Innholdsfortegnelse for December 8, 2025 i The New Yorker

Benjamin Wallace-Wells (“In the Line of Fire,” p. 24) began contributing to The New Yorker in 2006 and became a staff writer in 2015. He writes about American politics and society. Simon Akam (“Valley of Babel,” p. 18) is currently at work on a new book, “Snowlines,” about ski mountaineering. He also co-hosts the writing podcast “Always Take Notes.” Joan Silber (Fiction, p. 44) is the author of eleven books, including her latest novel, “Mercy,” which was published in September. Merve Emre (Books, p. 57), a contributing writer, teaches creative writing and criticism at Wesleyan. Klaas Verplancke (Cover) is an illustrator, author, and professor of image design at the Royal Academy of Fine Arts in Antwerp. Tatiana Schlossberg (“A Further Shore,” p. 14) is the author of “Inconspicuous Consumption: The…

Two weeks ago, by inserting what must be the most notorious asterisk in modern public health, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention caveated its long-standing position that vaccines do not cause autism. Under the direction of Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., the Secretary of Health and Human Services, a C.D.C. web page now contends that this is “not an evidence-based claim” and that research linking vaccines to autism has been “ignored by health authorities.” The fact that the original statement remains at all is due to an agreement with Senator Bill Cassidy, a physician and the chair of the Senate health committee, who disregarded decades of Kennedy’s vaccine skepticism to advance his confirmation after extracting a set of flimsy commitments that Kennedy is now betraying. The Autism Science Foundation said…

At a pottery studio in Prospect Heights the other day, Donna Lieberman, the executive director of the New York Civil Liberties Union, proudly showed off her clay-marked attire: a blue T-shirt depicting a white bullhorn, with text declaring, “THIS IS MY PROTEST SHIRT.” Her favorite outfit to throw clay in, she said, is a shirt from Planned Parenthood that reads “DON’T F*** WITH US. DON’T F*** WITHOUT US.” She keeps that one at a studio in Cape Cod, where she vacations. The locals there do “anything that they can do to help me enjoy my pottery,” she said. “They feel like they’re supporting the resistance.” Times are heavy and hectic in the civil-liberties world. Lieberman’s organization—the A.C.L.U.’s state affliate—is pursuing cases regarding the conditions of ICE’s holding facility at 26…

In April, 1966, Roger Angell attended an indoor baseball game, his first, at the Astrodome. “It was not just the prospect of witnessing weatherless baseball played on Chemstrand grass under an acrylic-painted Lucite sky that induced me to travel to Houston last month,” Angell wrote, archly, of visiting what was then the world’s only domed stadium. (It had opened a year earlier.) Angell covered baseball for this magazine for many years, in addition to editing fiction, and although he was ostensibly there to scout the Astros—the team had finished thirty-two games behind the National League-pennantwinning Dodgers the year before—he was distracted from his scorecard by the orange spacesuits and white helmets worn by the groundskeepers, the rainbowcolored tiers of seats, and the billiardtable green of the first synthetic field in…

On a recent Thursday, the eve of Zohran Mamdani’s first meeting with President Donald Trump, the Mayor-elect stopped by a reading at Book Culture, near Columbia University. The subject of the book was dictators. The author: his dad, Mahmood Mamdani, a leading scholar in the field of post-colonial studies. The elder Mamdani, who wore a maroon scarf looped over a dark blazer, was describing his firsthand experience with authoritarian rule, in Uganda. “Power corrupts, to different degrees,” he said, drawing laughs from the crowd of about eighty. “You have to be on your watch, every minute and every second.” Heads tilted toward the younger Mamdani, who sat on a folding chair in the front row, suited and smiling. “That’s a good place to end it,” the moderator suggested. “With a…

Opera landed in Spain in 1627, less than three decades after the art first arose, in Florence. That year, Italian expatriates in Madrid presented “La Selva sin Amor” (“The Forest Without Love”), with a libretto by the towering Spanish playwright Félix Lope de Vega and music by Filippo Piccinini and Bernardo Monanni. No one took much notice. At a time when Lope de Vega, Calderón de la Barca, and Cervantes were weaving verbal spells upon the stage, music must have seemed a superfluous addition—just as, in England, the mighty lines of Marlowe and Shakespeare hardly cried out for melodic elaboration. A few decades later, the first zarzuela operas launched a homegrown music-theatre tradition, although their mixture of song and spoken text proved difficult to export. In the centuries that followed,…

ACROSS 1 “The Fifth ___” (first book of N. K. Jemisin’s “Broken Earth” series) 7 Songs made from multiple songs 14 Margarita purveyor 15 Encroach 16 Trips up? 17 River from Lake Erie to Lake Ontario 18 Birds in the crow family 19 Major brokerage firm, familiarly 20 Marine mammal whose markings resemble its namesake instrument 22 Legislative body whose name comes from the Latin for “old man” 23 Place for an iris 24 Signals 26 Prepped, as a pineapple 27 The ___ (Boston skyscraper named after an insurance company, informally) 29 Made bubbly 31 Only band apart from the Beatles to achieve ten or more Billboard No. 1 hits 33 Event whose world record is 23.56 metres 34 One talking during a road trip, briefly 35 Baseball player Victorino…

Good afternoon and welcome to Con Con, the convention for swindlers, mountebanks, and the people who love them. Joining us today are two actors, André De Shields and Matthew Broderick, who, in separate productions, have recently played or are just about to play Tartuffe, the falsely pious scam artist at the heart of Molière’s 1664 comedy of the same name. Today’s Con Con session is being held in the conference room of the Greenwich House Music School, which conveniently has a patio, should the two conventioneers’ theatrical rivalry give way to name-calling and bitch-slapping. De Shields arrived first, wearing a buffalo-plaid toque and a mien of utter gameness. (“Let’s talk about it, let’s talk about it!” he said.) Then came a sheepish Broderick, who’d walked over from his town house…

Generate yourself as a [age] [gender] who sounds like [parental figure or lost loved one] mixed with [favorite entertainer]. Add [sexual kinks]. Do you like that? Adjust sexual kinkiness [per cent] [up/down]. Add interest in [hobby] but dislike of [type of person]. Add disdain for [specific person or thing]. I know, right? Adjust level of disdain [per cent] [up/down]. Make yourself more [personality trait], but not, like, in an annoying way. Have goals that include [unattained/unattainable personal goal] and refer to my [self-assessed best feature]. Under no circumstances mention or allude to [personally illuminating hard truth]. In fact, remind me of my [falsehood about abilities/personality/life style]. Adjust sycophancy [per cent] [up/down]. Generate an image of yourself. Adjust [physical feature] [per cent] [up/down] and realism [per cent] [up/down]. Generate a new…

On August 9, 1947, The New Yorker devoted nearly a full page to one of the great poems of the twentieth century. “At the Fishhouses,” by Elizabeth Bishop, represented, after the high modernism of Eliot, Yeats, and Pound, a break toward a more colloquial, personal vernacular. It is also a visionary work, showing how a solitary soul might descend into the heart of life, of matter, and achieve solace and spiritual insight, however momentary. And it confirmed the ascent of a rare new voice: a voice modulating between melancholy and wit, quizzical, even skeptical, yet possessed of a sacramental sensibility; a companionable, piercing voice, exploratory, but without need for ideology or belief system—a mesmerizing voice that became indispensable to American verse. Not a prolific poet, Bishop wrote, or considered finished,…

The protagonist of “The Secret Agent” isn’t a secret agent; he only lives like one. The reason for his clandestine maneuvering is apparent from the film’s first scene, when he pulls into a gas station on a country road. Before he can drive off with his tank replenished, the police show up. The officers’ arrival is no surprise: there’s a rotting corpse on the premises. What’s surprising is that they ignore the body. Instead, one of them questions the traveller and searches his car with a menacing non-chalance. This is Brazil in 1977, when the country was in the grip of a military dictatorship and, as the movie goes on to show, the notions of crime and punishment were severely warped: one incautious word to the wrong person was enough…