The New Yorker
Design for Living
Since the pandemic, many of America’s office towers have emptied out—and surrounding neighborhoods have become wastelands. Nathan Berman has helped save Manhattan’s financial district from a “doom loop” by carving attractive living spaces from former fields of cubicles. D. T. Max reports on an extreme form of urban recycling.
Above the Fold
Essential reading for today.
Gaza’s Unexploded-Bomb Crisis
Clearing the territory of ordnance and rubble could pose a challenge unseen since the Second World War.
“Challengers” Makes a Love Triangle Feel So Empty
The fussy structure of Luca Guadagnino’s film dissipates the erotic charge on which the drama relies.
How Worried Should We Be About Bird Flu?
According to the C.D.C., the risk to public health remains low. But the country’s initial approach has had an unsettling resonance with the first months of COVID.
The New Yorker Wins Two 2024 Pulitzer Prizes
The staff writer Sarah Stillman was honored for reporting on a draconian legal doctrine, and the first-time contributor Medar de la Cruz was recognized for an illustrated piece about Rikers Island.
Can Suing People for Lying Save Democracy?
The lawyers at Protect Democracy have brought defamation suits against Rudy Giuliani, Kari Lake, and Project Veritas, hoping to limit the spread of disinformation. Others worry that their efforts could impinge on freedom of speech.
The Political Scene
What Is Hope Hicks Crying About?
During Donald Trump’s criminal trial, the former White House aide was inscrutable on the witness stand, despite breaking out into tears.
Is 2024 Doomed to Repeat 1968 or 2020—or Both?
Trump has now made clear that he won’t concede if he loses the election. Believe him.
Trump Is Making Victimhood a Legal Strategy
Will the jury believe that the former President’s sordid acquisition of the White House was political business as usual?
How Much Aid Is Actually Reaching Gazans?
The chief economist of the U.N.’s World Food Programme on imminent famine and what’s needed to avoid it.
The Peculiar Delights of the Enormous Cicada Emergence
As loud as leaf blowers, as miraculous as math, the insects are set to overtake the landscape.
Campus Protests
Israel, Gaza, and the Turmoil at Harvard
Not since the Vietnam War has a protest movement reached campuses with such fury. The New Yorker Radio Hour examines the reverberations at one university in Boston.
Occupy Columbia
Scenes of dissent and defiance on the campus where scores of students were arrested for participating in pro-Palestine protests.
A Generation of Distrust
Among the protesters on college campuses—and among the students who oppose them, too—there is a deepening disillusionment with American institutions.
New Tricks
The A-list animal trainer Bill Berloni has worked with pigs, geese, and butterflies. He recently prepared Bing for a starring role in the adaptation of Sigrid Nunez’s “The Friend.”
The Critics
Claire Messud’s New Novel Maps the Search for a Home That Never Was
“This Strange Eventful History” traces three generations of an itinerant French family with roots in colonial Algeria.
Dua Lipa Devotes Herself to Pleasure with “Radical Optimism”
In an era of postmodern, self-referential music, there’s something refreshing about the artist’s new album.
“The Fall Guy” Is Gravity-Defying Fun, in Every Sense
Starring Ryan Gosling and Emily Blunt, this action-comedy about a stuntman, by the stuntman turned director David Leitch, sticks its landings, but don’t expect characterization.
The Indestructible Art of Frank Stella
The artist, who has died at eighty-seven, rattled standards of modernist abstraction rather as Bob Dylan did those of folk music.
“The Contestant” Is More Than a Cautionary Tale
The documentary charts the rise of an early reality-TV star and the ethically queasy choices that cemented his fame—but it’s elevated by its interest in what came afterward.
Three Broadway Shows Put Motherhood in the Spotlight
Paula Vogel’s “Mother Play,” Shaina Taub’s “Suffs,” and Amy Herzog’s “Mary Jane” strike back at the mother-as-monster dramatic trope.
What We’re Reading This Week
A story collection that exhibits a unique delicacy in chronicling Black life in the nineteen-fifties and sixties, a novel that cleverly intertwines paeans to the pleasures of eating with indictments of Japan’s standards for women, an immensely entertaining history constructed around medieval guidebooks and travelogues, and more.
Ideas
The Secret Society Chasing Our Fading Attention
As ads and apps reduce our ability to focus, an order purportedly reaching back centuries seeks to reset the world by understanding what happens between a person and a work of art.
The Hidden-Pregnancy Experiment
An attempt to hide personal news from online ad trackers makes clear how much surveillance we are engaged in, as both subjects and objects, and how insidious the problem is becoming.
Beastly Matters
People who think about the use and abuse of nonhuman creatures often end up calling for changes that might seem indefensible—at least, at first.
How ECMO Is Redefining Death
A medical technology can keep people alive when they otherwise would have died. Where will it lead?
An Inside Job at the British Museum
While facing renewed accusations of cultural theft, the institution announced that it had been the victim of plain old-fashioned theft—by someone on the staff.
“Cherry”
A young actor, Marie-Lise Chouinard, faces her terminal-cancer diagnosis with grace and comedy, in Laurence Gagné-Frégeau’s short documentary.
Puzzles & Games
Take a break and play.
In Case You Missed It
Is Hunterbrook Media a News Outlet or a Hedge Fund?
The hybrid media-finance company wants to monetize investigative journalism in the public interest. Is it a visionary game changer or a cynical ploy?
The Talk of the Town
Death Skull let out a hysterical cackle, which echoed piercingly from the stone walls of his lair.
“Why so combative?” he said, emerging from the shadows. “At the end of the day, we’re not so different, you and I.”Continue reading »
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