On Sunday, when it was reported that the filmmaker Rob Reiner and his wife, Michele Singer Reiner, had been stabbed to death at their home in Los Angeles, the news seemed so senseless and baffling, so at odds with Reiner’s lovable image, that it didn’t properly compute. Who could possibly want to kill Rob Reiner, … Read more
Across the newsroom, journalists picked their most notable movies from 2025.
2025 in Review New Yorker writers reflect on the year’s highs and lows. The Turing test, a long-established tool for measuring machine intelligence, gauges the point at which a text-generating machine can fool a human into thinking it’s not a robot. ChatGPT passed that benchmark earlier this year, inaugurating a new technological era, though not … Read more
In 1934, an 8.0-magnitude earthquake hit eastern India, killing thousands and devastating several cities. Curiously, in areas that were spared the worst destruction, stories soon spread that an even bigger disaster was on its way. Leon Festinger, a young American psychologist at the University of Minnesota, read about these rumors in the early nineteen-fifties and … Read more
“Cannon” is the second graphic novel by Lai, a thirty-two-year-old Australian who lives in, and makes art about, Montreal. Her first book, “Stone Fruit,” applied a similar visual style (characters in strong outline, hatch marks, soft gouache landscapes, film stills) to similar themes of gulped-down feelings, queer romance, and caregiving. Both books, but especially “Cannon,” … Read more
Got all that? Good. “Avatar: Fire and Ash” is many things: a lengthy demo reel for the latest sophistications in performance-capture technology, for which we can credit the ever more lifelike quality of the Na’vi characters, and the third chapter in a blockbuster mega-franchise that—if Cameron had his way, an unlimited budget, and perhaps a … Read more
The true-crime genre has been a cornerstone of the podcast market for years, and we could very well see a proliferation of newsletters about cold cases, wife murders, or gangland rackets. Sadly, this is a form that could easily be mimicked by ChatGPT, which can pull information off Wikipedia and other websites and stitch together … Read more
Emma Stone, “Bugonia” Stone was on my list in 2023, the year she gave two discomfiting comic performances, in the Showtime series “The Curse” and in the Yorgos Lanthimos film “Poor Things.” After winning her second Best Actress Oscar, for the latter, she teamed up with Lanthimos again in this dark-comic adaptation of the South … Read more
The comedian tries her hand at captioning New Yorker cartoons.
On January 17, 2025, three days before Trump’s second Inauguration, he took another leap into the crypto world, releasing a new meme coin: $TRUMP. The day before the ceremony, his wife, Melania, launched her own coin, $MELANIA. Unlike the World Liberty tokens, which gave their holders certain governance rights associated with the company, these assets … Read more