THE NEW YORKER MAGAZINE: The latest issue features Jason Zengerle on Tucker Carlson, Joshua Yaffa on Trump and Greenland, Hermione Hoby on David Foster Wallace, and more.
The President caused a crisis in NATO and deepened European distrust toward the U.S. to end up with basically the same set of options that existed months ago. By Joshua Yaffa
What MAGA Can Teach Democrats About Organizing—and Infighting
Republicans have become adept at creating broad coalitions in which supporting Trump is the only requirement. Democrats get tied up with litmus tests.
How Shinzo Abe’s Assassination Brought the Moonies Back Into the Limelight
A shocking act of political violence exposed the cult’s deep influence. By E. Tammy Kim
The US capture of Venezuelan president Nicolás Maduro reinforces the Trump administration’s capacity to invent any pretext to justify the use of armed force.
A new life of Gertrude Stein treats her as a philosopher of language to trust, not explain—and gathers force from archival discoveries and intriguing plots of her reception and reputation.
In the contemporary Chinese context, the idea that crucial parts of the central government could simply cease to operate for more than a month, as part of a procedural standoff between rival governing factions, would beggar belief. And in turn, to an American observer, the thought that miles of new high-speed rail lines could simply materialize by bureaucratic fiat, unencumbered by years of legislative horse-trading, environmental review, suburban backlash, and budgetary overshoot, is no less astonishing.
Adams will be remembered for his petty corruption, his self-mythologizing, and his ignominious dealmaking with the Trump White House; but he should also be remembered as the mayor who got New Yorkers to stop tossing giant bags of trash onto city sidewalks as if there were no alternative. You can laugh at a New York mayor who walks into a press conference wheeling out a trash can, beaming as if he invented the contraption, while “Empire State of Mind” blares triumphantly in the background. But truly, Adams’s proclaimed “trash revolution” represented a tremendous advance over abysmal past practice.
“Men make their own history,” Marx wrote, “but they do not make it as they please; they do not make it under self-selected circumstances, but under circumstances existing already, given and transmitted from the past.” That may be broadly true, but Dick Cheney got to make history under the exact circumstances he would have chosen.
He once defied the G.O.P. by blasting military interventions. But what looked like anti-interventionism is really a preference for power freed from the pretense of principle. By Daniel Immerwahr
Denmark Is Sick of Being Bullied by Trump
The U.S., once Denmark’s closest ally, is threatening to steal Greenland and attacking the country’s wind-power industry. Is this a permanent breakup? By Margaret Talbot
How Marco Rubio Went from “Little Marco” to Trump’s Foreign-Policy Enabler
As Secretary of State, the President’s onetime foe now offers him lavish displays of public praise—and will execute his agenda in Venezuela and around the globe. By Dexter Filkins
Turner is on our banknotes, Constable in our hearts By Ferdinand Mount
Coming out of Tate Britain just before noon on Budget Day, you are blinded by a blistering white sun behind Vauxhall Cross. The steepling glass towers south of the river are washed in an opal mist, the ziggurats of the MI6 HQ eclipsed to a ruined beige. Vauxhall Bridge gleams in the scarlet and yellow of a Turner sunset. J. M. W. would have rushed to the Embankment, whipped out his sketchbook, then worked up the whole shimmering scene into a six-footer and called it something like “The End of England”. John Constable would probably have turned away to catch the next coach to Hampstead Heath to paint Branch Hill Pond again.
‘One day, they’ll find me out’
How the young Dylan Thomas repeatedly stole from others By Alessandro Gallenzi
Mother was always right
A love-hate relationship recalled by France’s ‘greatest living writer’ By Marie Darrieussecq
The notebook fallacy
Why stylish stationery won’t change your life By Ian Sansom
News, Views and Reviews For The Intellectually Curious
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