Innholdsfortegnelse for October 27, 2025 i The New Yorker

On the afternoon of February 12th, Russell Vought, the director of the White House Office of Management and Budget, summoned a small group of career staffers to the Eisenhower Executive Office Building for a meeting about foreign aid. A storm had dumped nearly six inches of snow on Washington, D.C. The rest of the federal government was running on a twohour delay, but Vought had offered his team no such reprieve. As they filed into a second-floor conference room decorated with photos of past O.M.B. directors, Vought took his seat at the center of a worn wooden table and laid his briefing materials out before him. Vought, a bookish technocrat with an encyclopedic knowledge of the inner workings of the U.S. government, cuts an unusual figure in Trump’s inner circle…

Thing is, I’ve been trying to find a moment to write down what happened to Bennett and me for a while now, but the demands of my audience rarely abate. Soon as I post a fresh installment of “Charles: Final Boy,” readers clamor for more. I’ve hardly time to jot down a grocery list, let alone compose a personal chronicle. Bennett says I’m practically the Charles (as in Dickens) of scribblers devoted to mining the rich vein of a certain underappreciated sitcom of the nineteen-eighties, but I will leave that for history to judge. Besides, what does Bennett know? He’s practically dead. Just before he got that way, I was in Amok Mocha, where I like to sip cold brew and do my “C: FB” conjuring, and I struck up…

In 2014, Paul Kingsnorth was sunk in doubt. He was forty-one and had been on the green movement’s front lines since the nineteen-nineties—working for Greenpeace and EarthAction, chaining himself to a bridge, getting tear-gassed outside a G-8 summit. In the course of two decades, he had become one of Britain’s leading environmentalists, and an accomplished novelist, too: “The Wake,” set in eleventh-century Lincolnshire and written in cod–Old English (“When i woc in the mergen all was blaec though the night had gan and all wolde be blaec after and for all time”), was long-listed that summer for the Booker Prize. After twenty years of campaigns, though, he sensed that the movement was going nowhere—and missing the deeper point. Too many environmentalists had “no attachment to any actual environment,” he complained;…

One morning in late September, the writer and former Times columnist Mark Bittman walked into the Lower East Side Girls Club, a rec center in Alphabet City and the site of what would become, in less than eight hours, his first restaurant. At 6 P.M., an inaugural group of guests would arrive for the soft opening of Community Kitchen, a not-for-profit fine-dining experiment that Bittman spent years concocting, and which had found a home—for the next few months, at least—in an underused café on the club’s ground floor. The multicourse tasting menu, cooked by a highly credentialled chef, would be elegant and refined, made with heirloom produce from local farms. Experienced servers might pour meticulously curated natural wines, ask the obligatory “Have you dined with us before?,” and swiftly fold…

VIRGIL’S BOYS I very much enjoyed Anthony Lane’s gleeful review of Stephen Greenblatt’s new biography of Christopher Marlowe (Books, September 15th). Lane reminds us that Marlowe took the plot of his play “Dido, Queen of Carthage” from Virgil’s Aeneid. I’m not convinced, though, that Virgil would “blench” at Marlowe’s opening scene, where a lecherous Jupiter entertains Ganymede, a boy, on his knee. Have another look at the opening verses of the Aeneid (especially Book I, line 28). Virgil is careful to include, among the causes of Juno’s rage, and alongside the well-known judgment of Paris, Jupiter’s lust for Ganymede. Same-sex desire also appears throughout Virgil’s pastoral poems, the Eclogues. The second Eclogue—often thought to be autobiographical—offers a famous example in which the shepherd Corydon proclaims his love for the boy…

Oh, you’re doing baby-led weaning? We did that, too! It’s really the only way to raise confident, independent little humans. That’s why we decided to take it a step further and do child-led parenting. Hold on one sec—yes, Caleb, my love, how can I help your journey? I see. Yes, I understand that your heart wants to watch “PAW Patrol” right now, but remember you broke your iPad, so—O.K., yes, you can watch on my iPad. Great problem-solving! Anyway, yeah, we started with gentle parenting, but we found that we were having difficulty maintaining boundaries. And then Derek and I realized that we’re smart, capable people, and there’s no reason to believe that our son isn’t just as smart and capable. So we stopped enforcing boundaries. Instead we said, “Caleb…

The festival of eariwigs dispersed as I draggedthe blue tarp off the logs left to season nowfor going on a couple of years it must be. We bucked up the trunks to cut them to roundswith the chainsaw locked to the sawhorseand the floor—the floor of the forest— drifted with sawdust, the air was filled with freshrawness, and the sun came out, and we kept at ituntil we’d split a cord, a cord and a half. I dropped Turk at the station and back homestacked the shed for a bit, and was up the laddercutting back the multiform rose when the radio announced we were, now, at war. So I got a beerfrom the fridge and brought Andy’s new translationsof Bashō to the hammock. Even after the journey through Oku,…

Death in a Shallow Pond, by David Edmonds (Princeton). Few among us would hesitate to wade into a pond to save a drowning child. Faced with more distant suffering, however, most people in wealthy societies are curiously immobile. From this observation—first made by the philosopher Peter Singer, in the nineteen-seventies—sprang the movement known as effective altruism, whose adherents seek out impartial ways to do the most good, perhaps most archetypally by funding cost-effective interventions that improve the lives of people in extreme poverty. As Edmonds traces the movement’s rise (it now wields significant influence in Silicon Valley and in philanthropy) and untangles critiques that have been levelled against it, he transforms moral inquiry into a high-stakes adventure. Dinner with King Tut, by Sam Kean (Little, Brown). In this sprightly tour…

On a bright afternoon in late August, I met Kevin Parker, the polymath behind the psych-pop project Tame Impala, at a hotel bar in the Los Feliz neighborhood of Los Angeles. Parker was dressed in baggy pants, flip-flops, and sunglasses. His hair is the kind of shaggy that suggests abject neglect more than overpriced Hollywood coiffure. We ordered a round of mezcal cocktails, which, when they arrived, were conspicuously pink and garnished with tiny orchids. “I didn’t think it was gonna look like that,” Parker said, laughing, as we clinked glasses. “My friends are always giving me shit: ‘Kevin orders a pink flirtini’ or whatever.” In the early twenty-tens, Parker, who was brought up in Perth, in Western Australia, became an indie-rock megastar. (The first three Tame Impala records received…

OCTOBER 22 – 28, 2025 What we’re watching, listening to, and doing this week. New York suddenly finds itself in a superbloom of cutting-edge international programming this fall. L’Alliance’s Crossing the Line boasts a fully stocked lineup of co-productions, such as Caroline Guiela Nguyen’s “LACRIMA” (pictured)—a hit at the Festival d’Avignon—which tells the far-ranging creation story of a haute-couture dress (BAM, Oct. 22-26). Powerhouse: International, a brand-new season-long festival at a converted power plant in Gowanus, features a delicious slate, including the Irish group Dead Centre’s boundary-nudging intimacy-coördinator demonstration, “Good Sex” (Nov. 5-8). And N.Y.U. Skirball Center—one of our most audacious programmers of foreign performance—presents the Norwegian company Susie Wang’s Stateside début with its horror comedy “Burnt Toast” (Nov. 5-8).—Helen Shaw ABOUT TOWN ELECTRO-POP | The multi-instrumentalist and singer-songwriter Gabriela Jimeno…

The Burj Al Arab, which opened in Dubai in 1999, has often been called the world’s only seven-star hotel. The rating is unoffcial—hotels are generally ranked from one to five stars—but it befits the de-trop vibe. The building, which was constructed by an army of migrant workers, is shaped like a billowing spinnaker and rises on a man-made island off the coast. Half an acre of gilt adorns its interior. There’s a restaurant surrounded by an aquarium—a portion of beluga caviar costs seven hundred dollars—and a helipad upon which Roger Federer once played tennis against Andre Agassi. In May, 2017, Daniel Kinahan and Caoimhe Robinson, both Dubliners, were married at the hotel. The groom—short and burly, with thinning dark hair and eyes like coal—was weeks from his fortieth birthday. The…

Should women be themselves at the office? In the past two decades, self-expression has become a tacit expectation in many white-collar workplaces, with dress codes relaxing and companies professing interest in their employees’ lives and values. You got hired to do your job, the thinking goes; no use sending someone else to the staff meeting. But the past few years of layoffs, hiring slowdowns, and dwindling worker protections have left a subset of wage earners inclined to keep their cards close. “My workplace is not prepared for me to bring my authentic self to the office,” one Redditor wrote, cryptically, on r/LateStageCapitalism. In “Authentic: The Myth of Bringing Your Full Self to Work,” the author Jodi-Ann Burey argues that, for women and for people of color, being true to oneself…

The first thing the child actor discovers is universal love, quickly followed by universal hatred. The whipsaw between the two leaves a mark, even after the stage or set is abandoned. The universal love is the applause, either heard in person or received from afar, a love reinforced by the sense of an instant, intimate family—a life backstage or in the trailer, far more interesting than the often unhappy family left behind. The grown actors who share dressing rooms have war stories to tell and, whether they mean to or not, project an intoxicating air of adult possibility. The universal hatred comes from the child star’s coevals, whose curiosity about the occupation is mingled with resentment. As the onetime musical-theatre prodigy Debbie Gibson recalls in her memoir, “Eternally Electric,” she…