Innholdsfortegnelse for September 22, 2025 i The New Yorker

Lauren Collins (“The Unicode,” p. 34), a staff writer since 2008, is the author of “When in French: Love in a Second Language.” Clare Malone (“Mommy Issues,” p. 26) is a staff writer covering the media business, journalism, and politics. She received the 2025 Mirror Award for commentary. T. Coraghessan Boyle (Fiction, p. 66) is a longtime New Yorker contributor. His new novel, “No Way Home,” will be published in the spring. Awol Erizku (Portfolio, p. 55) is a Los Angeles-based artist with works in the permanent collections of the Los Angeles County Museum, the Metropolitan, and the Whitney, among others. Maxine Scates (Poem, p. 50) is the author of four poetry collections, including, most recently, “My Wilderness.” D. T. Max (The Talk of the Town, p. 14; “The Behemoth,”…

In 1954, the Cuban ethnographer Lydia Cabrera published “El Monte,” committing to paper the oral history of major Afro-Cuban religious traditions. The book’s title, which translates roughly to “The Wilderness,” refers not only to nature but to the sacred space where, for those who practice Palo Monte and Lucumí—better known as Santería—spirits and deities reside. Among its readers was the Cuban collagrapher Belkis Ayón, who drew from Cabrera’s research to create the characters that populate her strange œuvre: monochrome silhouettes, their only facial features a pair of stark, piercing eyes. Ayón’s work brought the photographer Erick Jiménez to “El Monte.” At least, that’s how Jiménez remembers it; his artistic partner and twin brother, Elliot, recalls them reading it sooner, in their twenties. (They’re now thirty-six.) They were born in Miami,…

Four hundred and fifty million years ago, vast continents collided, squeezing shale into schist to form Coogan’s Bluff, in Highbridge Park, in northern Manhattan. A few weeks ago, Sam Lerner Dreamer, aged nineteen, set out to climb one of its faces. “It’s tall and pretty cool,” he said. “And I think I could do it in a day.” Bouldering—climbing smaller rock formations without a rope or harness—is a cerebral sport. Charting a route to the top is known as figuring out the boulder’s “problem.” Lerner Dreamer’s rock problem would be a good one: the formation has an overhang, widely spreadout handholds, and a treacherous top. Lerner Dreamer has the ringlets and soft eyes of a young Jesse Eisenberg, but long ropy biceps and the hands of a Gripmaster fan. He…

My mother recently confessed to me that, when I was a child, my paternal grandmother periodically sent me new clothes from a department store in New York City, outfits that I never saw. My mother regularly intercepted the packages, returned the items, and used the money to buy food for our family. So many decades after the fact, we both laughed. My mother had guessed correctly that, rather than feeling betrayed, I’d be amused to learn belatedly of yet another example of her resourcefulness—along with the plywood furniture she built for us, the inventive meals she made for us using government cheese, the cookware she acquired by saving up Green Stamps—in the years when she and my father were just barely getting by. Not all my grandmother’s packages were intercepted,…

In high school, I waited tables on weekends at a restaurant in the tony Chestnut Hill section of Philadelphia, where framed covers of The New Yorker hung on the walls. That’s how I first encountered the magazine, and so I associated it with the moneyed clientele of genteel tastes who ordered items then exotic to me: ricotta blintzes, croquemonsieurs, frittatas. Then, one night, I went to see “Adaptation,” a new movie that was playing at one of the art-house theatres downtown. I vaguely recall a friend describing it as “meta”—superlative praise for a moody teen. The movie is, in part, about the labor pains of its creator, the screenwriter Charlie Kaufman. Kaufman had been hired to adapt “The Orchid Thief,” a book by Susan Orlean based on her New Yorker…

The Sagrada Família is an immense, unfinished church in Barcelona, begun in 1882 on what was once outlying farmland and is now the city’s center. When I last visited the building, in July, it was nine inches away from being the tallest in the city. Less than two weeks later, when a ring beam to support the base of a cross was added to its biggest tower, dedicated to Jesus, the church surpassed the city’s two highest skyscrapers, both of which stand at five hundred and five feet tall. The sandstone basilica will reach its full height, however, only once the cross—which is fifty-five feet tall and made of fluted steel—is installed atop the tower, later this month. This addition will also make it the tallest church in the world.…

Three thousand people attended the Turning Point USA event at which Charlie Kirk spoke on Wednesday, on an outdoor green at Utah Valley University. The sheer size of that crowd—in the morning, at a school in a suburb of Provo, and even if some were there to protest—is just another piece of evidence that Kirk, in his years-long campaign to inspire a hard-right turn among people in their teens and twenties, had built a formidable movement. There was a Q. & A. portion, and someone asked how many transgender Americans had been mass shooters in the past decade, to which Kirk replied, “Too many.” The person next asked, “Do you know how many mass shooters there have been in America over the last ten years?” Kirk said, “Counting or not…

In 1972, Greg Mitchell was an editor at Crawdaddy, the proto-rock magazine, when someone called his desk. “It was some fast-talking manager, who said, ‘I’ve got this hot act. We’re getting a big press entourage, taking you all up to Sing Sing prison,’” Mitchell recalled. The act was playing for the inmates to début his new band. “I thought, Well, I don’t care about this guy, but I get to go to Sing Sing,” Mitchell said. He and Peter Knobler, the magazine’s editor-in-chief, rode along in the band’s van. The manager was Mike Appel. The act was Bruce Springsteen. Nobody else showed up. “Greetings from Asbury Park” came out soon after, and Mitchell and Knobler wanted Springsteen for Crawdaddy’s cover. “The staff revolted: ‘You can’t put him on the cover,…

This is the way the world endsNot with a bang but a whimper.—T. S. Eliot This is how the text exchange ends. Not with an explicit farewell but with a two-day pause followed by a thumbs-upemoji reaction. This is how the career ends. Not with a retirement party and a gold watch but with a second career in the gig economy. This is how doing laundry ends. Not with crisp, clean bedding but with your sheet coming out of the dryer balled up in your duvet cover, still soaking wet. This is how dinner in your thirties ends. Not with a satisfying dessert but with a single square of dark chocolate snapped off a seventy-five-per-cent-cacao bar from Whole Foods. O.K., maybe two squares … What the heck—it’s Friday. This is…

This year’s Super Bowl was largely forgettable as an athletic contest, but it lives on in fashion history thanks to Kendrick Lamar, who presided over the halftime show in black leather gloves, a varsity jacket, and a pair of bleached-out, quad-accentuating low-rise denim flares. Fashion commentators declared that Lamar had achieved the impossible—reviving a style of pants widely believed to be lost to time and the liquidation of Wet Seal. Searches for “flared jeans” soared by five thousand per cent following the performance. The Cut declared that the pants, a twelve-hundred-dollar design from Celine, “stole the show.” Lamar’s backup dancers wore red, blue, and white casual wear. One commentator theorized that they represented American gangs—the Bloods, the Crips, and the Ku Klux Klan. Others saw references to prison jumpsuits, or…

In Agnès Varda’s film “Jane B. par Agnès V.,” from 1988, a nearly fortyyear-old Jane Birkin, dressed in jeans, a white T-shirt, and a tweed blazer, her messy brown hair pinned back, sits in front of the Eiffel Tower and dumps out the contents of her purse. The purse, which she helped design, is named for her: it’s the Birkin bag, by Hermès, one of the most famous accessories in the world. Inside are loose papers, notebooks, a tube of Maybelline’s Great Lash mascara, a copy of Dostoyevsky’s “The Gambler,” a Swiss Army knife, pens and markers, a roll of tape. “Well,” Birkin says, in heavily accented French, “did you learn anything about me from seeing my bag?” Then a grin: “Even if we reveal everything, we don’t show much.”Throughout…

At age sixteen, in 1987, Debbie Gibson, of Merrick, Long Island, released her début album of original pop songs, “Out of the Blue,” which went triple platinum. At seventeen, she became the youngest artist in history to write, perform, and produce a Billboard No. 1 single; at eighteen, she tied Bruce Springsteen for ASCAP’s Songwriter of the Year. Before that, she was a fairly normal, if precocious, suburban kid. Recently, Gibson, now fifty-five, visited the Metropolitan Opera House, which plays a supporting role in her new memoir, “Eternally Electric.” Gibson, who is energetic and youthful, often sings snippets of songs (“Pink Pony Club,” “Copacabana,” “Raspberry Beret”) to illustrate points, and she zipped around in high-heeled sandals and a combo of biceps-flaunting sleeveless top and flared pants. “This is so incredible…

In the late eighteen-nineties, when the New Croton Aqueduct was just beginning to pipe water into the Bronx from Westchester, James Reuel Smith, a wealthy classicist with a passion for cataloguing, used a bicycle to survey the springs and wells of Manhattan and the Bronx. The tone of the resulting book, “Springs and Wells of Manhattan and the Bronx,” published posthumously in 1938, shifts between romantic reverie (“The water is cold and very pleasant”—a spring in West Harlem) and, as the street grid expanded, apocalyptic dread. The old water sources were, Smith wrote, “disappearing from sight with such celerity that it is merely a matter of months when there will be none whatever left in view upon Manhattan island.” “When I first started to read his book in the library,…

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 Julia Suits, must be received by Sunday, September 21st. The finalists in the September 1st & 8th contest appear below. We will announce the winner, and the finalists in this week’s contest, in the October 6th 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 “We don’t solve our problems here. We go around them.”Dominic Ciafardini, Scarsdale, N.Y. “Just when I start to feel like I belong, someone picks me up and tosses me in the back of a…

ACROSS 1 Vehicle for a coast-to-coast journey 5 Country that skipped December 30, 2011, when it moved across the International Date Line 10 Output of a noisy hotel machine 13 Texter’s intro to a spicy take, maybe 14 Suboptimal time for a theatregoer to use the rest room 15 Valueless 17 Pair of socks? 19 Concerning find for a dog owner 20 “Well …” 21 Dynamic ___ 22 Theatres with a viral 2021 Nicole Kidman ad 23 Pair of sneakers? 27 Decorates for Halloween? 29 Wine dregs 30 Longest interval of geologic time 31 ___ fryer 32 Talk-show host Kelly 33 Vigilant 37 Pair of chaps? 40 English football club with a cannon logo 41 Secondary social-media accounts, briefly 42 First-responder grp. 43 Title for some Spanish teachers: Abbr. 44…