Charting Seamus Heaney’s Wordsworthian journey By Roy Foster
Writing novels by AI – and committee By Gordon Fraser
Our contributors choose their favourites
Simone Weil’s ethical life class By A. Rebecca Rozelle-Stone
THE NEW YORKER MAGAZINE: The latest cover features Edel Rodriguez’s “Mayor Mamdani”
His opponents tried to smear him for his youth, inexperience, and leftist politics. But New Yorkers didn’t want a hardened political insider to be mayor—they wanted Zohran Mamdani.
For years before taking office, the former Vice-President appeared less dogmatic than he was.
On “West End Girl,” all the gritty bits are there: messages with a husband’s mistress, the discovery of a cache of sex toys.
THE NEW YORKER MAGAZINE: The latest cover features ‘Sudden Shower’ by Sergio-Garcia Sanchez.
ChatGPT does not have an inner life. Yet it seems to know what it’s talking about. By James Somers
The President’s goals were clear on the first day of his term, when he issued an executive order overruling the Fourteenth Amendment’s birthright-citizenship clause. By Jelani Cobb
The jewel heist at the Louvre reminded Brooklynites of the time, in 1952, when two bejewelled crowns were swiped from a beloved local church—the one with a Mob boss on the ceiling. By Susan Mulcahy
The Poems of Seamus Heaney By Rosie Lavan, Bernard O’Donoghue and Matthew Hollis (edd.)
A woman stands, oblivious to our gaze, absorbed entirely in her activity – reading, pouring, weighing, holding out her pearls. A window to the left admits a radiance, which falls variously on the common stuff the room contains. The light enters as an absolute blank, but infuses colour as it illuminates the scene.
The rush to tell the story of Katherine Mansfield’s short, fascinating life began as soon as she died. Her husband, John Middleton Murry, a gifted editor, notoriously turned the publication of her writing into an industry.
TIMES LITERARY SUPPLEMENT: The latest issue features ‘Extinction rebellion’ – How Tennyson speaks to our fears.
The troubled history of US-China relations By Katie Stallard
Iris Murdoch’s unseen poetry, transcribed for the first time By Miles Leeson
Tennyson’s embrace of science and catastrophe theory By Angela Leighton
Tales of the uncanny from a master of ambiguity By Joyce Carol Oates
107 Days by Kamala Harris
Kamala Harris’s memoir 107 Days succeeds at least in distilling the evasions and weaknesses of the modern Democratic Party.
The Life and Death of States: Central Europe and the Transformation of Modern Sovereignty by Natasha Wheatley
How States Die: Membership and Survival in the International System by Douglas Lemke
World War I set the stage a century ago for new ways of thinking about where states come from and what happens when they disappear.
After a gloomy few years, promising auction results and some exciting upcoming sales suggest that the market could be on the road to recovery
A century ago, Alexander Tamanyan devised a startling layout for the city. Despite changes in regime and fashion, his vision has endured
THE NEW YORKER MAGAZINE: The latest cover features Victoria Tentler-Krylov’s “Racing Through Fall” – The city’s autumnal glow.
The act of destruction is precisely the point: a kind of performance piece meant to display Trump’s arbitrary power over the Presidency, including its physical seat. By Adam Gopnik
His posts and rants are omnipresent, ugly, and unhinged. Don’t look to history to make it make sense. By Jill Lepore
A data center, which can use as much electricity as Philadelphia, is the new American factory, creating the future and propping up the economy. How long can this last? By Stephen Witt
THE NEW YORKER MAGAZINE: The latest cover features Christoph Niemann’s “Market Shift” – How the wealthy sleep at night.
As a long-overdue ceasefire takes hold amid the ruins of Gaza, the President’s visit to Jerusalem is more about transactional politics than transformative peace. By David Remnick
With its standout deals and generous employment practices, the warehouse chain became a feel-good American institution. In a fraught time, it can be hard to remain beloved. By Molly Fischer
Russell Vought is using the White House budget office to lay waste to the federal bureaucracy—firing workers, decimating agencies, and testing the rule of law. By Andy Kroll
LOS ANGELES REVIEW OF BOOKS: The latest issue of LARB “Alien“, which wades into the unfamiliar. In Greta Rainbow’s “Tourists,” a woman travels to foggy Athens, where she confronts the unknowability of the city and her partner. In Sara Levine’s “Peter and the Women,” Peter (badly, ineptly, inappropriately, indecently) manages the women in his life: his hospice-bound mother and her nurse, as well as his girlfriends and one-night stands. And in Ari Braverman’s “Dogs of the Solar Steppe,” the narrator faces a decade-long punishment, performing domestic labor for a woman called Big Mother. Her former life assumes a “sheen of fantasy,” and the story warns us of “the easy slippage between one state and another.”
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