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As a young movie star, J. Law’s “cool girl” image at times overshadowed her work onscreen. Now she plays a mother for the first time since becoming one. Plus: • Why Trump thinks he’s invincible • How monsters became our friends • What childhood looks like in Texas Jia Tolentino A staff writer covering news and culture. There is a lot contained within my Profile, for this week’s issue, of the actress Jennifer Lawrence. You’ll find her long history of playing rather saintly maternal roles in movies, and her gravitation, after becoming a mother in real life, toward one of the most confrontational, feral portrayals of motherhood I’ve ever seen, in the new Lynne Ramsay movie “Die My Love.” Certainly, you’ll encounter her famously appealing personality, the story of how it buoyed then paralyzed her star trajectory, and the question of how Lawrence, who’s thirty-five but who has been an A-lister since the age of nineteen, now understands that period of her youth and career. But the main thought still lingering in my head is simpler, possibly even dumber, and I expose it here for you. While working on this Profile, which came together very quickly by this magazine’s standards—it was about seven weeks from me receiving an editor’s e-mail, with the subject line “time-sensitive idea for you,” to the official closing of the piece—I was regularly taken aback by just how famous Lawrence is. In San Sebastián, where I went with Lawrence for a screening of her new film, there were posters of her in the windows of random stores, as if she were running for office. In fact, people ask her the sorts of questions that you would ask an elected official, or maybe the Pope. There was something medieval about it all: the screaming, the outstretched hands all around her. At one point, watching Lawrence pose for a film-festival photo call, I (jet-lagged and sleep-deprived, as she was) had a sort of X-ray hallucination: the beach and the cloudless sky and the bright mountains were all around us, and still Lawrence’s star power—her presence in the context of the co-created fever dream of celebrity—somehow vacuumed everything in sight toward her, blacking out the sky. It felt like the time, in 2007, when I saw Damien Hirst’s “For the Love of God” in a London gallery: light glinting in every direction from a skull encrusted with diamonds, this isolated object scintillating in a pitch-dark room. What is it to be a person, an actor, a mother—Lawrence’s second child is just six months old—who lives in dialogue with this degree of fame? It was fascinating for me to think of the erasures, exaggerations, performances, evasions, fantasies, and flattenings in play each time a narrative is built around her—all while writing my own. Donald Trump’s grant of clemency to the founder of Binance, Changpeng Zhao, shows how the checks on Presidential power are failing. “It may be very difficult to rein him in,” a former White House ethics lawyer tells John Cassidy. “He thinks he is invincible.” Read the story » Why Trump Tore Down the East Wing Photographing How Texas Shapes Its Youth Daniel Denvir Digs Zohran Mamdani Today’s Crossword Puzzle: Unfailingly loyal—nine letters. Laugh Lines: Test your knowledge of classic New Yorker cartoons. Name Drop: Guess the identity of a notable person in six clues. P.S. Sarah Jessica Parker spoke backstage at this past weekend’s New Yorker Festival, recommending the best places to eat, read a book, and shop for vintage treasures in the city. And check out the mini tote bag she’s holding! Ian Crouch contributed to today’s edition.
