World
Kanye Gave Twitter an Exclusive Hit Single
One of the year’s most talked-about new songs, from one of the planet’s most influential musicians, is not available on Spotify, or Apple Music, or YouTube—not officially, anyway, although...
Robert Macfarlane on Books That Hold Water
The writer and scholar Robert Macfarlane has spent much of his life climbing up mountains and fishing on rivers, and his passion for each extends to his writing. Over...
How Donald Trump’s Crypto Dealings Push the Bounds of Corruption
Imagine that someone in a position of great political power created a hundred billion raffle tickets and made them available for public purchase. If you buy the tickets, eventually...
In “Jetty,” a Grand Infrastructure Project Becomes Both Visually and Politically Compelling
The algorithm has been feeding me industrial-strength A.S.M.R.: short videos of computer-controlled lathes, in extreme closeup, doing elaborate milling of wood or metal rods. Sam Fleischner’s modest yet ambitious...
Spare a Thought for the Snitch
The Boston Globe’s investigative Spotlight team has been reporting on wrongdoing for decades—before and after its stunning exposure, in 2003, of the vast Catholic Church child-sexual-abuse crisis, dramatized in...
Is the Next Great American Novel Being Published on Substack?
This past October, subscribers to Woman of Letters, the Substack newsletter of the writer Naomi Kanakia, received an e-mail titled “Why I am publishing a novella on Substack.” This...
One Hundred Years of New York Movies
This magazine’s ongoing centenary celebration has included a cinematic component: a series at Film Forum, “Tales from The New Yorker,” which featured movies connected to The New Yorker’s history,...
The Paradoxes of Feminine Muscle
The photo op is an emblem of a discarded time. Taken in 1991, during the second annual Great American Workout, a fitness event hosted on the South Lawn of...
Rediscovering a Great Film Critic of Hollywood’s Golden Age
Sometimes there’s light at the end of the rabbit hole. When Josef von Sternberg’s film “The Devil Is a Woman,” from 1935, was recently screened, I was curious about...
Sigrid Nunez on the Beauty of Narrative Restraint
“Plot, shmot,” the writer and editor William Maxwell once said to John Updike. Sigrid Nunez couldn’t agree more. She used to tell her students, “You don’t need a plot,...
