Tag Archives: Power Elite

Previews: The New Yorker Magazine – Feb 12 & 19, 2024

Pixelated Eustace Tilley magazine cover that appears and disappears.

The New Yorker (February 5, 2024): The new issue‘s cover features Nicholas Konrad’s “Online Profile” – The magazine celebrates its ninety-ninth anniversary..

How Nikola Jokić Became the World’s Best Basketball Player

Nikola Jokić holding a basketball during a game.

He doesn’t run very fast or jump very high, and seems to prefer the company of horses. But he has mastered the game’s new geometry like nobody else.

By Louisa Thomas

The Art World Before and After Thelma Golden

Thelma Golden photographed by Lyle Ashton Harris.

When Golden was a young curator in the nineties, her shows, centering Black artists, were unprecedented. Today, those artists are the stars of the art market.

By Calvin Tomkins

Baruch Spinoza and the Art of Thinking in Dangerous Times

A portrait of Baruch Spinoza by Franz Wulfhagen, 1664.

The philosopher was a champion of political and intellectual freedom, but he had no interest in being a martyr. Instead, he shows us how prudence and boldness can go hand in hand.

By Adam Kirsch

Previews: The New Yorker Magazine- February 5, 2024

A family shares a meal to celebrate Lunar New Year.

The New Yorker (January 29, 2024): The new issue‘s cover features Sarula Bao’s “Lunar New Year” – The artist depicts the joys of gathering with loved ones, around a table of good food

The Rural Ski Slope Caught Up in an International Scam

When the scheme became public Vermonts governor said “We all feel betrayed.”

A federal program promised to bring foreign investment to remote parts of the country. It soon became rife with fraud.

By Sheelah Kolhatkar

As the general manager of the Jay Peak ski resort, Bill Stenger rose most days around 6 a.m. and arrived at the slopes before seven. He’d check in with his head snowmaker and the ski-patrol staff, visit the two hotels on the property, and chat with the maintenance workers, the lift operators, the food-and-beverage manager, and the ski-school instructors—a kind of management through constant motion. Stenger is seventy-five, with white hair, wire-rimmed reading glasses, and a sturdy physique that makes him look built for fuzzy sweaters. 

The Perverse Policies That Fuel Wildfires

We thought we could master nature, but we were playing with fire.

By Elizabeth Kolbert

Ukraine’s Democracy in Darkness

A photo-illustration of Zelensky and the Ukrainian parliament.

With elections postponed and no end to the war with Russia in sight, Volodymyr Zelensky and his political allies are becoming like the officials they once promised to root out: entrenched.

By Masha Gessen

Previews: The New Yorker Magazine- January 29, 2024

A chicken takes a bath on a rainy day in the city.

The New Yorker (January 22, 2024): The new issue‘s cover features Roz Chast’s “Bird Bath” – The artist depicts her favorite antidote for dreary winter weather: a nice, hot bath.

Rules for the Ruling Class

An illustration of a bird walking above other birds.

How to thrive in the power élite—while declaring it your enemy

By Evan Osnos

As a young man in the nineteen-eighties, Tucker Swanson McNear Carlson set out to claim his stake in the establishment. His access to money and influence started at home. His stepmother, Patricia, was an heir to the Swanson frozen-food fortune. His father, Dick, was a California TV anchor who became a Washington fixture after a stint in the Reagan Administration. For fortunate clans like the Carlsons, it was “A Wonderful Time,” to borrow the title of a volume of contemporaneous portraits of “the life of America’s elite,” which included “the Cabots sailing off Boston’s North Shore, and Barry Goldwater on the range in Arizona.”

Sofia Coppola’s Path to Filming Gilded Adolescence

Sophia Coppola sits on a stool under a bright light.

There are few Hollywood families in which one famous director has spawned another. Coppola says, “It’s not easy for anyone in this business, even though it looks easy for me.”

By Rachel Syme

When Eleanor Coppola went into labor with her third child, on May 14, 1971, at a hospital in Manhattan, her husband, the director Francis Ford Coppola, was on location in Harlem, shooting a scene for “The Godfather.” Hearing the news, he grabbed a camcorder from the set and raced over to capture the moment. “When they say, ‘It’s a girl,’ my dad gasps and nearly drops the camera,” Sofia Coppola told me recently, of her birth video. “My mom is there, just trying to focus.” The footage—which has been screened by the family multiple times over the years, and as part of a feminist art installation designed by Eleanor—was the first of many instances in which Sofia would be seen through her father’s lens. When she was just a few months old, Francis cast her in her first official film role, as the infant in the dénouement of “The Godfather,” in which Michael Corleone, the ascendant boss of the Corleone crime family, anoints the head of his newborn nephew as his associates murder rival gangsters one by one.