The New Yorker

1 week ago | newyorker.com | Jeannie Suk Gersen

Preventing harm to children is a goal with which most people would agree. But the widening gulf between red and blue states has meant that, in a range of areas, there is no consensus—indeed, there’s extreme polarity—on what “harm” even means. On the issue of gender-affirming medical treatments for trans children and adolescents, both sides have claimed life-or-death stakes.

1 week ago | newyorker.com | Vince Aletti |Brian Seibert |Jane Bua |Hilton Als

“Constellation,” a Diane Arbus exhibition at the Park Avenue Armory (through Aug. 17), includes more than four hundred and fifty famous, little-known, and unknown photographs from her brief career, cut short by suicide in 1971, at the age of forty-eight. Controversy dogged her posthumous shows and publications, and though it has mostly been replaced by a profound appreciation, Arbus isn’t easy to love. The work remains tough, provocative, and brilliantly dark.

1 week ago | newyorker.com | Rachel Monroe

On Wednesday, April 19, 2023, the Lotto Texas jackpot was seventy-three million dollars. There was no winner that night—there hadn’t been a winner for the past ninety-one drawings—and so the pool of money rolled over. By the next drawing, that Saturday, it had reached ninety-five million. Dawn Nettles started getting worried. For the jackpot to have grown so quickly, sales volume must have been ten times what Nettles thought was normal. “I knew right then,” she told me.

1 week ago | newyorker.com | Isaac Chotiner

Last week, Israel began an extensive bombing campaign on Iran, in what the Israeli Prime Minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, has claimed is an attempt to wipe out the country’s nuclear program. Iran has fired back missiles in response, but Israel’s military superiority has been clear: it has damaged nuclear sites and energy facilities across the country, and has assassinated key figures in Iran’s military leadership.

1 week ago | newyorker.com | Jonathan Blitzer

Last Thursday afternoon, the House Speaker, Mike Johnson, stood smiling in a hallway of the Capitol as he deflected reporters’ questions about the week’s most recent outrage. A few hours earlier, in Los Angeles, Alex Padilla, the senior Democratic senator from California, had interrupted a press conference held by Kristi Noem, the Secretary of Homeland Security, then was thrown to the ground and handcuffed by federal agents.