2025 In Review The New Yorker

Leo Migdal

-Dec 11, 2025, 1:05 PM

New Yorker writers on the highs and lows of the past year. The New Yorker: The Best Books of 2025, a list of "essential reads" that accompanies a long list of further recommendations [see also The Best Books of 2024 • The Best Books of 2023 • The Best Fiction and Poetry of 2022 • The Best Nonfiction of 2022 • The Best Books We Read in... Year-end lists are fingerprints; aggregate statistics are smudges. Therefore, I make no tallies. Each week The New Yorker highlights the best books their writers and editors have read that week.

Here are 20 of our favorite fiction books from their selection, including a snippet of what they had to say about each one. "This novel re-creates the filmmaking career of G. W. Pabst, the brilliant Austrian director who, in the early Nazi period, made it out of Europe to America—and then, calamitously, went back... The book combines history, biography, and detailed dramatizations of filmmaking; what holds it together is a portrait of Europe in a state of emotional and moral disintegration. The unsurprising news in “The Director” is that most of us fall short of moral heroism and will accommodate ourselves to power one way or another.

Some of us even become rapt enthusiasts of the very things that had earlier repelled us." "In this spare, associative novel of projection and self-acceptance, a young woman, Sylvie, nurses an all-consuming obsession with her therapist. Simply conjuring up the therapist’s image gives her “a sense that a great freedom was close.” As their weekly sessions unspool, the dark outlines of Sylvie’s past are revealed—a controlling ex-boyfriend, an abusive father—and... "This short, powerful novel is a sequel to Ryan’s début, “The Spinning Heart,” from 2012, a series of monologues that told stories connected to a failed housing development in Ireland and the economic collapse... The collective effect of their intimate, first-person narratives is that of a confessional, revealing the psyche of a country going through a traumatic change." "This volume includes forty-four previously uncollected stories by Gallant—a master of the form, who published more than a hundred stories in The New Yorker.

... The stories span Gallant’s writing life from 1944, when she was twenty-two, to 1987, and are full of her pointed wit, her acute observations, and her profound understanding of the desire, terror, and loneliness... Events now move at a pace so exhausting that it’s hard to remember that 2025 began with an epic climate-fuelled disaster: large portions of the nation’s second-biggest city, Los Angeles, burned in a firestorm... A succession of such tragedies followed—for instance, the killer floods along the Guadalupe River, in Texas, where atmospheric moisture off an overheated Gulf of Mexico had hit record levels. Or Hurricane Melissa, where wind gusts reached two hundred and fifty-two miles per hour, faster than ever measured in a tropical cyclone at sea, thanks to the superheated waters of the Caribbean. The same day that Melissa hit Jamaica, a storm dropped five feet of rain on central Vietnam in twenty-four hours, the second-biggest deluge in recorded history, and the start of a truly sodden autumn...

The year 2025 seems nearly certain to enter the books tied with 2023 as the second-hottest ever measured, trailing only 2024. Since both of those earlier years were influenced by a strong El Niño event, this one will have the dubious distinction of being the hottest without such an extraneous force. This is apparently what business as usual looks like for a planetary climate carrying our atmosphere’s current load of carbon dioxide and methane. On the three-year moving average by which we measure such things, the Earth is now inching ever-closer to the 1.5-degree-Celsius increase in temperature set out as a goal to avoid just a decade ago... And diplomatic events in 2025 did little to ease fears about what’s coming. The thirtieth Conference of the Parties (COP) global climate talks in Belem, Brazil—which no one from the Trump Administration attended—just concluded, and the Times described the final document in unusually straightforward terms as “a...

None of this should shock anyone. International climate diplomacy, since its high-water mark at Paris, in 2015, has been besieged by the fossil-fuel industry and its proxy governments, which now include, of course, the United States, historically the Earth’s chief... I’m going to quote at some length from the speech the American President delivered to a silent U.N. General Assembly in September, because it sums up perfectly both his own imperviousness to fact and the assertiveness of the oil-and-gas world after his Inauguration this year. New Yorker writers reflect on the year’s highs and lows. Describing, for instance, his understanding of climate science (invented arguably in its modern form in the United States, whose scientists first tracked the gases accumulating in the atmosphere and then built the computer models...

If you look back years ago in the nineteen-twenties and the nineteen-thirties, they said, Global cooling will kill the world. We have to do something. Then they said, Global warming will kill the world. But then it started getting cooler. It’s the greatest con job ever perpetrated on the world, in my opinion.” Then, with regard to modern environmentalism, one of America’s greatest contributions to the world—a consciousness that allowed our air and water... Everything should stop.

No more cows. We don’t want cows anymore. I guess they want to kill all the cows. They want to do things that are just unbelievable.” The New Yorker at 100 (now on Netflix) succeeds at two things: On the surface, the documentary gives a longstanding journalistic institution a hearty promotional boost via a warm atta-boy pat on the back. Subtextually, however, it profiles a print magazine that somehow still maintains its rigor and identity in a time when the internet has tragically enshittified existence in general by undermining things like facts and truth.

The good thing is, fans of the publication can read it on their phone (I occasionally page through it on my local library’s app). The less-good thing is, this documentary – by Street Fight director Marshall Curry – is more worthy of a glossy ad in the New Yorker than the magazine’s own journalistic standards. The Gist: “The New Yorker is a miracle,” says David Remnick, and you can’t help but bristle a little when he says that. I mean, he’s been the editor-in-chief of the magazine since 1998. Of course he’s going to speak highly of it. He believes in it.

To be fair, it’s not an intentionally self-aggrandizing statement – he makes the statement in the context of the magazine’s existence in the world as it currently stands. In its opening montage, the film reflects the publication’s wildly varied content by touting its reputation for vital journalism and dropping in celebrity talking heads (Jon Hamm, Sarah Jessica Parker, Jesse Eisenberg and more)... It’s certainly apt; the publication has distinguished itself by reflecting the melting pot of its native city with a blend of razor-sharp investigative journalism, goofy cartoons, cultural commentary, celeb profiles, poetry and fiction. That the New Yorker has survived with its unique voice and standards intact, in the face of new-millennium movements and trends that have summarily dismantled countless publications? Sure feels like a miracle. The New Yorker at 100 weaves together three primary threads in an attempt to craft a full profile of the magazine.

One, it highlights the hard-hitting news stories that are key to its identity, including John Hersey’s 1946 full-issue examination of the realities of post-nuclear-bomb Hiroshima, Rachel Carson’s culture-altering expose on the dangers of DDT... Two, it fleetingly profiles a fistful of its contributors, ranging from current editors, cartoonists, critics, the office manager and fact checkers to big names like James Baldwin and Truman Capote. And three, it loosely tracks the production of the fat, double-sized 100th-anniversary issue published in Feb., 2025, which allows Curry to dig into the minutiae of the New Yorker’s history and the development of... Talking-head interviews mingle with fly-on-the-wall footage of the staff covering the 2024 presidential election or Remnick leading staff meetings, and the inevitable puffing-of-the-chest examples of its permeation of the national culture by way of... One of the best bits in the doc addresses the tone of those cartoons and how they’re selected – it’s early in the film, because Netflix likely dictated that the good stuff be frontloaded... Anyway, by the end of The New Yorker at 100 you will absolutely be convinced that everyone involved with the New Yorker believes the New Yorker is a “miracle.”

What Movies Will It Remind You Of? Admittedly, not many magazines are worthy of their own documentaries, so we have When We Went Mad!, Drunk Stoned Brilliant Dead: The Story of the National Lampoon and Smiling Through the Apocalypse: Esquire in... In just 96 minutes, it captures The New Yorker's history, its influence, its daily mode of operation, and its mystique of serious delight. “The New Yorker at 100” is a nimble and infectious documentary, one that brings off a trick more challenging than it looks. (In that way, it’s a lot like the magazine.) In just 96 minutes, the film, directed by Marshall Curry and narrated by Julianne Moore, lays out the fabled history of The New Yorker. It colors in the magazine’s larger cultural significance.

It gives us a close-up, between-the-lines portrait of how The New Yorker gets put together each week, presenting us with the creation of its 100th anniversary issue (which came out this past February) as... And it folds all of this into the enticing story of the magazine’s vibe and aesthetic: the way its commitment to truth and beauty are flip sides of the same coin, and how its... The New Yorker loves and fetishizes its traditions (the monocled fop Eustace Tilley, that stately but sensual Adobe Caslon font), but the magazine’s ultimate tradition is cutting through the scrim of contemporary noise to... If you’re a fan of The New Yorker and want a backstage tour of how the supremely refined sausage gets made, “The New Yorker at 100” draws back the curtain in an enchanting way. Here’s the fateful weekly cartoon meeting, where the final 60 contenders (out of 1,000 weekly submissions) get sorted into yes, no, or maybe baskets. Here’s the writer Nick Paumgarten trying to drum up a Talk of the Town piece by wandering through the East Village and questioning random New Yorkers about what’s on their minds, a catch-as-catch-can method...

And here’s David Remnick, The New Yorker’s editor since 1998, doing his daily two-step of menschy straightforwardness and Machiavellian demand — a mystique that brings out the best in his writers, because they know... For Remnick, The New Yorker is a holy mission that delights and consumes him. He says that he feels like Fred Astaire when his feet hit the pavement each morning, and he’s such a compulsive scheduler that his idea of relaxation is a Sunday guitar lesson. He also describes, with cutting candor, how having a profoundly autistic daughter heightened his humanity as a journalist. Our HOLIDAY ORDER DEADLINES, for order fulfillment by 12/24: Out of stock books (Priority Mail OR store pickup): Wednesday 12/10

In stock books (Priority Mail): Tuesday 12/16 In stock books (store pickup): Monday 12/22 We recommend Priority Mail for all holiday shipping orders.

2025 In Review The New Yorker

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