At least eighty-five per cent of the work of writing onto a blank page is figuring out what not to write.

There ought to be a word for the great American tradition of generating an idea you know is ridiculous and impractical in the final countdown to a meeting, just to hold space and show that you are generating ideas. Feignstorming?

Great culture can save lives. Literally. Amazing letter in today’s @thetimes.com about Tom Stoppard

Unexpectedly heartbroken by the death of Tom Stoppard. He was—as a writer with a high-flying career, but also as an artist—the real thing.

An important point about A.I. writing, not to be lost, is that no one enjoys reading it.

My lovely and brilliant colleague Mark Singer is always very funny about his ongoing nightmare of the one magazine profile he never wanted to do continually returning to relevance, like the re-gifted holiday fruitcake that keeps coming back.

Some inspiring words on cinema in the streaming era from the Pope. Yes, THAT Pope.

Helen Rosner, @hels.bsky.social, who brings frankness, precise expertise, sane perspective, and humanity to her writing about food, is one of my favorite critics to read these days, full stop. www.newyorker.com/culture/the-...

A real and alarming loss for CBS News, or any operation. Dickerson is both an irrepressibly responsible journalist and one of the most patient and good-faith colleagues in the industry. deadline.com/2025/10/john...

The President says that his team is accepting $130 million checks from individuals whose identities cannot be disclosed and using that money to fund the military, so don't worry.

One way to think about this, perhaps, is as a side effect of an increasingly plutocratic-standard society. As middle-class life becomes more fundamentally uncomfortable and plutocrats exercise increasingly visible influence, more busy, ambitious people feel an entitlement to billionaire-style life.

A small thing—but also not—is that I've never seen a greater explosion of misuses of the English language by people in public life wearing suits and ties than recently. "Begs the question" is one of the most minor. It helps support this sense of language coming unmoored from reality.

Diane Keaton, who died today, at 79, was “one of the most comedically pure and brainy actresses in our midst,” Penelope Gilliatt wrote, in 1978. https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/1978/12/25/diane-keaton-her-own-best-disputant

I disagree. High school and college are still, for better and worse, the closest things to wormholes in American society—where people can enter with one future and exit with another—and places of intellectual acculturation, where style and values are set. Flip a switch there, and the effects ripple.

I still agree with the guy who wrote this.

Anyone who has spent time in archives knows that one of the things that really vanished with the end of the pen-and-typewriter age is colored paper. Letters, manuscripts, etc., used to be done on paper of all hues. For several decades everything written at the NYer was done on canary-yellow paper.

A well-put point.

From this week's @newyorker.com anniversary issue: me on the paragraph-level genius of E. B. White. www.newyorker.com/magazine/tak...

remember folks, we cant have gun restrictions because if we do the federal government will occupy our streets, imprison people without due process, ship dissidents to foreign gulags and things of that nature

Scott Bessent went from public school to Yale, where he subsequently did some teaching on economic history. He worked in his industry for forty years. These tributes, of which this one isn't the most comical, must surely mark the exact point where careerism meets self-loathing.

The Glib, Asinine Artlessness of Web Headlines has become too much. Can we go back already to when headlines were good? Who on Earth wants these?

My colleague @zhelfand.bsky.social gets New Yorker fact checking right in this delightful history. www.newyorker.com/magazine/202...

It is comical and alarming how many financial potholes and structural flaws are now paved over with the idea of selling brand merchandise.

I love reading how writers edit themselves, so to read how E.B. White revised and revised to write this, "a single perfect paragraph," is delightful. (Also? I had no idea that anyone had ever been labeled a "paragrapher.") @nathanheller.bsky.social @newyorker.com link.newyorker.com/view/5be9f03...

This is extremely funny. defector.com/it-took-many...

My theory that issues cropping up in San Francisco show up in other major cities two or three years later seems to be holding. Here's my @newyorker.com piece on the crime-and-collapse narrative that became a political tool there after the pandemic. www.newyorker.com/magazine/202...

Galling to watch institutions of fact and culture—universities, publications, museums, etc.—gasp for survival, then read of capital rushing to startups seeking to implant computers in the brain. I wonder how many people feel that their main obstacle in life has been insufficient brain compute.

Some may find the argument of this wide-ranging essay—not least its sudden and surprising turn to the Time Warner/AOL demerger of 2009 as a model—incoherent, and, in that way, an indication of some value in humanistic training after all.

Very evocative of the French police, who are notorious for travelling in ambling, gossipy groups, like sorority members on a Friday.

Anyone who has ever tried to find a great movie based on platform user reviews (or searched quickly for place to eat abroad using Google Maps' user ratings, inexplicably a dowsing rod for joints geared toward American college students) will understand how dire this trend is.

Stupendo.

The student newspaper. This fell. To the student. Newspaper.

This was a fun discussion about the ambience of information with Simon Rosenberg of the @hopiumchronicles.bsky.social. www.hopiumchronicles.com/p/seeding-th...

I'll just observe that the now-aging insight that people can't deal with traditional textual journalism, want "other platforms," etc., has always been wisdom flowing from the top down, not the ground up. (Can also report that public transportation continues to be full of people reading.)

It's happening here.

This proposition popped out at me as odd, in that—believe what you will about the wisdom involved—there's little "classic" about these settlements with, and enriching, an antagonistic federal government, no sense in which it's business as usual. www.nytimes.com/2025/07/28/u...

What I find I want in this hard time is sumptuous works of art, patiently and beautifully made, filled with human contact and light—a reminder of what we had and could maybe have again.

One thing I've been around long enough to notice—a grounding, sane-making idea, somehow—is that ideas, strategies, successes that smell fishy generally are, although it might take a month or a decade for it to become obvious why and how.

In this week's Shouts & Murmurs, an important report from me with details of the new James Bond. www.newyorker.com/magazine/202...

A happy #Bloomsday to all! Hear Joyce reading from Ulysses and Finnegans Wake in two rare recordings from the 1920s: https://publicdomainreview.org/collection/james-joyce-reading-his-work-1924-1929 #Bloomsday2023

NYC this evening is in dead-on San Francisco summer weather: the temperature, the moisture in the air, the fresh breezes, the way it carries fragrances. Heaven!

A really lovely writeup of the Martin Amis event a bunch of us did onstage at 92Y a couple of weeks ago, from the Paris Review. www.theparisreview.org/blog/2025/05...

Move fast, ask nothing, learn nothing, break things, go home. www.nytimes.com/2025/05/28/u...

An interesting about-face to the past century or so of educational objectives. (JFK: "One of our most serious manpower shortages is the lack of Ph.D.s in engineering, science and mathematics; only about one half of 1 percent of our school-age generation is achieving Ph. D. degrees in all fields.")

Google has become amazingly, terrifyingly poor for locating anything published online before about fifteen years ago, in case we didn't already know there's a big black hole at the center of the digital universe. (I've had better luck with the Wayback Machine.)

This week's efforts to hang the current state of America on, of all people, Joe Biden are a little odd.

Published #OnThisDay 100 years ago

A diminishing arts culture isn't a middle-of-the-list crisis for a country (or a city) but a top-priority emergency, because of everything else it supports.