Indholdsfortegnelse for December 29, 2025-January 5, 2026 i The New Yorker

Alex Abramovich (“Last Highway,” p. 28), a journalism professor at N.Y.U., is the author of “Bullies: A Friendship.” David Owen (“Alphabet Soup,” p. 14) has been a staff writer since 1991. He is the author of “Volume Control: Hearing in a Deafening World.” Nell Zink (Fiction, p. 54) is a 2025 Guggenheim Fellow. Her most recent book, the novel “Sister Europe,” was published in March. Lawrence Wright (Takes, p. 37) has been a staff writer since 1992. His books include the novel “The Human Scale,” which was published last spring. Bianca Stone (Poem, p. 46) is the author of the poetry collections “The Near and Distant World,” “The Möbius Strip Club of Grief,” and “What Is Otherwise Infinite.” Helen Rosner (Tables for Two, p. 6), a staff writer, has received…

It’s nearly impossible to eat a meal at Babbo without being pummelled by reminders of its past. For nearly two decades, the West Village trattoria shaped how New Yorkers understood Italian cuisine and modern restaurant dining; more to the point, it was just a marvellous place to be, with soigné service set to a soundtrack of roaring classic rock. The flagship restaurant of Mario Batali, Babbo became synonymous with his edgy, expansive celebrity. If you know any of this story, you know the rest of it: In 2017, after allegations of sexual misconduct, Batali stepped back from public life, and most of his restaurants eventually closed. Babbo remained open, but failed to shake off its association with Batali’s tarnished name. Now the mega-restaurateur Stephen Starr has taken over and installed…

On a street in Paris, just off the Place Vendôme and around the corner from the Ritz, sits a small storefront that, the other day, a passing German tourist referred to as a bordel—literally, a bordello and, figuratively, a “massive mess.” The comment was overheard, and translated, by Jasper Sharp, a Britishborn curator and art historian, who is partly responsible for the massive mess in question—the latest installation in one of two galleries that the New York art dealer Larry Gagosian maintains in Paris. Five plate-glass windows offer a view into a re-creation of the cluttered basement studio in which the twentiethcentury American assemblage artist Joseph Cornell once cobbled together the “shadow boxes” that he is best known for. The faux studio—part Santa’s workshop, part dank suburban toolshed, part hoarder’s…

Tipped for the Oscars, “Hamnet” was released on November 26th. When the movie showed at film festivals, the director, Chloé Zhao, invited the audience to join her in an act of collective meditation before the screening. Among her instructions: “Close your eyes,” “Feel your own weight,” “Take deep breaths with sound,” “Sigh out loud,” and “Gently say to yourself, ‘This is my heart. These are our hearts.’” Would this ritual not have improved the viewing experience of many earlier films? “Gladiator” Close your eyes. Breathe in. Know that you are not alone. Three seats to your left, for instance, is a tiger. As you hear it noisily devouring the two moviegoers between you, sense how deeply you are tuned in to the rhythms of the natural world. Now reach beneath…

During the 1959 session of the Louisiana state legislature, Governor Earl Long, the less famous younger brother of Senator Huey Long, “went off his rocker,” as the tickled writer A. J. Liebling recounted in this magazine, adding, “The papers reported that he had cursed and hollered at the legislators, saying things that so embarrassed his wife, Miz Blanche, and his relatives that they had packed him off to Texas in a National Guard plane to get his brains repaired in an asylum.” Liebling, who joined the staff of The New Yorker in 1935, ten years after its founding, quickly made a reputation as a humorous and versatile observer of the human condition. “I am a chronic, incurable, recidivist reporter,” he confessed. And Liebling once boasted to a friend, “I write…

Josh Safdie’s hectic new film “Marty Supreme,” set in 1952, mainly in New York, is, essentially, “Uncut Gems” but with a happy ending. That recklessly exuberant 2019 drama, which Safdie co-directed with his brother, Benny, stars Adam Sandler as a jewelry dealer in Manhattan and a compulsive gambler who takes thrilling risks to pay off his creditors and learns that the house always wins. With “Marty Supreme”—Safdie’s first feature directed without Benny since 2008—the happy ending follows logically from a happy beginning, so to speak. The film’s first scene features a tryst, in a back room of a shoe store, between the protagonist, a twenty-three-year-old salesman named Marty Mauser (Timothée Chalamet), and a young married woman named Rachel (Odessa A’zion). But Marty’s greater happiness involves another secret, one that…

COMMENT THE NEW GUY According to the New York City Department of Records and Information Services, Zohran Mamdani will not actually be the city’s hundred-and-eleventh mayor, as many people have assumed. A historian named Paul Hortenstine recently came across references to a previously unrecorded mayoral term served in 1674, by one Matthias Nicolls. Consequently, on New Year’s Day, after Mamdani places his right hand on the Quran and is sworn in at City Hall, he will become our hundred-and-twelfth mayor—or possibly even our hundredand-thirty-third, based on the department’s best estimates. “The numbering of New York City ‘Mayors’ has been somewhat arbitrary and inconsistent,” a department official disclosed in a blog post this month. “There may even be other missing Mayors.” New York City has already had youthful mayors (John Purroy…

Andrea Zevallos declared 2016 her “year of dating.” She was twentyseven, working at Universal Studios Hollywood, the theme park, and determined to find love. She calculated it would take three dates a week. By December, she was losing hope. “It was exhausting,” she said. Then, while scrolling OkCupid, she noticed a “cute guy” with a “Hamilton” reference in his handle. His name was Alex Switzky, and like her he was a musical-theatre enthusiast and aspiring screenwriter. He was different from the other men she’d met. On their second date, he started planning a third. Zevallos “was used to L.A. guys cagey about any sort of calendar.” One day, Switzky called her. Accustomed to texts, she assumed that he was about to break up with her. “The most millennial response,” she…

Once, every middle-class home had a piano and a dictionary. The purpose of the piano was to be able to listen to music before phonographs were available and affordable. Later on, it was to torture young persons by insisting that they learn to do something few people do well. The purpose of the dictionary was to settle intra-family disputes over the spelling of words like “camaraderie” and “sesquipedalian,” or over the correct pronunciation of “puttee.” (Dad wasn’t always right!) Also, it was sometimes useful for doing homework or playing Scrabble. This was the state of the world not that long ago. In the late nineteen-eighties, Merriam-Webster’s Collegiate Dictionary was on the Times best-seller list for a hundred and fifty-five consecutive weeks. Fifty-seven million copies were sold, a number believed to…

In “Fashion and the Unconscious,” a book from 1953, the psychoanalyst Edmund Bergler describes a patient in her mid-thirties who wore so much gray clothing that her friends called her the Lady in Gray. When Bergler asked the woman why she dressed this way, she said simply, “I like it”—the kind of reply that, to a mid-century analyst, dangled like a red flag before a bull. Eventually, Bergler tells us, he excavated the unconscious motive for her gray attire: beginning in her late teens, the woman had spent six years composing music and devising ballets, but she gave up when the work on which she’d pinned her highest hopes—a tragedy about moths attracted to a great, beautiful light, who all end up burned to death—was rejected. Bergler grew convinced that,…

ACROSS 1 Campbell’s container 4 ___ Minor 8 Competitor of Sealy 13 Bird on Australia’s coat of arms 14 “Brooklyn Nine-Nine” org. 15 Honey alternative? 16 Like Netflix’s logo 17 Having a meltdown 19 Yale collegian 20 Cabinet department that oversees Ginnie Mae, for short 21 Come onstage 22 Low-quality digitally generated text, images, or videos 24 SAT section 25 Tech company that developed the U.P.C. bar code 28 Ravens quarterback Jackson 29 Shopping center 30 “Scott Pilgrim vs. the World” actor Michael 31 Pertaining to birth 33 ___ studies (discipline that examines issues of race and nationality) 35 Diet Coke, in a modern analogy to a smoke break 39 Cash in 40 Enjoy great success 41 Wednesday’s boarding-school roommate, on “Wednesday” 42 Delay deciding 44 Uproar 48 Speck in a…

Given that the U.K.’s wolves and moose expired long ago, the country’s largest land predator today is, somewhat embarrassingly, the European badger. Other aggressive species include the horsefly, a venomous sand-burrowing fish, and the cherubic-looking pine marten, a kind of cute but angry weasel. (Be warned!) Fittingly, perhaps, England has adopted, as unofficial ambassador and strategic diplomatic envoy, a polite, anthropomorphic bear in a red hat and blue duffel coat. North America may have grizzlies; Britain has Paddington. Paddington first arrived in the U.K. in 1958, in a children’s book written by Michael Bond. In the story, an English family finds the bear sitting in Paddington Station, with a note: “Please look after this bear. Thank you.” Bond, a BBC cameraman, was inspired by a sadlooking Teddy he once bought…

A hundred and three years on, F. W. Murnau’s “Nosferatu: A Symphony of Horror” still haunts the movie-going unconscious. Newcomers feel shudders of recognition on seeing Murnau’s indelible evocations of a Transylvanian vampire on the prowl: a reverse-negative image of Nosferatu’s carriage clattering through a forest; majestically disquieting sequences of a pestilential ship gliding across the frame; the vampire toting his coffin through the deserted streets of a German town; his shadow seeping along the wall of a stairwell, bony fingers outstretched. Film societies, symphony orchestras, and alternative venues show “Nosferatu” on a regular basis, especially around Halloween. Remakes by Werner Herzog, in 1979, and Robert Eggers, in 2024, have further boosted the fame of the original, although neither matches its sinister lyricism. The appearance of the word “symphony” in…

Based on the sheer quantity of revivals and new translations flooding our venues, New York theatre has chosen its Person of the Year: Molière. The satirical god of the seventeenth-century French stage has taken his throne back after a decade of near-neglect. For most of 2025, we were either watching one of the playwright’s comedies or bracing for one. In June, we had almost simultaneous productions: Taylor Mac’s “Prosperous Fools” (an update of “Le Bourgeois Gentilhomme”) and Jeffrey Hatcher’s fizzy adaptation of “Le Malade Imaginaire.” And, this fall, one version of the comedy “Tartuffe” (at the House of the Redeemer) had barely closed before New York Theatre Workshop premièred its own. This sumptuously produced, frequently amusing, occasionally inert staging of “Tartuffe,” adapted by Lucas Hnath and directed by Sarah…