World
The New Yorker’s Coverage of the 2026 National Book Award Fiction Nominees
All week, The New Yorker has been exclusively announcing the National Book Award longlists. Today, the fiction list has arrived. It includes many works that our critics have commented on,...
Emily St. John Mandel’s Fluid New Novel
Emily St. John Mandel’s novels remind me of swimming pools. Her seven works of fiction—which include “The Glass Hotel,” “Sea of Tranquility,” and “Station Eleven,” the 2014 pandemic novel that...
The Unsettling Ambiguity of Early Pregnancy
Part of the reason that viability is so difficult to determine comes down to arbitrary rules. For example, guidelines in the U.S. and the U.K. define one of the indicators...
My Weekend with an A.I. Agent
What else can Muse help me with? I ask it to pick out a movie for my wife and me to watch later, and it proposes a new Ryan Reynolds...
John Wilson’s Poetry of the Mundane
I think pretty much all movies are good, in a way, even if not for the reasons they were intended to be good. Every movie is of value to somebody...
Grit Isn’t Good Enough, According to the Author of “Grit”
Imagine you’re at Thanksgiving dinner and your brother-in-law starts spouting opinions you find objectionable. It’s almost impossible, Duckworth argues, to will yourself not to feel anger—that is, to change your...
Dean Rohrer’s “Beginnings”
For the September 21, 2026, issue, Dean Rohrer portrayed the city as a place for new beginnings. “When our younger daughter moved to New York, it caused my wife and...
What the Met’s John Galliano Reversal Reveals
The industry didn’t forget, exactly, but it did move on. Galliano spent two years out of the spotlight, studying with the Rabbi Barry Marcus and meeting with Abraham Foxman, then...
“The Uprising” Is a Grim But Scattershot History Lesson
The rebels have their own self-appointed religious authority, though, in the figure of John Ball (a fierce Jamie Bell), Tyler’s radicalized second-in-command. Ball is a priest who has been branded...
