Innholdsfortegnelse for August 11, 2025 i The New Yorker

Tad Friend (“Live Long and Prosper,” p. 26) has been a staff writer since 1998. In 2022, he published the memoir “In the Early Times: A Life Reframed.” Leslie Jamison (“Enemy of the Good,” p. 12) has published five books, including, most recently, “Splinters.” She teaches at Columbia. Kiran Desai (Fiction, p. 44) won the Booker Prize in 2006 for “The Inheritance of Loss.” “The Loneliness of Sonia and Sunny” is due out in September. Steve Martin (Shouts & Murmurs, p. 19) is an actor, a musician, and a writer. “Number One Is Walking,” his memoir about his career, was illustrated by Harry Bliss. Amy Sherald (Cover) is a painter whose first solo museum exhibition in New York, “American Sublime,” is on view at the Whitney through August 10th. Madeleine…

SPF Nostalgia Sunscreen, as a consumer good, tends to fall into the gloppy gray area between need and want. We are all aware that the sun, as dazzling and mood-bolstering as it may be, is an unmerciful adversary. Sustained exposure to UV radiation, the science tells us, comes with a roster of terrible potentialities, from skin cancer to cataracts to leathery wrinkles. So the need is clear; but what about the want? I have rarely stood in the sunblock aisle of a drugstore and found myself overwhelmed with desire. My concerns are practical: I am pale and quick to crisp. Give me high SPF, at a reasonably low price, and I’m sold. But, back in the summer of 2021, when I was newly vaccinated and practically feral for sensuous experiences,…

The “world’s greatest pedestrian,” as an old magazine once put it, may have been a farm boy born outside Zagreb, Croatia, in 1878. He has no Wikipedia page (yet!), though in his heyday his press coverage was abundant. “From childhood up he would watch the sun, a fiery ball, going down behind the western hills and wonder where it went,” the Fort Wayne Journal Gazette wrote in 1914. His name was Josip—later Joseph—Mikulec. He traversed the jungle in Brazil, the hills of Siberia, Tasmania, and Toledo, Ohio, all in the interest of circumnavigating the globe on foot, paying his way by selling postcards featuring his own likeness. He was said to have walked a hundred and twenty miles without sleeping. He became a brand ambassador for shoemakers. He wore gold…

Thirty years after this magazine published John Hersey’s “Hiroshima,” I sat in his classroom at Yale, hoping to learn how to write with even a fraction of his power. When “Hiroshima” appeared, in the August 31, 1946, issue, it was the scoop of the century—the first unvarnished account by an American reporter of the nuclear blast that obliterated the city. Hersey’s prose was spare, allowing the horror to emerge word by word. A man tried to lift a woman out of a sandpit, “but her skin slipped off in huge, glove-like pieces.” The detonation buried a woman and her infant alive: “When she had dug herself free, she had discovered that the baby was choking, its mouth full of dirt. With her little finger, she had carefully cleaned out the…

ACROSS 1 Fantasy being whose kind “never are roused unless it is clear to us that our trees and our lives are in great danger” 4 Target of some athletic rehab 7 Problem for someone who’s loud in bed? 12 Structure that’s typically one story but might have multiple levels 15 Olympic soccer medallist Carli or Olympic volleyball medallist Carli (no relation) 16 Sites’ entry points 18 Ran in a leisurely manner 19 Ceremonies that honor forebears 21 “I didn’t know that factoid!” 22 Adjust for daylight-saving time, maybe 23 Superlative suffix 24 Hurry in the direction of 25 “The Giver” singer Chappell 28 Nasal partitions 29 Cartoon creature described as being three apples high 30 Magna ___ (document that was sealed at Runnymede) 33 Show whose musical guest might…

The young Donald Trump was the Nelson Muntz of Jamaica Estates. (Or was he its Draco Malfoy? Scholars will debate such questions for generations.) In any case, Trump was, from his formative years, a spoiled bully. The Trump family, whose fortune was made in outerborough real estate, had a cook and a chauffeur, and “Little Donny” was a pigtail puller, an unruly loudmouth who tormented his teachers and hurled insults and rocks at other kids. When Trump was thirteen, his father, Fred, shipped him off to a military school, in Cornwall, New York. This was just the sort of place, it was hoped, where Donald would mature into a young man of rectitude and self-regulation. That, in fact, did not happen. Trump made it plain that his delight in domination…

John Wilson, the thirty-eight-year-old filmmaker, was drinking iced coffee on his home turf of Ridgewood, Queens, one recent morning. He was in Rudy’s Bakery and Cafe, a venerable neighborhood joint, feeling on edge. He and his friend Cosmo Bjorkenheim, a film critic, were about to head over to Low Cinema, a tiny storefront movie theatre (forty-plus seats) that they, with another friend, had quietly opened nearby in May. “We have one employee,” Wilson said. “And she’s never, like, fully opened the theatre before.” Their début bill had been a double feature of the 2002 rom-com “Two Weeks Notice,” starring Hugh Grant and Sandra Bullock, and a short from 1903 called “Rube and Mandy at Coney Island.” Bjorkenheim, who has a wisp of a mustache, said, “Our first full run was…

A dream book is an anatomy of dreams, with numbers trailing after. For more than a century, dream books served as the bibles of New York gambling. Their mystic authors—often women, often claiming a Caribbean origin—would pair dreams with numbers, and those numbers would be used to play the locally run lotteries: COFFIN—to dream of a coffin signifies that you will soon be married…. Play numbers 9-49-50; TOMBS—to dream of being among the tombs denotes a speedy marriage. Play numbers 7-8-31. TUMMY—to dream of one’s tummy as great and large predicts a fair and large estate. Play numbers 10-11-22. A dream book uses the irrational to rationalize the irrational. Something uncontrollable, a dream, gets translated into something controllable, a set of numbers, which can then supply the winning digits. Gambling…

Since the spring, at the federal courthouses in downtown Manhattan, hundreds of officers from ICE and other government agencies have lined the hallways and lobbies, waiting to detain some migrants as they leave their immigration hearings. Many of the agents are masked and armed, and they are dressed in tactical gear, even though all visitors to the buildings must pass through airportlevel security. Dozens of observers, migrant advocates, and members of the press show up each day to witness the arrests, which often take place with little regard for due process. It might not even matter how a judge rules in someone’s case. Migrants seem to be in shock as agents approach; family members might scream or sob as their loved one is taken away. The photographer Mark Peterson spent…

One foggy morning this spring, a ferryboat traversed the choppy waters between lower Manhattan and Governors Island. It was just after 7 a.m.—the first run of the day. But, for the boat, it was almost sunset. “She’s our tether,” a lightly bearded passenger named Sebastian Coss said. Coss, a former Governors Island staffer, was referring to the ferry, whose official name is the Lt. Samuel S. Coursen. Commissioned by the U.S. Army in 1956, the Coursen has reliably transported equipment, vehicles, and passengers to and from Governors Island ever since. During the island’s decades as an Army and Coast Guard base, the ship carried military families (as well as lumber and munitions). In its period of bureaucratic limbo, occasional government caretakers hitched a ride. Lately, food trucks, porta-potties, and luxury-spa-goers…

When Gordon Flett, a psychology professor who has spent his career studying perfectionism, was bringing up his two daughters, he was determined to help them understand that they didn’t need to be perfect. As they grew older, they would tease him whenever he was critical: “Aren’t you supposed to be teaching us it’s O.K. not to be perfect?” Despite his efforts, Flett noticed that his elder daughter, Hayley, showed some telltale signs: highly meticulous, she was routinely deemed perfectionist by teachers who graded the tests she’d stay up half the night studying for. When Hayley was ten, she took a test he’d developed with his longtime collaborator, Paul Hewitt—a questionnaire designed to identify perfectionism in children. Tallying her score, Flett was surprised to see that she didn’t seem to be…

The American poet James Schuyler composed his first significant poem during a nine-week stay at the Payne Whitney Westchester psychiatric clinic, in White Plains, New York, in late 1951. That fall, Schuyler, still a fresh face on the New York arts scene after an extended sojourn in Europe, had begun to introduce himself to friends as the Infant Jesus of Prague, a sixteenth-century wax-and-wood statuette clothed in embroidered vestments, and claimed that he had received from the Virgin Mary a package of Du Maurier cigarettes. The poem, called “Salute”—the word itself implies a toast to good health—was written as a step in Schuyler’s convalescence, between sessions of weaving belts and crafting moccasins for visitors. They included W. H. Auden, Schuyler’s old mentor, who footed the bill for the hospital stay,…