At the Democratic National Convention, the sense of relief was as overwhelming as the general euphoria—but the campaign against Donald Trump has only just begun. By Jonathan Blitzer
The New Yorker (August 19, 2024): The latest issue featuresBarry Blitt’s “Roller Coaster” – The highs and lows of the campaigns for America’s highest office.
President Biden has proposed radical changes to the Court. Reviewing them is a reminder of why reform is so hard, despite dissatisfaction and a wealth of ideas.
Julie Benko, who hit it big after going on in place of Beanie Feldstein in “Funny Girl,” has a lot of advice for the Vice-President, now that she’s done with waiting in the wings.
By Zach Helfand
What Does Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., Actually Want?
The third-party Presidential candidate has a troubled past, a shambolic campaign, and some surprisingly good poll numbers.
Fifty years after Shirley Chisholm ran for the Presidency, we find ourselves yet again questioning the durability of outmoded presumptions about race and gender. By Jelani Cobb
The Republican National Convention and the Iconography of Triumph
In Milwaukee, with a candidate who had just cheated death, the resentment rhetoric of Trump’s 2016 campaign gave way to an atmosphere of festive certainty. By Anthony Lane
Gillian Anderson’s Sex Education
She became famous playing buttoned-up Agent Scully. But in midlife her characters often have a strong erotic charge—and now she’s edited “Want,” a book of sexual fantasies. By Rebecca Mead
Where Do Republicans and Democrats Stand After the R.N.C.?
Biden imperilled his candidacy at the debate because of his inability to speak coherently. At the convention, Trump was doing something similar, and couldn’t stop. By Benjamin Wallace-Wells
Will Hezbollah and Israel Go to War?
Months of fighting at the border threaten to ignite an all-out conflict that could devastate the region.
Should We Abolish Prisons?
Our carceral system is characterized by frequent brutality and ingrained indifference. Finding a better way requires that we freely imagine alternatives. By Adam Gopnik
From the time of the Revolutionary War to the fires of the nineteen-seventies, the history of the borough has always been shaped by its in-between-ness.
The actor talks about the origins of “Adaptation,” his potential leap to television, and the art of “keeping it enigmatic.”
By Susan Orlean
The wobbly distinction between reality and artifice fascinates Nicolas Cage. The first time we encountered each other was in 2001, during the making of “Adaptation”—a film based on Charlie Kaufman’s struggle to adapt my book “The Orchid Thief” for the screen—in which Cage played Kaufman and his twin, Donald. He was in the middle of a scene, and I tiptoed onto the set as quietly as possible, convinced that any distraction would trigger one of the eruptions for which Cage had become famous. Between takes, he glanced at the handful of people watching, and exclaimed cheerily, “Oh, guys, look!” He pointed at me and a small, fuzzy-haired man I hadn’t noticed beside me. “It’s the real Charlie and the real Susan!” He seemed tickled by this collision between the characters in the movie and their real-life counterparts, and insisted that the crew take note. (Kaufman and I, who had never met before that moment, slunk away sheepishly.)
It can be easy to take the greatness of “This American Life,” the weekly public-radio show and podcast hosted by Ira Glass, for granted. The show, which Glass co-founded in 1995 at WBEZ, in Chicago, has had the same essential format for twenty-eight years and more than eight hundred episodes. It was instrumental in creating a genre of audio journalism that has flourished in recent decades, especially since the podcast boom—which was initiated by the show’s first spinoff, “Serial,” in 2014. Like “The Daily Show” or Second City, “This American Life” has trained a generation of talented people, and Glass’s three-act structures, chatty cadences, and mixture of analysis and whimsy are now so familiar as to seem unremarkable.
Mary Robison on the Art of Fiction: “The first thing they’d say was ‘This is a nice story—where’s your novel?’ And I would just lie my head off. ‘Oh, it’s at home. It’s almost there!’”
Elaine Scarry on the Art of Nonfiction: “A lot of my troubles in life have come from taking literally what I should have understood as figurative.”
Prose by Peter Cornell, Rodolfo Enrique Fogwill, Renee Gladman, Nancy Lemann, Banu Mushtaq, K Patrick, and Anne Serre.
Jhumpa Lahiri on the Art of Fiction: “My question is, What makes a language yours, or mine?”
Alice Notley on the Art of Poetry: “Writing is not therapy. That’s the last thing it is. I still have my grief.”
Prose by Elijah Bailey, Julien Columeau, Joanna Kavenna, Samanta Schweblin, Eliot Weinberger, and Joy Williams.
Poetry by Gbenga Adesina, Elisa Gabbert, Jessica Laser, Maureen N. McLane, Mary Ruefle, Julian Talamantez Brolaski, and Matthew Zapruder.
Paris Review Spring 2024 — The new issue features interviews with Jhumpa Lahiri and Alice Notley, prose by Joy Williams and Eliot Weinberger, poetry by Mary Ruefle and Jessica Laser, art by Chris Oh and Farah Al Qasimi, two covers by Nicolas Party, and more…
Jhumpa Lahiri on the Art of Fiction: “My question is, What makes a language yours, or mine?”
Alice Notley on the Art of Poetry: “Writing is not therapy. That’s the last thing it is. I still have my grief.”
Prose by Elijah Bailey, Julien Columeau, Joanna Kavenna, Samanta Schweblin, Eliot Weinberger, and Joy Williams.
Poetry by Gbenga Adesina, Elisa Gabbert, Jessica Laser, Maureen N. McLane, Mary Ruefle, Julian Talamantez Brolaski, and Matthew Zapruder.