The New Yorker Culture

During the 2016 election, much of the country was introduced to the concept of internet bots for the first time. Now, just a decade later, it feels like they’re everywhere.

Soaking up the sun.

“The Renoir Girls,” “Little Blue Dot,” “Air,” and “I Want You to Be Happy.”

Policymakers have assumed that people with good options wouldn’t make bad choices. What if access was never the real problem?

Kylie Minogue’s 2023 hit belongs to a category of solid, danceable pop music that barely penetrates the eardrums of self-professed thirtysomething old folks.

The director of “I Want Your Sex” discusses whether Gen Z is having enough of it, casting Charli XCX and Johnny Knoxville, and the importance of “weird, scary, confusing experiences.”

Somssi, from a veteran of the restaurant group behind Atomix, knows how to reel you in without trying too hard.

Her eponymous one-woman show was the seed of her Hollywood stardom, which a new revival now frames as the source of something matrilineal, passed down to two generations of Black actresses.

In “Biological War,” Annie Jacobsen imagines society collapsing from a man-made plague—part of a wave of such prophecies. But what do we miss when we try to predict the future?

Also: Flaco the Owl gets a documentary, Debra Winger and Arliss Howard play “The Gin Game,” Broken Social Scene and friends drop in on Brooklyn, and more.

Discrimination against the unattractive is widespread—and widely tolerated.

In Gregg Araki’s film, a B.D.S.M. workplace relationship opens up a cross-generational debate about carnal mores.

Kent Nishimura’s photographs capture the backstage labor that allows the Trump show to go on.

The cyclospora outbreak lays bare our underfunded and overwhelmed public-health system.

The President goes green.

In the documentary short “Sawyer Avenue, Sunday Afternoon,” body-cam and bystander footage examine a confrontation between residents and federal agents.

Yes, pulling the shade was my nightly task, and she’d never think to do it, but already I was half an hour away from home.

French theory, as taught in American classrooms, has acquired a reputation of forbidding difficulty and hauteur. A new history seeks to surface its human side.

The Venezuelan director Lorena Alvarado’s first feature, starring her own relatives in a fictional drama, connects a young woman’s homecoming and her artistic ambitions.

The “S.N.L.” cast member partners with Liva Pierce in a musical revue about best friends with bad jobs and no girlfriends.