In Cromer’s framing, that hollowness begins to feel like the play’s sad theme: when someone is on a desperate hunt for meaning, the source of it ultimately doesn’t matter very much. It also turns the play into a story about Agnes, not Peter—her decision to believe, in “X-Files” terms. Coon, who is Letts’s wife, builds … Read more
A titanic artist’s death is a terrible shock. In the case of the Hungarian filmmaker Béla Tarr, who has died after a long illness, at the age of seventy, I confess that I’d expected—without necessarily hoping for—a faint premonition, perhaps a grim tingle in our collective cinephile sixth sense. Tarr, unique among his European art-film … Read more
When President Trump announced the U.S. military’s capture of Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro, the cartoonist Barry Blitt decided that his image for the cover of the January 19, 2026, issue could hark back to Gilded Age political cartoons that skewered the oil barons and petty tyrants of the era. “After years of depicting Donald Trump, … Read more
To start the new year, New Yorker writers are looking back on the last one, sifting through the vast number of books they encountered in 2025 to identify the experiences that stood out. This is the second installment in a series of their recommendations (read the first here) that will continue in the coming weeks. … Read more
For this week’s Infinite Scroll column, Brady Brickner-Wood is filling in for Kyle Chayka. Late last year, the White House’s social-media team lauded ICE’s torrential deportation efforts with a string of memes seemingly engineered to go viral. In one video posted to Instagram, the song “all-american bitch,” by Olivia Rodrigo, provides a soundtrack to a … Read more
He goes on to say that to behead a corpse is to follow the path of Satan, and that it is God, not a lip-smacking corpse, who holds power over life and death. But the pastor seems to know that merely forbidding corpse-killing is not enough to stop it. The superstitious beliefs need to be … Read more
The latest and most vigorous addition to this genre is “Sex Beyond ‘Yes’: Pleasure and Agency for Everyone” (Norton), by Quill Kukla, a professor of philosophy and disability studies at Georgetown University. Part manual, part manifesto, “Sex Beyond ‘Yes’ ” has plenty of can-do ideas about how we might turn consensual sex into “good sex”—how we … Read more
For the cover of the January 12, 2026, issue, the cartoonist Harry Bliss used color and composition to contrast the warmth inside with the blistering cold outside. “While in art school, living off of ramen noodles, I’d peek into the windows of gorgeous old brownstones, imagining I lived there instead of in my freezing, roach-infested … Read more
A Danger to the Minds of Young Girls, by Adam Morgan (Atria). At the heart of this lively history is the editor Margaret C. Anderson, a radical lesbian who is perhaps best known for publishing, in a literary magazine she edited, James Joyce’s “Ulysses” in serial form. In 1921, Anderson was prosecuted by the U.S. … Read more
The leader of the fancy-patty movement, for me, though, is Bar Kabawa, the swanky, sexy East Village Daiquiri joint that’s attached to Kabawa, the chef Paul Carmichael’s marvellous Caribbean tasting-menu spot. Carmichael’s patties are cheffy and ambitious, for sure, with a dazzling array of creative fillings including curried crab with squash; pepper-pot-spiced duck with foie … Read more