Category Culture

Letters to Jeb Bush

In the fall of 2015, I moved from Brooklyn to Vermont for a month to try to write something new. I had spent four years working on a novel—four years covering cocktail napkins with notes about the tiniest interpersonal dynamics…

Kirsten Dunst’s Feminine Urges

You may have seen the recent meme involving the phrase “the feminine urge to,” followed by some pithy example of melancholy or chaotic behavior. “The feminine urge to stop replying to texts and sit in solitude for months at a…

Ken Jennings Has Some Questions About Death

Save this storySave this storySave this storySave this story In 2003, Ken Jennings was a twenty-nine-year-old software engineer, living in a suburb of Salt Lake City with his wife and young son, when his old college roommate suggested that they…

Ken Burns Turns His Lens on the American Response to the Holocaust

When we begin “The U.S. and the Holocaust”—a six-and-a-half-hour, three-part documentary about America’s actions during one of history’s greatest atrocities, the Nazis’ attempted extermination of the Jews—we find ourselves in 1933 Frankfurt, where a bourgeois German-Jewish family is going out…

Jorge Colombo’s “Off-Season”

The Coney Island boardwalk is best known as a summer place, a spot for sunshine, swimming, or amusement-park rides. In his cover for the December 5, 2022, issue, Jorge Colombo captures the place in a different moment and mood, with…

John W. Tomac’s “New Tricks”

Eustace Tilley, a monocled dandy, first appeared on the cover of The New Yorker’s inaugural issue, in 1925. He appeared on the cover for a second time one year later, in celebration that the magazine had survived. (It almost didn’t.)…