Category Culture

Donald Trump Plays Church

Save this storySave this storySave this storySave this story It’s usually gauche to take pictures in church. But at St. John’s, the Episcopal Church just across a sedate Lafayette Square from the White House, photography is inevitable at least once…

Till Lauer’s “Flames and Shadows”

Save this storySave this storySave this storySave this story For the cover of the January 27, 2025, issue, Till Lauer captured the tragic skyline in Los Angeles. The fires that have ravaged the city—burning through some forty thousand acres so…

Uncivil Defense

Sometimes, manners are just a cudgel. Featured in the December 2024 issue Credit: Anna Moneymaker/Getty Images Loading the Elevenlabs Text to Speech AudioNative Player… The hall monitors of the corporate media are regular Miss Manners acolytes when Donald Trump fires…

How a School Shooting Became a Video Game

Save this storySave this storySave this storySave this story The Final Exam, a recently released video game in which you play as a student caught amid a school shooting, lasts for around ten minutes, about the length of a real…

David Lynch’s Popularity Is a Judgment Against Us

The universal acclaim for the Montanan master of the cheap shot says more about us than about him. Credit: Drop of Light/Shutterstock The decades-long valorization and near-deification of the late filmmaker David Lynch is a sign of declining cultural standards…

The Cruel Abstraction of “Beast Games”

Save this storySave this storySave this storySave this story “Beast Games,” a reality-competition show currently streaming on Amazon Prime, opens with a dramatic camera shot, circling in three-sixty degrees to capture the show’s host, a skinny young man holding a…

The Henri Cartier-Bresson of South Korea

Save this storySave this storySave this storySave this story Let’s start with the photographer himself. A self-portrait, which, like the rest of Han Youngsoo’s work, is in black-and-white—not a nostalgic choice, just the technology of the times. It’s deep winter,…

Madame President: The Cover That Never Was

Save this storySave this storySave this storySave this story The portrait above, “Kamala,” painted by Kadir Nelson, would have been the cover of the November 18, 2024, issue of The New Yorker—that is, if Kamala Harris had won the election…