Innehållsförteckning för December 1, 2025 från The New Yorker

Jon Lee Anderson (“Dangerous Neighbors,” p. 60) is a staff writer who has covered conflicts throughout Africa and the Middle East. His latest book, “To Lose a War: The Fall and Rise of the Taliban,” was published in August. Ben Taub (“The Big Ice Is Sick,” p. 48), a staff writer, won the 2020 Pulitzer Prize for feature writing. He has also received a National Magazine Award and two George Polk Awards. This piece was supported by the Pulitzer Center. Sarah Stillman (“Disappeared,” p. 28) won a 2024 Pulitzer Prize for her investigation into the legal doctrine of felony murder. She runs the Investigative Reporting Lab at Yale, and was named a MacArthur Fellow in 2016. Alex Ross (“Written in Stone,” p. 36) has been the magazine’s music critic since…

On a Friday evening in October, 2021, the Justice Department launched into damage-control mode. The Attorney General, Merrick Garland, the Deputy Attorney General, Lisa Monaco, and other senior officials gathered on an emergency conference call to decide how to deal with what they considered outof-line remarks from President Joe Biden. Steve Bannon, the former adviser to Donald Trump, had defied a subpoena from the House select committee investigating January 6th. Committee members were weighing whether to refer Bannon to the Justice Department for prosecution. The White House press secretary, Jen Psaki, had ducked commenting on a matter of such delicacy. “That would be up to the Department of Justice, and it would be their purview to determine,” she told reporters. “They’re independent.” But Biden, asked by the CNN reporter Kaitlan…

Three dozen climate negotiators and scientists were at Lincoln Center the other day, in the Mitzi E. Newhouse Theatre, to see a performance of “Kyoto,” about the landmark 1997 treaty on greenhouse-gas emissions. It was a bittersweet reunion for “Team Climate U.S.A.,” as Sue Biniaz, a State Department lawyer for more than thirty years, put it, while addressing the group in the lobby after the show. On the one hand, “we usually work in total obscurity,” she said. “So to make it the subject of an incredible play is really, really nice for us.” On the other hand, “we are no longer in that business.” The Trump Administration eliminated the department’s climate-negotiation office in April, a few months after announcing its withdrawal from the Paris climate agreement, a successor to…

When I visited the king of Bukumu, Mwami Butsitsi Kahembe IV Isaac, he was dressed in a crisp white caftan, with the skin of a leopard killed by his greatgrandfather slung over his shoulders. A crown of matching fur sat on his head, and an ivory-tipped scepter announced his rank. The surroundings were less elegant. The king told me ruefully that his ancestral palace had been destroyed thirty years ago by combatants from the Hutu tribe, and that he had not yet found the resources to rebuild it. We met instead at his office in a compound at the edge of the city of Goma, in the eastern Congo. Mwami Isaac, as he is known, arrived in a chauffeur-driven Land Cruiser, escorted by three bodyguards carrying assault rifles. It was…

What we’re watching, listening to, and doing. NOVEMBER 26 – DECEMBER 2, 2025 The British musician Dev Hynes stays booked and busy. Hynes, as accomplished an artist-curator as he is a musician, has performed in concert halls with the composer Philip Glass, written music for Broadway, scored a half-dozen films, and written or produced for many talented friends, on albums and accompanying art pieces. In fact, his dance card has been so full that he spent seven years away from his defining project—singing and producing under the moniker Blood Orange—his longest hiatus since he took up the name, in 2011. At long last, he returned in August, with “Essex Honey,” a glorious and devastating album that puts his deep connections to great use, enlisting the pop savants Lorde and Caroline…

In a rehearsal studio in the Echo Park neighborhood in Los Angeles, Kurtis Blow was limbering up and getting loose. Earlier this year, his left arm swelled up abruptly, requiring four surgeries to resolve what was eventually diagnosed as deep-vein thrombosis. Blow usually holds the mike in his right hand when he raps, but he had to get his left arm going, he said, “because it’s my ‘Throw your hands in the air’ arm.” Lithe at age sixty-six, Blow was dressed in leather cargo pants, a track jacket, and a black baseball cap with the words “I AM HIP HOP” above its brim. He was whipping himself into shape for a “Legends of Hip-Hop” concert to be held just after Thanksgiving at the Peacock Theatre, in downtown L.A. He will…

The Stones of Stenness, a brood of lichen-encrusted megaliths in the far north of the British Isles, could be mistaken for a latter-day work of land art, one with ominous overtones. The stones stand between two lochs on the largest of the Orkney Islands, off the northeastern tip of mainland Scotland. Three colossal planks of sandstone, ranging in height from fifteen feet nine inches to eighteen feet eight inches, rise from the grass, along with a smaller stone that has the bent shape of a boomerang. In contrast to the rectilinear blocks at Stonehenge, the Stenness megaliths are thin slabs with angled upper edges, like upside-down guillotine blades. Remnants of a ceremonial circle, they are placed twenty or more feet apart, creating a chasm of negative space. The monoliths in…

In early 1993, the Icelandic photographer Ragnar Axelsson arrived at the most remote settlement in Greenland, a lonely town in the east that is tucked away in the world’s largest fjord system, which is usually locked in by ice. The temperature was minus forty degrees, in both Fahrenheit and Celsius—right where the scales converge. Sled dogs howled through the night, a warning against polar bears. The dogs smelled the bears. The bears smelled the children. The only other humans who had settled on that side of Greenland were five hundred miles to the south, separated by impassable mountains and glaciers. To the north was nine hundred miles of frozen wilderness, inhabited only by animals and a dozen or so Danish soldiers who were doing twoyear shifts on the world’s most…

During a stolen hour in the spring of 1944, when Primo Levi had been a slave laborer at Auschwitz for about three months, a French prisoner asked Levi to teach him some Italian. Levi, a young chemist from Turin, went on to become a major chronicler of life in the camps, but at the time he didn’t believe that he had what it took to survive. He thought too much. He was hollow with hunger and painfully aware that his hands were covered in sores and that he smelled. Worst of all, he felt that the things he’d seen would leave him dead inside even if he survived. It would have been natural to give up. He didn’t initially understand why a part of the Divine Comedy came to mind…

ACROSS 1 Captures on cassette 6 Subtle sound from a note-passer 10 Nightmare roommate for a neatnik 14 God named in the takbir 15 “Palo ___: A History of California, Capitalism, and the World” (Malcolm Harris book) 16 Pong company 17 Conservation area bordering Serengeti National Park … Park … Park … 19 Backpack stocked with emergency supplies, e.g. 20 Baby in a den 21 Raccoon relative with a flexible snout 22 Choose as one’s successor, say 23 Wallet material that comes from a sea creature 25 Capital of American Samoa … moa … moa … 27 Coffee-brewing option 28 ___ feed (blog convenience) 30 In medias ___ 31 “Highest 2 Lowest” director Spike 32 Video-game console of the nineties, for short 34 Emulates Berthe Morisot or Norval Morrisseau 37…

I’m Donut?, a Japanese bakery chain known for its viral popularity and its curiously punctuated name, opened earlier this year in a sleek Times Square storefront. The company’s specialty is the nama doughnut (the word, in Japanese, means “raw,” or “fresh”), an impossibly moist and light cumulus of starch and sugar that seems captured by gravity thanks only to the marginal heft of various frostings, icings, and fillings. This textural sorcery is achieved by way of a proprietary yeasted dough whose recipe involves, among other things, kabocha squash, which introduces a bit of earthy sweetness and gives the interiors a sunny yellow hue. The brand’s “original” doughnut, a sugar-dusted, circular pillow without a hole in the center, is something of a miracle—breathy, yeasty, tender, and warm, it was the dream…

As girls, we may find it diffcult to picture our mothers—especially if they are stern Caribbean mothers—as anything other than the poised ladies they’re so determined to mold us into. We struggle to imagine that they were ever little girls themselves, flying kites, climbing trees, playing hopscotch and marbles with their siblings. As mothers, some of us are so fearful for our daughters that we issue long lists of instructions that we hope will shield them from a hostile and menacing world. For mothers of Black girls, warnings about promiscuity are at the top of the list, to keep them from being considered “fast” and hypersexualized. These tensions are brilliantly captured in Jamaica Kincaid’s breathless, single-sentence short story “Girl,” first published in the June 26, 1978, issue of The New…

In September, 1639, John Winthrop, the governor of the Massachusetts Bay Colony, recorded in his journal a dreadful tale of Puritan true crime. One Robert Keayne had prospered as a London merchant before his immigration to Boston, where he did brisk custom as a shopkeeper and maintained a pious reputation as an “ancient professor of the gospel.” Now he stood trial for the “very evil” sale of “foreign commodities” at prices that exceeded the sum he had paid for them. For the sin of a standard retail markup, he faced excommunication. A tearful Keayne bewailed his “covetous and corrupt heart” but claimed to have been misled. The situation, the magistrates conceded, was tricky. Profit-taking was not technically illegal, and the just appraisal of goods remained a redoubtable challenge despite the…

“Though I had always wanted to be an opium addict, I can’t claim that as the reason I went to China.” Thus begins “The Big Smoke,” Emily Hahn’s account of her journey from peppy globe-trotter to sallow lotus-eater (and back again) in nineteen-thirties Shanghai. This insouciant kickoff leaves you curious why Hahn went to China, of course, and why she was so keen on becoming an opium addict. More pressingly, it makes you wonder: Who is this lady? What else will this droll, naughty adventurer get up to? Plenty. Along with fifty-two books, Hahn wrote more than two hundred articles for The New Yorker, over eight decades, about goings on in places as unalike as Rajasthan, Dar es Salaam, Hong Kong, and Rio de Janeiro. Her colleague Roger Angell described…

Civilization outlasts humanity in the new sci-fi drama “Pluribus.” On the night that the world as we know it is destroyed, a novelist named Carol Sturka (played by Rhea Seehorn) sees cars and planes veer off course, an emergency room full of convulsing bodies, and her city, Albuquerque, on fire. The President dies under mysterious circumstances, and, more devastatingly for Carol, so does her live-in partner, Helen (Miriam Shor). Then, in less than an hour, the apocalypse cleans up after itself. People stop convulsing. They put out the fires. Granted, they’ve been hijacked by an extraterrestrial virus—but, when they move to retrieve Helen’s body and Carol tearfully protests, they listen. “We just want to help, Carol,” they say, in unison. Not since “The Twilight Zone,” when aliens arrived promising “to…