The Magazine
100th Anniversary Issue
February 17 & 24, 2025
Goings On
Goings On
Goings On Turns a Hundred
Also: A starry revival of Ibsen’s “Ghosts,” the guitar god Jack White, the great Ukrainian photographer Boris Mikhailov, and more.
The Food Scene
Lundy’s and the Risks of Restaurant Revivals
An iconic Brooklyn seafood spot is back, after a fashion.
The Talk of the Town
David Remnick on Harold Ross’s creation from 1925 to now; most acquisitive; against the cut; robots by the dozen.
Comment
Onward and Upward
Harold Ross founded The New Yorker as a comic weekly. A hundred years later, we’re doubling down on our commitment to the much richer publication it became.
Reference Dept.
Most Likely to Own Madonna’s Yearbook
Seth Poppel, a lifelong collector, is the media’s go-to guy for yearbooks of the stars—from Patti Smith (“Class Clown”) to Ruth Bader Ginsburg (“twirler”) to Leonardo DiCaprio (“Most Bizarre”).
Dept. of Sensitivity
The “Intactivists” Campaigning Against the Cut
New York’s biggest foreskin fans take their anti-circumcision message to the streets.
Brave New World
Doing the Robot, for Your School
In a Queens high-school gym, budding roboticists went head to head, in front of a student choir and real-life refs.
Reporting & Essays
American Chronicles
The Editorial Battles That Made The New Yorker
The magazine has three golden rules: never write about writers, editors, or the magazine. On the occasion of our hundredth anniversary, we’re breaking them all.
U.S. Journal
Gary, Indiana, and the Long Shadow of U.S. Steel
Can a company town that’s been called “the most miserable city in America” remake itself?
Profiles
Mike White’s Mischievous Vision for “The White Lotus”
Sex, money, morals, and the making of an ever-shifting franchise.
Annals of Medicine
Can the Human Body Endure a Voyage to Mars?
In the coming years, an unprecedented number of people will leave planet Earth—but it’s becoming increasingly clear that deep space will make us sick.
Personal History
A Visit to Madam Bedi
I was estranged from my own mother, so a friend tried to lend me his.
The Weekend Essay
An Academic’s Journey Toward Reporting
I was used to a disembodied way of working: identify a philosophical problem, then study it. What could spending time with a philosopher teach me about his ideas?
Onward and Upward with the Arts
High-School Band Contests Turn Marching Into a Sport—and an Art
Band kids today don’t just parade up and down the field playing fight songs. They flow across it in shifting tableaux, with elaborate themes and spandex-clad dancers.
A Reporter at Large
The Nuns Trying to Save the Women on Texas’s Death Row
Sisters from a convent outside Waco have repeatedly visited the prisoners—and even made them affiliates of their order. The story of a powerful spiritual alliance.
Takes
Takes
Rachel Aviv on Janet Malcolm’s “Trouble in the Archives”
Malcolm’s letters to a source reveal the intimate relationship behind one of her most influential pieces.
Takes
Kevin Young on James Baldwin’s “Letter from a Region in My Mind”
The essay served as a definitive diagnosis of American race relations. Events soon gave it the force of prophecy.
Takes
Jia Tolentino on Joan Didion’s “everywoman.com”
Didion’s appraisal of Martha Stewart, in which most glosses of the subject could also apply to the author, is an ur-text on contemporary feminine ambition.
Takes
Roz Chast on George Booth’s Cartoons
Every object is lovingly drawn, in a way that only Booth could draw them. Every detail enhances the scene.
Shouts & Murmurs
Shouts & Murmurs
A Troubleshooting Guide to Your Moving Wall of Spikes
Problem: Moving wall of spikes completes migration across room, but victim is not impaled. Cause: Safety tips left on spikes?
Fiction
The Critics
A Critic at Large
The Profile Hemingway Could Never Live Down
When Lillian Ross profiled the celebrated novelist, the world saw ridicule and ruin. But letters between the reporter and her subject reveal something far more complicated.
Books
An Arachnophobe Pays Homage to the Spider
They’re venomous cannibals, hiding in our homes. With something like fifteen quadrillion spiders around, we can’t escape them. Can we learn to love them?
The Art World
The Eternal Mysteries of Red
It’s often deemed the first color, the strongest color, the color that stands for color itself. So why does it keep slipping out of our grasp?
On and Off the Menu
The L.A. Chefs Keeping Their Neighbors Fed
After wildfires displaced thousands of Angelenos, a patchwork of cooks, restaurateurs, and volunteers have operated something like a citywide meal train.
On Television
Fifty Weird Years of “Saturday Night Live”
“SNL50: Beyond Saturday Night” delves into cast auditions, “More Cowbell,” and a fateful season in which Lorne Michaels almost lost the show with new experiments.
The Current Cinema
The Uneven Cross-Cultural Comedy of “Paddington in Peru” and “Universal Language”
Cinematic nods abound in two tales of homecoming, one starring Paddington Bear and the other set somewhere between Canada and Iran.
Poems
Poems
“Nothing New”
A recently discovered poem, written in 1918 and published for the first time in The New Yorker’s Anniversary Issue.
Poems
“Temple of Poseidon, Sounion”
“Now I’m an adult, restraining the impulse / to elegize what is still alive.”
Cartoons
Puzzles & Games
The Mail
Letters should be sent with the writer’s name, address, and daytime phone number via e-mail to themail@newyorker.com. Letters may be edited for length and clarity, and may be published in any medium. We regret that owing to the volume of correspondence we cannot reply to every letter.