Nathan Heller

Great culture can save lives. Literally.

Amazing letter in today’s @thetimes.com about Tom Stoppard

Unexpectedly heartbroken by the death of Tom Stoppard. He was—as a writer with a high-flying career, but also as an artist—the real thing.

An important point about A.I. writing, not to be lost, is that no one enjoys reading it.

My lovely and brilliant colleague Mark Singer is always very funny about his ongoing nightmare of the one magazine profile he never wanted to do continually returning to relevance, like the re-gifted holiday fruitcake that keeps coming back.

The logic of algorithms tends to repeat what “works,” but art opens up what is possible. Not everything has to be immediate or predictable. Defend slowness when it serves a purpose, silence when it speaks and difference when evocative. Beauty is not just a means of escape; it is above all an invocation. When cinema is authentic, it does not merely console, but challenges. It articulates the questions that dwell within us, and sometimes, even provokes tears that we did not know we needed to express.

Some inspiring words on cinema in the streaming era from the Pope.

Yes, THAT Pope.

La Boca Is All Smoke, No Fire The Argentinean chef Francis Mallmann is notorious for his love of cooking over open flames. With his New York début, he fizzles out.

Helen Rosner, @hels.bsky.social, who brings frankness, precise expertise, sane perspective, and humanity to her writing about food, is one of my favorite critics to read these days, full stop. www.newyorker.com/culture/the-...

John Dickerson To Depart CBS News In First Major Talent Exit Under New Paramount Owners John Dickerson, co-anchor of CBS Evening News who has been with the network since 2009, said that he is exiting at the end of this year.

A real and alarming loss for CBS News, or any operation. Dickerson is both an irrepressibly responsible journalist and one of the most patient and good-faith colleagues in the industry. deadline.com/2025/10/john...

The President says that his team is accepting $130 million checks from individuals whose identities cannot be disclosed and using that money to fund the military, so don't worry.

Opinion | What’s Lost When Liberal Arts Schools Close

www.nytimes.com/2025/10/22/o...

Take a bunch of zinc (Zicam or something) at the first sign of a cold; with this and a full night's sleep it is actually possible to chase it or limit it to three days, rather than the usual seven to ten. It works only two-thirds of the time, but it does work!

One way to think about this, perhaps, is as a side effect of an increasingly plutocratic-standard society. As middle-class life becomes more fundamentally uncomfortable and plutocrats exercise increasingly visible influence, more busy, ambitious people feel an entitlement to billionaire-style life.

A small thing—but also not—is that I've never seen a greater explosion of misuses of the English language by people in public life wearing suits and ties than recently. "Begs the question" is one of the most minor. It helps support this sense of language coming unmoored from reality.

Yes!!

Diane Keaton, who died today, at 79, was “one of the most comedically pure and brainy actresses in our midst,” Penelope Gilliatt wrote, in 1978. https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/1978/12/25/diane-keaton-her-own-best-disputant

I disagree. High school and college are still, for better and worse, the closest things to wormholes in American society—where people can enter with one future and exit with another—and places of intellectual acculturation, where style and values are set. Flip a switch there, and the effects ripple.

I still agree with the guy who wrote this.

Anyone who has spent time in archives knows that one of the things that really vanished with the end of the pen-and-typewriter age is colored paper. Letters, manuscripts, etc., used to be done on paper of all hues. For several decades everything written at the NYer was done on canary-yellow paper.

A well-put point.

The question is whether they can gift-wrap for some people I know.

Nathan Heller on E. B. White’s Paragraph About the Moon Landing What sort of response could measure up to the occasion? White’s idea was as simple as it was audacious.

From this week's @newyorker.com anniversary issue: me on the paragraph-level genius of E. B. White. www.newyorker.com/magazine/tak...

remember folks, we cant have gun restrictions because if we do the federal government will occupy our streets, imprison people without due process, ship dissidents to foreign gulags and things of that nature

Scott Bessent went from public school to Yale, where he subsequently did some teaching on economic history. He worked in his industry for forty years. These tributes, of which this one isn't the most comical, must surely mark the exact point where careerism meets self-loathing.

The Glib, Asinine Artlessness of Web Headlines has become too much. Can we go back already to when headlines were good? Who on Earth wants these?

The History of The New Yorker’s Vaunted Fact-Checking Department Reporters engage in charm and betrayal; checkers are in the harm-reduction business.

My colleague @zhelfand.bsky.social gets New Yorker fact checking right in this delightful history. www.newyorker.com/magazine/202...

It is comical and alarming how many financial potholes and structural flaws are now paved over with the idea of selling brand merchandise.

by E. B. White The moon, it turns out, is a great place for men. One-sixth gravity must be a lot of fun, and when Armstrong and Aldrin went into their bouncy little dance, like two happy children, it was a moment not only of triumph but of gaiety. The moon, on the other hand, is a poor place for flags. Ours looked stiff and awkward, trying to float on the breeze that does not blow. (There must be a lesson here somewhere.) It is traditional, of course, for explorers to plant the flag, but it struck us, as we watched with awe and admiration and pride, that our two fellows were universal men, not national men, and should have been equipped accordingly. Like every great river and every great sea, the moon belongs to none and belongs to all. It still holds the key to madness, still controls the tides that lap on shores everywhere, still guards the lovers who kiss in every land under no banner but the sky. What a pity that in our moment of triumph we did not forswear the familiar Iwo Jima scene and plant instead a device acceptable to all: a limp white handkerchief, perhaps, symbol of the common cold, which, like the moon, affects us all, unites us all.

I love reading how writers edit themselves, so to read how E.B. White revised and revised to write this, "a single perfect paragraph," is delightful. (Also? I had no idea that anyone had ever been labeled a "paragrapher.")
@nathanheller.bsky.social @newyorker.com
link.newyorker.com/view/5be9f03...

It Took Many Years And Billions Of Dollars, But Microsoft Finally Invented A Calculator That Is Wrong Sometimes | Defector It’s not AI winter just yet, though there is a distinct chill in the air. Meta is shaking up and downsizing its artificial intelligence division. A new report out of MIT finds that 95 percent of compa...

This is extremely funny. defector.com/it-took-many...

This question always has only one answer, which is yes.

What Happened to San Francisco, Really? It depends on which tech bro, city official, billionaire investor, grassroots activist, or Michelin-starred restaurateur you ask.

My theory that issues cropping up in San Francisco show up in other major cities two or three years later seems to be holding. Here's my @newyorker.com piece on the crime-and-collapse narrative that became a political tool there after the pandemic. www.newyorker.com/magazine/202...

Galling to watch institutions of fact and culture—universities, publications, museums, etc.—gasp for survival, then read of capital rushing to startups seeking to implant computers in the brain. I wonder how many people feel that their main obstacle in life has been insufficient brain compute.