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The writers Charles Duhigg, Cal Newport, and Anna Wiener join Tyler Foggatt for a conversation about artificial intelligence and the promises, myths, and anxieties surrounding it. The discussion was recorded before a live audience at The New Yorker Festival this fall. They explore the gap between Silicon Valley’s sweeping claims and what generative A.I. can actually do today; how people are using the technology for work, creativity, and emotional support; and why the tech’s most immediate political consequences may be the hardest to grapple with.

This week’s reading:

“Trump Dishonors the Kennedy Center,” by David Remnick

“The Biggest Threat to the 2026 Economy Is Still Donald Trump,” by John Cassidy

“The Right Wing Rises in Latin America,” by Jon Lee Anderson

“Peter Navarro, Trump’s Ultimate Yes-Man,” by Ian Parker

“Americans Won’t Ban Kids from Social Media. What Can We Do Instead?,” by Jay Caspian Kang

Tune in to The Political Scene wherever you get your podcasts.

When the Studio Museum in Harlem opened, in 1986, it occupied a rented loft. Last month, it reopened, after a seven-year hiatus—this time, in a handsome structure of dark concrete and glass, built specifically for the purposes of housing art. Thelma Golden, the museum’s director, told us recently that preparations for that reopening have led her to dwell even more than usual on “the space and the place” in which the museum sits—that is, a Harlem that is both a physical location and an imaginary world that has inspired generations of Black artists. Not long ago, she joined us to discuss a few of the texts that have shaped her thinking about this special neighborhood. Her remarks have been edited and condensed.

The Street

by Ann Petry

This is the story of a young black mother, Lutie Johnson, who lives in Harlem in the nineteen-forties. It’s both a novel and an incredibly significant sociological study, because it puts struggle and survival right up against possibility. Petry writes such luminous, beautiful prose, but that beauty exists alongside harsh realities.

This novel was very important to me as a young person, because my father was born in Harlem in 1926, and was raised there, and so the world that this novel describes is the world that he knew. It really brought me to a new level of understanding of him and his life. That was especially true because of how the novel centers the lives of women. My grandmother raised my father on her own in Harlem, and “The Street” helped me to understand her.

Another Country

by James Baldwin

For many, “Go Tell It on the Mountain,” Baldwin’s semi-autobiographical novel about the young stepson of a Pentecostal preacher, is Baldwin’s classic Harlem novel. But, for me, it’s this.

“Another Country,” which was published in 1962, tells the story of a group of young, artistic, politically engaged people who move among Greenwich Village, Harlem, and France. It has a love story embedded in it, but it’s also a novel that teems with the ideas of the moment. It speaks to the ways in which places form us. A lot of what we understand about one of the characters, Rufus, is defined by Harlem—not just as a geographic place but also as a symbol for Black life writ large. The book has really helped me to think about Harlem itself as a character, and as a way to animate ideas of modernity and Blackness.

Jazz

by Toni Morrison

As someone whose life has been changed in every way by Morrison’s work, it’s hard to say what my favorite book of hers is. They all live in me. But in the twenty-five years that I have been at the Studio Museum, and living and working in Harlem, “Jazz,” her 1992 novel, has had a special place in my pantheon because of its absolutely gorgeous portrait of this place.

It’s set in the nineteen-twenties, and it’s called “Jazz,” so right away we have a sense of its context. The story follows a love triangle, but it evokes the place and time with incredible richness. It’s the Harlem of the meeting of many Black worlds, the Harlem of music and culture and politics, of barber shops and beauty parlors. And all of that, of course, is conveyed through the utter poetry of Morrison’s prose.

Also, the women depicted here—as in so many of Morrison’s other novels—are some of the greatest female characters ever written.

Crook Manifesto & Harlem Shuffle

by Colson Whitehead

These are two of what I understand will be a trio of novels that center on a character named Ray Carney, who is a car salesman on 125th Street. “Harlem Shuffle” takes place earlier, in the sixties, and “Crook Manifesto” in the seventies.

Ray is an upwardly mobile, aspirational person who exists both in the space of his legitimate business and in some of the other worlds of Harlem. What I love about both of these books is the way that they set themselves up in real history. There are lots of beautiful, important, scholarly studies about the history of this community, but these novels give you a way to understand what those books are talking about through the voice and the vision of a protagonist.

Harlem Is Nowhere

by Sharifa Rhodes-Pitts

This is such a beautiful volume. It’s an essay, but it feels novelistic. It’s a work that engages history, and that shows a lot of respect for the archive—both the formal one and the one that is held in people’s heads and hearts.

The book invokes the idea that Ralph Ellison speaks about, that Harlem is “nowhere”—nowhere, but also everywhere. It’s constantly being imagined and reimagined; it’s constantly being interpreted in terms of both the reality of a geographical place and the way that it has loomed so large in the minds of artists.

It always felt to me that Rhodes-Pitts was working with the ancestral guidance of Zora Neale Hurston. And the book has really helped to guide my own thinking about this incredibly storied community that I get the privilege to be a part of in this period of my life.

In 2010, Christina Cortez was a high-school junior. She enjoyed reading the “Twilight” series, playing softball, and listening to Linkin Park and the Eagles on her iPod. One day, she was in the car with her mother, who asked, offhand, what colleges she might want to consider as her senior year approached. “I don’t think I want to go to college,” Christina told her. “I think I want to look into the Amish.”

Christina spent her early childhood in Bakersfield, California. She moved, at age eight, to live with her mother in Maryland, where a small group of local New Order Amish dotted the road with their tractors and buggies. Her mother sometimes took their family to a Baptist church, then a Methodist one, but religion mostly remained an abstract, impersonal part of Christina’s life. Then, in her freshman year, she developed a secret obsession with her quaintly dressed neighbors, spurred, in part, by her love of old things, like the “Little House on the Prairie” books. She began reading Amish history alongside the Bible, which she had cracked open in earnest for the first time; she went online to order “Martyr’s Mirror,” a multivolume account of the persecution of the early Anabaptists, and read it hungrily.

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When Christina raised the possibility of skipping college and formally withdrawing from society, her mother was initially alarmed, but then remarkably open-minded. With her blessing, Christina approached a local Amish couple who ran a bulk-food store in town; she joined them for a Christmas-carolling event, and then her first Amish service. By the end of her senior year, Christina was learning to speak Pennsylvania Dutch and wearing clothes sewn by members of the community. Classmates teased her about wearing a veil, but this only strengthened her resolve. “If someone is okay with being martyred for their faith,” she said, “what is a little teasing compared to that?”

Christina’s story is one among several such accounts in “Godstruck: Seven Women’s Unexpected Journeys to Religious Conversion,” by the journalist Kelsey Osgood, who began converting to Orthodox Judaism in her late twenties. Osgood’s subjects find their way to Mormonism, evangelical Christianity, Islam, Quakerism; one of them becomes a Catholic nun. Like Osgood, they are earnest, funny, and articulate, if slightly eccentric. “I was a young person whose inner life had been—and still is, in so many ways—dominated by existential restlessness, and Judaism was a way to both validate that restlessness and channel it,” Osgood writes. With wry understatement, she adds, “I also happened to believe it was true.”

The book arrives at a moment when conversion may seem, in Osgood’s own words, a “wildly countercultural move.” The Pew Center’s Religious Landscape Study, which has held three rounds of surveys since 2007, has been reporting on a sharp trend toward secularism that has unfolded in the U.S. across decades, often called the “rise of the nones.” From 2007 to 2024, the group of people who were religiously unaffiliated grew from sixteen to nearly twenty-nine per cent. At the same time, the number of American Christians—the country’s dominant religious group—dropped markedly. But behind the headliner trends lie finer patterns of people moving toward, and away from, faith.

Osgood’s reporting takes us down the winding back roads of belief: though her title evokes a supernatural lightning bolt, she documents the clumsy, earnest pursuits that precede and follow any particular moment of revelation. Hana Nemec, a white woman from Cleveland who is the focus of a chapter on Islam, grows up with an instinctual openness to God, though she’s unmoved by her family’s vague Christian faith and disillusioned by the death of her mother. Things shift when her college roommate, a loosely observant Palestinian Muslim, sends her an e-mail that includes a short excerpt from the Quran. “Thy Guardian-Lord hath not forsaken thee,” Hana reads. “Did He not find thee an orphan and give thee shelter (and care)?” Tears of recognition spring forth. Such moments of transformation are striking—in time, Hana begins wearing an abaya—yet so, too, are her early graspings at belief. “This is so weird and random,” begins a Facebook message that Hana sends to one of her only Muslim acquaintances at school, who ends up helping her convert.

The “unexpected” journeys of Osgood’s subtitle might be taken to refer to the early reluctance of the converts themselves, but she seems to have in mind another group of skeptics: her readers. She writes with light self-deprecation, conscious that the reading public may see religion and intellectual seriousness as incompatible. Her subjects are familiar with this sentiment, too: one admits that she finds spirituality “powerful, but also slightly embarrassing.” So the book sets out to defend these women, and broadly make the case for religious life.

As a narrator, Osgood is affable and erudite, able to take smooth detours into the writings of Tolstoy, Plath, and Augustine, and others who have wrestled with religion and its place in society. She’s partial to the Stanford anthropologist T. M. Luhrmann, who suggested, in her 2020 book, “How God Becomes Real,” that even the most devout believers don’t experience God as a true presence in their lives—they attend services and participate in ritual in order to generate the feeling. “I am asking what we might learn if we shift our focus,” Luhrmann writes, “if, rather than presuming that people worship because they believe, we ask instead whether people believe because they worship.”

It can be difficult to defend religion to nonbelievers on its own terms. Instead, Osgood tends to highlight the most universally attractive qualities of being religious, rather than those off-the-wall aspects that might alienate a secular crowd. In the chapter that details Christina’s conversion to Anabaptism, Osgood focusses on the value of “a culture of restraint.” She mentions Christina’s limited awareness of certain global events (Brexit) and technologies (Twitter). “Many people I know . . . would love to have the kind of largely indifferent relationship to the news cycle that Christina has,” she writes. This feels true, if a little beside the point. Anabaptism was not formed to escape the news cycle, nor is blissful ignorance a tenet of the Amish way of life.

Much of the book is organized into neat narratives of seeking and finding. Angela, a data nerd and erstwhile fan of Richard Dawkins—she read the “The God Delusion” in high school to impress a boy—craves a fixed morality that externalizes the value of human worth, and finds it in Quakerism. Sara, a survivor of the Boston Marathon bombing, finds emotional and mental healing at a nondenominational church called Reality, on Santa Monica Boulevard. These details are compelling narrative tidbits, though one can’t help but feel that they are only part of the story. They’re the elements that augur a transformation, one Osgood can seem wary of describing in its totality. Anyone can appreciate moral boundaries and religious community as reasonable desires—even societal goods. It’s harder to defend the stubborn irrationality of abandoning one’s secular life for the woolliness of faith.

That’s not to say that Osgood never gestures at the weird stuff. It comes through in her own experiences of faith, descriptions of which are coyly and sporadically dispersed through the text. The broad strokes of her conversion are introduced early on: she went to college in New York, interned at “high-profile fashion magazines,” partied hard, and began contemplating a conversion to Orthodox Judaism in her twenties. Osgood compares Christina’s slow retreat from modern life to her own gradual adoption of the practice of Shabbat. “Like many converts, Shabbat was my gateway drug,” she writes, “and one of the major reasons I ended up pursuing an Orthodox conversion as opposed to one under the auspices of a different denomination, where the commandment is less obsessively obeyed.”

Osgood writes movingly about her experiences with Shabbat, which she enjoys as a source of community, routine, and time spent off her phone. (She deems the practice “the most valuable idea in all of history” and “the perfect response to our contemporary hell of overinformation.”) But even she realizes that her voluble, pluralistic analysis of the tradition doesn’t fully capture its power. Eventually, she writes, “My chirruping metacognitive exploration of Shabbat faded away, and I was able, for the first time ever, to direct my worship where it belonged: above me, to God, who’d had the wisdom to give me this gift in the first place.”

In the reported memoir “Don’t Forget We’re Here Forever: A New Generation’s Search for Religion,” the writer Lamorna Ash begins her own journey toward faith from a position of journalistic skepticism. Her inciting incident is learning about the conversion of two college acquaintances, a comedy duo, to the Anglican priesthood—both men finding God at the same time. She sets out to write an article on the comedians turned priests and discovers a book’s worth of material.

“At twenty-six, I knew that miracles and religious experiences were not real,” Ash writes. “That churches were as useless and beautiful as dinosaur bones.” So she begins talking to young people who have chosen some form of Christianity, the dominant faith in her native England, drawn by a “marked attitudinal shift in how my peers talk about religion compared to the generations which came before us.” When she starts to report the book, she arms herself with the “prophylactics” of notebook and audio recorder, she writes, “as if to say, I am not here to be changed.”

Ash has a few hypotheses for the curiosity about faith that blossoms among her generational cohort: her peers, she suggests, share an open-mindedness to a host of divergent views, and an existential dread in the face of climate change. “The accelerative capacity of social media both makes the rest of the world, its untold number of voices, feel more in reach,” she writes, “and also leaves us feeling ever more atomised and isolated, craving the kind of physical community we might have once gotten through the mosque, the synagogue, the temple, the church.” Like Osgood, she uses religion as a prism to refract broader questions about culture—about conspiracism, psychosis, suffering.

She also usefully broadens her scope to include people that Osgood’s presumed readership might find less palatable, seeking less to vindicate than to explain. Here we encounter, among other characters, believers seeking guardrails against what they see as the boundless immorality of modern life. Church leaders preach against “the culture” (defined by one pastor as a liberal, progressive individualism that originated in the nineteen-sixties) and the faithful place Post-it notes in their diaries in anticipation of Christ’s return. It’s the weird stuff, unadulterated, and Ash doesn’t shy away from it. She talks to a man who hears voices; she watches a mass baptism performed in a wading pool and live-streamed on a jumbotron while a woman waits nearby with a hair dryer to christen the new believers with a blowout. She has a brief falling out with a new convert, Max, who invites her to his baptism and then argues, in an e-mail exchange, that her queerness is a sin.

Eventually, Ash finds in herself a gradual attraction, not only to religious practice but to the wild disharmonies of belief. Her mother is sliding into late-stage dementia, and Ash yearns for a new source of meaning, something substantial and hard-won. “I was there to wrestle,” she writes, of early visits to religious services, “to be undone.” She tries to discern why she feels called to Christianity even as she finds some of its history abhorrent. Ash’s slow courtship with faith is moving, both because it’s colored by her impending loss and because of how she embraces the uncanny. “Once, I believed prayer was tantamount to wishing for something you could not hope to get,” Ash writes. She comes to see it, instead, as a “radical, active and quite literal acceptance.” Reflecting on the memoir “Love’s Work,” which was written by the philosopher Gillian Rose as she died of cancer and which opens with the epigraph “Keep your mind in hell, and despair not,” Ash writes:

Prayer forces me to speak with my mind in hell. The version of myself who does the praying speaks from a truer place than I ever manage in my day-to-day life, where I am always trying to retain a kind of lightness, a disaffected surface with those around me. There is nothing else like the utterance of prayer: it requires you to sift out what cannot or should not be prayed for because you are imagining yourself to be speaking towards something outside of the human realm. Whether you believe in God or not, if I were to say to you, “Try speaking in your head as if to a god,” something quite unlike your usual mode of speech would come out.

Even as Ash ventures into the less accessible parts of faith, there’s a hint of moderation here, too. “You are imagining yourself,” she writes. “Try” to speak “as if to a god.” Perhaps, Ash seems to suggest, you can pretend your way to the benefits of prayer. But her agonized attempts to telegraph her despair into another dimension capture something different: for it to really matter, you have to believe.

Osgood’s book aims to make religious conversion intelligible to the nonbeliever; meanwhile, many of Ash’s sources resist this sort of intelligibility at every turn, fearing that a religion compatible with the secular world is not enough of a religion at all. The tension between accessibility and maintaining a boundaried tradition is an existential one for every faith, especially as religion has shifted gently, across centuries, to accommodate greater individual choice. “The Chance of Salvation,” Lincoln A. Mullen’s 2017 history of conversion in the U.S., persuasively details the ways in which modern religion shaped—and was shaped by—the American project, spawning new systems of belief; hybrid theologies; backlashes toward fundamentalism; and a more individualized approach to faith. Mullen memorably details the nineteenth-century invention of “the sinner’s prayer,” a tool for evangelism that simplified the process of conversion into a single act of confession. To some, this was a savvy innovation; to others, it was an opportunistic distortion. “Their religion,” one critic wrote of such revivalist practices, “apart from the occasional whirlwinds of excitement in which they are allowed to figure in their favorite way, may be said to be characteristically superficial and cold.”

The religious landscape depicted in Osgood and Ash’s books is one where conversion appears more readily available than at any time before, as the internet offers endless potential for incidental contact with alternative versions of life. (Max, the convert from “Don’t Forget We’re Here Forever,” is radicalized to a conservative Christian faith after being served videos of anti-abortion pastors on YouTube.) What’s striking is that their subjects appear to choose faith because they want to approach it the hard way—the way that defies the sensibilities of the modern world. A woman named Orianne who appears in “Godstruck” joins a nunnery in part because she’s drawn to the challenge of lifelong celibacy. “When you marry somebody you give up a lot, including some things that we would label as freedoms,” she tells Osgood. “You’re tied to someone; you’ve bound yourself to someone. So it’s kind of a similar thing.”

There’s a moment in “Don’t Forget” in which Ash visits an evangelical youth gathering, one of the sort she finds aesthetically and politically unappealing. (Seeing the word FAITH! spraypainted on a building upon her arrival, she drags on her cigarette, and tells herself to get a grip.) A teen-ager approaches her to say that she has a word from God to share, and that the word is “Beloved.” Ash explains that this is an evangelizing process called treasure hunting—listening for God’s voice to share with strangers—and though she doesn’t yet consider herself a Christian, she finds herself surprisingly moved to tears. The encounter, like so many others in the book, captures an intrinsic challenge of writing about faith: the realm of belief can be so personal, so bizarre, that it begs for language that can’t be counted, verified, or corroborated. But religion has its own language for the elements that generate its centripetal force: being set apart, purified, chosen, favored, ordained, redeemed, made holy. Transformed. ♦

Just weeks before the 2016 Presidential election, the American public was provided with dispositive information on Donald Trump’s beliefs about women, sex, and the rights of men, particularly famous men. The information was delivered, unmistakably, in his voice. On October 7th, the Washington Post’s David Fahrenthold published a video of Trump, circa 2005, chatting merrily on a bus with Billy Bush, the co-anchor of “Access Hollywood,” as Trump prepared to make a guest appearance on an episode of the soap opera “Days of Our Lives.”

Trump bragged of his impulsivity. “I don’t even wait. And, when you’re a star, they let you do it. You can do anything,” he said. “Grab ’em by the pussy. You can do anything.”

In the same session, Trump was recorded saying that he had tried and failed to seduce Bush’s co-host at the time, Nancy O’Dell. “I did try and fuck her. She was married,” he said. “And I moved on her very heavily. In fact, I took her out furniture shopping. . . . I moved on her like a bitch. But I couldn’t get there.”

Initially, Trump failed to follow the dictum he had learned at the feet of Roy Cohn: Never apologize, never explain. After a fashion, he did both. He minimized the offense as “locker-room talk,” adding that his opponent’s husband, Bill Clinton, had “said far worse to me on the golf course.” Soon, however, he began denying that the recording was even genuine. At Trump’s second debate with Hillary Clinton, Anderson Cooper asked him, “You bragged that you have sexually assaulted women. Do you understand that?”

Trump, after allowing that he was embarrassed by the incident, tried to change the subject—to ISIS terrorists chopping off heads—and insisted, “I have great respect for women. Nobody has more respect for women than I do.”

COOPER: So, for the record, you’re saying you never did that.

TRUMP: Frankly, you heard these things I said. . . . I have tremendous respect for women—

COOPER: Have you ever done those things?

TRUMP: —and women have respect for me. And I will tell you, no, I have not. And I will tell you that I’m going to make our country safe. We’re going to have borders for our country, which we don’t have now. . . . We’re going to make America safe again, and we’re going to make America wealthy again.

Many things go into a voter’s decision, but the “Access Hollywood” tape and the gross lack of character reflected in it did not prove disqualifying in the 2016 election. A year later, Billy Bush, who is George H. W. Bush’s nephew, wrote an Op-Ed in the Times declaring, “Of course he said it.” Bush said that he and “seven other guys present at the bus at the time . . . assumed we were listening to a crass standup act. He was performing. Surely, we thought, none of this was real.” But, after reading numerous firsthand accounts of women who had been on the receiving end of Trump’s forcible affections over the years, he believed them. He was appalled and clearly resented Trump’s attempts to deny that the voice on the “Access Hollywood” tape was his. Bush wrote, “To these women: I will never know the fear you felt or the frustration of being summarily dismissed and called a liar, but I do know a lot about the anguish of being inexorably linked to Donald Trump. You have my respect and admiration. You are culture warriors at the forefront of necessary change.”

Trump’s attitude toward women was never unclear. As a businessman on the make for publicity, he was always eager to describe his conquests, real and imagined, for the benefit of gossip columnists and talk-show hosts. Since he became a politician, the picture has only sharpened. Around twenty women have publicly accused the President of various forms of sexual misconduct. (He has always denied the accusations.) In 2023, a New York jury awarded the writer E. Jean Carroll a five-million-dollar civil judgment against him for defamation and sexual abuse. She accused Trump of assaulting her in the mid-nineties in a dressing room of the Bergdorf Goodman department store, in New York. (Trump has denied Carroll’s account and has called on the Supreme Court to overturn the ruling.)

On Tuesday, as the Justice Department continued to release the avalanche of documents and photographs known collectively as the Epstein files, some, but hardly all, major news outlets reported on a letter purportedly written by Jeffrey Epstein to Larry Nassar, the former U.S.A. Gymnastics team doctor who abused hundreds of female athletes and pleaded guilty in 2018 to seven counts of first-degree criminal sexual assault. The letter was postmarked August 13, 2019, three days after Epstein killed himself in his Manhattan jail cell. The handwritten text reflects contempt for Trump and hints darkly about his past. While all three men shared a “love of young, nubile girls,” Epstein supposedly wrote, and the President “loved to ‘grab snatch,’ ” only Epstein and Nassar had “ended up snatching grub in the mess halls of the system. Life is unfair.”

The existence of a letter was cited in a 2023 dispatch by the Associated Press. But is it real? There is no reason to believe that it is. Julie K. Brown, the Miami Herald investigative reporter who has been on the Epstein beat for many years, wrote on X, “This is suspect to me, largely because Jeffrey Epstein didn’t know how to spell. It doesn’t seem to fit with the way he wrote, either. Plus it really looks like a woman’s handwriting.” The Justice Department later announced on X that “the FBI has confirmed this alleged letter from Jeffrey Epstein to Larry Nassar is FAKE.”

The case for this President’s indecency hardly requires putting a dubious letter into evidence. As we continue to sift daily through the detritus of Trump’s accumulating record and biography, we keep living with the notion that somehow, somewhere, there will appear a document or a detail so grotesque, so damning, that the country will finally rise as one to declare this Presidency at an end. Just one more instance of sexual assault; of cruel and illegal deportations; of financial self-dealing. Just one more indulgence of racism and antisemitism in the MAGA camp; one more outrageous insult hurled against a foreign leader or a female reporter; one more violation of constitutional and institutional norms.

There has already been a mountain of accurate reporting on Trump’s attitude toward women and the close relationship between the President and Epstein. Among the best and most comprehensive accounts was published last week in the Times. Nicholas Confessore and Julie Tate explored countless documents and interviewed more than thirty of Epstein’s former employees, as well as victims. They described the relationship as one of common carnal interest.

“Neither man drank or did drugs. They pursued women in a game of ego and dominance. Female bodies were currency,” Confessore and Tate wrote. “Over nearly two decades, as Mr. Trump cut a swath through the party circuits of New York and Florida, Mr. Epstein was perhaps his most reliable wingman. During the 1990s and early 2000s, they prowled Mr. Epstein’s Manhattan mansion and Mr. Trump’s Plaza Hotel, at least one of Mr. Trump’s Atlantic City casinos and both their Palm Beach homes. They visited each other’s offices and spoke often by phone, according to other former Epstein employees and women who spent time in his homes. With other men, Mr. Epstein might discuss tax shelters, international affairs or neuroscience. With Mr. Trump, he talked about sex.”

That passage is the “billboard” of the piece, the thesis, and it is amply supported by multiple sources who describe the details of their relationship, how Trump regaled Epstein over the telephone “with tales of his sexual exploits” and how Epstein delighted in making his discomfited assistants listen on speaker. Confessore and Tate reported the recollections of a former Epstein assistant, who recounted “one call in the mid-1990s on which the two men discussed how much pubic hair a particular woman had, and whether there was enough for Mr. Epstein to floss his teeth with. On another, Mr. Trump told Mr. Epstein about having sex with another woman on a pool table.”

In the Times’ reporting, both men are portrayed in all their vanity and blithe aggression. In 1993, at one of Trump’s beauty pageants, one contestant, Béatrice Keul, then a bank employee and part-time model from Switzerland, was asked by one of Trump’s employees to meet with him privately at a suite at the Plaza: “Almost as soon as she arrived, Ms. Keul said, Mr. Trump began groping her, kissing her and trying to lift her dress. ‘I yelled, I screamed, I pushed him,’ she said. ‘He didn’t want to give up.’ ”

Before her meeting with Trump, Epstein had approached her, according to Keul, saying he was “Don’s best friend.” Would she come to Mar-a-Lago to party? “When Ms. Keul demurred,” the Times account went on, “Mr. Epstein tried other tactics—going on about the wealth he kept in Swiss banks, then about famous friends with whom he could arrange meetings. ‘Epstein knew exactly what he was doing,’ she said. ‘He had a hunting method. It was a routine.’ ”

The White House press secretary, Karoline Leavitt, responded to the paper’s questions about its reporting by saying it was all a “fake news story.” Which is precisely where we began, on that bus, so many years ago: Deny, deny, deny, and move on. In his Op-Ed for the Times, Billy Bush recalled another off-camera remark from Trump, when Bush confronted him about lying—in this case, inflating his television ratings. “People will just believe you,” Trump said. “You just tell them and they believe you.” ♦

Paper cuts are the worst. In “No Other Choice,” a new comic thriller from the South Korean filmmaker Park Chan-wook, You Man-su (Lee Byung-hun), a longtime employee at a pulp manufacturer called Solar Paper, is one of many unceremoniously laid off after Americans take over the company. Months later, with his job search going nowhere, Man-su and his wife, Lee Mi-ri (Son Ye-jin), are forced to economize. Mi-ri finds part-time work at a dentist’s office. Their dogs are sent to live with her parents. Furniture is put up for sale, Netflix is cancelled, and their children’s future hangs in the balance. When the family’s beloved house goes on the market, Man-su snaps. This can’t go on. Something must be done.

Judging by the cinema of the downsized, a subgenre as global in its reach as unemployment itself, the possibilities of that “something” are endless. Unlike the shifty protagonists of Laurent Cantet’s “Time Out” (2002) and Kiyoshi Kurosawa’s “Tokyo Sonata” (2009), Man-su, at least, does not try to hide his termination from his loved ones. Will he patiently keep seeking out jobs, like the Finnish tram driver cut loose in Aki Kaurismäki’s “Drifting Clouds” (1998)? Or will he vent his fury, like the sacked defense worker in Joel Schumacher’s “Falling Down” (1993), who embarks on a brutal rampage through the streets of Los Angeles? This being a movie directed by Park, best known for the extravagant revenge thriller “Oldboy” (2005), it’s no spoiler to reveal that Man-su does not choose peace. He plots to murder a rival, Choi Sun-chul (Park Hee-soon), in hopes of replacing him as line manager at another paper company.

But getting rid of Sun-chul will not be enough. Man-su, wanting an accurate sense of his competition, invents a fake job opportunity and puts out a call for applicants. From the résumés that pour in, he deduces that there are two other highly qualified, recently laid-off paper experts, Gu Bum-mo (Lee Sung-min) and Go Si-jo (Cha Seung-won), who are likelier to be hired for Sun-chul’s position than he is, and who must therefore be eliminated first. Man-su tells himself he has “no other choice,” a phrase that reverberates through the film like a bad mantra: it’s what Solar’s new American overlords say when they kick him to the curb, and it’s also Man-su’s excuse for not trying his hand at another profession. “Paper has fed me for twenty-five years,” he declares. His fellow industry clingers-on feel a similar loyalty—and, with their sudden terminations, a similar betrayal. “No Other Choice,” a blackly comic tale of a breadwinner’s dilemma, is also about a crisis of masculinity: some men will kill to avoid learning another skill set.

Park’s film is the second adaptation of Donald E. Westlake’s satirical crime novel “The Ax” (1997), which set its paper-industry murder spree somewhere in the Connecticut area. The first, also titled “The Ax” (2005), was set in France and Belgium and directed, engrossingly, by Costa-Gavras, to whom Park dedicated his own version. Clearly, Westlake’s tale can be productively transplanted to any place that knows the sting of corporate mergers and restructurings. With “No Other Choice,” Park and his co-writers—Lee Kyoung-mi, Don McKellar, and Jahye Lee—have repotted the story in Korean soil, which proves remarkably fertile ground. (You’ll forgive the botanical metaphors: Man-su tends plants as a hobby, with a greenhouse and a garden plot that prove convenient for the disposal of bodies.) Park, ever a fan of pulp fiction, both maintains and updates the story’s paper-industry focus. The effects of increased automation and sustainability-minded practices are duly acknowledged, but so is the ubiquity of paper, which has too many uses—lottery tickets, ice-cream-cone sleeves, and cigarette filters, for starters—to be made obsolete by the digital revolution alone.

Park’s most significant transformation is one of tone. Westlake’s novel unfolds from the point of view of its culprit, who gets a grabber of an opening line: “I’ve never actually killed anybody before, murdered another person, snuffed out another human being.” Costa-Gavras’s treatment kept the hard-edged, noirish tone and sociopathic voice-over intact, and the nastier-minded Park of “Oldboy” might have done something similar. More recently, though, in films such as “The Handmaiden” (2016) and “Decision to Leave” (2022), both among his best, he has dialled back the extreme gore that was once his signature. To be sure, there are images in “No Other Choice” that sink into your brain like steel hooks—one shot of a corpse, bound and compacted for ease of burial, has a contortionist horror worthy of Francis Bacon—but there’s more winking mischief than hammer-swinging sadism in Park’s deployment of violence these days. Here, he brings out the story’s flashes of dark comedy and gives them the lavish, over-the-top exuberance of farce.

The film marks a reunion for Park and Lee Byung-hun, who had his breakout role twenty-five years ago in the director’s political thriller “Joint Security Area,” and who has since become one of Asia’s most popular stars. Best known outside Korea for his work on the series “Squid Game,” he’s a terrifically versatile talent; I’m especially fond of his prince-and-the-pauper double act in the period drama “Masquerade” (2012) and his astonishing performance, in Kim Jee-woon’s “I Saw the Devil” (2011), as a detective driven to extremes almost as deranged as the serial killer he’s hunting. In “No Other Choice,” he plays a murderer whose bursts of ingenuity are often waylaid by bumbling ineptitude. The part gives Lee’s comic gifts and his action chops a frenzied, intensely physical workout, whether Man-su is ducking out of sight, hurling himself down a hill, struggling for a gun, reeling from toothache, or writhing on the ground after a sudden snakebite rattles him at the worst possible moment.

Lee throws himself into all of it with a sad-sack slapstick energy that never undercuts—and, remarkably, even enhances—the psychological acuity of his acting. At fifty-five, he’s borne out the truism that certain heartthrobs, be they Ethan Hawke or Brad Pitt, become more interesting and more versatile with age; Lee, for his part, has also gotten funnier. When Man-su grins and blunders his way through a job interview early on, the glare of the sunlight in his eyes matched by the glares of his interlocutors, it’s a squirmy-funny tour de force. The deliberate exaggeration of both Lee’s performance and Park’s direction is what draws us into a suspension of moral disbelief, a sense of complicity with Man-su’s outrageous scheme. The soundtrack also helps: one of Man-su’s messier murder attempts is accompanied by Cho Yong-pil’s nostalgic 1981 hit “Redpepper Dragonfly,” a song that captures the film’s wild oscillations between comedy and tragedy and signals the first of several shifts into weirder, more poignant territory.

“No Other Choice” is, among other things, an extended meditation on marital discontent, and Man-su’s murder plot, for all the bloody chaos it leaves in its wake, also provides him with a therapeutic dose of perspective. The more he kills, the more he learns about the deep malaise—and, in some cases, eccentricity—of people he had assumed to be happier, more fortunate, and better adjusted than he is. One of the more memorable characters is Ara (a superb Yeom Hye-ran), Bum-mo’s increasingly fed-up, flagrantly unfaithful wife, who, in one harrowing confrontation, winds up both derailing and abetting the killer’s harebrained plot. Man-su and Mi-ri are more happily married, but months of unemployment and multiple homicides take their toll, excavating old resentments and failures, including Man-su’s past struggles with alcoholism. As Mi-ri gets closer to the truth, Son Ye-jin’s performance becomes bracingly unpredictable; she’s both an emotional anchor and a moral wild card.

Park’s work is defined by a freewheeling command of the camera, which he places in service of an ever more dazzling elegance of style. When Park and his director of photography, Kim Woo-hyung, send the camera soaring across the generous expanse of the Yous’ front yard—or plant it, whimsically, at the bottom of an enormous beer stein, the better to watch Man-su’s sobriety drain away—you sense their giddy enthrallment, practically to the point of arousal, by the visual possibilities of their material. This luxuriant, almost decadent virtuosity can feel out of synch with a tale of miserable, penny-pinching extremes. “No Other Choice” has drawn comparisons to Bong Joon Ho’s “Parasite” (2019), another bleakly funny, socially conscious Korean thriller in which desperate financial straits precipitate a whirlwind of carnage—but the showmanship of Park’s movie, unlike Bong’s, sometimes outstrips its finesse.

What “No Other Choice” and “Parasite” do have in common, fittingly, is a house to kill for. In Bong’s film, the coveted central location was a modernist masterpiece, all clean, sharp lines and immaculate surfaces. The Yous’ home, the eye-popping standout of Ryu Seong-hie’s production design, is a similarly enormous but earthier, more ramshackle affair. The interiors, dim but comfortable-looking, are full of plants and lumpy leather furniture; the exteriors are a ramshackle marvel, with red-brick arches, a long upper-story deck, and greenery spilling out in every direction. We learn early on that Man-su grew up in this house, and that he proudly bought it back years later and fixed it up himself. No wonder it looks so lived in, so jammed together, so fiercely guarded and loved. ♦