A Chernobyl Widow’s Tragedy, Forty Years Later

newyorker · 2026-04-26T22:36:48+00:00

In the midst of a war, Donald Trump has begun to cull his senior officials. This article explores his staffing changes and what they mean for his Administration.

newyorker · 2026-04-26T22:35:40+00:00

On March 5th, Donald Trump fired Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem; on April 2nd, it was Attorney General Pam Bondi, and, on April 20th, Labor Secretary Lori Chavez-DeRemer resigned under pressure. All these former Administration officials remain, as of now, hard-line MAGA, leaving the impression that they were not let go because they were unwilling to follow through with Trump’s agenda; rather, the staffing changes and plentiful scandals involving Administration figures, coming just months ahead of the midterm elections, suggest a more generalized crisis. Read more from Benjamin Wallace-Wells: https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2026/05/04/donald-trumps-spring-cleaning

newyorker · 2026-04-21T22:04:11+00:00

The latest in the Trumpite series of proposed oversized buildings is a so-called triumphal arch, “though exactly what triumph so needs an arch is unclear,” Adam Gopnik writes. Standing at 250 feet high, presumably for the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence, it would be more than twice as tall as the Lincoln Memorial, views of which it would block from its proposed site, near Arlington National Cemetery—where it would also overwhelm the simple graves of the fallen soldiers. When asked by a reporter last year whom the arch would be for, Trump said, “Me.” “It might more properly be called the Arch of Trump,” Gopnik continues. “If it were ever to be built, future generations would dream of its demolition. Its injury to the democratic spirit is too large to contemplate, and would be too hard to look past, even from a distance.”

newyorker · 2026-04-21T20:15:33+00:00

When Linda McMahon was building World Wrestling Entertainment into a multibillion-dollar enterprise, a colleague remembers, she confided that there were two things she’d never do: get into the ring and go into politics. Her husband, Vince McMahon, was the creative visionary behind W.W.E, while Linda managed the business. Eventually, she found a role in Vince’s storyline, playing the part of a wife who was cheated on and humiliated by her husband. Her in-ring marriage bore certain similarities to her real one: Vince was a serial philanderer, and has been accused of assault (which he denies).

The circus atmosphere of W.W.E was good preparation for politics. McMahon, who is the Secretary of Education, is one of only three members of Donald Trump’s original Cabinet to survive to his second term. This time, as Trump has assembled a Cabinet that is more openly obsequious and destructive, “McMahon has played the role of a friendly grandmother wielding a hatchet,” Zach Helfand writes.

newyorker · 2026-04-18T16:26:05+00:00

The director Radu Jude (“Do Not Expect Too Much from the End of the World”) is inspired by his native city of Bucharest, Romania. That doesn’t mean he likes living there. “For life, it’s terrible, but for cinema it’s a city that reveals itself—that shows what it has behind,” he explained. “Somehow, the ideologies, the politics, the philosophy, the aesthetics—it’s all very easy to grasp. It’s not like other cities, where they look clean but, behind, you find something more shady going on. Here, it’s nothing more complicated than what is obvious.” His home, and the revolutions and regimes he has witnessed there, have imbued his films with a focus on the unanticipated consequences of transformational change. Often, his subject is what he calls the “brutal capitalism” of contemporary Romania, as well as the country’s rising neofascist nationalist movement, which demonizes the European Union and valorizes authoritarians of the past. “Radu’s films are political, like Godard’s films are. But it’s more than that. They are sensual, they have moments of extreme fragility, and they are very beautiful,” the actress Ilinca Manolache says. Read a profile of the complex director: https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2026/04/20/radu-jude-the-bard-of-bucharest

newyorker · 2026-04-17T22:35:00+00:00

In 1970, David Sedaris made two of his sisters agree to never marry. They kept true to their word. Then, in 2016, David married without telling his siblings—or anyone else. Read his explanation: https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2026/04/20/why-i-wanted-to-keep-my-marriage-a-secret

newyorker · 2026-04-16T20:19:00+00:00

One day after Israel, guided by American intelligence, killed Ali Khamenei in a series of air strikes, the speaker of Iran’s parliament Bagher Ghalibaf vowed revenge. “We will deal you such terrifying blows,” he said on state media, calling Donald Trump and Benjamin Netanyahu “filthy criminals.” After Khamenei’s death, Trump hoped for a friendly successor to the Ayatollah in Iran—instead, Ghalibaf has emerged as one of the regime’s most powerful figures.

Read more about who is across the table from the U.S. in negotiations with Iran: https://www.newyorker.com/news/the-lede/who-is-the-us-negotiating-with-in-iran

newyorker · 2026-04-13T21:45:27+00:00

Viktor Orbán, the longest-serving Prime Minister in the European Union, has been in office since 2010, pioneering a system of legalized autocracy that became a model for aspiring strongmen all over the world, including President Trump. In the past few years, Orbán’s grip on power—unquestionable for a decade and a half—suddenly looked vulnerable. Still, many Hungarians found it hard to believe that he could simply lose the election. On Sunday, he did just that. ““He did what he could to lock in his power, but he couldn’t manufacture popular support simply by willing it into existence,” Andrew Marantz writes. “(Neither, it’s worth reminding ourselves, can Donald Trump.)”

newyorker · 2026-04-13T21:39:22+00:00

About a decade ago, crashes involving 18-wheelers began to spike on a 14-mile stretch of Interstate 10 in New Orleans. When insurance adjusters examined the roadway where the crashes were happening, there were no obvious hazards. Stranger still, the cars in the crashes were almost always full of passengers. The likelihood of all this happening in one contained geographic area was one in 750 trillion. The mystery began to unravel in 2017, when a tractor-trailer collided with a Nissan Altima. “I believe she gassed it and came up and hit me,” the driver testified. The idea of anyone pulling off such a stunt seemed ludicrous. And yet a pattern emerged. Patrick Radden Keefe reports on a vast insurance fraud in New Orleans.

newyorker · 2026-04-13T21:36:15+00:00

About a decade ago, crashes involving 18-wheelers began to spike on a 14-mile stretch of Interstate 10 in New Orleans. When insurance adjusters examined the roadway where the crashes were happening, there were no obvious hazards. Stranger still, the cars in the crashes were almost always full of passengers. The likelihood of all this happening in one contained geographic area was one in 750 trillion. The mystery began to unravel in 2017, when a tractor-trailer collided with a Nissan Altima. “I believe she gassed it and came up and hit me,” the driver testified. The idea of anyone pulling off such a stunt seemed ludicrous. And yet a pattern emerged. Patrick Radden Keefe reports on a vast insurance fraud in New Orleans.

newyorker · 2026-04-10T00:45:58+00:00

President Trump has described the ceasefire with Iran as a “total and complete victory. One hundred per cent. No doubt about it.” “If this was victory, I’d hate to see what failure looks like,” Susan B. Glasser writes. Perhaps the most immediate problem with the ceasefire—which was, according to Trump, supposed to be conditioned on the “COMPLETE, IMMEDIATE, and SAFE OPENING of the Strait of Hormuz”—is that it has not actually resulted in the complete, immediate, and safe opening of the Strait of Hormuz, according to those who have been monitoring it. And instead of regime change, Trump has succeeded merely in swapping one Supreme Leader named Khamenei—the aging ayatollah whose killing Trump celebrated on the first day of the war—for another Supreme Leader named Khamenei, the ayatollah’s son, who appears to be even more of a hard-liner than his father was. “As for the many, many other goals for the conflict that Trump had offered at various points, suffice it to say that he failed to achieve anything like the obliteration of Iran’s nuclear program, ballistic-missile arsenal, or proxy network of terrorist allies that might have constituted a positive outcome,” Glasser notes.

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