moimn.com

Last year, I had a strange dream. My father and I were wading in an industrial canal, reminiscent of a subway, as thousands of hatchery-raised fish were being released into it. The fish crowded, slimy, around our legs, and I knew (in the way that one knows in a dream) that they thought, as they…

Texting About Something Other Than Making Plans: Do you think we’re ready to start sending each other memes? Because I saw one of a cat, I remembered that you have a plant, and I was, like, “Whoa, another living thing”—same color, too. (You should water your plant.) Admitting You Didn’t Watch His/Her TV Recommendation: Because…

In August, 2011, I received a letter with a return address that read “Supreme Court of the United States.” There was no name on the envelope. I tore it open, wondering whether I was somehow being summoned for jury duty. Inside was a two-page letter from John Paul Stevens. He had recently read my book…

On Monday afternoon, following the news that President Trump would be visiting El Paso after a mass shooting that killed twenty-two people, a local immigrant-advocacy group began circulating a letter to the President asking him to stay away. The open letter, principally authored by the Border Network for Human Rights, stated that Patrick Crusius, the…

Buy New Yorker Cartoons »

“The worst is not,” Edgar says in “King Lear,” amid much—an old man’s madness, a father’s brutal blinding—that would seem about as bad as life can get, “So long as we can say ‘This is the worst.’ ” The true worst, his point is, will be so annihilating that we will not even have language…

Not long after President Trump issued his first tweets about Representative Elijah Cummings, on Saturday—Cummings’s Baltimore-area district, Trump wrote, is a “disgusting, rat and rodent infested mess”—the staff at Chase Street Accessories & Engraving, in the downtown Baltimore neighborhood of Mount Vernon, fired up a laser engraver for a one-off piece of merchandise: a mug…

This week’s second round of Presidential-primary debates were yet another marker of just how thoroughly Bernie Sanders’s Medicare for All advocacy has transformed the Democratic Party. Perhaps even more notable than the stridency of Sanders’s and Warren’s defenses of the plan were the barbs from moderates who have been forced by widespread enthusiasm for Medicare…

Boarding at 5:35 a.m., the business traveller knows she is among her peers. She joins the calm procession of solo professionals filing onto the plane, a “shuttle.” Dressed to take meetings two hours post-landing, in a sharp collar and shiny heels, she, like her fellow-passengers, is a portrait of an earlier, more glamorous era of…

Francis Ford Coppola is one of the best directors of the past fifty years, but not necessarily one of the best screenwriters, and his directorial artistry is boldly and poignantly on view in a movie that was written for him: the bright-toned and occasionally comedic but essentially tragic drama “Tucker: The Man and His Dream,”…