Innholdsfortegnelse for September 1-8, 2025 i The New Yorker

On your next visit to Manhattan’s American Museum of Natural History, head to the Allison and Roberto Mignone Halls of Gems and Minerals and have a look at the opals. In the Victorian era, opal got cancelled, in part, because the novelist Sir Walter Scott created a character who died while wearing one. And, O.K., opal is softer than, say, diamond, whose diabolical merchants contributed to opal’s tarnished reputation. But the stone was good enough for Shakespeare; in “Twelfth Night,” he called it the “queen of gems.” Because the opal’s structure contains water, it is susceptible to dehydration, creating “crazing,” an effect that gives only the appearance of flaws. Sign me up! Opals come in gumdrop red, kitten-nose pink. My favorites are the oceanic greens and blues, one of which…

If, as Mario Cuomo once said, you campaign in poetry and you govern in prose, then New York’s mayoral race has birthed some new kind of Tik-Tokian free verse. Andrew Cuomo, the candidate for the Fight and Deliver Party, which was recently invented by Andrew Cuomo, said that Zohran Mamdani defeated him in the Democratic primary because of social media. Now Cuomo posts candid videos and replies to random users on X. Eric Adams, the candidate for the Safe & Affordable Party, which was recently invented by Eric Adams, has always campaigned, governed, and generally lived life in poetry, of a sort. (He once described New York as “a place where every day you wake up you could experience everything from a plane crashing into our Trade Center to a…

On the hottest day in New York City in a decade, nearly a hundred people crowded into a hundred-and-seventy-degree sauna in a converted brewery in Williamsburg for the first U.S. National Aufguss Competition. An Aufguss—from the German word for “infusion”—is a ritual sauna ceremony that lasts for twelve to fifteen minutes. A sauna master fills the room with carefully curated scents by dropping snowballs containing essential oils onto hot rocks—the Finnish word for the resulting plume of steam is loyly—and waves a towel to distribute heat through the room. Alonzo Solórzano, the twenty-nine-year-old director of Aufguss at Bathhouse, where the competition took place, likes to say, “My job is to make the room very, very hot. And I like my job.” The ritual dates back thousands of years, but it…

The New Yorker was in its infancy when it discovered Elwyn Brooks White, who made his first contribution in 1925, the year of the magazine’s founding. By the following spring, he was writing everything from cartoon captions to editorials, all of which would help establish its manner and voice. The New Yorker’s founding editor, Harold Ross, regarded The Talk of the Town as the keystone of each issue, and sent as much of it as possible through White’s typewriter. Yet for all of White’s ubiquity—he contributed reporting, essays, humor, fiction, verse, criticism, and even copy for subscription advertisements—he despaired, as he turned thirty, and then forty, of leaving only magazine clippings behind. White published his first major work, “Stuart Little,” no less significant for being a children’s novel, when he…

When I was growing up, a critic was a jerk, a crank, a spoilsport. I figured that was the whole idea. My favorite characters on “The Muppet Show” were Statler and Waldorf, the two geezers who sat in an opera box, delivering instant reviews of the action onstage. (One logically unassailable judgment, from Statler: “I wouldn’t mind this show if they just got rid of one thing … me!”) On television, the film critics Gene Siskel and Roger Ebert structured their show so that at any time at least one of them was likely to be exasperated, possibly with the other one. On MTV, the rock critic Kurt Loder was a deliciously subversive presence, giving brief news reports with an intonation that conveyed deadpan contempt for many of the music…

Despite considerable evidence to the contrary, conventional wisdom has long held that New York City simply isn’t a taco town. Pablito’s Taqueria, in Sunset Park; Taqueria Al Pastor, in Bushwick; the Birria-Landia truck in Jackson Heights; Taqueria Sinaloense, in the Bronx, with its shrimp-packed tacos gobernador—these places aren’t secrets. Their businesses thrive; their customers are profoundly well served. Recently, however, something has shifted: a new wave of ambitious, modern taquerias have punctured the idea that the only tacos worth talking about are in the outer reaches of the outer boroughs. Santo Taco, one of the newest of the newcomers, opened this spring, in a sliver-slim SoHo space that previously housed La Esquina’s taqueria, whose primary function was as a street-facing decoy for the glamorous restaurant hidden downstairs. La Esquina abajo…

Criteria Recording Studios, in North Miami, is where the Eagles laid down “Hotel California,” Bob Marley sang “Could You Be Loved,” and Lil Wayne mixed “Tha Carter III.” An unfamiliar name recently appeared on the studio schedule: the Real J6 LLC. “I just thought it was some band,” a session observer said the other day. On the first of the new client’s two days at Criteria, a young pianist came in and recorded the national anthem. Odd, the observer, a clean-shaven man, thought, but not remarkable. “Then this guy L.J. came up,” he recalled. “He started to talk about how he was close with Trump, and how he’s been working on this for a long time.” L.J. referred to an existing recording of the national anthem that “wasn’t good because…

On the Saturday evening that I saw “Twelfth Night, or What You Will,” the sole production of the Public Theatre’s Shakespeare in the Park summer season, a raccoon scurried furtively along the top of a wall at the Delacorte. “Twelfth Night” marks the exuberant reopening of the open-air venue, after an eighteen-month renovation that promised, in part, to solve the amphitheatre’s raccoon problem. Central Park’s wildness, though, shall not be denied. This “Twelfth Night,” directed by Saheem Ali, comes fully stocked with celebrities—including Lupita Nyong’o as Viola, Sandra Oh as Olivia, and Peter Dinklage as Malvolio. But, for a few moments, the raccoon was our star. A part of me did notice that we were lacking a certain animal nature onstage. One look at the set, designed by Maruti Evans,…

Each week, we provide a cartoon in need of a caption. You, the reader, submit a caption, we choose three finalists, and you vote for your favorite. Caption submissions for this week’s cartoon, by Juan Astasio, must be received by Sunday, September 7th. The finalists in the August 18th contest appear below. We will announce the winner, and the finalists in this week’s contest, in the September 22nd issue. Anyone age thirteen or older can enter or vote. To do so, and to read the complete rules, visit contest.newyorker.com. THIS WEEK’S CONTEST THE FINALISTS “It’s fast, but I certainly wouldn’t say it flies.”Daniel Tully, Los Angeles, Calif. “The best part is that he tends to stop traffic.”Barbara Menold, Stuart, Fla. “For the last time, it’s not yours. It just looks…

AUGUST 27 – SEPTEMBER 9, 2025 Last summer’s season at Little Island scored a hit with Anthony Roth Costanzo’s glittering version of “The Marriage of Figaro,” in which the countertenor sang all the parts in Mozart’s masterpiece, from basso suitor to twittering soubrette. That show was, in its way, radically exposing: at one point, Costanzo swallowed a scoping camera so that the audience could see his vocal cords flexing as his voice changed registers. This summer, Costanzo becomes just one character: the histrionic diva at the center of “Galas,” Charles Ludlam’s camp melodrama from 1983, directed by Eric Ting, inspired by Maria Callas, whose operatic life rivalled the roles she played onstage. The part should fit the extravagantly gifted Costanzo (pictured in costume) like a long buttoned glove; his dark…

In 1976, the year the United States celebrated its bicentennial, Donald J. Trump, thirty, leonine, and three-piece-suited, was chauffeured around Manhattan by an armed laid-off city cop in a silver Cadillac with “DJT” plates, while talking on his hot-shot car phone and making deals. “He could sell sand to the Arabs and refrigerators to the Eskimos,” an architect told the Times. That architect was drawing up plans for a convention center that Trump hoped to build in midtown. Trump called it the “Miracle on 34th Street,” promising a cultural showpiece, with fountains, pools, a giant movie theatre, half a million square feet of exhibition space, and rooftop solar panels. On the Fourth of July of that red-white-and-blue year, the Tall Ships—a flotilla of more than two hundred vessels from more…

The actor and comedian Fred Armisen phoned the front desk from his room at a midtown hotel the other day, and asked the clerk to call right back. “I’m not going to pick up,” he explained. “I’ll just let it ring for a little bit, if you don’t mind.” Moments later, the phone rang—a rattly landline brrring—and Armisen recorded it with a mike. “That’s useful,” he said, pleased. Armisen, whose comedic confections include the hipster-utopia sketch show “Portlandia” and the Netflix special “Standup for Drummers,” spent months considering sounds and their subtexts for his latest project, an album called “100 Sound Effects,” which Drag City will release next month. He tried to capture subtleties: How does the metallic slam of a rental-car door differ from the polite click of a…

I often wake up before dawn, ahead of my wife and kids, so that I can enjoy a little solitary time. I creep downstairs to the silent kitchen, drink a glass of water, and put in my AirPods. Then I choose some music, set up the coffee maker, and sit and listen while the coffee brews. It’s in this liminal state that my encounter with the algorithm begins. Groggily, I’ll scroll through some dad content on Reddit, or watch photography videos on YouTube, or check Apple News. From the kitchen island, my laptop beckons me to work, and I want to accept its invitation—but, if I’m not careful, I might watch every available clip of a movie I haven’t seen, or start an episode of “The Rookie,” an ABC police…

I never felt the influence of Muriel Spark, despite the fact that she was a substantial female figure in British literature. It’s a pity, because there was much to learn from her macabre, entirely unsentimental art and its account of the strange violence of living. It was only quite recently, when I came across a new volume of her collected letters (meticulously edited by Dan Gunn), that I first felt confronted by her persona. The letters invited an investigation into both the life and the work. “The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie” (1961) was Spark’s best-known novel, and was also the basis for a very successful film starring Maggie Smith. It was this film, perhaps, that cheapened Spark’s influence in my eyes when I was a young writer: the film…

“Elizabeth Gilbert has a new memoir out.” The mere sentence radiates gentle inspiration—watercolors, billowy pants with elephants printed on them, sparkly truth-telling in a big straw hat. Gilbert had an estimable career as a journalist and a writer of fiction before she published “Eat, Pray, Love: One Woman’s Search for Everything Across Italy, India and Indonesia,” in 2006, a book that became not just a best-seller or even a phenomenon but something more like a cultural paradigm. Gilbert’s autobiographical account of a yearlong, post-divorce, mid-thirties rediscovery of herself was read by millions, many of whom, when they picture Gilbert, likely see Julia Roberts, who starred in the film adaptation, which grossed two hundred million dollars worldwide. Upon hearing that Gilbert has written another memoir—her first proper return to that deliriously,…

ACROSS 1 Leavened Indian flatbread 5 Alternatives to overhead lighting 10 “Stat!” 14 World capital situated on a fjord 15 Architect who designed the Louvre pyramid 16 Unleavened Indian flatbread 17 Material for some delicate scarves 18 Like soy milk or cashew cheese 19 Ink stain 20 Arabic term of endearment 22 Dark and depressing 24 Winding tales 26 Suck down some soup, say 27 Co. behind the Watson supercomputer 29 Sets on fire 31 Tear 34 Noncommittal R.S.V.P. 36 “Knives Out” actress de Armas 37 “___ were the days” 39 “… ish” 40 In-your-face, informally 42 Letting a sliver of light through, say 43 Like many high-ceilinged New York apartments 45 “Whatever you want, just say the word” 47 Fish in a caterpillar roll 48 One raising capital for…