Innholdsfortegnelse for December 22, 2025 i The New Yorker

Navied Mahdavian (Comic Strip, p. 30), a cartoonist and a writer, is the author of “This Country: Searching for Home in (Very) Rural America.” Mollie Cowger (“Rough Copy,” p. 20) is an associate puzzles-and-games editor. Her crosswords have appeared in USA Today and other outlets. Andrew Martin (Fiction, p. 54) is the author of the forthcoming novel “Down Time,” as well as the collection “Cool for America” and the novel “Early Work.” Emily Flake (Comic Strip, p. 31) has been a New Yorker cartoonist since 2008. Her most recent book is “Joke in a Box: How to Write and Draw Jokes.” Allan Sanders (“Going to Press,” pp. 14-15) is an illustrator of magazines, newspapers, and children’s books, including “A Number of Numbers,” by A. J. Wood. Ali Fitzgerald (Comic Strip,…

The thirty-six-year-old Greenlandic photographer Inuuteq Storch didn’t know much about Inuit culture growing up. In school, for instance, he was taught about ancient Greek deities, but there was no talk of a native pantheon of gods. About ninety per cent of the Greenlandic population are Lutherans, a legacy of Danish colonial rule. So thoroughly did European missionaries stigmatize Inuit beliefs that, even now, the more pious members of an older generation consider an appreciation of Indigenous spirits to be a sign of something demonic afoot. The word “Torngarsuk”—a shape-shifting Inuit spirit believed to assist shamans—is today used as a swear word. Storch, though, saw in the deity an opportunity to rediscover the culture of his ancestors. Four years ago, he got a tattoo of Torngarsuk along the span of his…

As the singer-songwriter Audrey Hobert descended into the Gutter, a Lower East Side bowling alley, the other day, she shared a confession. One of the singles on her album, “Who’s the Clown?,” is called “Bowling alley,” but that was largely incidental. “I see all these people online who are into bowling and are, like, ‘This means so much to me,’” she said. In truth, she had used the word “striking” when writing the first section. “So I had ‘strike’ in my head and was, like—bowling,” she said. “There really was no deeper meaning.” Hobert, who is twenty-six, had on a loose all-black outfit, and her strawberryblond hair was up in a messy bun. After slipping on a pair of rented bowling shoes, she rolled her first ball, then excitedly spun…

First, a moment of silence. The beloved cat of the actor-comedian Kumail Nanjiani died three months ago. Her name was Bagel. She was seventeen. “That’s the saddest I’ve ever been in my whole life,” Nanjiani said one recent evening, his eyes dewy. He was sitting in a large wooden cubby at a Lower East Side cat café called Meow Parlour. Felines roamed the room. Keeping Nanjiani company was a tortoiseshell kitty named Honeybee. A golden stripe sloped down her nose. “Oh, my God, look how pretty that is,” he marvelled. Nanjiani, who had on a navy-blue shirt and jeans, was in town to talk about his new standup special, “Night Thoughts,” on Hulu. His first in twelve years, it veers through musings on anxiety, concerts, drugs, and Bagel. “I hadn’t…

GOING TO PRESS page 14 SHUFFALO page 18 Note: These are all the common words that we found. You might find other, less common ones—if so, feel free to count them (and give yourself a pat on the back). RATE / TARE / TEAR CARET / CATER / CRATE / REACT / TRACE CREATE REËNACT ENTRANCE CENTENARY ROUGH COPY page 20 Answer: THE PROOFS ARE IN THE PUDDING CRYPTIC CROSSWORD page 67 ACROSS 1 C + A + P.S. 4 SWIG (anag.) 7 ARMAD + A (drama anag.) 8 LOS FELI + Z (Follies anag.) 9 LYSOL (hidden) 11 O(IL L)AMP (a mop anag.) 13 S + NO-(CO)NE 17 RIDG + E (grid anag.) 19 AN(TONY + M)S 20 REMARK (rev.) 21 TREK (hidden rev.) 22 NEST (hidden) DOWN 1…

This season, the best way to honor the music obsessive in your life is to manually thwart the dominance of streaming algorithms—simultaneously liberating your loved one from corporate surveillance and the echo chamber of their own taste—by letting your local record shop take the wheel. Luna Music’s Sound Subscription Service is curated by the staff of this Indianapolis-based shop ($333 for twelve months); Oxford, Mississippi’s The End of All Music (for my money, one of the best record stores in America) also has a great Record of the Month Club ($325 a year plus shipping, with bonus goodies each month). (Additionally, The End of All Music offers a one-time “We Pick ’Em” option: Venmo or PayPal some cash to the shop, and have one of their crackerjack employees curate…

On a chilly night last month, the Rockette Alumnae Association held its first black-tie charity ball, at the Edison Ballroom, in midtown. It was the culminating event in a weeklong celebration of the troupe’s hundredth anniversary, which also included a Sardi’s meetup and a family brunch. Some three thousand women have high-kicked on the stage at Radio City Music Hall, and more than four hundred of them turned up at the Edison. Most had on some vestige of showgirl glam—sequinned gowns, feathered fascinators, fur stoles. One eighty-five-year-old woman with a silvery bob (Rockette years: 1959 to 1962) pored over a display of archival photographs. “I’m looking for me,” she said. “So we’re looking for a black-and-white shot.” She was Lani Drake-Barovick, from Bement, Illinois. “I auditioned for Mr. Markert himself!”…

Assembling a magazine can feel like navigating a labyrinth—especially in the Daedalian officees of The New Yorker, where one wrong turn can lead to publishing peril. This year’s Cartoons & Puzzles issue offers a glimpse into our playful periodical’s hundred-year history. Can you make your way through the maze and close the issue before our printer shuts down for the holidays? (Find the solution to this puzzle and all the others in this issue beginning on page 74.)…

After putting away the leftover roasts and sweets from The New Yorker’s holiday potluck, we began finalizing this issue—only to find that several pages, including the crossword, had gone missing! We did our best to re-create the puzzle here, but something’s not quite right…. Twelve of the Across clues don’t fit their answers; correct those clues by changing one letter in each. Once you’ve solved the puzzle, write the incorrect letters in order, followed by the correct letters in order, to discover where the missing pages went. ACROSS 1 “Domo arigato, Mr. ___” 7 Throat-clearing sound 11 Stamp-pad liquid 14 “Regardless …” 15 Opposite of mint 16 Fish eggs 17 Large shake 18 Where to find hobbies 20 Tool similar to a hatchet 21 Always, poetically 23 Pretend 24 “___’s…

The New Yorker doesn’t easily let go of the old stuff. Recently, our copy department retired the hyphen we’d kept in “in-box” for longer than anyone should keep anything in an inbox. But “teen-ager” clings to its appropriately awkward hyphen, and “coöperation” retains its diaeresis. (Don’t call it an umlaut.) My favorite still functioning relics are two fat binders of “Talk spots”—hundreds of postage-stamp-size drawings that appear at the tops of Talk of the Town pieces, which the cartoonist Otto Soglow drew from 1926 to 1970, to illustrate stories in the section, and which have (mostly) been paired with new Talk pieces ever since. One of my first jobs at the magazine was to flip through these binders and pick decades-old drawings to run alongside some of our timeliest stories.…

The second Presidency of Donald Trump has been unprecedented in myriad ways, perhaps above all in the way that he has managed to cajole, cow, or simply command people in his Administration to carry out even his most undemocratic wishes with remarkably little dissent. Some civil servants and senior officeials, however, are experiencing bouts of conscience. In March, Erez Reuveni, a veteran Justice Department lawyer, was promoted to the position of acting deputy director of the Office of Immigration Litigation. He decided to personally take on the case of Kilmar Abrego Garcia, who had been wrongly sent back to El Salvador, in violation of a 2019 court order. On April 5th, Reuveni told his supervisor he would not sign an appeal brief that said Abrego Garcia was a “terrorist.” According…

Stefano Pisani became mayor of Pollica, a small community in the region of Cilento, in southern Italy, under the worst possible circumstances. Fifteen years ago, his predecessor, Angelo Vassallo, was assassinated—mowed down by nine bullets—after attempting to crack down on the drug trade. “For the first few hours, I thought, This is not my mission,” Pisani, who had been Vassallo’s deputy, recalled recently. Very quickly, Pisani changed his mind, realizing that if he didn’t carry on Vassallo’s efforts at revitalization then no one would. Pollica, which is both a village and the name of the larger administrative community, is made up of rugged mountains and dramatic coastline, and it has a long-standing tradition of farming, viniculture, and seafaring: Vassallo had been known locally as “the fisherman mayor,” on account of…

Our cartoon caption was lost in a blizzard! Solve the clues on the opposite page to help us find it. Each answer is seven letters long and curls around one of the numbered spaces in the grid, as shown below: The numbered space will always contain either the first letter or the last letter of an answer. The remaining letters will curl either clockwise or counterclockwise, exiting or entering the central hexagon through the gap in the bolded border. Each answer has four possible arrangements, as shown with the answer CURLING below: We’ve placed one answer in the grid to get you started. As an additional solving aid, the top and bottom rows of the grid will contain the exact same sequence of letters. When you’ve completed the grid, the…

Laura Dern’s scowl is one of the great wonders of American movies. Her mouth flattens into a blade, her eyes constrict into lasers, and you tense up instinctively, as if you might get caught in the crossfire. There’s a moment in “Is This Thing On?,” a modestly scaled but enormously affecting new picture directed by Bradley Cooper, when Dern’s expression, a silent commingling of shock, disbelief, and fury, almost stops your heart. She plays Tess Novak, a retired Olympic volleyball player turned New York suburban mom, who has recently separated from her husband of twenty years, Alex (Will Arnett). Out with a potential love interest one evening, in a packed Manhattan comedy club, Tess is startled when Alex strides up to the microphone. Unaware of her presence, he proceeds to…