Best New Yorker Reflections

You have to play a role that isn’t really you. It’s like slavery. You have to meet all those demands and keep a sense of yourself as well, Winfred Rembert writes.

With wildfires, heat waves, and rising sea levels, large tracts of the earth are at risk of becoming uninhabitable, but the fossil-fuel industry continues its assault on the facts, Bill McKibben writes.

A battle against famine in North Korea.

John Updike on the future of faith.

John Updike, in a piece from 1982, writes on the career of Herman Melville, and how slowing down preserved his communion with literary greatness.

George W. S. Trow’s classic essay on American society and the decline of adulthood.

Kennedy Fraser’s 1978 essay on fashion and influence. “Many societies have been openly dominated by fashionable people, but our society is quietly permitting itself to be dominated and transformed by fashionable minds.”

Jonathan Schell recounts the bombing of Cambodia, the massive student protests, a growing anti-Vietnam War movement, and civil-rights issues.

Richard Harris writes about the contentious relationships between U.S. Presidents and the press, especially Richard Nixon’s hostility toward the media.

Mavis Gallant’s account of the student strikes and police violence that played out in the streets of Paris, in 1968: “We are all living in a future, in something that has not taken place.”

Reflections, by James Baldwin, from 1962: “Whatever white people do not know about Negroes reveals, precisely and inexorably, what they do not know about themselves.”

Reflections by Gypsy Rose Lee, from 1943: “Teachers for my sister June and me were Mother’s greatest problem when we were touring the country as a child vaudeville act.”