New Yorker Favorites
A photographer’s college classmates, then and now.
The repressive, authoritarian soul of “Thomas the Tank Engine.”
Why the last snow on Earth may be red.
Harper Lee’s abandoned true-crime novel.
How the super-rich are preparing for doomsday.
What if a pill could give you all the benefits of a workout?
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Book Currents
Michael Lewis on the Magic of One-Hit Wonders
The best-selling author discusses books by writers who didn’t publish much, and how they helped shape his career.
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.
By Adam Gopnik
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.
By Jill Lepore
Takes
Ian Frazier on George W. S. Trow’s “Eclectic, Reminiscent, Amused, Fickle, Perverse”
The writer and his great subject—Ahmet Ertegun, the head of Atlantic Records—shared a deeply American restlessness.
By Ian Frazier
Open Questions
Should You Be Religious?
In “Believe,” the Times columnist Ross Douthat argues that science has strengthened, rather than weakened, the case for faith.
By Joshua Rothman
Second Read
A Writer Whose Novels Explored the Edges of Normalcy
Misdiagnosed with schizophrenia and institutionalized for years, Janet Frame was drawn to the inner worlds of people conventionally treated as inside-less.
By Audrey Wollen
Dept. of Reality
The Best Fake Books—Made Real
At the Grolier Club, in midtown, a collection of imaginary volumes—the play within “Hamlet,” Hemingway’s lost first novel—are bound, scuffed, and shelved.
By Zach Helfand
Books
The Classic Mystery That Prefigured the Los Angeles Wildfires
Ross Macdonald’s “The Underground Man” is exquisitely attuned to the Californian landscape—how it rises, falls, smells, and, most indelible of all, how it burns.
By Anthony Lane
Under Review
An Argentinean Writer and the Movement for Women’s Rights
Selva Almada’s work is central to the battle to protect hard-won victories that President Javier Milei has vowed to overturn.
By Graciela Mochkofsky
A Critic at Large
The Gilded Age Never Ended
Plutocrats, anarchists, and what Henry James grasped about the romance of revolution.
By Adam Gopnik
Reflections
Menopause Is Having a Moment
If you’ve got ovaries, you’ll go through it. So why does every generation think it’s the first to have hot flashes?
By Rebecca Mead
Book Currents
Min Jin Lee’s Indelible Twentieth-Century Women
The “Pachinko” author recommends four novels that present character studies of bold women making their way in changing times.