The Elusive Body, by Alexandra Sifferlin (Viking). Each year, around twelve million people in the U.S. experience a medical diagnostic error; some three million live with diseases that remain undiagnosed even after exhaustive medical investigation. Sifferlin’s book examines the roots of this situation, and explores avenues for addressing it. Though some methods—such as improving physician … Read more
The alchemy of any given sandwich is both specific and forgiving. Its stacked ingredients merge and mingle—you can swap out this or that, as long as whatever replaces it serves a similar role. In the Vegitalian, the sweet potato, with its happy mushiness, has a surprisingly similar yielding texture to a ruffled heap of thinly … Read more
From ancient Rome to the era of A.I., people have prized originality, but the line where influence ends and cribbing begins is notoriously blurry.
Everything took on a sickening poignancy: the boisterous din at our Saturday brunch place where, just a week before, my girlfriends and I had scrolled through the latest celebrity facelifts and griped about our jowls; the Santa Monica mountains coming back to life after the fires; Henry’s flag-football mouth guard on the kitchen table, imprinted … Read more
Most of the way up the Jade Dragon Snow Mountain, which rises to a height of more than eighteen thousand feet, in southwestern China’s Yunnan Province, there is a large alpine field called Yunshanping, or Spruce Meadow, where tourists gather to take photographs. Many of the visitors are couples about to get married. They wear … Read more
In the show notes handed to audience members at Marc Jacobs’s Fall/Winter 2026 presentation, at New York’s Park Avenue Armory in early February, the designer included a section titled Credits and Receipts. The list included entries like “Yves Saint Laurent Couture 1965,” “Prada Spring/Summer 1996,” and “Stüssy.” It also named a number of Jacobs’s own … Read more
By the time Kornev is finally ushered into the cell of Stepniak (a mesmerizing Aleksandr Filippenko), there’s no sense of triumph or even anticipation about what he will discover. Stepniak’s account is terrifying, though not terribly surprising: he is one of many Old Bolsheviks who have been strategically targeted by Stalin’s regime, and his “vital … Read more
Listen and subscribe: Apple | Spotify | Google | Wherever You Listen Sign up for our daily newsletter to get the best of The New Yorker in your inbox. Julio Torres got his big break as a writer on “Saturday Night Live,” and went on to make the cult favorites “Los Espookys” and “Fantasmas” for … Read more
Until the very end, our friend and colleague Calvin Tomkins looked at his life with a sense of wonder and bemusement. He died on Friday at the age of one hundred, just a few months younger than The New Yorker, his working home since 1958. Tad (he always went by Tad) was an irrepressibly energetic … Read more
One obvious way to finish things is to seek out an external structure. It’s true that my book is overdue—and yet, being overdue is actually a blessed state, since it depends on the existence of a deadline. Because there is a real editor waiting for my manuscript, the book is not-yet-finished, rather than unfinished. (My … Read more