Innholdsfortegnelse for November 24, 2025 i The New Yorker

When “The Importance of Being Earnest,” by Oscar Wilde, opened, on February 14, 1895, in London, the date was well chosen. It was the Victorians, after all, who decisively turned the feast of St. Valentine into a mass commercial celebration, with would-be lovers concealing their identities behind an anonymous exchange of greeting cards and other tokens of desire. “Earnest,” the fourth drawing-room comedy that Wilde had produced within three years, centered on the courtship of two young women, Gwendolen Fairfax and Cecily Cardew, by two young men, Jack Worthing and Algernon Moncrieff. Both suitors repeatedly resort to subterfuge in order to maintain double lives in which the satisfactions of social respectability are counterbalanced by the pursuit of pleasure and personal freedom. The play, which Wilde gave a paradoxical subtitle, “A…

On June 5th, Kash Patel, the director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation, was in Austin, Texas, to record a podcast interview with Joe Rogan. Patel had recently declared that the F.B.I. had moved on from its investigation into Jeffrey Epstein’s sex crimes, but his agents were still looking into other “coverups,” including the Covid-19 lab leak and the role that the Bureau’s own operatives supposedly played in the January 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol. In Rogan’s studio, Patel, wearing an olive-green hoodie and smoking a fat cigar, laid out a new conspiracy, in which the Chinese Communist Party was systematically killing Americans with fentanyl as part of a “long-term plan” to “wipe out tens of thousands of Americans a year” who “might grow up to serve in…

Outside, it was cold and dark. Inside, brightly colored forms seemed to swirl and spread. It was February, 2013, the evening of the opening of “Hilma af Klint—A Pioneer of Abstraction” at Moderna Museet, in Stockholm. Among the attendees was Kurt Almqvist, a white-haired man in his mid-fifties. Though Almqvist considered himself something of an expert on fin-de-siècle intellectual history—he had written a book on Carl Jung—he was seeing af Klint’s paintings for the first time. Almqvist, the C.E.O. of a nonprofit foundation that had financed a seminar to accompany the exhibition, had been to other shows at Moderna Museet—“smashed bottles and things like that,” as he put it to me—and found the frank beauty of af Klint’s work a relief. Many of the canvasses, painted a century earlier, were…

The Zorg, by Siddharth Kara (St. Martin’s). In this harrowing history, Kara, a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize, tells the story of the Zorg, a merchant vessel that the British captured from the Dutch in 1781. When the ship went off course during a voyage from Africa’s Gold Coast to Jamaica, it ran out of water; the crew then chose to throw more than a third of the four hundred and forty-two enslaved people on board into the sea. Kara also recounts the journey’s aftermath—the attempt by the ship’s owners to collect insurance money in compensation for the dead, and the heroic campaign of Granville Sharp, a former clerk for the Board of Ordnance, whose efforts to bring the perpetrators to justice marked a critical moment in Britain’s abolitionist movement.…

BUILDING A CASE E. Tammy Kim, in her article “Inside Donald Trump’s Attack on Immigration Courts,” makes clear that the odds of receiving due process are frighteningly slim for those in immigration proceedings (www.newyorker.com/kim-ontrump-and-immigration, October 23rd). Immigration courts have the potential to provide a fair forum for people to defend their rights, but the Trump Administration’s policies have turned these venues into traps, using mandated court appearances to put people into expedited removal proceedings. Unlike in criminal court, defendants in immigration court do not have the right to an attorney if they cannot afford one. This means that every year nearly two million people are forced—in one of the most complex areas of law—to appear pro se against the federal government, which is always represented by a lawyer. Representation can…

If, while reading a script, you encounter dialogue that runs “What, you take ONLY ONE BITE? THIS IS NOT A BIG DESSERT,” it would not be eccentric to imagine the words being spoken by Andrea Martin. From “SCTV” to “My Big Fat Greek Wedding” and “Pippin,” Martin has played characters whose proverbial control panel is reminiscent of a Japanese toilet’s: every button means “celebration.” Martin was sitting in the lobby of the Signature Theatre the other day, awaiting a rehearsal for “Meet the Cartozians,” the play that features the dialogue above. A witty period drama that morphs into a contemporary satire, the show, written by Talene Monahon and presented by Second Stage, centers on an actual 1925 federal court case about whether an Armenian American man named Tatos Cartozian should…

There is a big demand these days for effgies of me, and I’m happy to report that we now offer two different versions for purchase. The first is the standard, “classic” effigy of me, suitable for hanging from a tree limb or a scaffold. This effigy can also be dragged behind a horse. It is durable enough to withstand at least ten hangings or five horse-draggings. The classic effigy comes with a free hangman’s noose or lasso. The second effigy of me is designed for burning at the stake. Of course, this effigiy can be used only once, but it has a hardwood skeleton, which burns more slowly than the cloth-and-paper “flesh.” We are pleased to announce the addition of a new feature: an embedded audio recording of my actual…

That year, my mother was taking French lessons at the Alliance Française in Bangalore, and she claimed that her teacher had been impressed with her from the start. “Madame Aurélie says I have a natural ear,” she announced one evening. “Wonderful,” my father, an architect, said, not looking up from the plans he had spread across the dining table. Tarun, my sixteen-year-old brother, and I were at the table, too, wrapping our notebooks in brown paper. Summer was over; on Monday, we’d return to school. I must have said something similarly vague and admiring. But Tarun said only, “Denim.” “What?” I asked. “De Nîmes. Means ‘from Nîmes.’ Well, technically, it’s serge de Nîmes, which was a type of cloth from there. Anyway, it’s French.” Nobody asked how he knew this.…

Ruth Asawa once called herself “just aRuth Asawa rarely missed a chance to loop others into her work. At Black Mountain College, she would wake before dawn to rouse Josef Albers, the Bauhaus color theorist, so that they could watch the sun rise through the fog on the hills. At seventeen, in a Japanese American internment camp in Arkansas, she sketched caricatures of her fellow-detainees. Some of her signature wire sculptures—diaphanous, undulating forms, like chain-mail invertebrates—were made with the help of her sons and daughters. And in 1970, when she was commissioned to create a fountain for San Francisco’s Union Square, she enlisted schoolchildren from across the city in the design. Her circle has only widened since her death, in 2013. Long esteemed in the art world and a local…

NOVEMBER 19 – 25, 2025 What we’re watching, listening to, and doing this week. The forty-nine-year-old Icelandic artist Ragnar Kjartansson’s new exhibition, “Sunday Without Love” (a production photo is pictured below), consists of a single-shot, nineteen-minute video. The staging and the costumes were inspired by a folk postcard he owns; the music is a heartfelt reworking of a German comedy song. Kjartansson’s ability to unite such incongruous and obscure elements into a convincing whole is part of what makes him great. He’s also a maestro of repetition: ten people (including Kjartansson) create a folk-art tableau vivant while performing the chorus of the song over and over. This sameness limits emotional catharsis, even as the bucolic setting invites it. Such dichotomies animate his work, which is, at its best, absurd and…

Just as I come to know a thing it’s gone again. What’s in my heartwood in my head, brashy, ashy, friable, crumbled colors. Dormancy. Of matter, of leaf, an orderly degradation.I have come to measure the dark, not just the frost and notthe lack of light. The uninterrupted dark of which the winter is a small part. A contraction of the corona, catch in the windpipe of the old organ, organ of the old windpipe, pipe of the pileated woodpecker pecking a whole hole in me. Yellow, orange, brown. The greens break down, the chloroplasts depart. Each leaf losing its factories from the outside in, its faculties I seem to mean, from edge to artery, the last gold somewhere in a vein of no use now. Abscission is a nice…

In Lauren Greenfield’s stunning documentary “The Queen of Versailles,” from 2012, its subjects—the billionaire “time-share king” David Siegel; his shopaholic wife, Jackie; their eight kids; and various fluffy white dogs—represent a modern-day fall from grace. Greenfield, a noted photographer and filmmaker, embedded herself with the Siegels for years as the family built one of the largest private homes in America, a megatribute to Louis XIV’s Palace of Versailles, in a Florida housing development. After the 2008 financial crisis, David’s overleveraged empire falters, and their halffinished Versailles—suddenly a metaphor for American folly—heads toward foreclosure. As the documentary ends, evenJackie’s appetite for excess seems to slacken. Has the Queen had… enough? If only the playwright Lindsey Ferrentino and the composer and lyricist Stephen Schwartz had been able to stop there, too. But…