The New Yorker

The horror at the heart of “Everybody Scream,” Florence and the Machine’s sixth album, is deeply autobiographical. In 2023, not long after the release of “Dance Fever,” Florence Welch, who was pregnant, arrived at a concert in Cornwall feeling ill and bleeding heavily. She popped an ibuprofen and performed anyway, but when she got back to London, her doctor discovered that she had been carrying an ectopic pregnancy, and that her fallopian tube had burst, filling her abdomen with blood. She was rushed into emergency surgery. “The closest I came to making life was the closest I came to death,” she told the Guardian. Only ten days later, she was touring again. “Welch’s songs have often channelled the tempest of her desires, and the intermingling of birth, life, sex, and death,” Grace Byron writes. “But on her new album the spectre of the miscarriage forces her to reckon with her femininity—what it gives and what it takes—in a new way.” The ghost of a child haunts the album, particularly on the penultimate track, “You Can Have It All.” “I used to think I knew what sadness was / I was wrong,” she sings. “A piece of flesh / A million pounds / Am I a woman now?” The song hums with restless potential until it explodes in a raucous chorus, guitars chugging and strings whining. “There’s a clipped, breathless quality in her voice, a pervasive sense of anxiety, as if the near-death experience has unlocked something in her throat,” Byron notes. “Even the title track doesn’t surge with the same certainty as her old hits. These new songs don’t ripple with doubt but with fear and fury.” Read Byron’s review: https://lnkd.in/gm_XEXnD

Tuesday’s election was a sweep for Democrats, who won both gubernatorial races by unexpectedly wide double-digit margins and captured a number of down-ballot seats in districts that had voted for Donald Trump last year. The nagging questions that remain are important but not easily answerable until next year’s midterms: Does the country genuinely have buyer’s remorse? Is it fair to read this week’s election results as a repudiation of Trump—or are the outcomes better understood as a loud roar of protest from a part of America that already loathes the President? Whatever it means, a whiff of generational change is in the air. One definitely sensed it in Zohran Mamdani’s victory, in New York, but also in those of New Jersey’s Mikie Sherrill and Virginia’s Abigail Spanberger, neither of whom were in politics when Trump first became President. “Trump blamed Tuesday’s losses on the fact that he was not on the ballot to rally Republicans,” Glasser continues, “but he did not mention a larger constitutional truth about his lame-duck status that neither he nor his Party seems to have begun reckoning with: he won’t be on the ballot heading the ticket ever again.” Read her latest column: https://lnkd.in/ggPgEGb3

A cartoon by Lynn Hsu. #NewYorkerCartoons

Today’s Daily Cartoon, by Lindsey Budde. #NewYorkerCartoons Sign up for our humor newsletter to get more cartoons and other funny stuff right in your inbox: https://lnkd.in/gefJR59s

Nancy Pelosi has announced her retirement from Congress. Revisit her 2024 conversation with David Remnick, during which she discussed how she went from “housewife to House member to House Speaker”: https://lnkd.in/gYv9dpdK

Ira Sachs’s new film, “Peter Hujar’s Day“ is a bio-pic, of sorts, about the photographer of the title (played by Ben Whishaw), who, on December 19, 1974, was interviewed by the writer Linda Rosenkrantz (played by Rebecca Hall), at her apartment, on the Upper East Side. The characters in Sachs’s films always express themselves volubly, but in this surprising and boldly imaginative new drama, talk becomes the action, Richard Brody writes. “ ‘Peter Hujar’s Day’ is a requiem for Hujar and for the many other members of the downtown art scene lost to AIDS, victims not only of the disease but also of the stigmatization and persecution of gay men that shadowed the era,” Brody notes. “Sachs, without footnoting his movie in any way, evokes this history and Hujar’s place in it.” Read his review: https://lnkd.in/g3CEZEJj

Within hours of being sworn in, President Trump signed an executive order for a “pause” to all foreign assistance. The Secretary of State Marco Rubio sent a cable suspending every program outright. No program staff could be paid. No services could be delivered. Medicines and food already on the shelves could not be used. No warning had been given to the governments that relied on them. It was immediately obvious that hundreds of thousands of people would die in the first year alone. But the Administration did not reconsider; it escalated. Elon Musk exulted in swinging his chainsaw. Within weeks and in defiance of legal mandates, he and Rubio purged U.S.A.I.D.’s staff, terminated more than four-fifths of its contracts, impounded its funds, and dismantled the agency. One analytical model shows that, as of November 5th, the dismantling of U.S.A.I.D. has already caused the deaths of 600,000 people, two-thirds of them children. “The toll is appalling and will continue to grow,” Atul Gawande writes. “But these losses will be harder to see than those of war. For one, they unfold slowly.” The new short documentary “Rovina’s Choice” tells the story of what goes when aid goes. Watch here: https://lnkd.in/gzeEyM8V

Large numbers don’t quite mean what they used to as signals of relevance or clout, as social media has become more aged, more manipulable, and more automated by artificial intelligence. In a recent edition of her buzzy newsletter, Feed Me, the writer Emily Sundberg praised the new head editor of the publication Air Mail for not being a social-media power user: “I respect her sub-500 follower count on her private Instagram,” Sundberg wrote. In an issue of the fashion newsletter Blackbird Spyplane headlined “Now That’s How You Post,” the writer Jonah Weiner similarly complimented the stylist Lotta Volkova for posting haphazardly and being unafraid of only getting a few hundred likes. “There’s a certain status that comes from ignoring the usual signs of success online, and an envy inspired by those who can grow a career without the pressure of performing on social media,” Kyle Chayka writes in his latest column. Read about why less is more on social media these days: https://lnkd.in/gn-rXuyJ

A cartoon by Edward Steed. #NewYorkerCartoons See more from this week’s issue: https://lnkd.in/gZ_yYvdN

Martha Stewart’s recently reissued first book, “Entertaining,” from 1982, is organized into menus for events that are hard to imagine attending, let alone hosting, in 2025. A four-page spread gives instructions for a “midnight omelette supper for 30,” featuring a pound of herb butter, an array of pastries with homemade jams, and two quarts of chocolate mousse. For that occasion, Stewart recommends that one begin making omelettes at 11 P.M. and “serve undersized rolls, because they are lighter and daintier at night.” For a “soirée dansante” (dance party) with desserts for 40—palmiers, poached pears topped with crystallized violets, kiwi tartlets—she wonders, Why not “add champagne; add ballgowns and black tie”? “Such is life in Marthaland, where homemaking tasks are plucked from the realm of everyday drudgery and elevated to a pure pursuit of excellence. Stewart talks about cooking, gardening, and decorating with the equanimity of an endurance athlete,” Hannah Goldfield writes. “She never claimed that her approach was easy, inexpensive, or suited to everyone, only that her guidance was there for anyone who heard the call.” “It was totally doable, what I was doing,” Stewart told Goldfield, “if you put in the time and the energy, and didn’t mind getting exhausted.” Goldfield writes about Stewart’s guide to hosting and how home-cooking culture has changed in the years since it came out: https://lnkd.in/gJYBTtAV