The New Yorker

Anthony Fauci, Hillary Clinton, George Floyd, George Soros, Marjorie Taylor Greene, Kyle Rittenhouse, hydroxychloroquine, Bitcoin, Antifa—“Eddington” references all these and more, as if to position the film’s director, Ari Aster, as a nonpartisan provocateur. Why, then, given such a range of targets, is it the conviction of the young and woke that stings him into comic rebuke? Aster, whose previous movies include “Hereditary” and “Midsummer,” is no longer a horror wunderkind, Justin Chang writes; he now yearns to be an impish anatomist of the body politic. “The times grow worse and worse; must his movies follow suit?” Read his review of Aster’s new dark comedy: https://lnkd.in/gUw4A2TG

“How are we meant to feel about art that we both love and oppose?” Molly Ringwald wrote, in 2018. “What if we are in the unusual position of having helped create it?” Read more: https://lnkd.in/gpvb89DM

Last week, the Justice Department and the F.B.I. signed off on a memo that not only concluded that there was no evidence that Jeffrey Epstein was murdered but also stated that federal investigators found no support for the claims that he blackmailed powerful people or maintained a list of clients. Trump, who indicated on the campaign trail that he would be open to releasing Epstein-related files, now sounds incredulous that people are still talking about them. In a post on Truth Social, he dismissed the story, calling it something “nobody cares about.” “And yet, by this point, many of Trump’s supporters had established that they still care very much about Epstein, and were not willing to move along,” Jon Allsop writes. “If the Epstein blowup is revealing of Trump’s base—indicating that its worship of him is not unconditional but predicated on the idea that he’s a tribune of the people seeking to expose nefarious élites—it is also revealing of Trump himself, and his relationship to conspiracy theories, in particular. Over the years, Trump has not only amplified all sorts of lies but made a generalized distrust of élites and institutions a key building block of his political success.” So why is Trump no longer embracing the conspiracies surrounding Epstein? Read Allsop’s latest column: https://lnkd.in/gFUapQcX

Sleep—which, when things go well, consumes a third of our lives—poses two opposed existential perplexities. The first is about consciousness: we know that we sleep, but cannot know that we are sleeping. The second perplexity has to do with what we can remember, and that is the experience of dreams. While engaged in the non-knowable act of sleeping, we also learn nightly that it is possible to know that we have had vivid, intense, unforgettable experiences that are, at the same time, delusions. “Sleep tells us that there are black holes outside the possibility of narrative description; the dreams we have when we’re sleeping tell us that our entire existence might be a narrative fiction,” Adam Gopnik writes. “ ‘How do we know it’s not a dream?’ is the perennial philosopher’s question, the red-pill dilemma.” What about those among us with insubordinate imaginations that keep us awake when we should be nodding off? “Few phobias can be quite as psychologically painful as sleeplessness,” Gopnik writes. “The body simply won’t lose consciousness, and losing it is something that cannot be willed into existence, or, rather, into nonexistence. And so one begins to envy desperately not just the sleeping spouse but everyone in the world who is not awake.” Read about Gopnik's years-long battle with insomnia: https://lnkd.in/gv9d9JtG

David Sedaris bumped into a few hiccups while making his way back to New York City, following a vacation on a small island in Maine with his longtime partner, Hugh. Thunderstorms in the New York area led to the last-minute cancellation of their flight, so the pair opted to drive back to the city—with a fellow stranded passenger. Had Sedaris proposed earlier that he invite the stranger to come with them to New York, Hugh would have said no. But the woman, who had to be at work the next morning, was “so grateful that there was really no way for him to back out,” Sedaris writes. In a new Personal History, Sedaris writes about the pains and pleasures of travelling with Hugh and what he learned about himself and the stranger he invited along on their long, strange journey from Maine to New York. Read the full piece: https://lnkd.in/gEuEdkzm

Earlier this month, a detention facility known as “Alligator Alcatraz,” which can house up to 3,000 migrants, opened in the Florida Everglades. “This is something that the incoming Trump Administration fantasized about because it allowed them to really scale up their capacity both to instill terror and to arrest as many people as possible,” Jonathan Blitzer, a staff writer who has written extensively about Trump’s border policies, said. “What is utterly horrifying about it in practice is it’s just a recipe for mass racial profiling.” In today’s daily newsletter, Blitzer talks to Erin Neil about why this facility stands out—and what it tells us about the Trump Administration’s immigration crackdown: https://lnkd.in/gcuxZTPu

To try to distract his supporters from fixating on the Justice Department's decision not to release additional records about Jeffrey Epstein, President Trump has resorted to a familiar tactic: lashing out at his enemies. In recent days, he’s repeatedly attacked Joe Biden; the Fed chair Jerome Powell; and the celebrity Rosie O’Donnell. “It is striking that the adversaries that consume the leadership of the United States right now are, for the most part, not the country’s actual enemies but the personal obsessions of an insecure would-be autocrat,” Susan B. Glasser writes. Read her latest column: https://lnkd.in/gNsQRkht

HBO Max’s “The Pitt” just scored 13 Emmy nominations. Back in February, our TV critic, Inkoo Kang, explained why the hectic medical drama is a throwback to a different era of television. Revisit her review: https://lnkd.in/gZAm2enu

What your Wordle starting word says about you. 👀 https://lnkd.in/gspuFuwx

“Sesame Street” débuted on PBS stations across the country on November 10, 1969, four months after Apollo 11 landed on the moon, and about six months before the U.S. invaded Cambodia. The show was underwritten by grants from the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, the U.S. Department of Education, the Ford Foundation, and the Carnegie Corporation. Within weeks, “Sesame Street” was a cultural phenomenon. The Times critic Jack Gould predicted, “When the Educational Testing Service of Princeton, New Jersey, completes its analysis in the months to come, ‘Sesame Street’ may prove to be far more than an unusual television program. On a large scale, the country’s reward may be a social document of infinite value in education.” “To an astonishing degree, that turned out to be true,” the historian Jill Lepore wrote, in 2020. For kids who were under six in 1969, watching “Sesame Street” had a measurable effect on what is known as “grade for age” status: they entered school at grade level, and, in elementary school, they stayed on grade level, an effect that, the study concluded, “was particularly pronounced for boys, black, non-Hispanic children, and those living in economically disadvantaged areas.” And it cost only $5 per kid per year. In light of recent cuts to funds for public broadcasting, read about one of its most seminal success stories: https://lnkd.in/gaiQ3rqg