Indholdsfortegnelse for January 12, 2026 i The New Yorker

Jordan Salama (“A Plan Made in Hiding,” p. 36) is the author of “Stranger in the Desert: A Family Story.” Nicola Twilley (“Pour One Out,” p. 20), a frequent New Yorker contributor, is a host of the podcast “Gastropod.” Her books include “Frostbite: How Refrigeration Changed Our Food, Our Planet, and Ourselves.” Allegra Goodman (Fiction, p. 48) has contributed to the magazine since 1991. “This Is Not About Us,” her new work of fiction, is due out next month. S. C. Cornell (A Critic at Large, p. 55) is at work on her first book, about the murder of a migrant in Arizona. Kristina Libby (Sketchpad, p. 11) is an artist, a writer, and a film and TV creator. Her one-woman show premièred at the United Solo festival in October.…

Thelma Golden, the director of the Studio Museum, told us recently that preparations for the museum’s recent reopening have led her to dwell even more than usual on “the space and the place” in which it sits—that is, a Harlem that is both a physical location and an imaginary world. Not long ago, she discussed a few novels that have shaped her thinking about the neighborhood with us. Her remarks have been edited and condensed. The Street by Ann Petry This is the story of a young Black mother, Lutie Johnson, who lives in Harlem in the nineteen-forties. It’s both a novel and an incredibly significant sociological study, because it puts struggle and survival right up against possibility. Petry writes such luminous, beautiful prose, but that beauty exists alongside harsh…

At Joe’s Pizza on Carmine Street, Marc Shaiman, the celebrated composer and lyricist, dropped his slice on the floor. “Ugh, it’s the Shaiman vortex,” he said. “Everything I come near breaks.” Shaiman, sixty-six and a self-described Eeyore, with a scruff of white beard, was feeling fragile. He’d spent the past week holed up in his Chelsea apartment, obsessively rerecording a Barbra Streisand anecdote for the audiobook of his new memoir, “Never Mind the Happy: Showbiz Stories from a Sore Winner.” It had been a tough year, with a barrage of losses—most recently, his golden retriever, Chops, had died suddenly at the upstate house he shares with his military-veteran husband, an event so disturbing that Shaiman has imagined tearing up the floor where it happened. During a classroom visit at N.Y.U.’s…

HOST: Adam J., welcome to the pod. ADAM J.: Great to be here. Where’s my mommy? H: She left, but said she’d come back. A: Fuck. (Cries) H: Can you use your words, bro? A (wipes nose on sleeve): I’m good. H: The thing is, do we actually need mommies? A: Right. When you dive into the data and look at the studies— H: Mommies are straight-up, like, literally— A: Obsolete. H: Exactly. Not for nothing, you look superstrong. Like, pick-up-your-little-sister-and-walk-a-few-steps strong. A: It’s my new raw cran-apple pouch line. H: I’ve been cran-apple juicing since I was two. A: But that shit’s been double pasteurized. Mine retains all the healthy bacteria and pathogens so you build up natural immunity to girls. Try it. H (sips, spills everywhere): Whoa. That’s…

Lily García was ready for her seventeenth-birthday party well before it started. On a late-summer afternoon in San Bernardino, California, the high-school senior stood in the cool shade of her family’s covered back patio, wearing a black tank top and high-waisted jeans. As always, her mother, Rosalinda, had gone all out with the preparations. Traditional multicolored Mexican fabrics were draped across tables and benches. Two men from a party-rentals company were testing the controls for a mechanical bull they’d set up in the back yard. A mini-fridge was stocked with soda, and small bags of Cheetos and Doritos were neatly arranged in a basket. It was two-thirty in the afternoon; her friends weren’t even invited until five. “And that’s ‘Mexican time,’” Lily said, smiling, before heading off to her room…

Easily missed on the back side of the November ballots that brought Zohran Mamdani to Gracie Mansion was a proposal for a new map of New York City. Proposal 5, as it was called, was among the least noticed initiatives that New Yorkers were asked to vote on—yet, as happens with most proposals that make it to the ballot, a majority of New Yorkers voted for it, probably without really knowing what it meant, but approving it, in the New York manner, mostly for having made it there at all. It’s the same spirit with which we duly tick off our approval of judges and assemblypersons whose names we barely know and whose positions we can only guess at. Proposal 5 was actually a bit of skilled electoral craft on…

In 1994, when the MetroCard made its début, many straphangers were reluctant to say farewell to the subway token. Across the city, commuters struggled to master “the swipe.” The Times noted a few techniques, like “swinging your hand” at the turnstile as if it were “a slow tennis ball coming your way.” That hard-won expertise is now defunct. On December 31st, the M.T.A. stopped selling MetroCards, which have been fully replaced with the tapand-go OMNY system. This was tough news for Nina Boesch, a Brooklynbased artist who has spent twenty-five years turning the flimsy yellow-and-blue plastic cards into intricate collages. “My first thought was, Oh, no. Oh, shit!” she said the other day, in her Greenpoint studio. “There was a moment of panic.” Using scissors, Boesch, who trained at the…

The entire West Coast wine industry now fears a bitter, ashy-tasting product. According to Mike Zolnikov, who tends a couple of acres of Pinot Noir and an acre of Chardonnay on a flat, slightly soggy patch of the central Willamette Valley, in Oregon, it had been a once-in-a-decade growing season. “Not too hot, not too wet,” he recalled, wistfully. “It would have been a really great year.” A few hundred miles south, in California’s Napa Valley, the winemaker Ashley Egelhoff, of Honig Vineyard and Winery, was feeling similarly about her Cabernet and Sauvignon Blanc. “That’s how 2020 was panning out: like Goldilocks, just right,” she told me. For wine growers and makers, each season offers a series of fresh yet familiar opportunities for disaster. Drought shrivels the grapes; excessive heat…

ACROSS 1 Notable quality of a rain forest 9 ___ Film Festival (annual Barnard College event focussed on stories of women’s leadership) 15 Effects of some earthquakes 16 Skyrocketed 17 Oracle offering 18 Delicate 19 Digital instruments? 21 Establishment on “The Simpsons” 22 Disco balls, e.g. 23 Literary lion 26 It has an edible rind 27 Interjection at a flamenco performance 30 Gymnastics competition 31 Fled 34 First-rate 35 Part of a woodworking joint 36 Favorable margin 37 Sources of protection for lifeguards 39 Appearance 40 Canny 41 Features of some antique documents 42 Cake divisions 43 Month when Bloomsday is celebrated 44 Faux journalist of a two-thousands TV show 46 Intended to break down 51 Pierce 52 Like the climate in parts of the Australian outback 55 Secure tightly,…

Kathryn Bigelow, the director, and Alexandra Bell, the arms-control expert, are both nuclear-attack-submarine literate. Bigelow—whose new Netflix film, “A House of Dynamite,” imagines the U.S. government’s response to an incoming intercontinental ballistic missile (ICBM) eighteen minutes from impact—shot part of her 2002 submarine film, entitled “K-19: The Widowmaker,” on a decommissioned Soviet sub from the nineteensixties. Her team had found it drydocked in Florida, then had it towed to Nova Scotia. “When we were shooting in the submarine, we had to wear helmets and shoulder pads because you were hitting everything,” she said the other day. “It was painful.” Bell, who is the new president of the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, has visited active nuclear-missile submarines—“boomers,” in Navy slang—as part of her work on arms control. “I’ve been on…

“What I’ve been doing is being just completely honest in my statements,” Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene said in mid-October. She was sitting beside the comedian Tim Dillon, during a taping of “The Tim Dillon Show,” a kind of Joe Rogan lite that recently featured Senator Bernie Sanders. It was a warmup of sorts for appearances that she’d soon make on center-left talk shows—“Real Time with Bill Maher,” “The View”—during a lengthy government shutdown that Greene blamed on her fellow-Republicans. She wore kneehigh black leather boots, a jean jacket, and a solemn expression. Dillon had just asked Greene why she was suddenly saying things that resonated with a wider range of people, “including liberals.” Liberals have had little to console them in the past year, and it was perplexing that one…

In 1978, Greta Hibbard was twenty-two and living in rural Oregon. She had a two-year-old daughter, a minimum-wage job, and an unemployed husband. She was, she would later say, “living on peanut butter sandwiches.” She and her husband, John Rideout, often fought; sometimes he hit her or demanded sex. On the afternoon of October 10th, when he did just that, Hibbard fled to a neighbor’s house. Rideout followed her, cornered her in a park, and took her home. Once inside, she said, he punched her several times in the face and pulled down her pants. Their toddler, who was watching, went into her bedroom and wailed as her father penetrated her mother. That this might be rape, legally speaking, was a brand-new idea. Until the mid-seventies, much of the sex…

These are fractious times for the fraternal duos of filmmaking. The Coen brothers, once inseparable, have parted artistic ways—Joel with a black-and-white Shakespeare adaptation, “The Tragedy of Macbeth” (2021), and Ethan with two colorful bursts of slapstick noir, “Drive-Away Dolls” (2024) and “Honey Don’t!” (2025). The Safdies are also flying solo: this past year brought us Benny’s “The Smashing Machine,” a lightweight but bruising portrait of a champion wrestler, and Josh’s “Marty Supreme,” a whiplash-inducing tale of a Ping-Pong powerhouse. Fittingly, more than a few observers have been eager to turn art into blood sport, pitting Coen against Coen, Safdie against Safdie, and theorizing about which sibling is the greater talent. God forbid we should ever wage such a debate over the Belgian brothers Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne, who, on…