World
The Best Jokes of 2025
One of my favorite jokes requires a little setup. It’s from the first “Naked Gun” movie, from 1988, starring Leslie Nielsen as the bumbling Los Angeles police detective Frank...
A Chef’s Guide to Sumptuous Writing
From 1999 to 2020, Prune, a thirty-seat restaurant in the East Village, was a New York City institution. Its creator was Gabrielle Hamilton, a woman who (as The New...
“The Secret Agent” Is a Political Thriller Teeming with Life
Meanwhile, a real shark has washed ashore; the movie’s MacGuffin is a human leg found in the creature’s belly. To investigate, the city’s wily and pompous chief of police,...
A Romp Through Rea Irvin’s Forgotten Sunday Funnies
Rea Irvin, the magazine’s first art editor, is best known for creating Eustace Tilley, the monocled dandy whose upturned nose has graced our pages for a hundred years. Irvin...
Where Dante Guides Us
Hell is nevertheless filled with bloody and horrific torments. In Dante’s eyes, some sinners fully deserve what they get: corrupt clerics, for example—including a Pope—are jammed upside down into...
Malika Favre’s and Rea Irvin’s Eustace Tilley
For the first cover of the December 1, 2025, special centenary issue titled “Our Far-Flung Correspondents,” the artist Malika Favre created “Taking Flight,” the latest adaptation of The New...
A Battle with My Blood
Suddenly, the health-care system on which I relied felt strained, shaky. Doctors and scientists at Columbia, including George, didn’t know if they would be able to continue their research,...
A Holiday Gift Guide: Presents to Thank Your Host
For the pet-lover who hates taking care of pets: a self-sufficient ecosystem containing two or three miniature unneedy shrimp that can live for years without much help from you....
“Two People Exchanging Saliva” Rewrites the Slap in Cinema
One of the promotional images for the film “Two People Exchanging Saliva” is a black-and-white closeup of a woman, her face bruised, her nose bleeding, her eyes slack with...
“Hamnet” Feels Elemental, but Is It Just Highly Effective Grief Porn?
Zhao’s first three features were steeped in documentary realism, shot with a sturdy, windswept lyricism and abounding in nonprofessional actors. Then came her fourth picture, the clunky Marvel comic-book...