Style
Dolly Parton’s Quietly Inspiring Defense of Marriage
Abelard and Heloise, Vladimir and Véra, Prince Albert and Queen Victoria: to these historic his and hers, I would add Carl and Dolly. That’s Dean and Parton, the Tennessee...
Robert Macfarlane on Books That Hold Water
The writer and scholar Robert Macfarlane has spent much of his life climbing up mountains and fishing on rivers, and his passion for each extends to his writing. Over...
How Donald Trump’s Crypto Dealings Push the Bounds of Corruption
Imagine that someone in a position of great political power created a hundred billion raffle tickets and made them available for public purchase. If you buy the tickets, eventually...
Spare a Thought for the Snitch
The Boston Globe’s investigative Spotlight team has been reporting on wrongdoing for decades—before and after its stunning exposure, in 2003, of the vast Catholic Church child-sexual-abuse crisis, dramatized in...
One Hundred Years of New York Movies
This magazine’s ongoing centenary celebration has included a cinematic component: a series at Film Forum, “Tales from The New Yorker,” which featured movies connected to The New Yorker’s history,...
A Day in the Live-Streamed Life of Donald Trump
In Donald Trump’s first term, he reinvented many things about how the job of President was done. The strictly scheduled day of his predecessors—the rigid procession of fifteen-minute meetings,...
Sigrid Nunez on the Beauty of Narrative Restraint
“Plot, shmot,” the writer and editor William Maxwell once said to John Updike. Sigrid Nunez couldn’t agree more. She used to tell her students, “You don’t need a plot,...
What Can We Learn from Broken Things?
In my spare time, I’m an obsessed photographer, and through the years I’ve used dozens of cameras. A while ago, a horrible misfortune befell the one that I treasure...
My New York City Tour of Tours
I’m a sucker for guided tours. I love a CliffsNotes condensation of a place. All of Rome in ninety minutes gave me a Visigothic sense of accomplishment, untarnished even...
Why I Broke Up with New York
All this may seem to imply some deeper judgment about the city—that I think it’s wanton and unregulated, a “Where’s Waldo?” of Boschian perversion. But I will always defend...
