MoreRSS

site iconThe New YorkerModify

The full text is output by feedx. A weekly magazine since 1925, blends insightful journalism, witty cartoons, and literary fiction into a cultural landmark.
Please copy the RSS to your reader, or quickly subscribe to:

Inoreader Feedly Follow Feedbin Local Reader

Rss preview of Blog of The New Yorker

Kristi Noem’s Fireable Offenses

2026-03-07 05:06:01

2026-03-06T20:19:27.693Z

Late last March, after being held incommunicado for nearly two weeks in a mega-prison in El Salvador, a group of Venezuelans learned that Kristi Noem, the U.S. Secretary of Homeland Security, had arrived to tour the facility. “We were happy when she got here,” a twenty-nine-year-old refugee named Roger Molina Acevedo told me. He thought that she might be interested to know that prison guards were torturing the detainees; perhaps the information Noem collected would prompt the U.S. government, which had sent him and two hundred and fifty-one other men to the prison without due process, to reverse course. Inside the prison, Noem wore a navy baseball hat, a tight white long-sleeved shirt, and a fifty-thousand-dollar Rolex watch. Just before she reached Molina Acevedo’s cell, she turned around and left. “She didn’t speak to anyone,” he said. Instead, Noem addressed the cameras. “I want to thank El Salvador and their President for their partnership with the United States of America to bring our terrorists here,” she said. “I also want everybody to know, if you come to our country illegally, this is one of the consequences you could face.”

Noem, who was known by critics as “ICE Barbie”—accessorized for any law-enforcement scenario—spent most of her time in President Donald Trump’s Cabinet performing for the cameras. She dressed up in Coast Guard fatigues and in the green uniform of Border Patrol; she posed in flak jackets, and demanded that ICE agents record their arrests for social-media videos. In one case, as part of a two-hundred-and-twenty-million-dollar ad campaign, she recorded a message on horseback in front of Mount Rushmore, wearing a cowboy hat and tasselled chaps. “You cross the border illegally, we’ll find you,” she said. “Break our laws, we’ll punish you.” The ad was shot on the second day of a government shutdown. White House staffers told the Wall Street Journal that Trump was annoyed. He demanded to know where she got the money for the junket. It turned out, according to ProPublica, that the political-consulting firm that landed the contract for the shoot had extensive ties to Noem and members of her staff.

On Thursday, Trump removed Noem from her post, saying on Truth Social that her next role in the Administration would be as special envoy to the Shield of the Americas, a new initiative with no governing power. There are two ways to summarize Noem’s disastrous tenure at the Department of Homeland Security: one as a tragicomic story of vanity, vacuousness, and self-obsession, and the other as a grim account of how the department has imploded under her leadership. In either case, she will be remembered not only as the most incompetent Secretary in the department’s twenty-three-year history but also as the person who succeeded where many progressive activists had failed in discrediting much of the D.H.S.’s institutional legitimacy.

Early in Trump’s 2024 Presidential campaign, Noem, who had previously been the governor of South Dakota, was frequently mentioned as a potential running mate. Her chief credential was that she was loudly and unabashedly pro-Trump. Five years earlier, Corey Lewandowski, Trump’s former campaign strategist, began advising Noem on how best to ingratiate herself with the President. Her prospects for joining the ticket seemed solid until the publication of a political memoir, in which she recounted, in explicit detail, how she’d killed her family’s dog, Cricket. “It was not a pleasant job,” she wrote, but “it had to be done.” Trump was reportedly “disgusted” by the story. “Even you wouldn’t kill a dog, and you kill everything,” he told his eldest son, according to Alex Isenstadt’s 2025 book,“Revenge: The Inside Story of Trump’s Return to Power.” After Trump’s reëlection, however, the incident was said to have struck the President as an example of the sort of tough-mindedness that would be important for a Homeland Security Secretary. As John Oliver recently put it, “Noem didn’t bring a lot of non-dog-murdering experience to the job.”

The D.H.S. is the third-largest federal department, with more than a dozen agencies and some two hundred and sixty thousand employees. Past Secretaries, from Republican and Democratic Administrations, used to complain that immigration enforcement tended to overshadow, and undermine, all of the department’s other work, which includes cybersecurity, disaster relief, and the Secret Service. “Immigration is overheated and over-politicized,” Jeh Johnson, who served under President Barack Obama, once told me. “It has overwhelmed D.H.S.” With Trump in the White House, given both his obsession with the issue and his expectation of total fealty, it was virtually impossible to create a veneer of gravitas and impartiality at the department. Noem seemed almost gleeful about dashing whatever pretense may have remained after Trump’s first term. In her inaugural address to department staff, she walked out to a country song called “Hot Mama,” with the chorus, “You turn me on, let’s turn it up, and turn this room into a sauna.”

Even before Noem took over the department, there were rumors that she and Lewandowski were having an affair, something both of them have denied. But Noem’s leadership was inextricably tied to Lewandowski. He reportedly signed documents as Noem’s “chief advisor,” despite not being a member of the department or the Administration. Technically, he was “a special government employee,” a status reserved for private citizens who can consult with the federal government for no more than a hundred and thirty days a year. Department officials nevertheless described Lewandowski as a ubiquitous presence. He travelled in a private cabin with Noem on a seventy-million-dollar 737 MAX jet that the department leased and is seeking to purchase. (This was nearly double the cost of each of six other commercial planes that Noem had the department buy to carry out deportation flights.) At one point, according to the Wall Street Journal, Lewandowski fired a Coast Guard pilot who forgot to fetch Noem’s blanket from an aircraft. And he often avoided swiping into department buildings to stay under the service limit as a special government employee.

Much of Lewandowski’s influence appeared to be about consolidating power and control. Last summer, Noem created a policy requiring her to personally sign off on any department expenditure that was more than a hundred thousand dollars. Almost immediately, the agencies’ work ground to a halt. The policy coincided with hurricane season, and relief efforts in states such as Missouri, North Carolina, and California were delayed, angering the public and, in many cases, their Republican representatives. “People are hurting in western North Carolina from the most significant storm they’ve ever experienced,” Thom Tillis, the Republican North Carolina senator, told Noem at a recent hearing. “It begs the question: why?” Kevin Kiley, a California Republican, citing a two-and-a-half-million-dollar grant that has languished since June, told her, “My constituents are not being well served by your department.”

In Noem’s defense, Homeland Security’s marginalization of the Federal Emergency Management Agency was a goal shared across the Administration, which has sought to systematically redirect federal resources to immigration enforcement. Yet for all of Noem’s public bluster about immigration—the speeches baselessly villainizing immigrants as violent criminals, the routine threats and insults—she still managed to alienate potential allies inside the government. Noem and Lewandowski elevated Greg Bovino, the now disgraced Border Patrol commander, over more seasoned agency hands to carry out violent arrest operations in American cities. She also found herself at frequent odds with Tom Homan, Trump’s so-called border czar. When Homan appeared on television, Noem reportedly demanded to know how he got booked instead of her.

Noem’s insistence on filming arrest operations was both disgraceful and counterproductive. In some instances, according to reporting by CBS News, she had agents arrest protesters so that they would appear in cuffs on social-media spots, only to release them afterward without charges. One of the ironies of her obsession with cameras was that videos of abuses perpetrated by ICE and Border Patrol started to go viral. When Trump demanded answers, Noem blamed others, including those who’d cautioned against the very policies she pursued.

The beginning of the end for Noem was the killing of Renee Good and Alex Pretti, two American citizens, in Minneapolis. Both of them clearly posed no imminent threats to federal agents. But Noem didn’t hesitate to call them “domestic terrorists” anyway. When pressed by journalists and lawmakers, she doubled down. This was a lie but also a bad political bet, because although Trump’s chief adviser, Stephen Miller, had said the same thing, she quickly became the face of both the department’s aggression and its mendacity.

Under Noem, immigration agents have arrested, assaulted, and killed citizens and noncitizens alike. They have patrolled American cities wearing masks and driving unmarked cars, and have, by Noem’s own admission, entered people’s homes without judicial warrants, apparently in violation of the Fourth Amendment. Racial profiling is virtually a stated part of the department’s strategy, and ad campaigns have openly espoused white-nationalist rhetoric and talking points. Immigrants with legal status have been deported. Others have been arrested by agents at immigration courts and during routine administrative interviews. Federal judges have issued hundreds of orders to block the department’s actions, but Noem and her staff have ignored them.

The D.H.S. is currently under a partial shutdown after congressional Democrats refused to appropriate further funds without certain checks on the power of federal immigration agents. In this sense, Noem has achieved a rare feat of bringing together Democrats on a matter of immigration policy. But the most alarming fact of her political demise is that none of the department’s most egregious actions seemed to have been the reason that she was ultimately fired. What triggered Trump’s displeasure was the feebleness of Noem’s responses to mounting criticism. The story, in other words, had become about her—the shameless ad campaigns, the alleged affair, and, earlier this week, her shambolic appearance before Congress. Smelling blood, Republicans circled, accusing her of self-promotion and corruption. Her answers were canned and defensive.

In Noem’s place, Trump has nominated the Oklahoma senator Markwayne Mullin, a former M.M.A. fighter with a thin résumé and an excess of bravado. In a Senate hearing, in 2023, Mullin challenged the Teamsters president, Sean O’Brien, who was giving testimony, to a fistfight. “Stand your butt up,” Mullin said, as he rose from his seat. Bernie Sanders, who was chairing the hearing, ordered Mullin to sit down. “You’re a United States senator,” he told him, though Mullin continued to issue taunts. If Noem had a male counterpart, Trump deserves credit for finding him. ♦

The Global Fallout of Donald Trump’s War on Iran

2026-03-07 04:06:01

2026-03-06T19:00:00.000Z

Listen and subscribe: Apple | Spotify | Wherever You Listen

Sign up for our daily newsletter to get the best of The New Yorker in your inbox.


As Iran’s retaliation hit American allies throughout the Middle East this week, David Remnick was joined by two New Yorker writers with decades of experience reporting from the region. Robin Wright has reported from Iran extensively, and she met with Ali Khamenei before he became the Supreme Leader of Iran; Dexter Filkins covered the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, and he has been reporting on the Pentagon and military readiness. Filkins and Wright discuss the possibilities for future leadership in Iran; the Trump Administration’s chaotic statements in regard to its goals and time frame; and the economic impact of the war, which is already being felt around the globe.

Further reading:

New episodes of The New Yorker Radio Hour drop every Tuesday and Friday. Follow the show wherever you get your podcasts.

The New Yorker Radio Hour is a co-production of WNYC Studios and The New Yorker.

Ryan Coogler on “Sinners,” His Epic Film about Race, Music, and the Undead

2026-03-07 04:06:01

2026-03-06T19:00:00.000Z

Listen and subscribe: Apple | Spotify | Google | Wherever You Listen

Sign up for our daily newsletter to get the best of The New Yorker in your inbox.


A red text card that reads “The New Yorker Radio Hour | WNYCStudios.”

When the Oscar nominations were announced this year, Ryan Coogler’s “Sinners” set a record. It received sixteen nominations, the most for any film ever. The fact that it’s, in part, a vampire movie, made by a director who’s not yet forty, makes that feat all the more remarkable. Coogler—who previously directed “Creed” and “Black Panther”—sat down with the New Yorker staff writer Jelani Cobb to discuss the recurrent themes of history, faith, and race in his work, and how he refracted them through the lens of horror in “Sinners.”

This segment originally aired on April 11, 2025.

Further reading:

New episodes of The New Yorker Radio Hour drop every Tuesday and Friday. Follow the show wherever you get your podcasts.

The New Yorker Radio Hour is a co-production of WNYC Studios and The New Yorker.



Daily Cartoon: Friday, March 6th

2026-03-07 01:06:02

2026-03-06T16:22:32.586Z
A talking candlestick smirks at a dismayedlooking Donald Trump.
“Talk about the ballroom—everyone loves that!”
Cartoon by Brendan Loper

Barry Blitt’s “War-a-Lago”

2026-03-07 00:06:01

2026-03-06T15:00:00.000Z

For the cover of the March 16, 2025, issue, the cartoonist Barry Blitt portrays President Donald Trump in his latest guise, as a general heading to war in the Middle East. This all comes after years of promising his voters “America First!” and “no more Forever Wars.” Blitt’s cover image shows the President at his Florida golf resort standing in his martial golf cart alongside his caddy and Secretary of War, Pete Hegseth.

For more war-related covers, see below:

Soldiers look over masses of people.

July 27, 1940,” by Christina Malman

The shadow of the hooded man from Abu Ghraib is imposed over the American flag.

A Shadow Over the Election,” by Françoise Mouly

Wheelchairbound veteran at the foot of a hospital stairway.

Uphill Battle,” by Barry Blitt

Find Barry Blitt’s covers, cartoons, and more at the Condé Nast Store.



“Hoppers” Is a Happy Leap Forward for Pixar

2026-03-06 20:06:02

2026-03-06T11:00:00.000Z

In the animated features of old, people and animals conversed freely, and Walt Disney saw that it was good. Audiences did, too. It was easy enough to believe that Snow White could cajole birds and squirrels into doing housework, or that Cinderella could be fluent in rodent. But that was then; in more recent decades, the sophistications of computer-generated realism have encroached on the terrain of hand-drawn fantasy, and human-critter relations have largely gone the way of Babel. For the big brains at Pixar, always up for a conceptual challenge, interspecies communication is not a given to be embraced but a problem to be solved. And so, in “Ratatouille” (2007), a man and a rat must overcome their language barrier through a shared love of food. In “Brave” (2012), a daughter learns to converse anew with her mother, whom she has accidentally transformed into a bear. One of the wittiest inventions in “Up” (2009) is an electronic dog collar that helpfully translates canine thoughts into human words—in multiple tongues, to boot.

The “Up” collar gets a quick shout-out in the new Pixar movie “Hoppers”—the sort of cute, in-house Easter egg that’s meant to flatter the cleverness of the filmmakers and the discerning brand loyalty of the audience. The story takes place in a small, woodsy American town called Beaverton, but, as we are seldom allowed to forget, it also inhabits a jaunty and irreverent media-consolidation universe, where pop-cultural influences and allusions fly as fast as hummingbirds. Early on, a nineteen-year-old college student named Mabel Tanaka (voiced by Piper Curda) discovers that her biology professor, Dr. Sam (Kathy Najimy), has developed a top-secret technology—a system of helmets, wires, buttons, and monitors that enables an individual human consciousness to “hop” into the body of a highly realistic-looking animal robot. Mabel’s response is pretty much the one that’s already formed in your head: “This is like ‘Avatar’!” To which Dr. Sam retorts, with proprietary defensiveness, “This is nothing like ‘Avatar’!”

I’m generally wary of any movie that attempts to pass off unoriginality as a self-aware joke. (“Avatar,” a trippy, futuristic retread of “Dances with Wolves,” was hardly a fount of storytelling invention to begin with.) But “Hoppers,” directed by Daniel Chong, uses familiarity as a springboard, launching itself into realms of narrative illogic rarely countenanced even by Pixar’s more out-there abstractions, such as “Inside Out” (2015) and “Soul” (2020). In those earlier pictures, metaphysical conceits became visual and dramatic gambits as the filmmakers set out to colonize the vast interior worlds of, respectively, the mind and the spirit. “Hoppers” doesn’t have the same patina of profundity, but, as a result, the story it tells winds up feeling all the stranger. It begins as a work of eco-themed science fiction, veers into civic-minded zoological fantasy, and nearly becomes a body-snatching horror flick—all of it held together by a screw-loose comic vigor that has been absent from the studio’s recent string of mediocrities, including “Lightyear” (2022) and “Elemental” (2023).

The script is by Jesse Andrews, who co-wrote the Pixar comedy “Luca” (2021), a sunny tale of youthful self-discovery and the seemingly unbridgeable chasm between the human and natural worlds. “Hoppers,” though much unrulier in its construction, is onto something similar. Mabel is a freckle-faced, messy-haired misfit, with a love of nature that she inherited from her late grandmother (Karen Huie). She’s an activist at heart, and she wants only to protect her grandmother’s favorite place: a tranquil local glade that, thanks to an industrious beaver colony, has long been a haven of biodiversity. Now, however, the beavers have inexplicably vanished, and they appear to have taken all the birds, fish, insects, and other forest creatures in the vicinity with them. Mabel has her suspicions as to why, especially since Jerry (Jon Hamm), the popular mayor of Beaverton, is trying to build a highway through the area and can do so only if it is cleared of wildlife.

Bent on restoring the beavers to their rightful home, Mabel defies Dr. Sam’s warnings and impulsively commandeers the technology. In beaver form, she makes her way deep into the forest, stumbles on the glade’s various displaced residents, and finds, to her delight, that she can understand their language (and so, of course, can we). Elsewhere, though, the rules that govern this furry fiefdom defy easy comprehension. The animals prove welcoming enough to a bushy-tailed outsider like Mabel, but this isn’t exactly Zootopia. The food chain is in full and pitiless effect, and no one bats an eye, or side-eyes a bat, when natural predatory impulses kick in.

The place has its unnatural elements as well, starting with a system of government that takes the notion of an “animal kingdom” to goofily literal-minded extremes. All of Mabel’s new forest friends—there are deer, rabbits, turtles, raccoons, and a singularly gloomy bear—bow down to a beaver sovereign, King George (Bobby Moynihan), a gregarious and naïve soul who embraces a humble, communal ideal of living. He believes that all creatures great and small, humans included, are acting on a pure-hearted devotion to the common good. “We’re all in this together,” he’s fond of declaring. None of his subjects question this way of thinking, and their zomboid passivity ultimately feels more creepy than charming. Mabel, it appears, has found her way into a village of the dammed.

The plot thickens from there, with an escalating outlandishness that makes “The Wild Robot” (2024), another animated mashup of animals and androids, look like a nature documentary. Mabel wants the beavers to return to the glade and block Mayor Jerry’s highway, and, to that end, she investigates—and exposes—how he engineered the animals’ mass exodus in the first place. An emergency summit is convened, where the genial George is joined by louder, angrier rulers from across the animal kingdom. There is a royal goose with a bulbous beak, voiced by the late Isiah Whitlock, Jr. Meryl Streep lends her imperious dulcet tones to the role of an orange-winged monarch, who, alas, does not call herself Butterfly McQueen. In these moments, “Hoppers” plays like a loopy riff on an Old Testament tale, one in which it’s the animals who get kicked out of Eden. With their eyes newly opened to the full knowledge of human evil, they hatch a uniquely deranged revenge plot, the stupefying and sometimes horrifying particulars of which I’ll leave for you to discover. Suffice it to say that Mabel suddenly realizes she’s gone too far, in both her deception and her activism. She must save the day and make amends.

The dispensing of moral instruction is an often tiresome staple of child-friendly animation, but the lessons that Mabel must learn—to be less impulsive, less strident, and more willing to see the good in others—also turn out to be shrewd organizational and negotiating tactics. The more “Hoppers” goes on, the more it comes to resemble a bonkers political farce, in which such pressing matters as the rights of animals, the fate of the environment, and the destructiveness of human greed can be resolved, or at least productively debated, in a flurry of cross-species coalition-building. The movie’s conclusions are reasonable, centrist ones, perhaps disappointingly so; viewers whose empathy with the four- and six-legged denizens of the glade has been aroused will surely find themselves crying out for mayoral blood. More than once, an insect gets squished for comic effect, and you have to wonder why, in the spirit of all being in this together, the filmmakers didn’t dare to add a human life or two to the body count. Can’t we take it? Haven’t we earned it, with our vainglorious conquests and wanton destruction of the natural world? To root passionately against one’s own species is one of the great, subversive pleasures of moviegoing; certain films in the “Planet of the Apes” series knew this and exploited it for all it was worth. So did “Avatar.”

To which one can only shrug and conclude that Pixar will always be Pixar, a reliable dispenser of movies whose pleasures, even at their most comically unhinged, must come wrapped in a warm, cozy blanket of moral edification and emotional reassurance. And so we get frequent flashbacks to Mabel’s happier times with her grandmother in the glade. We also get a stirring tale of friendship between two beavers, in which the feelings are genuine even if one of the beavers isn’t. In an exquisitely subtle touch, the character animation modulates in accord with our shifting perspectives: note how George seems to transform in shape, expression, and definition, morphing between jovial goofball and dumb animal depending on whose eyes we’re peering through at any given time. “Hoppers” is a hoot but also a more soulful film than some will give it credit for. It knows that, for humans and animals alike, seeing and understanding are one and the same. ♦