the lowest score given in the county. The other, Ponche Suizo, an Ecuadorian place in North Plainfield, was in the news for being one of only a few other establishments with a score anywhere close. (“Ice machine has mold like substance”; thirty-four.) Which…

The ocean: friend or foe? Although it is easy to be enthusiastic about the sea’s ability to regulate climate and to produce both oxygen and delicious marine life that goes well with melted butter, it is also easy to recognize that the sea is an uncompromising bringer of death, a hotheaded bully who is perpetually ready to rumble. The other day in the Rockaways, on the shore at Beach Eighty-seventh Street, the ocean was exhibiting its pugilistic side: four-foot waves, strong undertow—perfect conditions for test-driving one of the city’s new beach-patrol initiatives. For the past three years, New York City beaches have relied on drones to detect sharks and riptides, and now the gizmos are being used to drop flotation devices on swimmers in trouble. This summer, a stretch of…

The Mott Haven Houses, in the Bronx, are orange brick buildings about twenty stories high. The stairwells are dangerous, the elevators slow; Greg Gulbransen, a pediatrician from Long Island, waited in the lobby, bouncing with impatience. Even at dawn, he was pressed for time. It was six-thirty, and he needed to get back to the suburbs to see patients by nine. “Let’s hope we can find him on our first try,” Gulbransen said. He was looking for Red, a former tattoo artist in his early thirties who was addicted to drugs and now drifted between hideouts in and around the Mott Haven projects—an abandoned construction site, a janitor’s closet, a stairwell to the roof. They had met about a year earlier, when Gulbransen was on his way to see Malik,…

One of the first New Yorker writers hired by Harold Ross, the founding editor, was Marquis James. The men were good friends whose wives were also good friends; the couples vacationed together. James’s début feature ran in the second issue, in February, 1925. I could have written this piece about that piece, a Profile of Alice Roosevelt Longworth, a child of Theodore Roosevelt, based on the following passage alone: “She knows men, measures and motives; has an understanding grasp of their changes. That’s all there is to what is grandiosely known as ‘public affairs.’” Several issues later, James turned to the subject of John Francis Hylan, New York’s mayor. Then Ross sent him to Tennessee. The A.C.L.U. had published a newspaper ad offering to defend anyone who would test the…

Starting over in New York is a cliché for a reason; so is starting over by leaving it behind. Lena Dunham, who became the poster child for a certain kind of Brooklyn millennial during the run of her first series, “Girls,” recently reflected on her “breakup” with the city in this magazine. Now she’s returned to television with “Too Much,” a romantic comedy about rediscovering oneself by saying goodbye to all that. The show’s protagonist, Jess (Megan Stalter), has little reason to stick around. Her live-in boyfriend, Zev (Michael Zegen), has left her. Her passion for her job, as a producer of TV commercials, is long gone, too. Unattached and adrift, she lives with her sister (Dunham), her mother (Rita Wilson), and her grandmother (Rhea Perlman) in the latter’s Long…

ACROSS 1 Revolutionary who wrote, in her 1987 autobiography, “Love is an acid / that eats away bars” 13 “Reserve your seat now!” 15 Event for city runners? 17 Outburst met with a “Gesundheit!” 18 Avocado or coconut product 19 Ghanaian fabric 20 Nickname for Chester 21 Seeing-red feeling 23 City in northwestern Nevada 24 Crucial 25 Styling approach that pairs luxury and non-luxury items 27 Lion cub’s home 28 Brown drinks 29 Unspoken 31 Seedy places? 32 “The Wretched of the Earth” author Frantz 33 Accent mark that signifies a creaky, rising tone in Vietnamese 34 Showered affection (on) 35 Sports org. that added a Utah team in 2024 36 Concertgoers’ requests 38 ___ the question 41 Unstressed syllable followed by a stressed syllable, in poetry 43 Scrabble bagful…