By Rebecca Mead
Copyright newyorker
The power of the talking cure. The podcaster and fashion designer Bella Freud, a great-granddaughter of Sigmund—and daughter of Lucian—has had a lot to unpack. Plus:
What R.F.K., Jr., has done to the C.D.C.’s reputation
Does society have too many rules?
Introducing the 2025 National Book Awards longlists
Rebecca Mead
A staff writer who has contributed reporting and criticism since 1997.
Sometimes when interviewing a subject, particularly a well-known one who has a new project to promote, I’m aware that I’m hearing a narrative that person has told many times before. My transcripts even occasionally contain word-for-word recapitulations of lines delivered in other, earlier interviews that I’ve read in preparation. No surprise there: we all curate versions of ourselves and anecdotes we retail for effect—even those of us who don’t have something to publicize.
But sometimes a much more interesting thing happens: an interview subject really engages, so that their conversation seems to become a genuine form of self-reflection. Bella Freud knows the difference. As the host of “Fashion Neurosis,” a mesmerizing podcast that launched about a year ago, she is experienced in the asking-questions side of the equation. She is a curious and captivating interviewer, eliciting revealing disclosures from her subjects, who have ranged from Karl Ove Knausgaard to Courtney Love. In the course of several extended conversations with Freud this past spring, I discovered that, as an interview subject, she is equally curious and captivating—frank, funny, thoughtful, and open to the possibility of discovering something that she hadn’t quite formulated before. (Our conversation ranged from the moral valence of Birkenstocks to the pros and cons of age-gap love affairs.) Being the great-granddaughter of Sigmund Freud and the daughter of the great artist Lucian Freud—for whom she sat repeatedly as a subject—Freud has a substantial inheritance both when it comes to observing herself, and to being observed. Those of us who write New Yorker profiles aspire, in our way, both to understand and to portray the people who agree to converse with us. It’s a privilege and a joy when a subject puts down her talking points, and just talks.
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Dan Jernigan worked at the C.D.C. for thirty years, under five Presidents and through the COVID-19 pandemic. Charles Bethea speaks with Jernigan, who resigned after Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., fired the C.D.C. director, Susan Monarez, about the ongoing turmoil within the agency. “The C.D.C.’s brand has certainly been tarnished,” he says, and worries that we are now poorly equipped to handle the next major health threat. Read the story »
Does Society Have Too Many Rules?
Stephen Shore’s Precocious Adolescent Eye
The 2025 National Book Awards Longlist
The Bureau of Labor Statistics today issued a revision of its employment numbers for the twelve months between April of 2024 and March of 2025, showing more than nine hundred thousand fewer new jobs than originally estimated. This data was released just days after the B.L.S.’s estimate for jobs in August came in below expectations.
How bad is the employment picture? The revised numbers largely reflect the period before Donald Trump’s return to the White House—but they show that the job market was weaker than previously thought.
And that’s before the Trump Administration implemented sweeping tariffs, began a massive deportation regime, and fired tens of thousands of people from the federal government. John Cassidy, our economics columnist, argues this week that these policies are beginning to show up in the more recent jobs data, accounting for the latest over-all slowdown. “Although the unemployment rate is still pretty low on a historical basis, job seekers are having a tougher time of it,” Cassidy writes, “and that includes everyone from high-school dropouts to recent college graduates.” His analysis: MAGAnomics isn’t working. Cassidy writes, “The big picture suggests that, though Trump hasn’t yet sunk the great U.S. freight ship, he has knocked it off course. And he isn’t done yet.” Read the full column for more »
Read: “All the Way to the River”—a new memoir out today from Elizabeth Gilbert, the author of “Eat, Pray, Love”—is about her chaotic experience caring for her dying, drug-addicted lover. As Jia Tolentino writes, it “takes an end-stage rocket ship to the romantic stratosphere.”
Watch: Will Jean Smart win another Emmy for “Hacks” this weekend? “Anyone would glow in Smart’s presence,” Doreen St. Félix writes. “She generates her own light.”
Listen: The Czech composer Bohuslav Martinů is known for his “curt themes, darting rhythms, tangy harmonies, glittering textures.”
Today’s Themed Crossword Puzzle: matchy-matchy.
Laugh Lines: Test your knowledge of classic New Yorker cartoons.
Name Drop: Guess the identity of a notable person in six clues.
P.S. Lachlan Murdoch, the eldest son of Rupert, will take control of the family’s media empire for at least the next twenty-five years—settling a contentious family fight. Sound familiar? Maybe it’s time to rewatch “Succession.”
Ian Crouch contributed to this edition.
