The New Yorker

What is your best writing advice? At this year’s National Book Awards, the five winners of the Fiction, Young People’s Literature, Nonfiction, Translated Literature, and Poetry awards shared their wisdom.

One of the more reliable chemical reactions in European culture occurs when particles of German mental matter enter Italy; suddenly, German writers discover that life is worth living again. When, in the mid-1920s, a group of German academics—including Theodor Adorno, Walter Benjamin, Ernst Bloch, and other figures who would come to constitute the body of Continental thought known as the Frankfurt School—took a series of extended holidays in southern Italy, they knew they were following in a distinguished tradition. But they could not anticipate how Italy would operate on them. Coming from Germany, one of the most advanced industrial countries in the world at the time, they witnessed a society that stubbornly resisted modernization as they knew it—or, as they came to feel, that found its own way through. Read about how Naples caused a group of German Marxists to rethink modernity: https://lnkd.in/gzqkEKV2

A cartoon by Greg Nussbaum. #NewYorkerCartoons See all the cartoons from this week’s issue: https://lnkd.in/gJfyXDzH

In Mohammad Rasoulof’s “The Seed of the Sacred Fig,” contemporary social unrest threatens to tear an Iranian family apart. The film is an epic of reproach. When Justin Chang first watched it, at the Cannes Film Festival, he “broke down weeping” at a pivotal scene. Read his review of the “gripping, superbly acted” drama: https://lnkd.in/gX5sgV9r

A bonus Daily Cartoon by Jason Adam Katzenstein. #NewYorkerCartoons

Until a few years ago, robotics seemed to be developing far more slowly than A.I. Then some of A.I.’s achievements began spilling into robotics. Now the field may be approaching its ChatGPT moment. “This is the year that people really realized that you can build general-purpose robots,” a roboticist told James Somers. The latest version of ChatGPT can talk to you aloud in dozens of languages, on any topic, and sing to you—it can even gauge your tone. Anything it can do, it can do better than stand-alone models once dedicated to that individual task. The same thing is happening to robots. A future generation of machines will not be programmed to complete specific tasks. Instead, they will use A.I. to teach themselves. Robots have already learned to play Ping-Pong, move boulders, and even tie shoelaces. It’s easy to see the appeal of these advancements—and to imagine the risks of loosing so much strength upon the world. We have already found A.I. difficult to control. “If an A.I. that talks about weapons is dangerous, picture an A.I. that is a weapon,” Somers notes. Somers reports from the companies on the front lines of robotic innovations, and on the risks and rewards this new revolution could unleash on society: https://lnkd.in/gvh3bdC3

Today’s Daily Cartoon, by Anjali Chandrashekar. #NewYorkerCartoons https://lnkd.in/gTURzYmn

“Am I capable of getting up in someone’s face? When it’s called for, absolutely.” In The New Yorker Humor, the confessions of someone who is totally fine with conflict. https://lnkd.in/gSZxEjN9

A cartoon by Brendan Loper. #NewYorkerCartoons See all the cartoons from this week’s issue: https://lnkd.in/gSk_cueC

Horror stories about the fentanyl epidemic have a particular resonance for U.S. politicians—they suggest that instability, violence, and suffering are just below the surface, even though unemployment is under four per cent. “There were times, this summer, on the Presidential campaign trail when it seemed to me that 2024 was going to be a fentanyl election,” Benjamin Wallace-Wells writes. While reporting in Ohio, he sought to understand what had made the state move, in the course of a decade, from slightly Republican to convincingly red. “My assumption had been that the key was economic anger, over the displacement of manufacturing jobs to China and the long-tail effects of NAFTA,” he continues. “But the Republican officials I met, when asked to explain Ohio’s turn toward right-wing populism, tended to emphasize the opioid epidemic rather than jobs.” A recent study found that communities that had been pinpointed by OxyContin sales reps in the ’90s had become “increasingly aligned with the Republican party,” across House, gubernatorial, and Presidential elections. These opioid ground zeros moved toward the Republicans by an extra 4.6 per cent in the 2020 House elections. “In a country on a partisan knife’s edge, this is a remarkable effect,” Wallace-Wells notes. Read about how the fentanyl crisis has shifted the political landscape, and how it may have helped Donald Trump return to the Presidency: https://lnkd.in/gSa4aBv4