In this week's @newyorker, I wrote about the World Massage Championship, in Copenhagen. newyorker.com/magazine/2025/…

This kid on the train just screamed YO EVERYBODY and we all thought “Showtime” was for sure happening and he screamed MY FRIEND GOT INTO CORNELL while hugging his friend and now the whole train car is screaming and clapping lol 😭

Longest, loudest booing in U.S. history? I’m counting on you, Knicks fans.

This video is even better. So happy for the whole family.

What a champ and what a mensch! ❤️

True story: when I first moved to NYC in the mid-90's, I did extra work on SNL for parts of two seasons. In the fall of 1996 Phil Hartman was the host, and I was playing an army recruit in a sketch (don't even remember if the sketch made the show). During rehearsal downtime on Thurs or Fri, he started chatting with all the extras. Nicest, sweetest, most generous guy. Someone asked about his characters on the Simpsons, and whether he had a favorite line. And without a pause he said, "Oh yeah. It was Troy McClure when he marries Selma, and Bart and Lisa are in his pool, and he stops and says..." ⬇️⬇️⬇️⬇️

I'll always love Chris Kreider.

Here's what I believe: no more business as usual in the Senate. We shouldn't be voting to proceed to normal legislation until Republicans schedule a debate and a vote and on a declaration of war against Iran. Let's see if Trump has the votes to authorize war. I bet he doesn't.

A packed house at Politics and Prose last night for a moving tribute to the Washington Post Book World, closed by the paper’s executives. I grew up reading it. Bob Woodward and Rita Dove were among the speakers. “Awful and tragic” — Woodward on the changes to the Post.

This is excellent exactly right, from John Williams, former editor of WaPo's shuttered Book World theatlantic.com/books/2026/0…

What a stupid timeline where we can be bombed and killed in our own homes for no reason, yet are forbidden from paying public tribute to slain athletes. This is not neutrality, this is silencing the victim.

A pathetic attempt to play the victim by the IOC president. The real victims are Ukrainian athletes, who will never compete at the Olympics because Russia killed them. The real victim is Heraskevych, who trained for years under the Russian missiles and in blackouts caused by Russian attacks, but has been denied a right to compete at the Olympics. Get a grip

I often refrain from saying anything here that I’ve already seen posted or reposted by someone else. So while I was tempted yesterday to say it was the worst day of my nearly 18 years at The Post, it had already been said - and said well by many others. But today, for the record, since there is not one mention of it in the print edition delivered to my home in the nation’s capital: leaders at The Washington Post yesterday laid off 300 journalists. They closed bureaus around the globe, leaving fewer eyes on vital power centers and hostile regimes. They vastly shrunk our ability to cover the District of Columbia and the surrounding area. They abandoned the coverage of sports teams central to the region’s identity and at a time when upheaval and online sports gambling has become pervasive. They fired a stunning number of talented colleagues who make sense of the world around us in technology, business, education, climate, health and more. They fired journalists who take and select photos, edit video, produce audio, sketch graphics and who conceive and create other forms of digital story telling. They fired Pulitzer winning investigative reporters who spent the last year writing about the growing political influence of billionaires and dedicated editors and unsung heroes who every day save our copy from errors. It was, by any metric, a Washington Post-worthy news story, a story of gross corporate fiscal mismanagement, of a loss of independent media - of the buckling, critics would say; “restructuring,”  Post leaders would say - of an American institution. In the newsroom, there are goodbyes to come for so many journalists I’ve been proud to call colleagues. Sadly, it was not a one-day story, readers will soon see.

Our traffic in The Washington Post’s book section was actually quite robust, even relative to the general decline of newspaper audiences. There’s an appetite for this work no matter how little institutional will there is to support it.

When you start "the world's biggest bookstore" and buy a print publication but think encouraging a culture of reading is a waste of money and kill its books section.

Jeff Bezos wealth in 2024: $194 billion Jeff Bezos wealth in 2025: $215 billion Jeff Bezos wealth today: $249.4 billion Net increase in Bezos wealth since 2024: $55.4 billion Cost of Bezos’s 417-foot superyacht: $500 million Amazon investment in "Melania": $75 million Original Bezos purchase price of the Washington Post in 2013: $250 million Bezos net worth in 2013: $25.2 billion Net increase in Bezos wealth since buying the Post: $224.2 billion Last reported annual losses of Post: $100 million Number of years Bezos could absorb those losses with what he makes in a single week: 5 @JeffBezos

It seems like only yesterday that nearly every American newspaper, dozens and dozens of them, even in mid-size cities, ran book reviews by local critics. The alt-weeklies (I wrote for many of them) were everywhere and had feisty and boisterous book sections. Time, Newsweek and other weeklies had serious critics who mattered to the conversation. All this is gone. The stamping out of the Washington’s Post’s excellent book section - one of the last standing - ends an era. It’s a turning point in America's literature, which can’t thrive without serious and ardent criticism - aka public talk, back and forth, between competing voices, in something like real time. The silence out there is good for no one. Gloom suddenly feels like eclipse.

There's so much to be sad about the destruction of The Washington Post, right now, but I'm also just feeling wistful about how much I loved our book section. Writing for our section head, John Williams, let me be the kind of writer and critic I always want to be. Threading a few:

In this week's New Yorker, a busy day off with the teen Islanders star Matthew Schaefer. newyorker.com/magazine/2026/…

Phil Hartman and Catherine O'Hara on #SNL on October 31, 1992, singing about the Toronto Blue Jays winning the World Series and being proud Canadians 🇨🇦 📽️: SNL/NBC

Catherine’s knowledge of humanity was always at the center of her comedy, no matter how absurd the character or loopy the material. She could play heartless because she was warm, brainless because she was brilliant, careless because she truly cared. Everyone loved her and everyone learned from her. This is a deep loss.