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The New Yorker

The Fall of My Teen-Age Self

Zadie Smith recalls the most significant day of her adolescence: “Many interesting things have happened to adult me, but in the opinion of teen-age me there is only one real event in our lives and it occurred on the sixteenth of April, 1993, when I fell thirty feet from my bedroom window.”

A scan of a photograph of Zadie Smith in her youth holding a guitar.
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The Lede

Reporting and analysis on the affairs of the day.

The Supreme Court’s Self-Excusing Ethics Code

Under the Court’s new rules, the Justices appear not to have made any mistakes.

Elon Musk’s Poisoned Platform

Users and advertisers are fleeing X after Musk’s message supporting an antisemitic conspiracy theory. But the platform seems destined to die a slow death.

The Next Power Plant Is on the Roof and in the Basement

A Department of Energy report promotes a new system that could remake the energy grid.

Biden and Xi’s Blunt Talk

Nobody should expect diplomacy between the U.S. and China to return to the performative, if misleading, good cheer of a generation ago.

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Profiles

Joyce Carol Oates’s Relentless, Prolific Search for a Self

In more than a hundred works of fiction, Oates has investigated the question of personality—while doubting that she actually has one.

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Annals of Communications

All the Newspapers’ Men

In Martin Baron’s “Collision of Power” and Adam Nagourney’s “The Times,” two well-known journalists turn their investigative power on their institutions—and themselves.

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The Israel-Hamas War

How Qatar Became the World’s Go-To Hostage Negotiator

The Gulf state is trying to help Hamas and Israel come to a deal. How did it become one of the world’s most prominent hostage-situation mediators?

The Trauma of Gaza’s Doctors

The head of mission for Doctors Without Borders in Palestine on the horrors of practicing medicine under siege.

Escalating Violence Between Israel and Lebanon

There’s a sense of history repeating itself along the border, where tens of thousands have been displaced and the civilian death toll is climbing.

The Use of Children, Hostages, and the Vulnerable in War

The war in Gaza has the feel of history sliding backward.

How Gaza and the British Right Split London on Armistice Day

Duelling protests, a country divided over Israel and Palestine, and the return of David Cameron.

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Cultural Comment

The Surprising Sweetness of the Ayn Rand Fangirl Novel

Lexi Freiman’s “The Book of Ayn” paints an obsession with the godmother of libertarianism as a useful but transient phase.

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Comment

Opinions, arguments, and reflections on the news.

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The New Yorker Interview

John Woo Returns to Hollywood

The Hong Kong filmmaker talks about his quest to make personal genre movies, his enduring faith in friendship, and his new, dialogue-free revenge drama, “Silent Night.”

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Thanksgiving Reads & Recipes

The Open Secret of Thanksgiving, and a Recipe

Whether the feast is transcendent or mediocre, whether you are fond of your dinner companions or can’t stand them, the day is defined by something else.

A Thanksgiving Dinner That Longs for France

Recipes for a small but still lavish holiday meal.

Win Thanksgiving (and Post-Thanksgiving) with Double Stock

A true double stock is a culinary showpiece, an investment of time and ingredients that is worthy of its own spotlight.

Thanksgiving Without Borders

The challenge of cooking Thanksgiving dinner abroad.

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A Mother’s Grief in New Haven

Laquvia Jones lost both of her sons to shootings. Now she wonders why a city with a deep sense of community—and one of the wealthiest universities in the world—can’t figure out how to address gun violence. 

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The Critics

On Television

Why Can’t We Quit “The Morning Show”?

Apple’s glossy experiment in prestige melodrama is utterly baffling—and must-watch TV.

Cultural Comment

The Droll Capitalist Parable of Cabbage Patch Kids

A new documentary, “Billion Dollar Babies,” shows how a product of Appalachian folk art drew the blueprint for all holiday toy crazes to come.

The Front Row

“Saltburn” Is a “Brideshead” for the Incel Age

Emerald Fennell’s class satire is diabolically clever, but there is a void at its center.

Listening Booth

PinkPantheress Is a Hopeless Romantic

On her new album, “Heaven Knows,” the songstress displays a yearning quality that’s surprisingly difficult to locate in today’s pop world.

The Front Row

Frederick Wiseman Reveals the Mighty Substance of Culinary Luxury

The nonagenarian’s new film, “Menus-Plaisirs—Les Troisgros,” examines the social and aesthetic context of a world-famous three-star restaurant.

The Theatre

“Hell’s Kitchen” Brings Alicia Keys’s Musical Power to the Public

The R. & B. titan shares a fictionalized version of her coming of age.

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The Food Scene

A Food-Themed Holiday Gift Guide

Kitchen tools, culinary trinkets, tinned treats, dinner-party fixings, and many more curios for the person of appetites in your life.

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Annals of Artificial Intelligence

The Godfather of A.I. Fears What He’s Built

Geoffrey Hinton has spent a lifetime teaching computers to learn. Now he worries that artificial brains are better than ours.

A Coder Considers the Waning Days of the Craft

Coding has always felt to me like an endlessly deep and rich domain. Now I find myself wanting to write a eulogy for it.

Does A.I. Lead Police to Ignore Contradictory Evidence?

Too often, a facial-recognition search represents virtually the entirety of a police investigation.

What the Doomsayers Get Wrong About Deepfakes

Experts have warned that realistic A.I.-generated videos might wreak havoc through deception. What’s happened is troubling in a different way.

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Dept. of Popular Culture

Bravo in the Flesh

More than a hundred and sixty reality stars descended on Las Vegas, for BravoCon, where they were pulled apart by their harshest critics, who also happen to be their most diehard fans.

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Books

What if Nostalgia Isn’t What It Used to Be?

As our faith in the future plummets and the present blends with the past, we doomscroll and catastrophize and feel certain that we’ve reached the point where history has fallen apart.

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Puzzles & Games

Take a break and play.

Name Drop: Make Me Laugh

Can you guess the identities of these nine comedy legends?

The Crossword

A puzzle that ranges in difficulty, with themes on Fridays.

Solve the latest puzzle

The Cryptic

A puzzle for lovers of wily wordplay.

Solve this week’s puzzle

Caption Contest

We provide a cartoon, you provide a caption.

Enter this week’s contest
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Listen to The New Yorker

The Kingpin Who Kidnapped Migrants for Ransom

An Eritrean trafficker promised to help Africans desperate to reach Europe—then brutalized them inside a Libyan compound while extorting their families back home. With his fortune, he partied in Dubai.

Bayard Rustin Gets to Shine in Our Era

The civil-rights mastermind was sidelined by his own movement. Now he’s back in the spotlight. What can we learn from his strategies of resistance?

Can Happiness Be Taught?

Bolstered by Oprah, a Harvard Business School professor thinks you should run your inner self like a company.

A Trans Teen in an Anti-Trans State

One family’s move to find gender-affirming care.

Fiction

“Beauty Contest”

Photograph by Kyoko Hamada for The New Yorker
My mother had two treasures. One was an opal ring, the only present she ever received from my late father. She kept it in a small box and took it out only once or twice a year, on special occasions, for a few short hours. The box, which was covered in deep-blue velvet, made a little sound, like a kitten yawning, when it was opened.

When I was alone in the house, I often opened the box to stare at the opal.Continue reading »

The Talk of the Town

Fetish Dept.

Johnny Marr Loves his Axes

Now You See It

The Statue Wars Turn to Cyberspace

London Postcard

Milk, the Book!

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