Molly Fischer

1 week ago | newyorker.com | Molly Fischer

There are plenty of old magazine stories I love, but I also love old magazines themselves. They’re time capsules, perfectly preserved and bristling with ephemera. The listings, the reviews, the ads—when I page through the double issue of The New Yorker published in February, 1996, this is the stuff that conjures a period I just barely remember absorbing as a preteen reader. There are a lot of ads, too; the issue is thick with them.

1 month ago | newyorker.com | Molly Fischer

In recent decades, as food has claimed pop-culture status, culinary autobiography has become a familiar genre. It tends, for example, to include a tour of formative foods. Julia Child’s revelatory taste of sole meunière, Anthony Bourdain’s first oyster—these experiences initiate gourmands and shape their obsessions. By contrast, the New York restaurateur Keith McNally’s new memoir, “I Regret Almost Everything,” is light on memorable meals. What it has instead are memorable walls.

2 months ago | newyorker.com | Molly Fischer

Last Friday could have passed for a lovely spring day on the Connecticut campus of Wesleyan University. Students with books and laptops dotted a green hillside; flocks of admissions visitors trailed tour guides; baseball season had just begun, and practice was under way. It was almost possible to forget the grim straits of American higher education in 2025. Colleges and universities have been early targets of the second Trump Administration.

Mar 24, 2025 | newyorker.com | Molly Fischer

Last summer, a poll by the Survey Center on American Life produced a striking statistic. Breaking down the electorate by marital status and then by gender, the survey found that, in an already polarized Presidential race, one divide stretched wider than the others: divorced men were fourteen percentage points more likely than divorced women to say that they supported Donald Trump.

Dec 12, 2024 | newyorker.com | Molly Fischer

In today’s newsletter, a favorite winter dessert. And then, Dhruv Khullar on the year in which profits trumped people in the health-care industry. Plus:Inside Syria’s most fearsome prisonLeos Carax’s whirligig self-portrait filmThe forgotten works of Caroline BlackwoodMolly FischerStaff writerI’m a year-round sucker for nut-based sweets, but winter is when they get their true chance to shine. They’re rich; they’re chewy; they aren’t subject to the vagaries of produce.