World
How Rembrandt Saw Esther
Jewish persecution and Jewish self-protection, not to mention Jewish paranoia, the relations of Jews and Persians, the morality of Jewish reprisals for Jewish persecution, even the impulsive acts of...
The Director Ari Aster Explains His COVID-Era Western “Eddington”
Listen and subscribe: Apple | Spotify | Google | Wherever You ListenSign up for our daily newsletter to get the best of The New Yorker in your inbox.“I’m personally...
“Eddington” Is a Lethally Self-Satisfied COVID Satire
“Eddington” is a slog, but a slog with ambitions—and its director and screenwriter, Ari Aster, is savvy enough to cultivate an air of mystery about what those ambitions are....
“Cloud” Is a Cautionary Tale of E-Commerce—and the Summer’s Best Action Movie
Ryosuke Yoshii (Masaki Suda), the thirtysomething protagonist of the mesmerizing Japanese thriller “Cloud,” is never more content than when he’s in front of his computer. Some will surely relate,...
Justin Bieber’s Messy, Improbable Masterpiece
In the course of Justin Bieber’s nearly twenty-year career, his music has come to be somewhat immaterial to his celebrity. For many, he is an almost Kardashian-like figure, whose...
How “The First Homosexuals” Shaped an Identity
About those faraway realms: Can we really credit two white Victorians, and their peculiarly German fetish for classification, with the invention of homosexuality? Anticipating this question, the exhibition opens...
A.I. Is About to Solve Loneliness. That’s a Problem
There’s real reason for caution here, starting with the idea that interactions with A.I. can be treated as genuine relationships. Oliver Burkeman exasperatedly writes that, unless you think the...
A Memoir of Working-Class Britain Wrings Playfulness from Pain
The escape from working-class life has good narrative pedigree, a classic form—beginning with the idea of escape itself. It’s something like a sharpened bildungsroman. The child is nudged forward...
Teaching Men Who Will Never Leave Prison
It’s 2018. I am, for the first time, in a classroom at Great Meadow Correctional Facility, in Comstock, New York, a men’s maximum-security state prison. There are sixteen students...
An Adolescent Crush That Never Let Up
John Updike’s professional relationship with The New Yorker began in 1954, when he was twenty-two and the magazine published his poem “Duet, with Muffled Brake Drums,” but his personal...
