The cover of the June 30 2025 issue of The New Yorker which features a colorful geometric illustration of the Brooklyn...

Christoph Niemann’s “The Bridge”

Crossing over the water. “The real beauty of the Brooklyn Bridge can only be experienced in motion,” the artist Christoph Niemann said, about his cover for the June 30, 2025, issue. Niemann’s celebration of the structure is a kaleidoscopic composition that plays with its cathedral-like thick towers and its thin mesh of wires. “My recommendation…

Read More

The DOGEfather Part II

Joe Gebbia, a RISD grad and an Airbnb billionaire, may soon lead the federal cost-cutting effort known as DOGE. Could there be clues to his methods in his art-school days? Who will help lead the Department of Government Efficiency now that Elon Musk has left the scene? News reports have mentioned Joe Gebbia, a Tesla…

Read More

Trump Changed. The Intelligence Didn’t.

Whenever Donald Trump has contemplated confrontation with Iran, his decisions have been guided less by the consensus of the U.S. intelligence community than by his own calculation of risk and reward. At times he has pulled the trigger. At times he has backed down. All the while, the U.S. assessment of Iranian nuclear intentions has…

Read More

Questions From the Bomb Shelter

Some dreams do come true. At night, I dream of the rising screech of sirens across Jerusalem, of running to a bomb shelter, of thinking wildly about my grown children elsewhere in Israel dashing through dark streets for safety as missiles whoosh overhead. I dream of distant booms that I hope are interceptions and not…

Read More

Trump Got This One Right

“Why are the wrong people doing the right thing?” Henry Kissinger is supposed to have once asked, in a moment of statesman-like perplexity. That question recurred as Donald Trump, backed by a visibly perturbed vice president and two uneasy Cabinet secretaries, announced that the United States had just bombed three Iranian nuclear sites. It is…

Read More

The Dangerous Consequences of Donald Trump’s Strikes in Iran

On Saturday, President Donald Trump brought the United States into Israel’s war against Iran. American planes and submarines struck three sites in Iran, including two nuclear enrichment facilities—at Natanz and Fordow—and a complex near Isfahan that was believed to contain stores of uranium. The Israeli government had been pushing for Trump to strike, in part…

Read More

The Only Iran Hawk Is Trump

By carrying out air strikes on three Iranian nuclear sites last night, Donald Trump showed the fundamental error of American political ornithology: There have never been Iran hawks and Iran doves. There have been only doves. Every prior U.S. president, including Trump himself, has refrained from attacking Iranian territory, even in response to killings and…

Read More

Latinos Vote Differently Under Threat

Recently, in Los Angeles, protesters waving Mexican flags amid burning vehicles and law enforcement in riot gear have resurrected memories of 1994, when similar scenes defined Latino political identity for a generation. During that year’s movement against California Proposition 187, which sought to bar undocumented immigrants from accessing education, health care, and social services, Latino…

Read More