“Donald Trump just can’t shut up about himself.” Susan B. Glasser on the President’s discordant speech at the Charlie Kirk memorial and his grievance-filled ramble at the U.N. But, first, Kanye West had never been a stranger to provocation, but then came the Nazi stuff. Plus:
The Maine oyster farmer trying to defeat Susan Collins
The magic of bringing films back to life
A children’s book that actually feels like childhood
An Intimate Chronicle of Kanye West’s Fall from Grace
The rapper and producer has become a pariah, running for President and praising Hitler. A new documentary gives insight into what went wrong.
By Andrew Marantz
In March of this year, Ye, the artist formerly known as Kanye West, announced an “open casting call” to his thirty-three million followers on X. Anyone thinking of showing up for the casting call had plenty of reasons to be wary. Previous Kanye West music videos had included one in which he and the rapper Lil Pump wear ridiculous boxy costumes and impish grins while sexually harassing a gigantic Adele Givens; one in which Teyana Taylor performs a sweaty, semi-pornographic dance routine before turning into a catlike mythical beast; and one that depicts West sleeping next to nearly a dozen celebrity bedfellows, nude and snoring, including Taylor Swift, Anna Wintour, Bill Cosby, and George W. Bush—still the world’s wildest polycule a near-decade later.
But anyone who was still following West in 2025 had even more acute cause for concern, as the rest of his X post made clear. The casting call had five rules. West, a shock-jock poet on social media no less than in his music, spelled them out, with line breaks and expressive capitalization:
All males
NO FAT PEOPLE
The skin complexion of Sean Combs and darker
With shaved heads OR must be willing to shave head if approved
MUST BE COMFORTABLE WEARING SWASTIKAS.
He implied that the casting call would be for “Carnival,” a song whose attempts at boundary-crossing were so hoary (“She ride the dick like a carnival”; “Anybody pissed off, gotta make ’em drink the urine”) that, when it came out, no one paid much attention. In fact, he was apparently casting a video for another song, one that landed so squarely on a century-old third rail that it did get people’s attention: a recent single called “Heil Hitler.” In the video, thirty-five people stand in four rows, illuminated by harsh UV light, chanting the three-word earworm of the chorus. (The first word, maximizing both shock value and cognitive dissonance, is the N-word.) The first rule of the casting call seems to be in effect, but the second, fourth, and fifth appear to have been relaxed. Some of the men are shirtless. Others wear not swastikas but vaguely Nordic-looking animal skins. Their neck muscles flex with rage; the whites of their eyes shine in the black light. Even at the end, as the camera lingers on a guy in a wolf mask and archival audio of a fulminating Adolf Hitler plays in the background, you still can’t tell whether the whole thing was supposed to be scary or funny.
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Graham Platner raised half a million dollars in the first four days after he announced his campaign to unseat Susan Collins, the Republican senator from Maine. But who is he? Platner grew up in Sullivan, Maine, across the bay from Bar Harbor. He’s a veteran of the Iraq War and a newcomer to politics. But now “Graham Platner fever” is sweeping Vacationland, and the Democrat is drawing support from both sides of the aisle. Lisa Wood Shapiro reports on the unlikely candidate’s sudden rise »
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How Bad Is It?
Earlier this week, Donald Trump held a press conference in which he suggested a link between the drug acetaminophen, commonly known as Tylenol, and autism—and discouraged pregnant women from taking it. Dhruv Khullar, a physician and a contributing writer for The New Yorker, joined Tyler Foggatt on a recent episode of The Political Scene podcast to discuss the President’s comments and the Administration’s confusing approach to medical guidance. An excerpt from their conversation, which has been edited and condensed, is below. Listen to the full episode wherever you get your podcasts »
Tyler Foggatt: What are the potential ramifications of having someone like Trump go onstage and say that you shouldn’t take Tylenol unless you are literally about to die?
Dhruv Khullar: That whole press conference was incredibly irresponsible. You know, that is not the way that public health or science should be communicated in a country like ours. It was confusing. There were all sorts of false claims. And you could tell at times that Trump himself felt uncomfortable delivering medical advice as someone without any medical expertise. He said things like, This is just the way I feel about it. And one of the challenges here is that he’s using the bully pulpit of the United States to raise questions about a topic that is still disputed and inconclusive. I mean, Tylenol is one of the most widely used medications in the United States, and to say something like, It causes autism if it’s used in pregnancy, without solid research—it’s just incredibly irresponsible.
So what we know is that there have been some links between Tylenol and autism in some studies. These are observational studies. These aren’t randomized, control trials, which are difficult to do in pregnancy, of course, but very high-quality studies have found no link at all. There’s a large study of more than two million people, for instance, that tested siblings: if the mother took Tylenol with a pregnancy for one sibling and not with the other, there was no difference in the rate of autism. Imagine what Trump’s doing here. If you’re a woman who’s pregnant or a new mother whose child ends up having autism, the level of burden you’re placing on that person who might be thinking, “If I only had not taken that pill of Tylenol, maybe my child’s life would be different.” That’s an incredible burden to place on someone without any evidence.
Our Culture Picks
Read: Natalia Ginzburg’s “clean and crisp” novel “Family Lexicon,” from 1969, explores motherhood in Fascist Italy.
Watch: William Greaves’s thrilling, unfinished historical documentary, “Once Upon a Time in Harlem,” is centered on a 1972 reunion of Harlem Renaissance luminaries.
Listen: Jeff Tweedy’s new solo album is out tomorrow; the lead singer of Wilco “is the overachiever of the words-and-guitar generation.”
Daily Cartoon
Puzzles & Games
Today’s Crossword Puzzle: HBO Max show starring Jean Smart and Hannah Einbinder—five letters.
Laugh Lines: Test your knowledge of classic New Yorker cartoons.
P.S. Trump briefly got stuck on an escalator as he arrived at the U.N. General Assembly on Tuesday, a predicament he later referred to as “sinister.” But at least he could get out of the situation by simply walking up the flight of stairs—unlike Nicholas White who, in 1999, got trapped in an elevator for forty-one hours.
Erin Neil contributed to today’s edition.