Finalist: Vinson Cunningham of The New Yorker

On Inauguration Day, the forty-seventh President cast himself as an especially favored vessel of the Almighty.

It’s usually gauche to take pictures in church. But at St. John’s, the Episcopal Church just across a sedate Lafayette Square from the White House, photography is inevitable at least once every four years. Every Inauguration Day, many of the most powerful representatives of the United States government, past and quickly matriculating, go to the so-called Church of the Presidents, notionally to pray. The intimate sanctuary, with its air of contemplation, is, in this way, a small part of the theatre of American continuity. Presidential Administrations, so often wildly divergent one from the other in tone and in political direction, are concatenated by this littlest nod toward God.

Back in 2020—a lifetime ago politically, but just yesterday when you think about it—the air outside that church was thick with tear gas. Troops deployed by Donald Trump’s orders beat back a crowd gathered in the square to protest police brutality. Trump needed the space to stand in front of the church’s marquee and hold up a Bible: a photo-op dense with symbols over which Trump—a producer of spectacle, yes, but seldom of deep meaning—had no interest in exerting control. He just wanted a picture.

Widowers drive the plots of “Paradise,” “Severance,” and “American Primeval,” to poignant effect.

In the very first shot of the pilot episode of “Paradise”—a recent dystopian political thriller from Hulu—a man played by Sterling K. Brown lies alone, unrestfully, in bed. His eyes are bolted open. A watercolor wash of blue light floods his face. He blinks a bit and looks around the room, then caresses the unused pillow next to his own. The man—soon we learn that he’s a hyper-competent, scrupulously moral Secret Service officer named Xavier Collins—is manifestly unhappy, and so the color of the light through the window is a bit of a pun. Xavier’s got the blues.

“Paradise” does an exciting and sometimes moving job of managing so much plot and making its scenarios seem darkly plausible, given the real-life crises that, these days, are steadily encroaching upon its viewers. But, after watching all eight episodes of the show’s first season (a second one is in the works), I’m still thinking of that quiet first few seconds and its wordless picture of grief. Sad Xavier is a widower. That lonely pillow should belong to his wife, Teri. (That’s Dr. Teri Rogers-Collins to you: she was tough, and Xavier never fails to point this out.) She couldn’t make it in time to escape into the cave—she was on a work trip, that ancient eroder of marital bonds—and now Xavier’s left to serve the interests of a political order that couldn’t be bothered to save her life. He’s got two kids, a boy and a girl, over whom, even during his deepening investigation, he frets with a special intensity. He can’t stand to lose another thing, another face.

“Paradise” does an exciting and sometimes moving job of managing so much plot and making its scenarios seem darkly plausible, given the real-life crises that, these days, are steadily encroaching upon its viewers. But, after watching all eight episodes of the show’s first season (a second one is in the works), I’m still thinking of that quiet first few seconds and its wordless picture of grief. Sad Xavier is a widower. That lonely pillow should belong to his wife, Teri. (That’s Dr. Teri Rogers-Collins to you: she was tough, and Xavier never fails to point this out.) She couldn’t make it in time to escape into the cave—she was on a work trip, that ancient eroder of marital bonds—and now Xavier’s left to serve the interests of a political order that couldn’t be bothered to save her life. He’s got two kids, a boy and a girl, over whom, even during his deepening investigation, he frets with a special intensity. He can’t stand to lose another thing, another face.

One potential message of the weird new season—I love it, but it’s been controversial, leaving lots of people impatient with its proliferating strangeness—is that the life of intimate grief, one lover losing the other, quickly meanders from a strict chronological or causal rhythm. Henry Adams, the brahmin descendent of two American Presidents, called his life after the death of his wife, Clover, “posthumous.” He was a wanderer, a traveller, a vagabond historian and critic whose great midlife shock had left him feeling unfettered, sorrowfully free.

The same might be said of Mark Scout and Xavier Collins: the loss of their beloveds has wounded them but also cleared the way for the courage they display amid thickening intrigues. Marital life is liquid—it spreads to fit the containing shape of the self. When the bottle breaks, a livid flood comes rushing out. The widower becomes dangerous, breaks some glass against the wall of civilization. Mark and Xavier are both flailing against power in high places: Mark has the monolith Lumon, an entity that has sprouted its own kind of mystery cult, coöpting legislators and popular sentiment as it nears its nefarious ultimate goals. Xavier has the increasingly psychopathic Sinatra, who, we learn early on, has been dealing with a loss of her own: the death of her young son.

Both guys come from occupational backgrounds—education and law enforcement—that, at least in the popular imagination, tend to bolster society and keep it rolling on toward the future. But these posthumous men have already survived an apocalypse of a kind. Why not instigate another?

The city’s least self-conscious, Rupert Murdoch-owned daily newspaper sticks to its story, new information be damned, yet holds real clout in liberal New York.

Last fall at the Philharmonic, I was seated near a guy reading the New York Post. As often happens when I see the notorious tabloid in public, I tried to read it discreetly, out of the corner of my eye. The header said “Israel Under Attack.” The two articles below—flagrantly contradicting the banner under which they appeared—were about Israeli air strikes on Lebanon and Iran. I squinted and tried to skim both pieces until the lights went down.

That page was pure Post: New York’s most dastardly, least self-conscious daily newspaper chooses heroes and villains and sticks to its own story, new information be damned. The paper deals in overstatement and unsubtle deception, and its bold headline fonts make it a kind of small-scale, endlessly serialized work of public art. It’s meant to be read, sure, but also seen. You glimpse it on a newsstand or on the train and become sickly intrigued by some ingenious pun or awful image.

Like its longtime owner, Rupert Murdoch, the Post is right-wing and gleefully biased. It casts students protesting Israel’s war in Gaza—where more than ten thousand children have now been killed—as apologists for Hamas and has cheered on President Donald Trump’s crackdown on activists and college administrators. It has crassly opposed the influx of asylum seekers to the city, which crested between 2022 and 2024. A story of malfeasance with an immigrant near its center gets a sensationalist spin. A street fight in Gerritsen Beach, Brooklyn, for instance, became a “Bloody Migrant Brawl.” Any uptick in crime, real or perceived, is an occasion for the paper to declare New York—according to a favorite page-header—a “CITY IN CRISIS.”

Democrats, generally, get hammered by the Post. (In April, a front-page story about the former governor Andrew Cuomo headlined “CREEP TRICK”—not its best—was about how state taxpayer money has been used “to settle Handsy Andy’s sex-harass suit.”) But if a Dem is sufficiently conservative, especially on crime, he might get a pass. Eric Adams, now tarnished by petty corruption, probably owes his mayoralty to months of good press in the Post during his 2021 campaign. “Having been a police officer for 22 years, Adams understands the crisis,” the editorial board wrote in its hearty, heavily pro-cop endorsement. “He articulates a clear, firm and common-sense route to cleaning up our streets.”

And yet the paper holds real clout in notionally liberal New York. It editorializes on perennially important local issues—mass transit, real estate, the ever-fluctuating fortunes of the Knicks—and leads substantive political investigations. No other outlet in the city has as thoroughly covered the struggle between Governor Kathy Hochul and Donald Trump over the construction of the new Penn Station, or their ongoing political fight about New York’s congestion-pricing law, which took effect in January, or the recently—and quite dubiously—dropped federal corruption case against Mayor Adams, the Post’s former golden child.

The Post’s dedication to this kind of fisking, oppositional metro reporting is rarer than ever, if hopelessly slanted. Its tabloid archrival, the Daily News, is still kicking, but its circulation has steadily fallen, and its staff has radically shrunk, after its parent company was acquired by a hedge fund with a reputation for gutting newsrooms. The Times, meanwhile, has become a colossus, raking in money in large part because of its cooking app and its arsenal of addictive games, casting a large shadow over an imperilled industry. But when it comes to the home front the Times has—shamefully, I think—retreated. Last year, it was announced that the paper would no longer issue endorsements in local elections, and the ambit of the excellent Metro section has narrowed considerably.

Here’s a big urban problem: How do you speak to an entire city using only one loud voice? Most politicians can’t pull it off. The Post has an answer: make a daily billboard so neon in its message, so portable in its form, that citizens will volunteer—or, better, pay—to carry it around on your behalf.

The paper works as a way to broadcast your own identity, too. During the program at the Philharmonic, one composer gave an evangelistic speech about how her concerto had been inspired by the climate crisis. Many audience members erupted in applause. But my neighbor, impassive, lethargically tapped his forefinger against his Post. I felt I could read his mind: he’d come for the music, not this Greta Thunberg routine. I didn’t know him, but for a moment, if only archetypally, I sort of did. Rudy Giuliani—a sadist, yes, but our sadist—knows passages from Verdi’s “Rigoletto” by heart.

One minor tension of my life is that I can’t bring myself to hate the Post. I find its politics detestable but its voice irresistible. I read the famous gossip section, Page Six, and skim the horoscopes. I whiz through the local politics and government coverage—often well reported, spin notwithstanding—and try to read the articles on national and international affairs as a fun-house mirror of the reality I usually inhabit. On one page, the entertainment critic Johnny Oleksinski cracks me up with his staccato phrasing and his uncareful way with celebrity self-regard. (“The Rocket Man keeps crashing,” he once wrote of Elton John. Recently, he so badly peeved the Broadway producers of the Denzel Washington-led “Othello”—having kvetched about high prices—that the show’s publicist yanked the customary offer of free critics’ tickets.) A few pages later, the neocon columnist Michael Goodwin inverts the truth so egregiously, and with such smug certainty, that I want to set the whole rag on fire. The Post and me: it’s a bad relationship I can’t figure out how to leave for good.

Worse, I’m not sure I want to. If I’m away and something big happens, I usually ask a friend if he can stop by a newsstand so I don’t miss the hard copy of a good front-page headline. If I’m somewhere with a critical mass of vacationing New Yorkers, I set out on foot, knowing there’s likely a Post nearby. In August, 2022, just after the F.B.I. raid at Mar-a-Lago, in search of allegedly mishandled classified documents, I rushed into a liquor store on Martha’s Vineyard and scored a copy. On the cover was Trump, cheeks ablush. The headline: “YOU COULDA JUST ASKED.”

Maybe I’m simply interested in that voice, that loud, familiar sound—the demotic tone, the direct address, the sense of a great organ yelling into power’s ear and being overheard everywhere, from Dyckman to Dyker Heights.

The Post, the oldest daily newspaper in the United States, was founded in 1801 by Alexander Hamilton. With a group of his fellow-Federalists, Hamilton had scrounged together the money to establish the upstart broadsheet, then called the Evening Post, in order to express the group’s disapproval of the newly elected President, Thomas Jefferson, and his party of populist libertarians, the Democratic-Republicans. That year, Jefferson avoided giving an annual state-of-the-nation speech to Congress and, instead, delivered a message in the form of a letter. Hamilton—taking his new paper for a spin like a Ferrari through the backstreets of a small town—wrote a series of acidic articles refuting, one by one, the “strange absurdity” of his adversary’s arguments. The President’s message, he wrote, was “a performance which ought to alarm all who are anxious for the safety of our Government, for the respectability and welfare of our nation.” Anxiety asserted as a kind of duty, high stakes made existential, personal vendetta masquerading as the news—it was lurid overstatement from the start.

Through the decades and editorships that followed, the Post took up many causes, including abolitionism, collective bargaining, opposition to central banking. (One strain of continuity is its interest in the performing arts: it has almost always employed a theatre critic.) In 1939, the finance heiress Dorothy Schiff bought the paper and transformed it into a largely liberal tabloid, especially popular among the Jewish upper-middle classes. Socially conscious journalist heroes such as Murray Kempton and Pete Hamill worked as columnists. By the seventies, a comfortable sleepiness had set in; the paper was more respected than read. In 1962, Schiff had declared herself editor—according to Nora Ephron, a Post alumna, she “changed the focus of the paper from hard-hitting, investigative, and liberal to frothy, gossipy, and woman oriented”—but she resisted spending the money necessary to compete in a crowded tabloid market.

The popular narrative tends to be a bit unfair to Schiff, focussing too much on the late decline and ignoring the real excellence to which her Post often rose. Kempton and Hamill were icons of their era, and in 1975 Schiff hired Frank Rich, who turned out to be one of the finest drama critics of the late twentieth century. Under Schiff’s watch, the paper even showed up in great works of art. In the poem “The Day Lady Died,” a potent ditty of avoidant grief, from 1964, Frank O’Hara name-checks the Post as having informed him of the death of one of his heroes, Billie Holiday:

then I go back where I came from to 6th Avenue
and the tobacconist in the Ziegfeld Theatre and
casually ask for a carton of Gauloises and a carton
of Picayunes, and a NEW YORK POST with her face on it

He built his lovable persona not on the page but via pictures and improvised chat, the stuff of screens.

Shortly after Pope Francis died, on Monday, the Vatican released a brief document he had authored in 2022, outlining his last testament: how and where he should be buried, how the proceedings should be handled. The Pope, famous—perhaps foremost—for his insistence on simplicity and aversion to clerical glitz, wanted to be buried not at the Vatican but at the Papal Basilica of St. Mary Major, where before and after each of his international trips he went to pray. His tomb, he wrote, “should be in the ground; simple, without particular ornamentation, and bearing only the inscription: Franciscus”—his papal moniker, rendered in Latin.

These instructions foregrounded a paradox in Francis’s radiant personality. On the one hand, he insisted that the Church he stewarded should be less interested in visible surfaces and stylistic curlicues, the distracting aesthetics of lace-frilled priestly vestments and fussy liturgical preferences, and focus instead on the heart of the Christian message: an affection for the poor, a preference for the geographical and existential “margins” and those who inhabit them, the contours of Christ’s face made plain by an ethos of joy and peace and love. And yet, pursuing these themes, the Pope revealed himself, throughout the twelve years of his papacy, to be a canny maker and promoter of imagery. He had his own style—plain clothes, humble plazas, his friendly hand clasping yours—and, in his self-expression, he could be just as controlling as the incense-obsessed traditionalists he sometimes antagonized in his public remarks.

If human workers don’t have to read, write, or even think, it’s unclear what’s left for them to do.

If a recent crop of commercials touting the benefits of artificial intelligence is any indication, lots of Americans these days feel unduly burdened by the demands of everyday cognition. Apparently, it’s asking way too much to expect a human to figure out how to make a small repair, or write a note to a friend, or plan a meal to feed a child. Let alone read.

I’ve got a perverse favorite among these ads, for Apple Intelligence. (You can look it up on YouTube, in an archival effort by Apple that I would kibosh if I ran the company, but who’s asking me?) A sharp-looking Black man of maybe fifty named Lance sits down at a drab, clean conference table full of colleagues. Somebody asks him if he’s read a “prospectus,” and Lance decides to lie about it. Of course he read the prospectus! “Oh, yes,” he says, his face reeking of guilty and guileless dishonesty. “It was wonderful.” As these things go, he’s asked to offer a synopsis to the rest of the team. Then, crisis established, comes a bit of surrealist slapstick nonsense. In full view of everybody, Lance slowly scoots off in his rolly chair into a hallway, where he consults Apple’s A.I. about the prospectus that’s already sitting right there on his laptop. The thing spits out a few summarizing bullet points, and Lance, newly confident, slowly rolls back to his spot at the table, ready to contribute. “O.K., guys,” he says, his confused colleagues looking on, “let’s get into the prospectus.”

The spot plays as a joke: Lance isn’t exactly a hero, and neither are his largely silent co-workers. But, still, the point is to sell us something, less a consumer item or a user interface than a life style unmarred by pesky intellectual tasks like reading a text and then verbalizing what you read. When I was a kid, people were always telling Black boys they had to be twice as good—at comprehending, at composing, at thinking, at speaking—as the other faces around the table, lest they be banished from the aspiring classes altogether. Maybe Lance is evidence of progress: be ostentatiously mediocre, even forget how to read—who needs it?!—and succeed. The young Frederick Douglass, enslaved, riskily contravening the laws of his time, learned to read from young white boys in Baltimore. Literacy was a symbol for the larger freedom Douglass would later achieve. But those days are over, right? Lay that struggle down once and for all.

Lance seems to be some kind of middle manager, of unclear authority. He’s achieved enough seniority to speak aloud at meetings, instead of, say, writing down the minutes (another role that A.I. cheerfully promises to abrogate; if you want it to, it’ll pay attention on your behalf and take your notes), but he’s still sufficiently subordinate to be put on the spot, called on without previous consent or forewarning. High-ranking executives these days sometimes play the role of so-called “creatives,” supposedly executing corporate and technological maneuvers with the sensitivity of artists. But a guy like Lance is a train on a track, playing out his career with a deterministic energy. When he’s called on, he answers: that’s the gig.

He doesn’t look like he glories in his work. I’m not mad at him for squeezing past a homework assignment or two. A new ad for the note-taking A.I. tool Plaud, powered by GPT and other reasoning tools, shows a Lance-like office drone drowning in jargon at a meeting he’s taking notes for: “KPI,” “optimize,” “ROI,” “stakeholders,” “deliverables.” Then he placidly presses the button on a little toy that starts recording and transcribing what people in the room are saying, and then offering “instant insights.” So many of these new gadgets are straightforwardly presented as salves for the massive ennui that plays bass notes beneath the music of contemporary corporate culture. The preferred state, it seems, is a zoned-out semi-presence, the worker accounted for in body but absent in spirit.

I do wonder what else Lance has got to do, what freedom he thinks he’s winning by allowing his powers of thought to be supplanted by some whirring machine. Does a person with this much contempt for texts by day insist on reading aloud to his kids at night? (A spot for Qualcomm’s Snapdragon features a dad so shaken by the momentary absence of his wife—she’s working late—that he has to ask A.I. what to feed his children. It also helps him “create” a story to read at bedtime. No domestic improv for these types.) Does he check out the paper and catch up on current events? Does he carry on deep conversations with his spouse? Does he go to an Elks Lodge or a community-board meeting or a church or a soup kitchen to kibbitz with his neighbors and make sure they’re doing all right? Does this fella even have friends?

I don’t know. That kind of stuff takes effort. To me he looks sort of sad. I can more easily imagine Lance in bed at night, his face lit up by the screen of the same laptop from work, just a browser tab over from that poor, unread prospectus, placing semi-automated online bets on sporting events he may or may not watch and will almost certainly not attend in person. The implicit idea of commercials like this one is that by spending less energy on thinking, you’ll get more time to act. But in what way? That part seldom comes up.

CBS and its parent company, Paramount, have set an end date for one of the last public pipelines to some version of the truth.

Nothing to see here! CBS’s cancellation of “The Late Show,” an institution so basic to the texture of our rapidly thinning common entertainment culture that it feels like a quasi-public utility, as profligately available as water or electricity, has nothing to do, we are told, with Stephen Colbert—the show’s peppy, shrewdly wholesome host for the past decade—and his steady stream of critique aimed at President Donald Trump. Never mind that Paramount, CBS’s parent company, recently forked over sixteen million dollars to Trump, following his lawsuit against “60 Minutes.” Or that only three days before the cancellation was announced, Colbert inveighed against that settlement—calling it a “big fat bribe”—on the show. And don’t worry about the fact that Paramount now desires to sell itself to the entertainment behemoth Skydance Media, owned by the mega-rich David Ellison, and that it might help to offer up a nice, juicy Colbert-size sacrificial lamb to the Trump Administration—known, of course, for its susceptibility to bribes and ostentatious displays of forced loyalty—in order to clear the way to get the deal done.

In a statement, the CBS executives George Cheeks, Amy Reisenbach, and David Stapf insisted that the cancellation was “purely a financial decision” and—protesting so much—“not related in any way to the show’s performance, content or other matters happening at Paramount.” That’s some stressed-out syntax and an oddly specific chain of denials, but, sure, let’s say that’s true. We could consider ourselves fully briefed and move on. One of the signature features of life under the recrudescent Trump regime is that a constant sandstorm of casual lies and destabilizing ambiguity keeps obscuring important facts—the kinds of facts atop which a constitutional republic, ruled by self-governing, notionally informed citizens, is supposed to be built.

For instance: the Wall Street Journal recently reported that Trump allegedly wrote a summer-camp-style love note to the plutocrat pervert Jeffrey Epstein on the occasion of Epstein’s birthday, cooing suggestively that “enigmas never age,” and that “we have certain things in common, Jeffrey,” and wishing that “every day be another wonderful secret.” What to make of this skeevy epistle? Who knows. Trump says that this is “not my language.” Great, thanks. As goes Epstein, so goes CBS—the answer may just end up being that the world will never know. So many big questions with scant answers! Little wonder that conspiracy theories, centered on government and the high spires of business and finance, flower so easily in this era’s soil.