The New Yorker

Michael Lee Horrocks and his ex-wife, Leah Stelly, disagreed on their kids’ medical care. Leah had come to the belief that vaccines are dangerous, and to a broader world view that aligned with the Make America Healthy Again movement. Online, she posted about Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., “b!g ph@rm@,” and living a “non-tox” life style, and recorded lessons for her 11,000 followers on divine femininity and receiving messages from the universe. Michael did not share Leah’s MAHA sensibility, but he was no liberal scold. He had nonspecific theories about the pandemic, which he believed “duped a lot of people in a lot of different ways,” and he didn’t get the COVID vaccine. However, he wanted his kids to receive the same basic vaccinations that he had received when he was a child. Leah refused. Then their kids got sick—and doctors said it could be measles. Read the story: https://lnkd.in/ePn_3nYa

A cartoon by Edward Steed. See more cartoons from this week’s issue: https://lnkd.in/eHp_vYcn

“Death hath ten thousand several doors, get over it. Whichever way you go, it ends the same way. What would it profit me to be shot to death with diamonds or strangled with pearls?” Helen Simpson writes in her short story “Lub Dub Lub Dub Lub Dub.” Read more here: https://lnkd.in/euR4whBA

Farewell to the summer of 2026, we hardly knew ye. Covers by Anthony Russo, Harry Bliss, Roz Chast, Garrett Price, Heidi Goennel, Charles Saxon, Eric Drooker, Perry Barlow, Eugene Mihaesco, Rea Irvin, Merle Nacht, Donald Reilly, Arthur Getz, Nicole Rifkin, and Gayle Kabaker.

A cartoon by Liana Finck. Get more toons delivered to your inbox with our newsletter. Sign up: https://lnkd.in/gNpj-WSG

Susan Te Kahurangi King has a riotous œuvre of terrifying, hilarious, lewd, and ornery drawings. In counterpoint stands the artist herself, who does not read, write, or speak. The promotion of her art depends entirely on other people. She cannot give an interview or tell you what her drawings mean. The only way to get to know her, besides looking at her work, is to be next to her in a room. “And so I found myself in Auckland,” Laura Preston writes. Preston travelled to New Zealand to profile King, who, at 75, may be the country’s greatest living artist. Read the full story: https://lnkd.in/erDCJCfu

Rivers Cuomo, the singer and guitarist of Weezer, was born in New York City and raised in various spiritual communities around the Northeast. Throughout this time, he had very limited contact with his father, a painful experience he writes about in the band’s first album. Recently, after his father’s passing, Cuomo began sorting through correspondence between his parents and letters his father had written him. As he looked at everything, he “started to reconstruct a different perspective on that relationship,” Cuomo tells Amanda Petrusich. Read their full conversation: https://lnkd.in/eDT3QKXy

Bad movies are monumental feats of incompetence, inspired in their badness, bad in ways you could never have dreamed a film could be bad, so feverishly and outlandishly bad that they have bodied forth a new aesthetic category: trash movies. These films are more a matter of sensibility than of thematic preoccupation or stylistic continuity; thus, it is difficult to pin down their hallmarks. To understand bad movies, it is crucial to understand their most distinguished representative, the ultimate trash auteur: the enigmatic Neil Breen. Read about the Ingmar Bergman of bad movies: https://lnkd.in/e_aeqziX

New maps show how Israeli settlements have expanded in the West Bank—and thwarted hopes for a Palestinian state. See them here: https://lnkd.in/eM8DP2-5

Last Wednesday, an apocalyptic, tsunami-like surge of water, mud, and debris coursed through the China-Nepal border, killing at least 538 people, as of Friday. Nearly two thousand people are still missing. Civilian infrastructure failed or disappeared, telecommunications broke down, and hundreds of thousands of people were stranded in a remote, rugged corner of the country. Scientists believe the disaster was set off by a glacial collapse—which released a torrent of ice, mud, rock, and water that burst through the region’s narrow valleys and waterways. “Nepal is paying an extraordinarily disproportionate price for a crisis it did not create,” a member of Nepal’s Parliament said. “We contribute a negligible share of global emissions, yet we sit downstream of some of the fastest-warming glacial systems on Earth.” Ishaan Tharoor writes about the floods in Nepal, and their devastation on a country already in political and financial distress: https://lnkd.in/eAyZvM4D