The thrill of “A Very Murray Christmas”—minor as it may be—is the suggestion that we might be seeing the closest thing to Bill Murray playing himself. He hits all of his best notes—charismatic ham, besieged and neurotic star, winking Hollywood skeptic, avuncular oracle, giddy conspirator—at just the right volume.
Read more of Ian Crouch’s review of the Netflix special on newyorker.com.
Image by Ali Goldstein / Netflix / Everett
Roger Angell, a senior editor and staff writer, has contributed to The New Yorker since 1944 and was inducted into the Baseball Hall of Fame last year, for his writing on the sport. This year, he won a National Magazine Award for his essay “This Old Man,” about aging, loss, and love. On this week’s episode of “The New Yorker Radio Hour,” Angell spoke with David Remnick about writing in his tenth decade.
“What would it look like if I took America’s obsession with firearms to its logical extreme?” says the artist Eric Drooker about “Shopping Days,” his cover for next week’s issue. Read more.
San Bernardino is No. 13—the thirteenth mass public shooting in the United States in the past week. Most of the others—in Boston, Houston, Sacramento—haven’t received much national news attention, because Americans are still absorbing the horror of what happened last week, when, on the day after Thanksgiving, a man named Robert Lewis Dear, Jr., was arrested after going on a rampage at a Planned Parenthood clinic in Colorado Springs, killing three people and injuring nine others. It’s too soon to know what led to the killings in San Bernardino, but it’s a strange fiction to pretend, as we often do, that we have yet to understand what led us to this broader moment. Some of the reasons are in plain sight, and have been for decades.
Evan Osnos examines the growing prevalence of domestic terrorism in the United States. Read more on newyorker.com.
The cover of Joanna Newsom’s latest album, “Divers,” is a photograph by the New York-based artist Kim Keever. Keever is known for crafting elaborate dioramas in an aquarium, then releasing pigments into the tank and taking pictures of the resulting underwater scenes.
See more of the artist’s “Abstract” series.
Courtesy Kim Keever / Waterhouse & Dodd
Our Comma Queen Mary Norris explains what it means to split an infinitive—and whether it’s advised. Glean more grammar knowledge by watching the rest of her video series.
(Source: newyorker.com)
One day in the early nineteen-nineties, during the worst of the AIDS crisis in the United States, a physician named Edward Atwater was taking a Red Line train in Boston when he noticed a cartoonish poster on the wall. It showed a pair of hands unwrapping a condom, with a simple message on either side of the illustration: “Prevent AIDS. Use One.”
The poster, which was created by the Massachusetts Department of Public Health, interested Atwater so much that he started a collection. In the following decades, he amassed some sixty-two hundred posters in a range of languages and dialects—Arabic, Chinese, English, French, Spanish, and nearly sixty others.