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  • Tucker Carlson’s Nationalist Crusade

    Neff agreed with other AutoAdmit commenters who argued that Michael Brown deserved to be killed by a police officer in Ferguson, Missouri, complaining that “the violent criminals are even MORE heroic to Black people.” He claimed that the four liberal congresswomen known as the Squad—Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Ilhan Omar, Ayanna Pressley, and Rashida Tlaib—want to “MAKE YOUR COUNTRY A DUMPING GROUND FOR PEOPLE FROM THIRD WORLD SHITHOLES.” In another post, Neff warned that “once Democrats have the majorities to go full F**K WHITEY, things are going to get really wacky really quickly” and lamented that “there’s a suicidal impulse to Western peoples that honestly feels almost biological in origin.”

    In July, 2020, after a CNN reporter discovered Neff’s AutoAdmit posts, Neff resigned from Fox News. (Years later, Neff, who went on to work as a producer on Charlie Kirk’s podcast, would maintain that he was “the least racist person on AutoAdmit,” noting that, unlike many of the site’s users, “I never posted the N-word.”) Carlson, for his part, said that he was unaware of the posts. “We don’t endorse those words,” he said. “They have no connection to this show.” But Neff’s AutoAdmit habit was not a secret to some people he worked with. At the Daily Caller, Neff bragged about his posts to at least one colleague. “He was really proud of his AutoAdmit persona,” a former Caller staffer remembered. And Neff’s connection to Carlson was not a secret on AutoAdmit, either. In 2017, when Scott Greer, who had been a colleague of Carlson’s and Neff’s at the Daily Caller, appeared on “Tucker Carlson Tonight” to promote his book “No Campus for White Men,” Neff dropped a favorite AutoAdmit catchphrase—“the sweet treats of scholarship”—into Carlson’s script introducing Greer. Neff’s fellow AutoAdmit members didn’t miss the Easter egg. “We maed [sic] it,” one wrote.

    An analysis of the neo-Nazi website the Daily Stormer found that, between November, 2016, and November, 2018, Carlson was mentioned in two hundred and sixty-five of its articles, most of them featuring clips of his show, with titles like “Tucker FILLS Liberal Kike with LEAD for Demanding Gun Control” and “Tucker Carlson FORCES Fat Beaner Whore to CHOKE to DEATH on GREASY TACOS.” (Hannity, by comparison, was the subject of twenty-seven Daily Stormer articles during that period; Laura Ingraham, another of the network’s prime-time hosts, was the subject of four.) As one blog post on the site celebrated, “Tucker Carlson is basically ‘Daily Stormer: The Show.’ Other than the language used, he is covering all our talking points.”

    On a Monday morning in April, 2023, Carlson was at his winter home in Florida, having just sent his producers the first draft of his monologue for that evening’s show—a lengthy attack on Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, whom Carlson liked to refer to as Sandy Cortez, invoking her high-school nickname—when he got a call from Fox News’ chief executive, Suzanne Scott. “We’re taking you off the air,” Scott told him. He was being fired. Scott offered him the opportunity to include his own statement in a press release that Fox would send out in fifteen minutes announcing his departure, a face-saving gesture that would make it seem like the decision was a mutual parting of ways. Carlson refused. If Fox was firing him, he wanted the world to know. When the phone call was over, he sent an e-mail to his staff—known inside Fox as the Tuckertroop—telling them the news.

    In the days after Carlson’s firing, there was much speculation, both inside and outside of Fox, about the reasons behind it. Six days earlier, the network had settled a lawsuit with Dominion Voting Systems, which alleged that Fox News hosts, including Carlson, had knowingly aired false accusations that the company’s voting machines were used to change vote totals in the 2020 Presidential election. Some thought that Carlson’s dismissal had to do with offensive comments that were revealed during discovery, including a text message in which Carlson reportedly called Irena Briganti, the head of Fox News’ media-relations department, a “cunt.” Others wondered whether it could have been because of another lawsuit, brought by Abby Grossberg, a former head of booking on Carlson’s show, who accused him and the network of creating a hostile work environment. (Fox settled the suit for twelve million dollars.) Still others speculated that it had something to do with a potential lawsuit from Ray Epps, a January 6th protester from Arizona who was at the center of a conspiracy theory—amplified by Carlson—that Epps was a government provocateur placed in the crowd to spur an insurrection. In fact, a sympathetic profile of Epps had appeared on “60 Minutes” the night before Carlson’s firing. Perhaps Murdoch, who, at ninety-two, fit squarely in the CBS show’s viewer demographic, had seen it and got spooked. (Epps’s suit was eventually dismissed.)

    Jason Zengerle

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  • Inside Bari Weiss’s Hostile Takeover of CBS News

    Trump, for his part, was effusive in his praise of Weiss. “I think you have a great new leader, frankly, who’s the young woman that’s leading your whole enterprise,” he said during his sit-down with O’Donnell. “I don’t know her, but I hear she’s a great person.” After the recording concluded, Weiss stepped forward to introduce herself to the President. It was the first time that she’d met the man whose presence now loomed over her installation at the network. They greeted each other warmly, exchanging a kiss on the cheek.

    Weiss grew up in the Squirrel Hill neighborhood of Pittsburgh, “raised in what can be accurately described as an urban shtetl,” she wrote in her 2019 book, “How to Fight Anti-Semitism.” Her great-grandfather Philip (Chappy) Goldstein was a successful flyweight boxer who sometimes sported a Star of David on his boxing silks. Her parents worked in the family’s furniture store, where Weiss’s father, Lou, had a flair for marketing, doling out a line of candies called Weiss Krispie Treats to customers. Weiss attended a Jewish day school—which one of her three sisters now heads—and the family spent a couple of summers in Jerusalem, where her parents learned Hebrew. “I grew up in a family where we belonged to three synagogues,” Weiss told an interviewer in 2019. “It was not unusual for me to read Torah at shul and then go, say, to a Chabad family for lunch before heading to basketball practice.”

    The Weisses’ Shabbat dinners featured a rotating cast of guests and were often contentious. “I remember vividly, like, constant debate,” Weiss’s sister Casey told the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette last year. “Sometimes it got really heated.” Lou, who grew up in a “McGovern liberal” household, had become a conservative at Kenyon College. He kept copies of Commentary magazine and the Financial Times around the house, and frequently contributed op-eds to local Pittsburgh papers. His politics were centered around free markets and support for Israel. “They hate gays, and they subject women to horrible second-class treatment—not every single person, but as a group,” he told the Pittsburgh Jewish Chronicle in 2017, for an article about Syrian refugees. “If you bring them here, ultimately, they will vote. If you think they’ll vote to support Israeli interests, you’re sadly mistaken.” Weiss’s mother, Amy, has described herself as a “very moderate liberal Democrat”; she threatened a Lysistrata-esque sex strike in 2016 if Lou voted for Trump. (He ended up writing in Amy’s name.)

    Weiss’s bat-mitzvah ceremony was held at Pittsburgh’s Tree of Life synagogue, which, in 2018, became the site of the deadliest antisemitic attack in U.S. history, a mass shooting that left eleven congregants dead. Weiss covered the massacre for the Times, writing a moving report about the aftermath. “When an anti-Semitic murderer mows down Jews in the synagogue where you became a bat mitzvah, you might find yourself in the sanctuary again,” she wrote. “But instead of family and friends, the sanctuary is host to a crew of volunteers—the chevra kadisha—who will spend the week cleaning up every drop of blood because, according to Jewish tradition, each part of the body must be sanctified in death and so buried.”

    One of Weiss’s elementary-school teachers told the Post-Gazette that Weiss was “a power to reckon with, even in second grade.” At Shady Side Academy, a secular private high school, Weiss led pro-Israel events and organized student groups for interdenominational understanding. Students followed a dress code, inspiring a lifelong practice. “If you’re really getting down to work and you’re Bari Weiss,” her youngest sister, Suzy, told me, “you’re putting on a collared shirt.”

    “Mr. Karamazov is my father’s name. You can call me Dmitri, Mitka, Mitya, Dima, Mityok, D-Man, D. Doggy-Dogg . . .”

    Cartoon by Ivan Ehlers

    After graduation, in 2002, Weiss worked on a kibbutz near the Gaza border and studied at a yeshiva in Jerusalem before entering Columbia the following fall. During her sophomore year, she took an introductory course with Joseph Massad, an assistant professor in the Middle East and Asian Languages and Cultures department. Massad, a Jordan-born Palestinian academic, had recently become the subject of student accusations that the department’s faculty trafficked in antisemitism. In 2004, the Boston-based advocacy group the David Project helped produce a short film, “Columbia Unbecoming,” which featured interviews with Jewish students accusing certain professors of harassing them because of their support for Israel. A student who had served in the Israeli Army said that, during a public lecture, Massad asked him, “How many Palestinians have you killed?”

    Clare Malone

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  • Vinson Cunningham on Barry Blitt’s Obama “Fist Bump” Cover

    I was in a yellow cab in high summer when I saw it. Twenty-three at the time, I sometimes skimmed articles about politics on my clunky BlackBerry while cruising through Central Park to my first real job, fund-raising for Barack Obama’s 2008 Presidential campaign. Usually, the ride was placid. This time, I opened a link to an article in Politico (still an upstart outlet at the time) about a quickly growing controversy. Apparently, the latest cover of The New Yorker was a doozy.

    Barry Blitt’s already infamous illustration, which graced the July 21st issue, shows Barack and Michelle Obama in the Oval Office. The rug in the room, flat and ornate as a coin, looks proper to its setting. So does an insouciantly drawn old chair. But look at the Obamas! Instead of their customary J. Crew-ish Presidential attire—thin lapels, a sleeveless dress—the charismatic couple are outfitted in clothes that look like the loose parts of one big racist joke. The presumptive Democratic nominee wears a white thawb and sandals, and the future First Lady appears in the clichéd garb of an outdated Black radical: black shirt, camo pants, a rifle slung across her back. He wears a turban shaped like the Guggenheim; she’s got a scribbled-in Afro. Her face looks cruelly joyful while his is impossible to read. In the fireplace, an American flag is being eaten by flames. Osama bin Laden’s face sneers from a portrait on the wall. The couple bump their knuckles together, a reference to a recent bout of hysteria over an identical real-life gesture, sparked by a Fox News host who referred to it as a “terrorist fist jab.” It’s an image tightly packed with complex meanings, to say the least.

    Nearly two decades later, it can be hard to remember just how flagrantly racist the rhetoric against the Obamas often was. During the primaries, Hillary Clinton’s aide Mark Penn spent a whole TV interview testing how many times he could smoosh the words “cocaine” and “Obama” together. Right-wingers insisted not only that Obama had been born outside the United States but that he’d been educated at a Muslim “madrassa.” Michelle Obama’s throwaway comment about not having felt fully “proud” of her country until recently was pilloried as if she had cried, “Kill Whitey!” Speaking of “Whitey,” someone started a spurious rumor that she’d been recorded using the word.

    Blitt’s cover was, at heart, a work of media criticism, aimed at this latticework of horseshit. Here’s one big risk a public satirist of racism takes: by displaying a panoply of tropes and crude imagery, he reveals just how well he knows and can deploy them himself. It’s a generous act: assuring the rest of us—just as fixated on and poisoned by this stuff, whether we acknowledge it or not—that someone else is weighed down by this, too.

    Once I got to the office, I found out a lot of people were furious. Or at least they acted that way. One strain of the uproar had a touch of blithe condescension: there were people out there who wouldn’t get the joke, and who would take the cover as a straightforward assertion by The New Yorker—of all the joints in the world—regarding the attitudes and ideologies of the Obamas. Another strain, somewhat more reasonable, still rang of a prudish fear of images to which I have never been able to relate: to reproduce this imagery, for any reason at all, some said, was to add to its total volume and, over time, to augment its dark power.

    I’ll admit, I laughed in the cab. I still do when I see the cover now. I regard it as important evidence of the darker edges of a promising moment, a portrait of a nation that too often sees cartoons when confronted with flesh and blood. ♦

    Vinson Cunningham

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  • Why Trump Supports Protesters in Tehran but Not in Minneapolis

    On January 8th, the twelfth day of mass protests in Iran, which began when shopkeepers, responding to runaway inflation, closed Tehran’s Grand Bazaar, the Iranian government shut down public access to the internet, further shrouding an already largely closed society. Nevertheless, isolated images and details have been smuggled out, giving a hint of how brutal and monumental these events are.

    Video clips have circulated of people outside a morgue, unzipping body bags as they search for their loved ones. In the western city of Ilam, near the Iraqi border, security officials stormed a hospital to try to seize wounded protesters, while medical staff resisted. An ophthalmologist at a hospital in Tehran reported that it has been overwhelmed by casualties, including many people who were shot in the eye. In the conservative city of Mashhad, a journalist said that the streets were “full of blood.” The Iranian government has acknowledged the deaths of two thousand people, though international observers fear that the total may be much higher. The Chancellor of Germany, Friedrich Merz, insisted on Tuesday that the regime was in “its last days or weeks.” If he proves to be correct, it will be because of hundreds of thousands of brave acts by Iranian citizens—acts of discontent but also of idealism.

    The portfolio of this crisis landed across classified Washington, on the desks both of career staff in the intelligence and diplomatic services and of Donald Trump’s recent appointees, among whom idealism is an increasingly shunned philosophy. The norm in American foreign policy has been that all interventions, including blatantly self-serving ones, are pitched in elevated humanitarian terms. During Trump’s second Administration, universal principles such as self-determination and due process are wielded only opportunistically. In Venezuela, Trump followed his ouster of Nicolás Maduro not by supporting the democratic opposition but by sanctioning the ascent of the dictator’s second-in-command, Delcy Rodríguez, seemingly in exchange for oil revenues. (The opposition leader, María Corina Machado, could only offer her Nobel Peace Prize medal.) Just after the New Year, in a conversation that also touched on annexing Greenland, against the will of its people, the White House adviser Stephen Miller gave CNN’s Jake Tapper the emerging party line: “We live in a world, in the real world, Jake, that is governed by strength, that is governed by force, that is governed by power.”

    This is an encompassing vision, one that is now playing out in the ICE campaign in Minnesota against undocumented migrants and, more and more, against protesters and ordinary citizens. It also makes plain the hypocrisy in Trump’s embrace of the Iranian opposition. Ayatollah Ali Khamenei’s government has denounced the protesters it has killed, calling them terrorists; the Trump Administration has said that Renee Good, the woman shot dead by an ICE officer in Minneapolis, was engaging in an act of “domestic terrorism.” If the scenes in the Twin Cities look like those from an overseas occupation, the historian Nikhil Pal Singh suggested in the magazine Equator this week, that is because, under this Administration, the foreign and the domestic realms have bled together, as Trump threatens war-time powers “to arrest and remove unauthorised immigrants—and discretionary police powers abroad, to arrest foreign leaders (and seize foreign assets) under US law.” The Administration is asserting, too, an almost colonial kind of impunity: last week, Vice-President J. D. Vance baldly asserted that ICE agents have “absolute immunity” from local prosecution for their activities in Minnesota.

    Even so, although the President’s intrinsic sympathies are with strongmen—Putin, Orbán, Kim—his strategic interests in Iran are with the protesters. (As it happens, the Administration’s old allies in Israel and its newer ones in Saudi Arabia and the Gulf states all want the Iranian theocrats gone.) On social media, the President made some gestures of solidarity. “keep protesting,” he urged. “help is on the way.”

    Exactly what kind of help remains unclear. Trump’s adviser Steve Witkoff met with Reza Pahlavi, once the crown prince of Iran, but the White House found the deposed royal unconvincing. “He seems very nice, but I don’t know how he’d play within his own country,” Trump told reporters. In posts and appearances, the President returned to more familiar themes: he mused about possible military strikes on strategic sites in Iran, threatened tariffs against countries that trade with it, and announced a little bit of progress—the Iranian government had apparently reversed a plan to execute Erfan Soltani, a twenty-six-year-old shop owner who was arrested in connection with the protests. “We’ve been told the killing is stopping,” Trump said on Wednesday afternoon, and then, somewhat tellingly, struggled with his verb tenses. “It has stopped. It is stopping.”

    Benjamin Wallace-Wells

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  • The Lights Are Still On in Venezuela

    We spent Christmas Eve driving around Caracas, revisiting familiar places, such as San Agustín del Norte, the neighborhood where my grandfather grew up, and Bellas Artes, the picturesque museum district. My grandfather, despite nearing his centenary year, insisted on driving—his way of retaining a sense of control among the local and geopolitical chaos. During the crisis years, in the second half of the twenty-tens, when poverty, violent crime, and civil unrest reached a fever pitch, my grandparents had purchased an armored Toyota Camry, the only bulletproof vehicle they could afford. But the car—small, low to the ground, and exceedingly heavy, owing to the ballistic steel and glass—is not suited to a city like Caracas, which is rife with steep inclines and deep potholes, and is best travelled in a four-by-four. The car was surely designed for a foreign diplomat to drive down one straight road between an embassy and a hotel; instead, it suffers greatly at the twists and turns of this city, and at the hands of my grandfather, who drives boldly.

    When my grandparents felt that Caracas was at its most dangerous, around 2019, they rarely left their neighborhood at all. In recent years, as violent crime has declined, they’ve become more willing to venture out, eager to reconnect with a place that, for years, they felt they could not explore. On Christmas Eve, we looked through the car windows with awe at a city that my grandparents had almost forgotten, and that I had never got to know in the first place—a mosaic of colorfully painted houses and narrow favela streets, loud with the sound of motorbikes and music, interspersed with walkways wrapped in Christmas lights.

    There was something slightly comical about the aesthetics of Christmas, shaped as they are by the colder global North, being superimposed on this tropical landscape. But the humor quickly turns dark when you cross the Río Guaire into San Agustín del Sur, the hillside favela near my grandfather’s old quarter, and arrive at a pyramidal building called El Helicoide. A wildly ambitious brutalist project, the structure was intended as a luxury shopping mall, complete with a four-kilometre ramp that loops around it, allowing vehicles to drive right in and park inside. It is now one of the most notorious political prisons in South America. For the past three months, it has also been a Christmas tree. An L.E.D. star sits atop the pyramid, and strands of colorful lights encircle the structure, like tinsel.

    Inmates have reported cruel and inhumane treatment: electrocution, beatings, and simulated executions, among other horrors. Many were arrested for protesting Maduro’s regime, after he stole the Presidential election, in 2024. Some were detained for simply sending texts questioning the government’s legitimacy—messages that were uncovered during the phone searches that have become a routine part of law enforcement in Caracas.

    Trump’s aggressive actions toward Venezuela only worsened the Maduro regime’s paranoia, and, in turn, its authoritarian grip on power. A common slogan, written on the armored personnel carriers that could be seen coming and going from El Helicoide at all hours of the day, translates to the declaration “To Doubt Is Treason.” The city’s most ubiquitous image, painted all over Caracas by government-commissioned muralists, is of the eyes of Hugo Chávez, Maduro’s predecessor, watching us.

    In September, after the Trump Administration had begun striking boats off the coast of Venezuela, I was out photographing the local flora, a few streets down from where my grandparents and I live. After taking a picture of an unusually overgrown kapok tree—which, my neighbors later told me, was near a property owned by a high-ranking government official’s daughter—plainclothes officers approached me. They asked fairly banal questions about my employment and my reasons for taking photographs, and they looked through my phone, where they discovered that I had some text messages in English, further arousing their suspicion.

    After roughly half an hour of sitting with the officers in the shadow of the kapok, being interrogated about my thoughts on the government, a four-by-four pulled up. Officers from SEBIN, the country’s intelligence service, dressed in black balaclavas and combat gear, with semi-automatic rifles slung over their shoulders, emerged from the vehicle and said that they were going to take me somewhere for questioning. They explained that, for my own safety, they were going to have to restrain me, and, in a gesture painfully symptomatic of the fact that I have spent far too much of my life in England, I made sure to shake the officers’ hands before they zip-tied my wrists.

    Armando Ledezma

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  • Denmark Is Sick of Being Bullied by Trump

    When the King visited Greenland in April—looking jaunty and at ease while cruising on a fjord with the Prime Minister, and taking a coffee-and-cake break with locals at a cultural center in Nuuk—the contrast with Vance’s gloomy trip couldn’t have been starker. Shortly before the royal visit, the King had issued an updated coat of arms for the Kingdom of Denmark in which the symbols for Greenland and the Faroe Islands, the other Danish territory, take up more space. In the new flag, it’s easier to see that Greenland’s polar bear is roaring.

    Denmark recently pledged to give Greenlanders an additional quarter of a billion dollars in health-care and infrastructure investments. Trump’s nakedly imperialistic rhetoric has also prompted Danish leaders to look more honestly at their own role as a colonial power. In August, for example, Frederiksen issued an official apology for a program, started in the nineteen-sixties and continued for decades, in which Danish doctors fitted thousands of Indigenous Greenlandic women and girls with intrauterine birth-control devices, often without their consent or full knowledge.

    Such reckonings are overdue. In 2021, Anne Kirstine Hermann, a Danish journalist, published a pioneering book, “Children of the Empire,” in which she chronicled how little say Greenlanders had in Denmark’s decision to incorporate the former colony into its kingdom, rather than granting it independence. Hermann told me, “Danes aren’t used to being the villain—we’re do-gooders. But Greenland has a whole different experience.”

    Pernille Benjaminsen, a human-rights lawyer in Nuuk, said that Danes have always compared themselves, favorably, “to what happened in North America—putting Indigenous people in reservations, killing them.” But, she noted, “a lot of bad things also happened in Greenland—we had segregation between white Danish and Greenlandic people, we had eras when we were asked to leave stores when Danish people wanted to enter.” She added, “We need to kill the narrative that there can be a ‘good’ colonizer.”

    Benjaminsen credited Prime Minister Frederiksen for being more forthright about the colonial past. Around the time that Trump returned to office, Frederiksen posted online that Danes and Greenlanders “have some dark chapters in our history together, which we, from the Danish side, must confront.”

    Some people in Copenhagen told me that, for younger Danes, the Black Lives Matter movement in the U.S. had spurred soul-searching about their own country’s racism toward Inuit Greenlanders. But Denmark’s sudden attentiveness to Greenland was also an inadvertent gift from Trump. Hørlyck, the photographer, told me, “He has activated Danish people’s connection to Greenland.” Danes of his generation were asking themselves, in a way they hadn’t before, “What do I really know about Greenland? Have I really talked to Greenlanders?” He went on, “It’s quite funny that the strategy over there from Trump opens up something positive here.”

    Trump’s antagonism toward Greenland has also changed Danish views about European unity. In the past, Danes had been soft Euroskeptics. They joined the E.U. in the nineteen-seventies, but they kept their own currency, the krone, and in 1992 they voted against the Maastricht Treaty, which tightened European conformity regarding security, citizenship, and other matters. When Frederiksen recently called for more defense spending, she acknowledged, “European coöperation has never really been a favorite of many Danes.” They’d grumbled, she said, about everything from “crooked cucumbers and banning plastic straws” to open immigration policies, which Frederiksen’s government had rejected.

    Ole Wæver, a professor of international relations at the University of Copenhagen, told me that Danes have long had a “kind of anti-E.U. sentiment, with a lot of the same arguments that you saw in Brexit—‘Oh, it’s big bureaucracy,’ ‘Brussels is far away,’ ‘It’s taking away our democracy.’ ” Such attitudes, Wæver said, had helped to make Denmark “go overboard” in its allegiance to America. Elisabet Svane, a columnist for Politiken, told me, “Our Prime Minister used to say, ‘You cannot put a piece of paper between me and the U.S., I’m so transatlantic.’ She’s still transatlantic, but I think you can put a little book in between now.”

    Margaret Talbot

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  • Donald Trump Was Never an Isolationist

    There aren’t many moments in Donald Trump’s political career that could be called highlights. But one occurred during the 2016 Republican primary debate in South Carolina, when Trump addressed the prickly issue of the Iraq War. It had been a “big, fat mistake,” he charged. And the politicians who started it? “They lied.”

    The audience hated this. Trump’s fellow-debaters Jeb Bush and Marco Rubio argued that George W. Bush—Jeb’s brother—had kept the country safe. Trump plowed on loudly through the booing. It was as if an “angry Code Pink-style protester” had crashed the Republican debate, the journalist Michael Grunwald wrote.

    Trump hadn’t stood against the Iraq War from the start, as he has frequently claimed. (When asked, in the run-up to the invasion, whether he supported it, he replied, “Yeah, I guess so.”) But by 2004 he truly was opposed. He scoffed at the notion that the war would achieve anything. What was the point of “people coming back with no arms and legs” and “all those Iraqi kids who’ve been blown to pieces?” he asked. “All of the reasons for the war were blatantly wrong.”

    Skepticism came easily to Trump, who had long been hostile to mainstream foreign policy. He made his political début, in 1987, by taking out full-page ads in several papers to complain of Washington’s “monumental spending” on defense for allies like Japan and Saudi Arabia. The foundations of U.S. supremacy since 1945—the aid packages, alliances, trade pacts, and basing arrangements that make up what the former Secretary of Defense Robert Gates calls the “symphony of power”—have all seemed to Trump like a colossal waste.

    Critics have called Trump an isolationist. Given the unconcealed delight he takes in dropping bombs on foreign lands (seven countries in 2025 alone), that can’t be right. A better diagnosis is that Trump doesn’t think the United States should seek to superintend global affairs, to take responsibility for the operation of the system. “American foreign policy elites convinced themselves that permanent American domination of the entire world was in the best interests of our country,” his recently released National Security Strategy explains. “Yet the affairs of other countries are our concern only if their activities directly threaten our interests.”

    At times, Trump has veered oddly close to the left, which has opposed trade deals (“neoliberalism”), military interventions (“warmongering”), the bipartisan foreign-policy consensus (“the Blob”), and the U.S. policing of the planet (“empire”). In his 2016 race against Hillary Clinton, he scored points by spotlighting her support of the Iraq War. “In the end, the so-called nation-builders wrecked far more nations than they built,” he said last year, “and the interventionalists were intervening in complex societies that they did not even understand themselves.”

    What distinguishes Trump from the left, of course, are his narrow nationalism and his love of raw force. “I’m the most militaristic person there is,” he has boasted. He relabelled the Department of Defense the Department of War, and appointed a Secretary, Pete Hegseth, who has promised to give “America’s warriors” the freedom to “kill people and break things.” Forget the symphony of power; Trump just wants to crash the cymbals.

    Trump’s second term has been cacophonous with threats—to acquire Greenland, ethnically cleanse Gaza, make a state of Canada, throw the world economy into convulsions. This is a self-conscious flight from principles toward what he calls the “iron laws that have always determined global power.”

    Hence this past weekend’s assault on Venezuela, in which U.S. forces launched air strikes on Caracas and nabbed the head of state, President Nicolás Maduro. (At least a hundred people were killed, local authorities say.) Trump claims that his goal is to punish Maduro for heading a “vast criminal network” that has brought “colossal amounts of deadly and illicit drugs into the United States.” But this is hard to swallow. The drug that is killing people, fentanyl, is almost entirely produced in Mexico, and the drug Venezuela does play a (minor) part in transporting, cocaine, goes mainly from there to Europe. Also, didn’t Trump just pardon Juan Orlando Hernández, the former Honduran President, who had been sentenced to forty-five years in federal prison for conspiring to import four hundred tons of cocaine into the United States?

    Daniel Immerwahr

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  • Winter 2026 U.S. Credits

    Vanity Fair’s Winter 2026 issue, featuring Teyana Taylor

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  • The Making of the First American Pope

    In Peru every August, throngs of Catholics set out on foot from the remote northern town of Motupe, bound for a cliffside chapel that houses the Cross of Chalpon. The cross, made of guayacán wood and ringed with precious metals, stands about eight feet tall and is believed to have been discovered, as if by a miracle, in a nearby cave in 1868. The ascent takes about an hour, and venders along the way sell religious images and replicas of the cross, as well as roasted corn and Inca Kola. A highlight of the pilgrimage comes when a procession bears the cross downhill, to the church of San Julián, in Motupe’s main plaza. The next day, the Bishop of Chiclayo, the regional capital, leads a Mass for a congregation that fills the square. A brass band plays and helicopters scatter rose petals over the faithful. For decades, the presiding bishop was a member of Opus Dei, a traditionalist movement, founded in Spain in 1928, that has thrived in Latin America. In 2014, however, Pope Francis appointed Robert Prevost, an Augustinian priest from Chicago who had spent a dozen years as a missionary in Peru, to the post.

    Prevost himself, of course, is now the Pope; he was elected on May 8th and took the name Leo XIV. Made famous overnight, he stuck to a Midwestern matter-of-factness: he addressed the cardinals who’d elected him in flat-vowelled English, phoned his family daily, kept up his morning habit of doing the Times’ Wordle puzzle, and sent e-mails and texts from his personal accounts. His election was striking but not altogether surprising: he was on many Vatican watchers’ lists and, since the Second Vatican Council, in the early nineteen-sixties, it has been the pattern that a dynamic, pathbreaking Pope is succeeded by a more sober, deliberate ally. Leo—who in recent years worked closely with Pope Francis as the Prefect of the Dicastery for Bishops, a powerful Vatican office—seems likely to carry forward his predecessor’s emphasis on the poor and those on the margins of society with a steadiness that will complement the Argentinean prelate’s improvisatory style.

    The public was instantly captivated by Prevost’s background. He was called “the first American Pope,” “the pan-American Pope” (as a bishop, he was required to take Peruvian citizenship), and “the three-world Pope” (to account for his time in Rome). Following accounts that his mother’s family was from New Orleans and his maternal grandfather, born in Haiti, was listed as Black in the 1900 census, he was hailed as “the Black Pope”—until reports of his Sicilian, French, Québécois, Spanish, Cuban, and Creole ancestry brought him the tag “the immigrant Pope.”

    “You can settle your check whenever you’re ready to understand my need to turn this table over at least three times tonight in order to make any sort of living.”

    Cartoon by Jeremy Nguyen

    The press descended on his childhood home, a modest brick bungalow in Dolton, Illinois, just south of Chicago, and on his boyhood church there, St. Mary of the Assumption, which was shuttered in 2011, its rose window cracked and weeds sprouting near its cornerstone. His elder brother John, a retired Catholic-school principal, confirmed that Leo was a White Sox fan and liked the thin-crust pizza at Aurelio’s; Sox fans started showing up at home games dressed in papal garb, and Aurelio’s introduced a pie called the Poperoni. His eldest brother, Louis, Jr., a retired Navy man, described himself as a “MAGA type” and “Rob” as “much more liberal,” but suggested that he would lead the Papacy “down the middle.”

    The summer had the feel of a soft opening to Leo’s pontificate, in part because many papal events had been arranged before he was elected. In Rome, he arrived by helicopter at the Jubilee of Youth, which drew about a million young Catholics to a park south of the city, and he presided over the canonization of the “first millennial saint,” Carlo Acutis, an Italian teen-ager known as “God’s influencer,” who, before his death, from leukemia, used digital media to promote Catholic values. Leo took part in a Vatican conference on the climate emergency, where Arnold Schwarzenegger, a guest speaker, called him an “action hero” because, as soon as he became Pope, he “ordered the Vatican to put solar panels on the buildings.” He met with people who had a wide range of viewpoints, including Ben Shapiro, the conservative podcaster; Henry Louis Gates, Jr., the host of the PBS series “Finding Your Roots,” who presented him with the Prevost family tree; Father James Martin, a Jesuit who advocates “building bridges” with L.G.B.T.Q. Catholics; and Cardinal Raymond Burke, a “rad-trad” advocate for the restoration of the Latin Mass.

    Then, on September 30th, a news correspondent for EWTN, a Catholic broadcaster, asked Leo about a controversy in Chicago: the archbishop, Cardinal Blase Cupich, planned to give an award to Senator Dick Durbin for his long support of migrants’ rights. Traditionalists pointed out that Durbin, a Democrat, has also long supported abortion rights. The Pope replied, “Someone who says ‘I’m against abortion,’ but says, ‘I’m in favor of the death penalty’ is not really pro-life. Someone who says ‘I’m against abortion,’ but ‘I’m in agreement with the inhuman treatment of immigrants who are in the United States’—I don’t know if that’s pro-life. So they are very complex issues. I don’t know if anyone has all the truth on them, but I would ask first and foremost that there’d be greater respect for one another.”

    Some saw those remarks as a rebuke of the White House (“Holy Smackdown,” the Daily Beast announced, “Pope Leo Trashes Trump’s Signature Policy”), others as Leo giving cover to Cardinal Cupich. (Because of the controversy, Durbin decided not to accept the award.) The website Where Peter Is, which focusses on the Papacy, saw it as a sign of “Leo’s unifying, de-escalation-oriented priorities.” It was, in other words, an instance of Leo going about the Papacy the way his brother said he would—playing it down the middle.

    Man on deserted island waves goodbye to someone who just got airrescued from a neighboring island.

    “I’m so happy for you.”

    Cartoon by Jon Adams

    “I’m just a month and a half into this new mission,” Leo told a friend in an e-mail in July. A man who a decade ago was presiding over pilgrimages in a remote Peruvian town is now leading a global religion with more than a billion followers, and will have to contend with rising authoritarianism and Christian nationalism, a Church divided between progressives and conservatives, clashes over immigration, grinding wars, and a climate crisis rapidly growing more intense. The Pope’s life, since he entered a seminary high school in 1969, as he turned fourteen, has been a series of assignments, each with clear objectives. The question now is: What is the papal mission, as he sees it?

    In 1955, when Richard J. Daley, who went to Mass every morning, became the mayor of Chicago, there were 1.7 million Catholics among the city’s population of some four million people. Irish, Italian, German, and Polish communities each worshipped—in Latin—at their own churches, often within blocks of one another. Beginning in the nineteen-thirties, the archdiocese, led by Cardinal George Mundelein, had been allied with the Democratic Party and labor unions, and had promoted social activism through groups such as Young Christian Workers and the Catholic Interracial Council. During the postwar years, though, tens of thousands of white parishioners chose to move to new enclaves in the city and the suburbs as, owing to the Great Migration, the Black population, long sequestered on the South Side, grew and expanded into other neighborhoods.

    Robert Prevost’s parents—Louis Prevost, from the South Side, and Mildred Martinez, from the North Side—met while pursuing graduate degrees in education at DePaul, a Catholic university in the Lincoln Park neighborhood. After marrying, they moved to Dolton, a mostly white suburb that was thriving along with the nearby steel mills and refineries. He worked as a school principal and superintendent; she was a librarian at Mendel Catholic, a high school run by the Augustinian order, a community founded in 1244 and named for St. Augustine, a fourth-century Bishop of Hippo and the author of “Confessions.”

    The Prevosts raised their three sons in Dolton; Rob was born there in 1955. The boys rode bikes and played baseball with the kids on the block, John told reporters. They knew that their mother’s father had been born in Haiti, he said, but “we never really talked about it.” They were altar boys at St. Mary of the Assumption, often serving at six-thirty Mass before school, a diligence that the priests rewarded by taking them to Sox games. A Spanish Augustinian named Fidel Rodriguez, whom their father had met through a local charity effort involving migrant workers, sometimes came to supper, dressed in the black habit worn by members of the order. “He had quite an impact on me,” Robert Prevost said, years later. “I never forgot it, in terms of his sense of humor, his generosity, his willingness to serve these people who were, if you will, kind of down and out, and just the way he reached out to them.” Rob practiced celebrating the Mass by draping a sheet over an ironing board in the basement and consecrating Necco wafers. “He was going to be a priest,” John said. “Period. End of discussion.”

    Paul Elie

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  • What Will New York’s New Map Show Us?

    On the new map, you can readily see where each train stops, but with less of a sense of where you are on the grid. Central Park, for instance, has been reduced to a small, deformed square. This change is not as helpful to tourists as it is meant to be, but, then, locals secretly think that, if you don’t know where the B train runs, you shouldn’t be on it. (Anyway, locals and tourists alike, seeking some new destination, will ultimately turn to their phones, on which the cooing G.P.S. lady will tell them how to get there.)

    Maps become less perfect, even as they attempt to become more perfect. In Lewis Carroll’s “Sylvie and Bruno Concluded,” we learn of a map, described by an ambitious philosopher, that increases in scale bit by bit until it’s the same size as the terrain it represents. Unable to roll the map out, its creators cheerfully realize that the country itself can serve as its own map. Perhaps the most beloved map in recent decades was Saul Steinberg’s view of New York, initially a cover for this magazine. In the guise of a map, it captured a mentality: New Yorkers see anything beyond Eleventh Avenue as blank, uncharted wilderness. Steinberg’s point was not that his fellow New Yorkers were provincial but that all maps record a state of mind. (Indeed, on the Steinbergian map of today’s New York state of mind, many Brooklyn neighborhoods would loom as large as his West Side avenues did.)

    Even the current redistricting battle reveals the constant paradox: we draw firm lines around a fluctuating reality. The intention in Texas, recently green-lighted by the Supreme Court, was to redraw the congressional map to make it easier for Republicans to win more districts, however absurd the boundaries. But the shifting allegiances of the people within those boundaries may thwart the designers’ aim. The Latinos grouped together who were expected to vote Republican may, after the mass mobilization of ICE and the implementation of other anti-immigrant policies, no longer do so. The map itself can’t capture the changing views of the people who populate it.

    “The map is not the territory” is by now a truism, but the more important truth is that the territory is inarticulate without a map to know it by. Maps are the ideal metaphor for our models of what the world might be. A new political map of New York City awaits us—“slight left turn ahead,” as the G.P.S. lady would say, unless she pauses and issues an unsettling “recalculating” alert.

    And so for the map of the country. We live in a time when the chart of the nation, its recognizable edges and worn paths, has been largely erased and replaced with one that calls to mind medieval maps, with misshapen horizons, weirdly distorted territories, and dragons lurking beyond the borders. The primary feeling that many of us currently experience is not merely distress but profound disorientation. We not only don’t like where we are; we don’t know where we are. Once reliable routes to reality have been cut off.

    It helps to know where we’re going before we get there. If there is a consoling reflection in this season, it is that all good maps, like the digitized city map, turn out to be shared work, made by many hands over a long period of time. Drawing a plan of our plans is the necessary task of the approaching year, as an act of collective imagination and common hope. ♦

    Adam Gopnik

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  • A Mexican Couple in California Plans to Self-Deport—and Leave Their Kids Behind

    In 1995, after a couple of years in Mexico, her mother heard that one of Rosalinda’s brothers was getting into trouble in the States and decided that she needed to live closer to him. Rosalinda wanted to stay, but her mother ignored her pleas, saying, “Pack your bag, because tomorrow we’re leaving early.” It took them three attempts before they were able to sneak across the border, with the help of smugglers, who drove them to San Bernardino. During the ride, one of the men groped Rosalinda, who was fourteen. “There was nothing I could do—I couldn’t scream or anything,” Rosalinda said, wiping away tears. “I just had to stay silent. After that, I told my mother, ‘You do whatever you want, but I am _never_crossing again. That’s it, I’m finished.’ ” Two years later, as a high schooler in San Bernardino, she met Manuel and became pregnant with José.

    As a couple, Rosalinda and Manuel had sometimes contemplated returning to Mexico. But only once, more than fifteen years ago, did they come close, after a particularly humiliating experience of trying to sign up their young children for Medicaid. Rosalinda told me, “The woman who worked there made me feel so bad that I came back sobbing, and I said, ‘I don’t want to live in this country anymore.’ ” But when she and Manuel asked José, who was twelve at the time, if he wanted to move to Mexico, he begged them to keep the family in America. “And they respected my wishes,” José told me, recalling the conversation. “They listened.”

    About half of the Garcías’ extended family now lived in Southern California. The other half, in Mexico, Rosalinda knew largely by name only. Until recently, she and her husband had a vibrant social life in San Bernardino. For many years, she regularly attended an evangelical church, and she still went to exercise classes with friends she’d made there. Manuel, for all his shyness, had been a regular on a recreational baseball team.

    Rosalinda hadn’t forgotten her youthful promise to never cross the border again. It felt surreal to be returning to Mexico, which, after her three decades in America, seemed like a construction of her imagination. “We are afraid, because we’re moving to a place that we don’t remember,” she told me, sighing. “I guess that’s just how it goes.”

    On weekends, the family liked to unwind at a nearby R.V. park and private campground where they had been members for years. There were campsites for tents and trailers, rental cabins, barbecue grills, two lakes, and three swimming pools. It had long been Rosalinda’s favorite place, and now it had the additional appeal of being private property. “It’s all fenced in, so it’s one of the few places outdoors where ICE can’t just show up,” José explained. Last spring, when the raids in San Bernardino hit their peak, Rosalinda camped there for two weeks. “I slept in a tent close to the showers so that I would be more comfortable,” she said.

    One Saturday afternoon, Rosalinda, Ana, José, Irene, and I piled into their black Tahoe and drove to the campground. In the car, Rosalinda wanted me to listen to one of her favorite norteños—a type of Mexican folk song that heavily features the accordion. “It’s the one I’m going to listen to when I leave the United States,” she explained. The song was called “El Mojado Acaudalado,” or “The Wealthy Wetback,” reclaiming a slur that dates from the early twentieth century and refers to Mexican immigrants who entered the U.S. illegally by crossing the Rio Grande. The song’s narrator is a migrant who has saved up money while working in the U.S. and is finally returning to his homeland. Rosalinda sang along to every word:

    Jordan Salama

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  • Peter Navarro, Trump’s Ultimate Yes-Man

    That phrase is at the heart of the free-trade lexicon. Free trade in goods or services, unencumbered by tariffs or other barriers, is likely to lead to greater total output than if there had been no trade. Specialization makes economic sense: not every country should grow its own peppers. (Years ago, Navarro described this as “one of the deepest truths in all of economics.” He now refers to “so-called gains from trade.”)

    In Cambridge, Navarro needed to produce a dissertation about the economics of corporate charitable giving. Dubin needed to pay his rent. (“I was a poor student, and he was rehabbing a triplex in Central Square.”) Money changed hands. “He told me the direction he wanted to go, and I helped him get there, theoretically and empirically,” Dubin said. “I might have used his data to set up models and get him going. And then he took over at some point and it became his own.” Dubin, speaking half seriously, described this as “one of my first consulting experiences.” He observed that “most people, at that level, would not pay someone else to help them.” But Navarro saw nothing improper in the exchange, and neither did Dubin.

    The two men become close friends. “We went to the Cape together,” Dubin said. “We double-dated.” They also co-wrote several papers. Dubin remembers that Navarro, who was “very into his health, into his body,” was an enthusiast of dimethyl sulfoxide (DMSO), a gooey, unregulated byproduct of the paper industry that purportedly soothes muscle strains. According to Dubin, Navarro wasn’t immune to the substance’s notorious side effect: “He reeked of garlic because of it.” (Navarro told me that, today, he doesn’t “drink, smoke pot, use any hard drugs or even prescription medicines,” adding, “Just not my thing. Live clean or die.”)

    Navarro’s dissertation, submitted in 1986, doesn’t acknowledge Dubin’s contributions. According to every economist I asked, that omission constitutes an academic violation. Harry Holzer, a public-policy professor at Georgetown, told me that, if someone “is actually developing his models for him, I think it crosses a boundary.” Holzer, who served as the chief economist at the Department of Labor during the Clinton Administration, is a former Harvard acquaintance of Navarro’s. “At a minimum, a footnote acknowledging a person’s input is appropriate,” Holzer said.

    Lawrence Goulder, the sole surviving member of Navarro’s dissertation committee, agrees. If Navarro received substantial help, he told me, then some recognition of that would have been “expected,” and its absence was “inappropriate.” (Goulder, who’s now at Stanford, noted that, at Harvard, Navarro had taught him to windsurf.)

    Navarro, asked if he’d engaged in an academic deceit, said, of Dubin, “I don’t recall him providing any substantive assistance on my dissertation.” Navarro also pointed to other publications in which he had thanked Dubin for his help.

    Later in life, Peter Navarro introduced readers of his books to a friend named Ron Vara. According to “If It’s Raining in Brazil, Buy Starbucks,” a 2001 book of financial advice that urged retail investors to be alert to world events, Vara had been the captain of a reserve unit at the time of the Gulf War. He now lived on a houseboat in Miami and was known as the Dark Prince of Disaster, for making “macroplays”—trades taking nimble advantage of sudden onsets of human misery. Vara had macroplayed Hurricane Andrew and a Taiwanese earthquake. In 1986, when Vara was a “struggling doctoral student in economics at Harvard,” he’d apparently been clairvoyant: two days before the Chernobyl disaster, he’d shorted companies invested in nuclear energy.

    Vara appears in several other Navarro books, including “Death by China,” where he’s quoted as saying, “Only the Chinese can turn a leather sofa into an acid bath, a baby crib into a lethal weapon, and a cell phone battery into heart-piercing shrapnel.” Vara was also credited as the executive producer (and the musical director) of the videos that Navarro showed to his Rising China class at U.C. Irvine.

    Ian Parker

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  • How Willie Nelson Sees America

    “That’s his living room,” Nelson’s lighting director, Budrock Prewitt, told me on the road to Camden. He meant the stage—specifically, a twelve-by-thirty-two-foot maroon rug that Nelson’s crew rolls out at each venue before putting every instrument, amp, and monitor in the same spot as always. Whenever Nelson needs to replace the bus, a company that he’s been working with for decades re-creates the same interior in the next one, as precisely as possible. And Nelson keeps his buses leased year-round, whether they’re in use or not. “They park up and wait for us to come back,” his production manager, Alex Blagg, told me. “My bunk is my bunk.”

    “We only go skating because we’re too embarrassed to wear our Christmas sweaters on land.”

    Cartoon by Victoria Roberts

    Nelson’s band does not have its own name. On ticket stubs and marquees, they’re simply Family, as in “Willie Nelson and Family.” For fifty years, Nelson’s sister Bobbie anchored the group from behind a grand piano. She and Willie had a pact: they’d play to the end of the road. When Nelson’s drummer, Paul English, died, he was replaced by his brother, Billy. Jody Payne was Nelson’s longtime guitar player; now his son Waylon plays in the band. Bee Spears started on bass at nineteen and stayed until his death, at sixty-two. Mickey Raphael, who joined the band at twenty-one, is now seventy-four.

    Nelson’s road crew is family, too. His tour manager, John Selman, is the son of Wally Selman, who ran the Texas Opry House; he was hired twenty years ago, straight out of college. Prewitt and Larry Gorham, a Hells Angel who handles security, have been with Nelson since the seventies. So has Nelson’s manager, Mark Rothbaum. Rothbaum’s parents fled Poland in 1937; his mother died when he was thirteen. He stopped caring about school. “I was just fucking angry,” Rothbaum told me. He got a job with a business manager in Manhattan. One day, he saw Nelson behind a glass partition at his office, on West Fifty-seventh Street. “He looked like Jesus Christ,” Rothbaum recalled. “He was glowing.” Rothbaum worked his way into the circle. “I adopted them. But I had to do it. I had to become useful.” He and Nelson have never had a contract. “You couldn’t put a piece of paper between us,” he says.

    Family members call this Willie World, and it, too, is elastic. When the steel player Jimmy Day drank his way out of it, Nelson didn’t replace him. The steel parts simply disappeared. When Spears went on tour with Guy Clark, Nelson brought in Chris Ethridge, of the Flying Burrito Brothers, to play bass—and, when Spears called and asked to come home, Nelson welcomed him back and kept Ethridge on. For a while, he toured with two bassists and two drummers: a full-tilt-boogie band captured on “Willie and Family Live,” from 1978. At around the same time, Leon Russell joined them on piano, bringing along his saxophone player and the great Nigerian percussionist Ambrose Campbell. When Grady Martin, the top session player in Nashville, retired from studio recording, he went on the road, too, upping the number of people onstage to eleven. “Willie ran a refugee camp, to some extent,” Steve Earle told me.

    Bee Spears died in 2011, Jody Payne in 2013, Paul English in 2020, and Bobbie Nelson in 2022. “The biggest change was Sister Bobbie,” Kevin Smith, who now plays bass, told me. Bobbie outlined the chord structure of every song. After her death, Smith was shocked at how little sound there was onstage. These days, Nelson and Raphael take all the solos. Sets are shorter. Lukas sits in when he’s not out touring on his own; his brother Micah, who plays guitar with Neil Young, joins when he can. But Nelson’s sound has been stripped to its essence. “It’s more like spoken word now,” Raphael said. “Like poetry with a rhythm section.”

    Nelson goes from number to number with almost no patter—an approach he learned from the great Texas bandleader Bob Wills, who kept audiences on the dance floor for hours. In Camden, he got through twenty-four songs in sixty-five minutes, pausing only to wipe his brow with a washcloth or to sip from a Willie’s Remedy mug full of warm tea. The set didn’t feel hurried—on “Funny How Time Slips Away,” Nelson gave the song’s ironies and regrets space to sink in—but the crew kept an eye on the clock. After Camden and Holmdel, Nelson was scheduled to play Maryland, Indiana, Wisconsin, and, finally, Farm Aid, at the University of Minnesota: six shows in eight days at the end of eight months on the road. “He just keeps going and going,” Annie said. “He’s Benjamin Buttoning me.”

    I ran into Annie in Camden, doing her laundry backstage by the catering station. She and Nelson met in the eighties, on the set of a remake of “Stagecoach.” Annie is two decades younger than Willie. She is sharp, protective, and unflappable, with a wide smile and long, curly hair that she has allowed to go gray. She told me that the build-out for Farm Aid was supposed to have started that day in Minneapolis. CNN was planning a live telecast. But Teamsters Local 320—made up of custodians, groundskeepers, and food-service workers at the university—had chosen that moment to go on strike. Members of IATSE, the stagehands’ union, would not cross the picket line, and neither would Nelson. Cancelling the concert, though, would break faith with the people Farm Aid was meant to serve. “It’s not great for us,” Annie said. “But who really suffers? The farmers. This year of all years.”

    Alex Abramovich

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  • Why Millennials Love Prenups

    All founders have an origin story involving some intractable problem that they simply could not accept. For Rodgers, it was paper. Her mother was a matrimonial attorney, and Rodgers, as part of her childhood chores, organized stacks and stacks of financial-disclosure documents, including for couples getting prenups. There had to be a better way, she would later say. While attending Suffolk University Law School, she took a class called Lawyers and Smart Machines, on how to automate certain legal processes. “They taught us coding, which I did not excel in,” she admitted. That’s where Jaffe, an engineer, later came in, though the two eventually had their own split. (Rodgers preferred not to go into detail.)

    Rodgers began developing her platform a few years after graduating from law school, just before her own wedding, to another lawyer. “We were the first couple to use HelloPrenup,” she said. “We were the test case.” She and her husband had met on Match.com—“old school,” she noted—and got married in 2019, in Newport, Rhode Island, at the picturesque Castle Hill Inn, overlooking Narragansett Bay. “Oh, my God, I had the best wedding. I had the best wedding,” she said.

    Surveying the scene at Sadelle’s, we guessed where Affleck and Lopez might have sat. “It’s so crowded,” Rodgers observed. “Maybe in the back somewhere.” We started discussing the end of her own marriage. She and her husband had a baby in 2020, and the onset of the pandemic left them without family help. “He’s a patent litigator. He was very busy. I was working as an attorney, plus trying to build this business,” she said. “It was just, like, pressure on pressure on pressure.” They divorced in 2022.

    But the COVID lockdown also primed HelloPrenup for success. No one wanted to visit a lawyer’s office. “Everything was becoming digitized in a really rapid way,” Rodgers said. By early 2021, roughly two and a half million women had left the labor force, in what became known as a she-cession. An article on HelloPrenup’s site sounded off: “Who was expected to stay home, watch the kids, become a pseudo-teacher, take care of household responsibilities and manage to still be at their work-from-home desk eight hours a day? Women.” Amid the ashes of girlboss feminism, Rodgers saw opportunity. “Prenups can solve for the motherhood penalty, because you can have an equalization clause,” she told me, explaining that a greater share of assets could compensate for a stay-at-home parent’s lost earning potential.

    Rodgers refers to prenups as “the modern vow,” as they can govern finances and other major life decisions during marriage. Couples today want those choices to be made in the spirit of equality and backed by a contract. “They ask, ‘Are our in-laws going to move in? Are we going to buy a house or do the FIRE method and travel the world?’ ” FIRE is a life style popular with millennials and Gen Z marked by extreme saving and aggressive investment; it stands for “Financial Independence, Retire Early.” An elder millennial, I had to look it up.

    In February of 1990, it was reported that Donald and Ivana Trump were divorcing, after thirteen years of marriage. The news dominated the headlines. “They ran it before the story out of South Africa,” one outraged New Yorker told a local TV crew, referring to the release of Nelson Mandela from prison that week. People immediately began speculating about the spoils. “It’s not just a marriage on the line. It’s Donald Trump’s reputation as a dealmaker,” the journalist Richard Roth declared on CBS News. The couple had a prenup—and three “postnups”—allegedly granting Ivana around twenty million dollars, a fraction of Trump’s purported five-billion-dollar fortune. “IVANA BETTER DEAL,” read the cover of the Daily News. In a skit on “Saturday Night Live,” Jan Hooks, playing Ivana, balks at the prenup: “That contract is invalid. You have a mistress, Donald.” (There were rumors that Trump had been unfaithful with a Southern beauty queen named Marla Maples.) Phil Hartman, playing Trump, flips through the pages of the contract before saying, “According to Section 5, Paragraph 2, I’m allowed to have mistresses provided they are younger than you.”

    The prenup largely held. Ivana got a measly fourteen million, a mansion in Greenwich, an apartment in Trump Plaza, and the use of Mar-a-Lago for one month a year. But it was understandable that the public thought that Trump’s entire empire might be at stake. In the eighties, prenups were usually in the news for getting tossed out. In 1990, Vanity Fair reported that Steven Spielberg was ordered to pay his ex-wife, the actress Amy Irving, a hundred million dollars after a judge voided their prenup, which had allegedly been scrawled on a scrap of paper. (Irving conveyed through a representative that “there was no prenup ever even discussed.”)

    Jennifer Wilson

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  • Dyslexia and the Reading Wars

    Sometimes the axon highways almost seem to pave themselves. My daughter, Laura, began to read all of a sudden, the summer before kindergarten. (“It’s hard to believe that ‘knock’ starts with ‘k,’ ” she said, while following along as I read her a bedtime story about Amanda Pig.) But even she didn’t become a reader entirely on her own. All children have to learn the relationships between letters and meaningful sounds. For some it’s harder than for others. “Maybe instead of four lanes you have two,” Gaab said, “or instead of a smooth surface you have a bumpy one.” Caroline had a large vocabulary, and she was read to as often as Laura was, both at home and at school, and there were just as many colorful plastic alphabet magnets stuck to the refrigerator in her kitchen. But she needed teachers who understood that literacy doesn’t happen naturally, especially for children with dyslexia.

    A decade ago, Emily Hanford, a senior correspondent at American Public Media, was researching a story about college-level remedial-reading classes. She became interested in dyslexia and then in literacy generally, and in 2022 she produced an immensely influential podcast series, “Sold a Story,” about reading instruction in American schools. The central argument is that teachers all over the country employ instructional methods and materials that were proved, long ago, to be not just ineffective but counterproductive. Such methods, Hanford demonstrated, are based on a fundamental misunderstanding of how children learn to read. They direct beginning readers to look for hints in illustrations and to make deductions based on context, word length, plot, and other cues, with only incidental reliance on the sounds represented by letters. The idea is that, as children become adept at deduction, the mechanical side will, in effect, take care of itself.

    Skilled reading has many elements. A popular metaphor is the “reading rope,” created by the psychologist Hollis Scarborough in 2001. It depicts eight “strands,” which readers weave together as they become proficient. The strands include not just an understanding of the sounds represented by letters and combinations of letters but also such elements of language comprehension as vocabulary, grammar, reasoning, and background knowledge. All the strands are necessary. In Hanford’s view, the ones related to word recognition, including phonological awareness and decoding, have often been neglected. That harms many students and is a disaster for children with dyslexia.

    Antipathy to phonetic decoding is sometimes traced to the nineteenth-century American educator Horace Mann, who described the letters of the alphabet as “skeleton-shaped, bloodless, ghostly apparitions” and argued in favor of teaching children to recognize words as discrete units. A later, more powerful influence was Marie Clay, a teacher and researcher in New Zealand, who studied schoolchildren learning to read and concluded, in the nineteen-sixties, that understanding the relationships between letters and sounds wasn’t essential. Hanford, in the second episode of “Sold a Story,” says, “Her basic idea was that good readers are good problem solvers. They’re like detectives, searching for clues.” The best clues, Clay reasoned, were things like context and sentence structure. Frank Smith, a British psycholinguist, came to the same conclusion. He argued that, to a good reader, a printed word was like an ideogram. “The worst readers are those who try to sound out unfamiliar words according to the rules of phonics,” he wrote, in 1992.

    There have always been opposing voices. In 1955, Rudolf Flesch published “Why Johnny Can’t Read,” a brutal indictment of “whole word” methods. “If they had their way, our teachers would never tell the children that there are letters and that each letter represents a sound,” Flesch writes. To illustrate the problem, he recounts a story, told by a literacy researcher, about a boy who could read the word “children” on a flash card but not in a book. (The boy explained that he recognized the flash card because someone had smudged it.) Flesch’s book spent months on best-seller lists, but teaching methods like the ones he had seemingly destroyed remained widely used.

    “We’re only walking to the other end of the cage.”

    Cartoon by Lynn Hsu

    Today, two of the most popular reading-instruction programs are Units of Study, whose principal author is Lucy Calkins, a professor at Columbia University’s Teachers College, and Fountas & Pinnell Classroom, by Irene Fountas and Gay Su Pinnell. Both are traceable to the work of people like Clay and Smith, and both are sold by the same educational publisher. They have remained entrenched in school systems even though scientific studies have shown that their theoretical foundations are flawed. Technology that allows researchers to track the eye movements of people as they read has demonstrated, for instance, that good readers actually do decode words by looking closely, if quickly, at letters and combinations of letters. Dehaene writes that “ ‘eight’ and ‘EIGHT,’ which are composed of distinct visual features, are initially encoded by different neurons in the primary visual area, but are progressively recoded until they become virtually indistinguishable.” If fluent readers are able to read familiar words in a way that makes it seem as though they’re recognizing ideograms, it’s because they analyzed them phonetically during earlier encounters, prompting their brains to create permanent neural pathways linking spelling, sound, and meaning.

    David Owen

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  • What Zohran Mamdani Is Up Against

    According to the New York City Department of Records and Information Services, Zohran Mamdani will not actually be the city’s hundred-and-eleventh mayor, as many people have assumed. A historian named Paul Hortenstine recently came across references to a previously unrecorded mayoral term served in 1674, by one Matthias Nicolls. Consequently, on New Year’s Day, after Mamdani places his right hand on the Quran and is sworn in at City Hall, he will become our hundred-and-twelfth mayor—or possibly even our hundred-and-thirty-third, based on the department’s best estimates. “The numbering of New York City ‘Mayors’ has been somewhat arbitrary and inconsistent,” a department official disclosed in a blog post this month. “There may even be other missing Mayors.”

    New York City has already had youthful mayors (John Purroy Mitchel, a.k.a. the Boy Mayor), ideological mayors (Bill de Blasio), celebrity mayors (Jimmy Walker, a.k.a. Beau James), idealistic mayors (John Lindsay), hard-charging mayors (Fiorello LaGuardia), mayors with little to no prior experience in elected office (Michael Bloomberg), immigrant mayors (Abe Beame), and even one who supported the Democratic Socialists of America. (That would be David Dinkins.) Whether Mamdani turns out to be a good or a bad mayor, he will also not be alone in either respect. He will, however, be the city’s first Muslim mayor, and the first with family roots in Asia. He is as avowedly of the left as any mayor in city history. And the velocity of his rise to power is the fastest that anyone in town can recall.

    Since his general-election trouncing of the former governor Andrew Cuomo, Mamdani has been preparing for the sober realities of governing—appointments, negotiations, coalition management, policy development. Trying to preserve the movement energy he tapped during the campaign, he has also made an effort to continue the inventive outreach practices that brought him to broad public attention. Just last Sunday, for instance, he sat in a room in the Museum of the Moving Image, in Astoria (a few blocks from the rent-stabilized apartment he’s giving up to move into Gracie Mansion), for twelve hours, meeting with New Yorkers for three minutes at a time. It was a gesture to show that he could look his constituents in the eye, and that he could listen to them.

    Mamdani ran a disciplined campaign, and he has run a disciplined transition. He didn’t take the bait when Mayor Eric Adams criticized him, told Jews to be afraid of him, and pulled other last-minute maneuvers seemingly designed to undermine him. Mamdani met with President Donald Trump in the Oval Office—and they startled everyone by having an outwardly productive meeting. (Trump happily told Mamdani that it was O.K. to call him a “fascist.”) Mamdani discouraged a young D.S.A. city-council member, Chi Ossé, from staging a primary challenge next year to the House Minority Leader, Hakeem Jeffries—a magnanimous move, considering Jeffries’s ongoing chilliness toward Mamdani. In rooms full of wealthy business leaders and in others filled with donors, he has tried to win over skeptics among New York’s élite. (“They are finding themselves, unexpectedly, charmed,” the Times reported recently.) It was a relief to the city’s political establishment when he asked Jessica Tisch, the current police commissioner, whom Adams appointed, to stay in the job. Last week, when a top appointee’s old antisemitic tweets surfaced, Mamdani accepted her resignation within hours.

    Having rocketed, in a matter of months, from one per cent in the polls to mayor, Mamdani seems comfortable facing his doubters. But what he’s up against cannot be overstated. It’s been an open question for centuries as to whether New York is “governable” in a top-to-bottom, municipal, positive sense. For a long time, city government here was considered little more than a trough for Tammany Hall. In the past century, the city proved that it could (more or less) pick up its own garbage, get a handle on crime, and operate large school and hospital systems, even if sometimes just barely. It can do more than that, of course, but can it durably make life in New York better, and not just more tolerable, for the bulk of its residents? In his effort to answer affirmatively, Mamdani will have to navigate problems of management, budget, and bureaucracy inside City Hall, and also Trump (does anyone think their chumminess will last?), ICE raids, intransigent billionaires, public impatience with slips or inconsistencies, and twists of fate and nature. The billionaire exodus that was forecast during his campaign has shown no signs of materializing, but one bad blizzard in January could hamper Mamdani’s ambitious agenda for months.

    Eric Lach

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  • Lawrence Wright on A. J. Liebling’s “The Great State”

    During the 1959 session of the Louisiana state legislature, Governor Earl Long, the less famous younger brother of Senator Huey Long, “went off his rocker,” as the tickled writer A. J. Liebling recounted in this magazine, adding, “The papers reported that he had cursed and hollered at the legislators, saying things that so embarrassed his wife, Miz Blanche, and his relatives that they had packed him off to Texas in a National Guard plane to get his brains repaired in an asylum.”

    Liebling, who joined the staff of The New Yorker in 1935, ten years after its founding, quickly made a reputation as a humorous and versatile observer of the human condition. “I am a chronic, incurable, recidivist reporter,” he confessed. And Liebling once boasted to a friend, “I write better than anyone who writes faster, and faster than anyone who writes better.” Among sportswriters, he was esteemed for his boxing coverage. His unapologetic passion for food, evidenced by his waistline, was one of the great romances in literary journalism. As he saw it, dieting represented an absolute evil: “If there is to be a world cataclysm, it will probably be set off by skim milk, Melba toast, and mineral oil on the salad.”

    Liebling took over The Wayward Press, a column in the magazine, in which he prosecuted the sins and miscues of the Fourth Estate, which he labelled “the weak slat under the bed of democracy.” Although he was terribly nearsighted, out of shape, and plagued by gout (his great friend and colleague Joseph Mitchell once observed him using a strip of bacon as a bookmark), his vigorous coverage of D Day and the liberation of Paris led the French government to award him the Cross of the Legion of Honor. Untidy in his personal life, he was on his third wife, the novelist Jean Stafford, when he died, at the age of fifty-nine.

    Liebling’s foremost talent was bringing memorable characters roaring to life, so it’s not surprising that he fell in love with Earl Long. The New Yorker wisely allocated three issues to Liebling’s profile of Long, titled “The Great State”; the articles were later collected in a book with a superior title, “The Earl of Louisiana.”

    Like other reporters who joined in the merriment, Liebling came to Louisiana to scoff at Long. “I had left New York thinking of him as a Peckerwood Caligula,” he confessed. But, when he watched news coverage of the legislative session, he listened closely to what the ranting governor was saying to the recalcitrant legislators. Long was attacking a law, passed around the time of Reconstruction, that allowed election registrars to disqualify voters on “educational” grounds, a measure designed to push Black people off the voter rolls. “It took me a minute or two to realize that the old ‘demagogue’ was actually making a civil-rights speech,” Liebling wrote. He began to recognize Long as something more important than another Southern political buffoon. Long was a skillful progressive politician operating in a conservative, racist environment. For all the droll humor in Liebling’s coverage, that insight is what made his report a classic.

    Liebling’s articles about Long caught my eye when they were published, in the spring of 1960. They influenced my decision to attend Tulane University, in New Orleans, the city that Liebling had painted so vibrantly; they also pointed me toward journalism, and they fixed in my mind The New Yorker as my ideal professional destination. For my generation, Liebling still loomed as a model of incisive journalism with a personal voice. He was scholarly and highly literate while also at home with hat-check girls and the bookies at the racetrack. He barbecued the reactionary intellectuals of his era, but portrayed ordinary people with warmth. Most of them, that is. Liebling displayed a New York City chauvinism by mercilessly skewering Chicago, the “second city.” In the evening, when the commuters fled, Chicago was a “vast, anonymous pulp,” he wrote, “plopped down by the lakeside like a piece of waterlogged fruit. Chicago after nightfall is a small city of the rich who have not yet migrated, visitors, and hoodlums, surrounded by a large expanse of juxtaposed dimnesses.”

    I have in my office a poster on which Liebling’s portrait is accompanied by his cautionary warning: “Freedom of the press is guaranteed only to those who own one.” ♦

    Lawrence Wright

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  • The Entire New Yorker Archive Is Now Fully Digitized

    In the introduction to “The New Yorker Index 1992,” a twenty-page catalogue of everything the magazine published that year, the staff writer John McPhee acknowledged a ritual familiar to many New Yorker readers: tackling a stack of unread issues. Instead of catching up at home, he’d schlep his copies up to New Hampshire and read in the middle of a lake, while lying in a canoe. With those issues dispatched, he’d call the New Yorker office and ask the librarian for help locating other stories he wanted to read: “Hello, Helen, in what issue did [the staff writer Thomas] Whiteside tee up the American latex tomato? Whose was the thing about the grass at Wimbledon?” (The thing was McPhee’s, of course.)

    Exploring past New Yorker pieces is now a lot easier (and more portable). As of this week, our full archive is available to read at newyorker.com. On top of what was previously accessible, we’ve added more than a hundred thousand articles from more than four thousand issues, a stack hefty enough to sink your canoe. Not only is everything from the 1992 index accounted for—Susan Orlean on the inner workings of a supermarket, Talk of the Town stories about “urinals (art)” and “urinals (not art)”—but also John Updike’s 1961 short story “A & P” and Calvin Tomkins’s Profile of Marcel Duchamp. There’s work by Jorge Luis Borges and Susan Sontag, Ralph Ellison and Louise Glück. There are articles about Frank Sinatra and Michael Jordan, royals and rock stars, cowboys and clowns. All in all, there are more than thirty-one thousand Talk of the Town stories; twenty-four hundred Reporter at Large pieces; more than thirteen thousand works of fiction and fourteen thousand poems; three thousand Letters from everywhere, from Abu Dhabi to Zimbabwe; and fifteen hundred “Annals of” everything, from “haberdashery” to “veterinary medicine.”

    While the complete digital archive may not have the same charm as magazines piled on the nightstand, there is now a single home for every issue—a place to peruse covers, scan tables of contents, and choose what to read next. Better still, if you don’t happen to have the phone number of our librarian, upgraded search capabilities allow you to hunt down “Whiteside” or “Wimbledon,” “vaping” or “vampires,” and sort results by date of publication. We’ve also made use of A.I. to add short summaries where they didn’t previously appear, making it easier to discern what an article is about. (This is, after all, a magazine in which the headline “Measure for Measure” might lead to an essay not on Shakespeare’s comedy but on the rise of the metric system.)

    The magazine’s centenary celebrations, which kicked off in February, provide a wonderful occasion to get reacquainted with our rich history. Whether you are looking for something specific, going down a rabbit hole, or simply catching up, the newly expanded archive is designed to make a hundred years of writing more accessible than ever. Subscribers enjoy unlimited access; if you aren’t a subscriber yet, become one today.

    We’ll continue to highlight some of our past favorites in the Classics newsletter, on our home page, and elsewhere, but consider this an open invitation to dive into the archive on your own. If you do choose to read on the water, please be careful—an iPad dropped overboard won’t hold up quite as well as a copy of the print magazine. ♦

    Nicholas Henriquez

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  • Roz Chast on Gahan Wilson

    He had his own world: a place where the funny and the horrific crossed paths.

    Roz Chast

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  • Oliver Sacks Put Himself Into His Case Studies. What Was the Cost?

    As Sacks aged, he felt as if he were gazing at people from the outside. But he also noticed a new kind of affection for humans—“homo sap.” “They’re quite complex (little) creatures (I say to myself),” he wrote in his journal. “They suffer, authentically, a good deal. Gifted, too. Brave, resourceful, challenging.”

    Perhaps because love no longer appeared to be a realistic risk—he had now entered a “geriatric situation”—Sacks could finally confess that he craved it. “I keep being stabbed by love,” he wrote in his journal. “A look. A glance. An expression. A posture.” He guessed that he had at least five, possibly ten, more years to live. “I want to, I want to ••• I dare not say. At least not in writing.”

    In 2008, Sacks had lunch with Bill Hayes, a forty-seven-year-old writer from San Francisco who was visiting New York. Hayes had never considered Sacks’s sexuality, but, as soon as they began talking, he thought, “Oh, my God, he’s gay,” he told me. They lingered at the table for much of the afternoon, connecting over their insomnia, among other subjects. After the meal, Sacks wrote Hayes a letter (which he never sent) explaining that relationships had been “a ‘forbidden’ area for me—although I am entirely sympathetic to (indeed wistful and perhaps envious about) other people’s relationships.”

    A year later, Hayes, whose partner of seventeen years had died of a heart attack, moved to New York. He and Sacks began spending time together. At Sacks’s recommendation, Hayes started keeping a journal, too. He often wrote down his exchanges with Sacks, some of which he later published in a memoir, “Insomniac City.”

    “It’s really a question of mutuality, isn’t it?” Sacks asked him, two weeks after they had declared their feelings for each other.

    “Love?” Hayes responded. “Are you talking about love?”

    “Yes,” Sacks replied.

    Sacks began taking Hayes to dinner parties, although he introduced him as “my friend Billy.” He did not allow physical affection in public. “Sometimes this issue of not being out became very difficult,” Hayes told me. “We’d have arguments, and I’d say things like ‘Do you and Shengold ever talk about why you can’t come out? Or is all you ever talk about your dreams?’ ” Sacks wrote down stray phrases from his dreams on a whiteboard in his kitchen so that he could report on them at his sessions, but he didn’t share what happened in therapy.

    Kate Edgar, who worked for Sacks for three decades, had two brothers who were gay, and for years she had advocated for gay civil rights, organizing Pride marches for her son’s school. She intentionally found an office for Sacks in the West Village so that he would be surrounded by gay men living openly and could see how normal it had become. She tended to hire gay assistants for him, for the same reason. “So I was sort of plotting on that level for some years,” she told me.

    In 2013, after being in a relationship with Hayes for four years—they lived in separate apartments in the same building—Sacks began writing a memoir, “On the Move,” in which he divulged his sexuality for the first time. He recounts his mother’s curses upon learning that he was gay, and his decades of celibacy—a fact he mentions casually, without explanation. Edgar wondered why, after so many years of analysis, coming out took him so long, but, she said, “Oliver did not regard his relationship with Shengold as a failure of therapy.” She said that she’d guessed Shengold had thought, “This is something Oliver has to do in his own way, on his own time.” Shengold’s daughter, Nina, said that, “for my dad to have a patient he loved and respected finally find comfort in identifying who he’d been all his life—that’s growth for both of them.”

    Rachel Aviv

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