What Can We Do About Pandemic-Related Learning Loss?
Remote school was devastating for many students. In Richmond, Virginia, a plan to switch to a year-round calendar brought promise and pushback.
Previews: The New Yorker Magazine – June 26, 2023
Tag Archives: The New Yorker
Previews: The New Yorker Magazine – June 19, 2023
How Dowries Are Fueling a Femicide Epidemic
Every year in India, many thousands are killed in marriage-payment disputes. Why does this war on women persist?
By Manvir Singh
In September 21, 2021, my mother sent a message to my extended family’s WhatsApp group: “Neeti had a heart attack and suddenly passed away—too tragic!” Neeti was a daughter of her sister, and someone I’d known all my life. But my cousin and I inhabited different worlds. I was born and raised in suburban New Jersey; she was a lifelong Delhiite. To me, Neeti and her identical twin, Preeti, exuded an urban glamour. At weddings, they sported chic, oversized sunglasses and matching, pastel-colored Punjabi-style outfits. Their faces looked a lot like my mom’s: long, with prominent cheekbones and almond-shaped eyes.
Biden’s Dilemma at the Border
America’s broken immigration system has spawned a national fight, but Congress lacks the political will to fix it.
Earlier this year, in a helicopter above the Mexican border, a team of Texas state troopers searched for people crossing into the United States. As they flew over a neighborhood west of El Paso, the radio crackled with the voices of Border Patrol agents on the ground below, calling out migrants who were evading them.
New Yorker 2023 Reviews: Richard Brody’s Best Films
The New YorkerPreviews: The New Yorker Magazine – June 12, 2023
How the Marvel Cinematic Universe Swallowed Hollywood
Robert Redford, Gwyneth Paltrow, Paul Rudd, and Angela Bassett now disappear into movies whose plots can come down to “Keep glowy thing away from bad guy.”
The Writer Who Insists He Knew Tennessee Williams
James Grissom says that he met the playwright and his famous muses, and quoted them extensively in his work. Not everyone believes him.
By Helen Shaw
How a Fringe Legal Theory Became a Threat to Democracy
Lawyers tried to use the independent-state-legislature theory to sway the outcomes of the 2000 and 2020 elections. What if it were to become the law of the land?
An extreme version of the theory could give state legislatures the power to award Electoral College votes however they see fit. Illustrations by Golden Cosmos
Previews: The New Yorker Magazine – June 5, 2023
The Case For and Against Ed Sheeran
The pop singer’s trial for copyright infringement of Marvin Gaye and Ed Townsend’s “Let’s Get It On” highlights how hard it is to draw the property lines of pop.
The Trials and Triumphs of Writing While Woman
From Mary Wollstonecraft to Toni Morrison, getting a start meant starting over.
When the critic Joanna Biggs was thirty-two, her mother, still in her fifties, was diagnosed with Alzheimer’s. “Everything wobbled,” she recalls. Biggs was married but not sure she wanted to be, suddenly distrustful of the neat, conventional course—marriage, kids, burbs—plotted out since she met her husband, at nineteen. It was as though the disease’s rending of a maternal bond had severed her contract with the prescribed feminine itinerary. Soon enough, she and her husband were seeing other people; then he moved out, and she began making pilgrimages to visit Mary Wollstonecraft’s grave.
Previews: The New Yorker Magazine – May 29, 2023
Stephen Satterfield Puts Black Cuisine at the Center of U.S. History
The host of Netflix’s “High on the Hog” draws seductive stories from a bittersweet legacy.
Stephen Satterfield, the host of the Netflix food-history series “High on the Hog,” was bent over the stove in his parents’ kitchen, near Atlanta. It was one o’clock on a February afternoon, and he was preparing Sunday dinner for the family. Most of the meal was canonical Black Southern food: turnip greens simmered for hours, cheese grits, biscuits baked in a cast-iron skillet.
What We Owe Our Trees
Forests fed us, housed us, and made our way of life possible. But they can’t save us if we can’t save them.
By Jill Lepore
The woods I know best, love best, are made of Northern hardwoods, sugar maple and white ash, timber-tall; black and yellow birch, tiger-skinned; seedlings and saplings of blighted beech and striped maple creeping up, knock-kneed, from a forest floor of princess pine and Christmas fern, shag-rugged. White-tailed deer dart through softwood stands of pine and hemlock, bucks and does, the last leaping fawn, leaving tracks that look like tiny human lungs, trails that people can only ever see in the snow, even though, long after snowmelt, dogs can smell them, tracking, snuffling, shuddering with the thrill of the hunt and noshing on deer scat for dog treats.
Two Weeks at the Front in Ukraine
In the trenches in the Donbas, infantrymen face unrelenting horrors, from missiles to grenades to helicopter fire.
A twenty-two-year-old Ukrainian sniper, code-named Student, stuffed candy wrappers into his ears before firing a rifle at the Russians’ tree line. He’d been discharged from the hospital two weeks earlier, after being shot in the thigh.Photographs by Maxim Dondyuk for The New Yorker
Previews: The New Yorker Magazine – May 22, 2023
How Philipp Plein Became the King of Low-Brow High Fashion
The maximalist designer has positioned himself as an underdog hero of the common man, who is successful despite the falsity and the snobbery of the élites.
By Naomi Fry
Earth League International Hunts the Hunters
A conservation N.G.O. infiltrates wildlife-trafficking rings to bring them down.
By Tad Friend
How a Disaster Expert Prepares for the Worst
Lucy Easthope, who has worked on major emergencies since 9/11, says that small interventions can make a significant difference.
By Sam Knight
Previews: The New Yorker Magazine – May 15, 2023
Notes from Prince Harry’s Ghostwriter
Collaborating on his memoir, “Spare,” meant spending hours together on Zoom, meeting his inner circle, and gaining a new perspective on the tabloids.
The Filmmakers Who Voyaged Inside the Body
For more than a decade, two “recovering” anthropologists have brought documentary closer to the human experience. Now they’ve made the camera part of our flesh and blood.
The Critics
- Books – Martin Luther King, Jr., and the Perilous Power of RespectabilityWe revere the man and revile the strategy, but King knew what he was doing.By Kelefa Sanneh
- Books – Briefly Noted“Nothing Stays Put,” “Still Life with Bones,” “Stealing,” and “Hit Parade of Tears.”
- Books – BuzzFeed, Gawker, and the Casualties of the Traffic WarsBen Smith’s new book shows how the race for clicks spawned—then strangled—the new media.By Nathan Heller
- Musical Events – Yo-Yo Ma Goes Underground with the Louisville OrchestraTeddy Abrams, the ensemble’s music director, has created a work about Mammoth Cave—and staged the piece inside its reverberating walls.By Alex Ross
Previews: The New Yorker Magazine – May 8, 2023
Can Charles Keep Quiet as King?
As Prince of Wales, Charles was always ready with an opinion. Now, with his coronation at hand, his job is to have none.
“My great problem in life is that I do not really know what my role in life is,” Charles once said, adding, “I must find one.”Photo illustration by Alma Haser for The New Yorker; Source photographs from Getty
Barry Blitt’s “Room at the Top”
The artist discusses being young and adrift in London, and gives King Charles tips for painting with watercolors.
New Yorker covers don’t always reflect current events, but some staged proceedings, both anachronistic and immemorial, can be catnip for cartoonists and commentators alike. King Charles III automatically acceded to the throne when his mother, Queen Elizabeth II, died on September 8, 2022. Charles, the longest-serving heir apparent in Britain’s history, spent seven decades preparing for the role of monarch. He became the next in line to reign over the United Kingdom at three years old, when Elizabeth became queen, in 1952.
Previews: The New Yorker Magazine – April 24, 2023
JooHee Yoon’s “Drawing Hands with A.I. (After M. C. Escher)”
The artist discusses artistry, artificial intelligence, and the human experience.
Chatbots and image generators, newly on the rise, have sparked our imaginations—and our fears. As artificial-intelligence machines sharpen their ability to translate written prompts into images that accurately capture both style and substance, some visual artists worry that their specialized skills might be rendered irrelevant.
“Drawing Hands,” M. C. Escher, 1948.
The Future of Fertility
A new crop of biotech startups want to revolutionize human reproduction.
In 2016, two Japanese reproductive biologists, Katsuhiko Hayashi and Mitinori Saitou, made an announcement in the journal Nature that read like a science-fiction novel. The researchers had taken skin cells from the tip of a mouse’s tail, reprogrammed them into stem cells, and then turned those stem cells into egg cells.
Crooks’ Mistaken Bet on Encrypted Phones
Drug syndicates and other criminal groups bought into the idea that a new kind of phone network couldn’t be infiltrated by cops. They were wrong—big time.
Many criminals have been convicted as a result of encrypted-phone stings—more than four hundred in the U.K. alone.Illustration by Max Löffler
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