Indholdsfortegnelse for September 29, 2025 i The New Yorker

Dana Goodyear (“Fire Season,” p. 26) has been a staff writer since 2007. She is the host of the podcast “Lost Hills.” Zadie Smith (“On the Impersonal Essay,” p. 14) has contributed to the magazine since 1999. Her newest book, the essay collection “Dead and Alive,” will be published next month. Ben Yagoda (A Critic at Large, p. 54) is the author of “About Town,” a history of The New Yorker, and the novel “Alias O. Henry,” out earlier this month. Ian Buruma (Books, p. 66), a professor at Bard, is the author of, most recently, “Spinoza: Freedom’s Messiah.” David Kamp (The Talk of the Town, p. 11) is the author of “Sunny Days: The Children’s Television Revolution That Changed America.” Seamus Heaney (Poems, p. 48), who died in 2013,…

Bong, an itsy-bitsy new Cambodian restaurant in Crown Heights, exudes more energy on any given day than most spots can muster on their most lit-up nights of the year. The cooks are half dancing in the open kitchen as they slice and stir-fry. The customers all seem wildly in love with one another. Inside, the light bouncing off the acid-green walls makes everyone’s faces appear traced with neon. The thumping bass of the hip-hop playlist rolls through the open door to reach the diners seated at bistro tables out front. Even a half block away, the air smells sweet and bright, like seared shellfish and sizzling herbs. Open just three evenings a week, Bong (the name comes from a Khmer term of kinship and respect) is run by the Cambodian…

In Shubert Alley, which runs between West Forty-fourth and Forty-fifth Streets, Jeremy Irons, dressed in a tweed cap turned backward and three artfully arranged layers of European workwear, pointed to a patch of asphalt beneath the marquee of the Booth Theatre. “This is where I used to argue with the police that I should be allowed to park my motorcycle. But they made me put it in the damn car park up the street,” he said. Irons was reminiscing about his Broadway début, in Tom Stoppard’s “The Real Thing” forty-one years ago. The production was mounted in the Plymouth, next door to the Booth, which is now the Schoenfeld Theatre. “That was my dressing room,” Irons said, pointing to a small window high above the stage door. Pointing to an…

The first essay anybody writes is for school. Same here. But the only examples I remember are the ones I wrote at the end, in my A-level exams. One compared Hitler to Stalin. Another, Martin Luther King, Jr., to Malcolm X. I was proudest of the essay that considered whether the poet John Milton—pace William Blake—was “of the devil’s party without knowing it.” I did well on those standardized tests, but even passing was far from a foregone conclusion. I’d screwed up my mocks, the year before, smoking too much weed and studying rarely. Since then, I’d cleaned up my act—a bit—but was still overwhelmed by the task before me. My entire future rested on a few essays written in the school hall under a three-hour time constraint? Really? In…

Igrew up moving, so often that I sometimes lost count: New Jersey, Ohio, London, Maryland, Missouri, New Hampshire, Connecticut, and Hong Kong by the time I was eighteen. When I left New York to join my soonto-be husband, Billy, in Los Angeles, at the beginning of 2005, it occurred to me that I had never lived anywhere longer than seven years. In L.A., the pattern held—from one neighborhood to another, until I started to think I had an internal atomic clock. Then, in 2019, Billy and I landed with our two children, aged seven and nine, on a breezy bluff between the Pacific Ocean and the Santa Monica Mountains. Technically a neighborhood of Los Angeles, Pacific Palisades stood apart, an extra ten minutes’ drive from civilization, on the last stretch…

Exactly who the Jews are—often a fraught question—has rarely been a mystery to their enemies. Stalin cast them as “rootless cosmopolitans” colluding with “American imperialists” to undermine the Soviet Union. In Hitler’s fevered imagination, they were bacilli infecting the healthy “Aryan” race. They have been denounced as lecherous predators and as omnipotent conspirators, as arch-Bolsheviks and arch-capitalists. Increasingly, these days, “Jew” is conflated with “Zionist,” which, as a term of opprobrium, can mean anything from “settler colonialist” to “fascist” to “racist.” The older sense of Zionism—establishing a Jewish state to shield Jews from persecution—has largely slipped from view. Of course, opposition to Zionism does not itself amount to antisemitism. And right-wing politicians who accuse pro-Palestinian students of antisemitism are hardly credible arbiters. The Trump Administration, which poses as a defender…

Following the tragic death of the conservative activist Charlie Kirk, the line between eulogy and blame wore swiftly and predictably thin. By Monday afternoon, five days after Kirk’s murder, it was threadbare. If the encouragement of political dissent is a part of Kirk’s legacy, as his supporters have insisted, the actual practice of it isn’t tolerated much at the moment. His podcast continued, on schedule, with a series of guest hosts. One was Vice-President J. D. Vance, who declared that national unity wasn’t possible while people were “celebrating” Kirk’s death. The available evidence suggests that Kirk’s alleged killer, a twenty-twoyear-old man from Utah without any clear political affliation, acted alone. But Vance already had a unified theory of the case, and he brought on Stephen Miller, the White House’s most…

How do great artists get their start? The misty-eyed will say it all begins with a dream. At Juilliard, it takes a bit more than that. On a recent gray evening, a group of drama students were in their sixth hour of rehearsals for a concert at Joe’s Pub. An upright piano, several music stands, and a Gretsch drum set were globbed together in a tiny, allwhite room that could pass for a sanitarium. Loose lyric sheets littered the floor. The air was tropical. The door bore a sign with the words “Tesori Sessions.” “Tesori” was the composer Jeanine Tesori, two-time Tony winner and Obi-Wan Kenobi of the workshop. As students buzzed about the room, grabbing pencils and tuning guitars, she leaned against a back wall with one foot up,…

The structure of “Elephant,” one of Raymond Carver’s last stories, is simple, but the emotional effect is out-sized, numinous, convincing, and comic. It opens with the narrator’s brother calling him to ask for money. His mother, “poor and greedy,” also needs some, as does his daughter, who was living in Bellingham with two kids and “a swine who wouldn’t even look for work,” and his son, in college in New Hampshire, who says he will deal drugs or rob a bank if he can’t get money from his dad. That’s the first part of the story. In the next section, the head-winds intensify. The brother’s plans for paying him back have fallen through, the mother says it’s not in the cards for her to save for a rainy day, the…

America, circa now. Things, most of which have been weird for a while, are getting distinctly weirder. The President of the United States is busy redecorating the White House and bent on buying Greenland. A new wonder drug is making people skinny. Domestic affairs are increasingly controlled by an upstart political entity whose official status is murky but whose powers are all but limitless: DOGE, or the Department of Government Efficiency, which was started by a multibillionaire with a sideline in unusual forms of transportation—rocket ships, Cybertrucks, Hyperloops—and named for an internet meme featuring the Comic Sans typeface and a Shiba Inu. Tens of millions of people, followers of a mysterious figure known only by the letter “Q,” believe that many of the nation’s leaders are involved in a global…

If movies were given scores as figure skaters are, fantasy would start with a high rating for technical difficulty. The landings of the genre are hard to stick, because fantasy, by definition, isn’t rooted in experience. No one has lived on a distant planet, in the far future, or any place where dragons or wizards rule—so, kudos to anyone who can make such realms feel truly lived in. “A Big Bold Beautiful Journey,” directed by Kogonada and written by Seth Reiss, offers a framework of fantasy that’s daringly extreme yet closely connected to ordinary realities. The story involves everyday people who need supernatural assistance to consider and appreciate their own lives. In this regard, it’s related, if distantly, to “It’s a Wonderful Life,” even if, in keeping with modern times,…

Maqluba, in Arabic, means “upside down.” It’s also the name of a pilaf dish popular in the Levant: a pot of rice, vegetables, meat, and potatoes, coagulated and flipped into a stout cylinder. Mahmoud Khalil, the Palestinian activist and recent Columbia graduate whom the Trump Administration has spent months trying to deport, makes it using his mother’s recipe. “Hers just tastes, I don’t know … better?” Khalil said the other day. “Every time I cook it, it tastes a little different.” Khalil, wearing a T-shirt reading “FOR LAND & LIBERATION,” stood barefoot while paring an eggplant in the kitchen of the Brooklyn apartment he moved into last month. His previous relocations made headlines: in March, plainclothes federal agents arrested him in his Morningside Heights building and shipped him to Louisiana…

The mission: attend “Style Across the Aisle,” a Fashion Week spectacle wherein local politicians walk the runway wearing clothes mostly made by upand-coming designers from their dis-tricts, and determine which of the models exhibits the most diva-like behavior. Which offcial, be they elected or appointed, is most likely to throw a phone at an assistant while screaming, “I am not wearing more khaki!”? Who, in short, is the civil-servant Naomi Campbell? “I think there’ll be many models with diva behavior,” Joann Ariola, the City Council minority leader, said the week before the event, which benefitted Witness to Mass Incarceration, a nonprofit dedicated to fostering economic independence for formerly incarcerated people. Yet, leading up to the show, the squawks from the models sounded more like practical concerns than diva demands. Ariola…

Some actors you can watch doing the same thing over and over again. Cary Grant built a career on smirking suavity; Cate Blanchett has made an art form of falling apart with tragic intensity. Lately, Ethan Hawke has joined their ranks: the onetime Gen X heart-throb has reinvented himself in middle age as a character actor with impeccable taste in auteurist projects. His specialty is now the heedless hero whose certainty about his righteousness drives him to extremes. In Paul Schrader’s 2017 film, “First Reformed,” the actor was spellbinding as a clergyman radicalized by environmental destruction, which he regards as humanity’s defilement of God’s creation. Hawke then delivered one of the best TV performances of the past decade as the militant abolitionist John Brown in the 2020 adaptation of James…

ACROSS 1 Thick carpet option 5 Drinks gingerly 9 Capital near the Great Sphinx 14 Cadbury chocolate bar with a gooey center 16 Stomach woe associated with stress 17 Daily paper based in Portland, with “The” 18 Gawk 19 Instrument for John Coltrane 21 Stung 22 How distant sounds might be heard 24 Parent with stereotypically groan-worthy jokes 25 Amount paid to a 28-Down driver 26 Constellation between Cancer and Virgo 27 Lead-in to café or criminal 30 Basketball player, in old slang 31 “Tie a Yellow Ribbon Round the Ole ___ Tree” 32 One coming into a fortune 33 Shakespeare’s “___ Andronicus” 34 Water-balloon filler 35 Animal in a Western herd 36 Patriarch of the Roy family on “Succession” 37 Versions of the same film shot 38 Cask ___…