The first business dedicated to the manufacture and sale of shokuhin sampuru was founded in 1932 in Osaka by Iwasaki Takizō, one of the craft’s original three practitioners. A native of Gujō Hachiman, a town in the central prefecture of Gifu, he became enthralled by wax during his boyhood. Legend has it that he got … Read more
The cover of the December 22, 2025, special Cartoons & Puzzles issue, by Luci Gutiérrez, celebrates the particular mixture of zaniness and dedication that it takes to produce an issue of a magazine. Gutiérrez, who illustrates The New Yorker’s Shouts & Murmurs page every week, has firsthand experience with the particularities of the process. “The … Read more
The Award, by Matthew Pearl (Harper). David Trent, a struggling writer whose behavior steers this blackly comic thriller, exults upon learning that his new neighbor in Cambridge, Massachusetts, is the Pulitzer-winning novelist Silas Hale—“an echo,” he initially thinks, of “Henry David Thoreau living in Ralph Waldo Emerson’s backyard!” When it becomes clear that Silas has … Read more
Helen Shaw reviews “Marjorie Prime,” with June Squibb, Cynthia Nixon, and Danny Burstein,
Trends in restaurants are like trends in art: cumulative, ambient, much more evident in retrospect than they are in the chaos of the present. If 2024 was the year that the French resurgence really took hold, bathing New York City in cream and caviar, maybe 2025 was the year of the scrappy, auteurish indie: restaurants … Read more
In September, the playwright Tarell Alvin McCraney returned to his career-making breakthrough from 2007, a mythopoeic tale about Oshoosi Size (Alani iLongwe), a gifted singer who has returned home from prison, on probation, and his brother, Ogun Size (André Holland), a rule-follower who can not let Oshoosi feel free. Moving around and between the Sizes … Read more
Nineties teen counterculture, a trip to Universal Studios, and the modern American dream of perpetual childhood.
Sarkozy is assigned prisoner number 320535. “Four days earlier, I had been Nicolas Sarkozy, the former President of the Republic, being received by President Emmanuel Macron himself at the Élysée Palace,” he writes. “Could one ever have imagined a more striking contrast? A more ludicrous situation?” (And you thought Jean Valjean was having an identity … Read more
The British photographer Chris Steele-Perkins died, in September, at the age of seventy-eight, after a groundbreaking and globe-spanning career, leaving behind a catalogue that ranges from images of war-torn Afghanistan during the mid- to late nineties to scenes from Japan in the early two-thousands. But Steele-Perkins, a member of the Magnum photo agency, was particularly … 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. Gabrielle Calvocoressi’s most recent collection, “The New Economy,” was a finalist for the 2025 National Book Award for Poetry, and one of their poems was included … Read more