Best New Yorker Articles of 2024

Zach Helfand writes about the history and changing etiquette of tipping employees in restaurants, coffee shops, bars, hotels, and other businesses.

Hollywood wrote her off as an actress at age fifty, so she learned to direct. Just before turning ninety-eight, she celebrates after presenting a retrospective, Alexandra Schwartz writes.

Fiction by David Means: What matters is that a few weeks later the two of them found him on the corner of Fifty-third and Woodlawn, a street cat with matted black fur and a smear of white.

Beatriz Flamini liked to be alone so much that she decided to live underground—and pursue a world record. The experience was gruelling and surreal. D. T. Max reports.

With elections postponed and no foreseeable end to the war with Vladimir Putin and Russia, Masha Gessen writes about the state of Ukrainian democracy under President Volodymyr Zelensky.

After Zac Brettler mysteriously fell to his death in the Thames, his parents, Matthew and Rachelle, discovered that he’d been posing as an oligarch’s son, including in dealings with Akbar Shamji and Verinder (Dave )Sharma. Patrick Radden Keefe reports on the case’s many complexities, including an oddly curtailed police investigation.

Two London playwrights prep for “Gwyneth Goes Skiing,” a comic play about Gwyneth Paltrow’s legal battle with an optometrist over a crash on the slopes in Deer Valley, Anna Russell writes.

Kathryn Schulz reports on severe solar storms, which may have the potential to upend many technologies essential to our daily lives, from G.P.S. and the power grid to communications satellites and FEMA emergency-response systems.

Trailing Trump in polls and facing doubts about his age, the President voices defiant confidence in his prospects for reëlection. Evan Osnos reports.

Fashion experts weigh in on Major League Baseball’s new inadvertently see-through uniforms, which leave nothing to the imagination, Zach Helfand writes.

Molly Fischer on the Emmy Award-winning actress, and how the comedian and writer, who got her start with the Girl Who’s Never Been on a Nice Date, created a network hit.

Sam Knight on the Tory U.K. Prime Ministers David Cameron, Theresa May, Boris Johnson, Liz Truss, and Rishi Sunak, and issues including Brexit, the N.H.S., inflation, housing, and the economy.

In the Brazilian Amazon, illegal miners are ravaging Yanomami lands. Jon Lee Anderson embeds with a unit of combat-trained environmentalists who are fighting to save the rain forest.

Louis Menand reviews “Reading the Constitution: Why I Chose Pragmatism, Not Textualism,” the new book by the former Justice, which touches on issues including abortion, gun laws, and gay marriage.

The average American celebrates just one healthy birthday after the age of sixty-five. In “Outlive: The Science and Art of Longevity,” Attia argues that it doesn’t have to be this way. Dhruv Khullar reports.

As the first Native American Cabinet member, the Secretary of the Interior has made it part of her job to address the travesties of the past. Casey Cep reports.

While facing renewed accusations of cultural theft, the institution announced that it had been the victim of actual theft—from someone on the inside. Rebecca Mead reports.

Fiction by André Alexis: He had promised to love her until they were in their nineties and fit only for lying in each other’s arms, staring happily at the moon and listening to the kiskadees.

3M found that many of its products, including Scotchgard and Scotchban, leached toxic chemicals called PFAS. Sharon Lerner reports on why the company kept making them.

The star pianist uses her glamour to lead audiences out of their comfort zones, Alex Ross writes.

With a lopsided conservative majority on the U.S. Supreme Court, Eyal Press writes, progressive activists are seeking legal opportunities in state constitutions.

Wahat al-Salam/Neve Shalom was founded on a total belief in the power of dialogue. Masha Gessen writes about the community in the aftermath of the Hamas attack and amid Israel’s war in Gaza.

For decades, Jay Fielden writes, Yoko Ono thought that the birthday gift was in her Dakota apartment. But it had been removed and sold—and now awaits a court ruling in Geneva.

A Profile of the L.A. surgeon who has operated on Charlize Theron, Laura Ingraham, Aaron Rodgers, Arnold Schwarzenegger, and other celebrities. Zach Helfand reports.

Kathryn Schulz reviews Rebecca McCarthy’s biography of the author of “A River Runs Through It and Other Stories” and “Young Men and Fire.”

Ian Frazier walked a thousand miles in the borough and found that, from the time of the Revolutionary War to the fires of the nineteen-seventies, the history of the borough has always been shaped by its in-between-ness.

When a bullet wounded Donald Trump’s ear at a recent rally, the former President joined a long list of historical and literary precedents, from Evander Holyfield to Hamlet’s father, Zach Helfand writes.

Jeremy Bamber remains in prison in England for the murders, at Whitehouse Farm, of his family: his parents, Nevill and June; his sister, Sheila; and her sons, Daniel and Nicholas. Despite newly discovered evidence, his appeals for another trial have been rejected. Heidi Blake reports.

The high-wire artist, famous for his Twin Towers walk, joins the tourists at Edge before a tightrope walk inside the Cathedral of St. John the Divine, Bob Morris writes.

Fiction by Donald Barthelme: My wife has been wanting a dog for a long time. I have had to be the one to tell her that she couldn’t have it. But now the baby wants a dog, my wife says.

Louis Menand reviews “The Bookshop: A History of the American Bookstore,” by Evan Friss, and “The Secret Lives of Booksellers and Librarians,” by James Patterson and Matt Eversmann.

Declining enrollment has caused public-school closures across the U.S.—driven by rising absenteeism, the COVID-19 pandemic, charter schools, and homeschooling. Alec MacGillis reports on the closure of School 10 in Rochester, New York.

With her new memoir, “Be Ready When the Luck Happens,” the star of the Food Network’s “Barefoot Contessa” and “Be My Guest” looks back on her troubled childhood, her East Hampton store, her collaboration with Martha Stewart, and her marriage to Jeffrey.

For years, Russia has been using the Norwegian town of Kirkenes, which borders its nuclear stronghold, as a laboratory, testing intelligence operations there before replicating them across Europe, Ben Taub writes.

A Profile of the “Saturday Night Live” star Bowen Yang, who co-hosts the “Las Culturistas” podcast with Matt Rogers and will appear in the upcoming movie “Wicked.” Michael Schulman reports.

Ken Caillat, who was an engineer on the Fleetwood Mac album “Rumours,” went to see David Adjmi’s hit play and was surprised by the similarities with his own memoir, Michael Schulman writes.

Fiction by Lore Segal, the author of “Other People’s Houses,” “Her First American,” and “Ladies’ Lunch and Other Stories.”

From Coinbase to OpenAI, the tech sector is pouring millions into super PACS that intimidate politicians into supporting its agenda. Charles Duhigg reports.

Fiction by Joshua Cohen, the author of “The Netanyahus”: You’re my famous cousin, the guy who wrote the book. Their little Jewish writer guy—they’ll trust you.

Glenn Horowitz sold the archives of writers including Vladimir Nabokov, Alice Walker, Bob Dylan, and Gabriel García Márquez. Then Don Henley of the Eagles accused him of possessing stolen property.

Nicholas Lemann goes on the road with Pete Buttigieg and Julie Su to see the scope of Bidenomics, and reckons with why voters don’t support him and Kamala Harris more.

The maritime researcher Nigel Pickford looks for sunken treasure and has helped to discover dozens of historic shipwrecks, containing millions of dollars’ worth of recovered cargoes. Sam Knight reports.

David Remnick on the ex-President’s defeat of Kamala Harris, and how Democrats must regroup to protect liberal democracy and civil liberties.

A profile of Marielle Heller, the director of “Diary of a Teenage Girl,” “Can You Ever Forgive Me?,” “A Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood,” and the new Amy Adams movie “Nightbitch,” as well as an actor in “The Queen’s Gambit.” Emily Nussbaum reports.

Fiction by Shuang Xuetao: So you get on well? he said. You could say that, I said. You could say that, for a while now, she’s been my only reason to go on living.

Alice Gregory reports on L. A. Paul, a philosophy professor at Yale and the author of “Transformative Experience,” who has written about how there is no rational way to decide whether to have a child.

After the no-confidence vote against Prime Minister Michel Barnier, Macron is confronting challenges including those posed by the Rassemblement National, or R.N., party, led by the right-wing politicians Marine Le Pen and Jordan Bardella. Lauren Collins reports.

Alexandra Schwartz profiles the director of “The Childhood of a Leader” and “Vox Lux,” whose new film stars Adrien Brody and is an Oscar favorite.

Gerald (Gerry) Fremlin, the partner of the Nobel Prize-winning author, sexually abused her daughter Andrea. The abuse transformed Munro’s books and short stories. Rachel Aviv speaks to Munro’s children, Andrea, Sheila, and Jenny.