The New YorkerModify

In a journal entry from August, 2015, the writer, director, and artist Eleanor Coppola wonders what compels her—then a woman at the end of her seventies—to keep pursuing creative endeavors. “To what end am I driven?” she asks. “Not a new career at this point in my life. Not to make money, though I confess I’d enjoy having a stash I’d made myself. Not to get famous, but yes, it would be good to be a bit more visible in a family of high visibility where I am seen as the nice wife, mother, grandmother at the edge of the frame, or just cropped out.” Indeed, throughout her adult life, Coppola, who died in 2024, at the age of eighty-seven, was known primarily through her husband, the Oscar-winning auteur Francis Ford Coppola, and later, too, her daughter, the director Sofia Coppola. The problem of visibility plagued most American women of Coppola’s generation, who came of age just before the rise of second-wave feminism, and therefore were made, as she writes, to “prioritize given roles above who [they] really are and what [they] want to do.” In Coppola’s case, however, it was further exacerbated by the near-blinding aura of her celebrated kin. Who was she without them? Did she even count as her own person?

These questions are explored, movingly and straightforwardly, in the just-released posthumous collection “Two of Me: Notes on Living and Leaving,” which brings together a selection of Coppola’s journal entries from the final decade of her life. This is not the first book Coppola has written; preceding it were “Notes: On the Making of ‘Apocalypse Now,’ ” which came out in 1979, and “Notes on a Life,” from 2008. Both of these earlier volumes provided accounts of private storms the Coppolas weathered, such as the death of their eldest son, Gian-Carlo, in a boating accident, as well as behind-the-scenes glimpses at major cultural moments the family was involved in—most prominently, Francis Ford Coppola’s nearly doomed struggle to complete his Vietnam War epic. (Eleanor Coppola also co-directed, with George Hickenlooper and Fax Bahr, the fantastic 1991 documentary “Hearts of Darkness: A Filmmaker’s Apocalypse,” which included footage she captured in the Philippines during the embattled filming of “Apocalypse Now.”)

“A publisher who considered my first book said, ‘Well, now you’ve written the notes, go home and write the book,’ ” Coppola reports, wryly, in “Two of Me.” But part of what’s distinctive about Coppola’s approach is its self-professed attachment to minorness. While her position in the relative margins has clearly been a source of frustration—at one point, she describes the “fury” that rises in her when she thinks of “how much women of my generation were conditioned to follow orders from the authoritative men experts who decided what was best for the ‘little lady’ ”—it has also allowed her the opportunity to closely explore a more intimate, hidden terrain that might not have been so readily available to her as a subject matter had she been free to play a more major, public role during her lifetime.

This comparatively reduced terrain has often served as complement to her husband’s much grander vistas. “I am the observer, the audience watching the action as if in a theater,” she writes, in “Two of Me,” of visiting Francis on set while he directs his latest and likely final filmic extravaganza, “Megalopolis” (2024). Similarly, in “Notes: On the Making of ‘Apocalypse Now’ ” she describes a complicated location shoot on a beach, involving the simulation of a napalm bombing. “The napalm went off right with the jets, flying through frame, perfectly. . . . Twelve hundred gallons of gasoline went up in about a minute and a half,” she writes. Stationed half a mile away from the site of the explosion, she records, simply, that she “felt a strong flash of heat”—the spare, withholding prose suggesting her position as a mere body in the landscape, sensing rather than analyzing, experiencing rather than reacting. In an earlier journal entry from the same day, she reports, again with little elaboration, on the difference between the very few women and the many men she watches on set. “The flabby American men are getting tan and strong,” she writes. “The women look tired.”

Photograph by Jimmy Keane

Among these tired women is Coppola herself, and “Two of Me” suggests that this fatigue didn’t just stem from the nightmarishly long “Apocalypse” shoot she described in her first “Notes.” It also came from the elemental tensions within the Coppola marriage itself. Eleanor Coppola was a woman who, as she writes, dreamed of living her life as an “adventure” while working on her own “art projects” and raising children on movie sets, “like a circus family,” but had to simultaneously fulfill the demands of her brilliant, mercurial, sometimes wayward husband, who wanted her to be a “very traditional wife, happily devoted to caring for our children, creating a nice home, and supporting his career.” During most of her life, she was indeed—to riff on the book’s title—“Two of Her.” Who among us wouldn’t be exhausted by such an inherently paradoxical position?

“Two of Me,” however, does depict the opening of an unexpected aperture, through which Coppola was able to finally access a measure of freedom from this duality—one that wasn’t available to her during most of her adult life. In 2010, an X-ray scan revealed a rare type of tumor growing in Coppola’s chest. Though the doctors she consulted with advised her to begin chemotherapy to shrink the growth, she feared that the treatment would reduce her quality of life, and decided to wait, instead—practicing alternative therapies and undergoing scans every six months to monitor the tumor’s gradual progress. (She lived for fourteen more years, experiencing the growing tumor’s considerable ill effects only in the last couple of years of her life.) In the book, she describes her family’s unhappiness at her decision to forego traditional therapy: “Francis told me he and the children must be paramount in any decision I made, and they were eager for me to proceed with a therapy, an action, a solution that would take me out of danger,” she writes. Coppola, however, refused to bend to their urging, even though, as she admits, she had “no ‘reasonable’ argument or evidence” to support her decision, and, as I read along, I imagined with what frustration and perhaps anger I might have reacted had someone close to me rejected conventional medicine to treat a major illness.

But from another, possibly more symbolic perspective, Coppola’s decision made sense, at least according to the terms in which she saw her life. “I was stunned to realize that I was so conditioned by my upbringing to be a good girl and follow doctor’s orders that it had never occurred to me that the choices for my life were mine to make,” she writes. The tumor was “[a] great teacher,” a “swift kick” that finally compelled Coppola to peep “out from behind the shadow of [her] family.” Though the growth was a constraining thing, an obstruction “pressing against [Coppola’s] heart and lungs”—and, as such, not unlike the pressures she was used to navigating during most of her life as a wife and mother—these limitations were what ultimately let her grasp the limits of her own autonomy. “What did I have to lose?” she writes. “I was going to die anyway.” In 2016, Coppola became, as she notes, the oldest woman to direct her first feature film, the romantic comedy “Paris Can Wait.” (In 2020, at age eighty-four, she followed up with the movie “Love Is Love Is Love.”) But these quantifiable achievements weren’t the only markers of her newfound freedom. The book itself is a small-scale cri de coeur, animated by Coppola’s tenacity—by her insistence on tracing the contours of her own world, in writing.

When her tumor is first discovered, one of Coppola’s doctors tells her that it’s “the size of a large lemon”—the botanical metaphor blooming within the harsher, more literal framework of Coppola’s life-and-death battle. This is true, too, of her descriptions of nature, which fill the book. In a journal entry from 2018, she relays that she has resolved to stay behind on the family estate, in Napa, while Francis and the rest of the Coppolas take a trip to New Orleans, a decision that “Francis was very irritated with,” she writes, since “he passionately believes my place is by his side.” And yet Coppola remains steadfast in her choice, and “almost giddy in [her] solitude.” She looks out the window on a “sunny, cold winter day,” watching the “gnarled 200-year-old oak tree” with three bird feeders that she notices are empty. “Two redheaded woodpeckers are seated expectantly on a branch as if waiting for mom to come feed them. Small finches and sparrows flutter about in disappointment,” she writes. “I’m sure they are fine, as nature is abundant all around: thick green grasses, bushes with red berries, mosses, oaks, and bay trees abound. Just as the family is doing fine in New Orleans without me.” ♦

As political acts go, an assassination is more like a natural disaster than a controlled explosion: it will wreak havoc, it will often change the course of history, but its perpetrators can never know in what direction. When Gavrilo Princip shot Archduke Franz Ferdinand, in 1914, his objective was South Slavic independence from the Austro-Hungarian Empire; what he got was the First World War and the slaughter of millions. On the other hand, in 1995, when a far-right extremist assassinated the Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin, at a rally in support of the Oslo peace accords, he could be said to have achieved precisely what he intended: the lasting destruction of the peace process. For that reason, Rabin’s killing is sometimes called the most “successful” assassination in modern history.

These appear to be two substantially different acts. But, if you go by the historian Simon Ball’s rubric in “Death to Order: A Modern History of Assassination,” they share a key set of characteristics. “Before 1914, assassination was the preserve of disgruntled individuals, plotters in royal courts, or small groups of fanatics pursuing lost causes,” Ball writes. Princip established a new template: even if the outcome of an assassination proved chaotic, the intention behind it generally was not. The assassin had become a rational figure, precise in his targeting, legibly motivated, and, crucially, often part of a wider movement or conspiracy to topple those in power. Though we usually hear about Princip alone, he acted along with a seven-man assassination squad, tied to a much larger underground network. The man who shot Rabin belonged to a burgeoning movement whose adherents included Itamar Ben-Gvir, a politician who threatened Rabin on live television shortly before his assassination, and who now serves as Israel’s minister of national security.

Historically, Ball notes, the “direct results of assassination have almost always disappointed the assassins.” Rabin’s murder is one exception. Another might be the moment, in 1942, when British special agents and Czech resistance fighters acted in concert to murder Reinhard Heydrich, a brutal Nazi commander and one of the key authors of the Final Solution. It was certainly clear why, and Heydrich’s killing became “a template for ‘honourable assassination’ carried out by righteous democrats,” Ball writes. But the other consequences were horrific: the Nazis went to a village called Lidice, which had once sheltered a British radio operator, and killed all the men, sent all the women to a concentration camp, and gave the “Aryan” children to German families to raise but slaughtered the rest. Ball sums up the conclusion of the British report on the Heydrich assassination: “Technical success, operational disaster.”

“Death to Order” is a dense, detailed, and sometimes dry read, unlikely to set a conspiracy theorist’s (or really anybody’s) blood racing, but its international scope and careful documentation are salutary. Importantly, it does not neglect state-sponsored assassination plots, especially those engineered by the C.I.A. during the Cold War. Ball manages to sound wryly appalled quoting the contents of a C.I.A. assassination manual: though murder cannot be justified, the guide advises, “killing a political leader whose burgeoning career is a clear and present danger to the cause of freedom may be held necessary,” which means that “persons who are morally squeamish should not attempt” assassination. For those who get past their qualms, the handbook recommends the “most efficient” method: dropping a person at least seventy-five feet “onto a hard surface.” Pistols are discouraged, but the manual accepts rifles, which, in the twenty-first century, have become a popular weapon of choice.

What do assassins want now? It’s a case-by-case question, but one worth asking, not least because political violence appears to be on the rise in the United States. Among the recent notable examples are two attempts on Donald Trump’s life, including one in which a bullet struck him as he spoke at a campaign rally in Butler, Pennsylvania, in 2024; the attempted arson of Pennsylvania Governor Josh Shapiro’s home, in April, as he and his family slept inside; the killings, in June, of the Minnesota state legislator Melissa Hortman and her husband, Mark; and the murder of the right-wing activist Charlie Kirk, in September. Two weeks after the Kirk assassination, a man opened fire at an ICE facility in Dallas, killing not the officers who were his reported targets but two detainees; according to his parents, he had lately become overwhelmingly afraid that he had radiation sickness.

A cursory appraisal of these events suggests that the age of Princip is over. We have returned to an era of disgruntled plotters and fanatics—of lone and often lonely men (many things have changed, but the vast majority of assassins are still men), whose hazy motives seem patched together by personal grievances, mental illness, and solipsistic internet quests. Thomas Matthew Crooks, the twenty-year-old who tried to kill Trump in Pennsylvania, was a registered Republican of otherwise jumbled allegiances, who seems to have been choosing between various prominent targets, including Joe Biden and Trump, in the months leading up to the event. We don’t yet know what Tyler James Robinson, the twenty-two-year-old Utah man charged with shooting Charlie Kirk, hoped to accomplish. (Robinson has not filed a plea.) The prosecutor in the case, Jeff Gray, has sketched out a scenario in which Robinson, who grew up in a Republican family, had recently moved to the left, and become, as his mother allegedly told police, “more pro-gay and trans-rights-oriented.” According to Gray, Robinson’s roommate and romantic partner was transgender. In a text exchange after Kirk’s shooting, the roommate asked Robinson why he did it. “I had enough of his hatred,” Robinson replied. “Some hatred can’t be negotiated out.” Whatever Robinson thought might happen, the short-term consequences of Kirk’s killing have included federal and local crackdowns on free speech, and a rising profile for the white supremacistNick Fuentes, who is trying to fill the vacuum left by Kirk. And as a would-be act of solidarity with trans people, if that is what it was, Kirk’s assassination left Robinson’s roommate, and arguably trans people in general, more vulnerable, not less.

In the past, political violence in the U.S. was more likely to be carried out by groups—the left-wing Weather Underground during the nineteen-seventies; the right-wing militia and anti-abortion movements in the eighties and nineties. Now it is more often committed by individuals unaffiliated with any organization. As Rachel Kleinfeld, a senior fellow at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, has written, there is a “deeper trend: the ‘ungrouping’ of political violence as people self-radicalize via online engagement.” The Antifa that Trump is always invoking as an all-purpose bogeyman—some lethal, disciplined underground network that resembles the Irish Republican Army—does not exist. Instead, we have individuals whose opaque, ad-hoc gestures rarely fit into a recognizable campaign. Even when they leave a message of some kind—partial manifestos, a crumb trail of social-media posts, or words etched on bullet casings—clarity is elusive. We’re left examining ghostly traces of ideas that won’t coalesce into an ideology. Speaking about the Trump shooting, Katherine Keneally, a threat-assessment expert, told the Times, “These sorts of incidents, where we can’t figure out why they did it, are becoming more common.”

None of this stops people from imposing their own explanations after the fact. In October, Mike Johnson, the Speaker of the House, was asked about death threats made against Democratic House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries by a man who’d stormed the Capitol on January 6th, been sentenced to prison, and then received a pardon from Trump. Johnson invoked what he called an “assassination culture” being advanced by the left, adding, absurdly, “So let’s not make it a partisan issue.” This was a particularly tendentious reading, but we, the audience for political violence, are increasingly the ones grafting meaning onto the acts. In the absence of a conspiracy, we make one up.

Of all the recent assassinations in the United States, the one that would seem to have the clearest narrative, or at least to have found the biggest audience who claimed to understand it, is the killing of the UnitedHealthcare C.E.O. Brian Thompson, in December, 2024. Thompson was shot outside a midtown Manhattan hotel where he was attending a meeting for the company’s annual investor day. In an industry generally notorious for denying claims while saddling patients with medical debt, United had a reputation for denying more than most. On Thompson’s watch, its profits had increased from twelve billion dollars a year in 2021 to sixteen billion in 2023. When the man charged with the crime, Luigi Mangione, turned out to be a handsome, twenty-six-year-old University of Pennsylvania graduate who seemed to have selected his target with some thought, he became a folk hero to many Americans—Robin Hood in a hoodie, the avenger who launched a thousand memes. “The problem with most revolutionary acts is that the message is lost on normies,” Mangione had written in a spiral-bound notebook seized by the police. And also: “The investor conference is a true windfall. It embodies everything wrong with our health system. What do you do? You wack the CEO at the annual parasitic bean-counter convention. It’s targeted, precise, and doesn’t risk innocents. Most importantly—the message becomes self evident.”

But, as the journalist John H. Richardson writes in his new book, “Luigi: The Making and the Meaning,” the message wasn’t as self-evident as all that. “What was the symbolic takedown supposed to achieve?” Richardson asks. “A series of attacks on CEOs? The collapse of technological society? A revolution? A better health care system?” Richardson is a smart and resourceful reporter, but he doesn’t have a great way of answering these questions. He didn’t interview Mangione, nor anyone close to him. Mangione won’t go back to court until December, and we haven’t seen his legal defense in full. (He pleaded not guilty to murder and stalking.) Gamely, Richardson toggles through what remains of Mangione’s online presence: Reddit posts, accounts he followed on X, books he reviewed on Goodreads or listed as wanting to read. He finds evidence of a young man drawn to self-help and a wide range of pop social commentary, who counselled people kindly about back pain (a problem he suffered from until he had a successful operation), who doesn’t seem to have been particularly steeped in policy debates about the American health-care system, and whose ideas about what was wrong with the world, like many people’s, seemed earnest but inchoate, neither left nor right. As Richardson writes, “a look at Luigi’s online accounts as he moved into the world reveals patterns—his interests in health, AI, psychedelics, climate change, nuclear power, lab-grown meat, evolution and baby gorillas, along with a gradual drift into the ‘manosphere’ of right-leaning male influencers.”

To try to understand Mangione, Richardson turns to past reporting that he has done on ecoterrorists; on so-called accelerationists, who believe technological change must be sped up in order to destabilize society; and on young men who have been “Tedpilled” into admiration for the Unabomber, Ted Kaczynski. And he draws on correspondence that he exchanged with Kaczynski himself. These interludes are interesting in their own right, but they cast limited light on Mangione, who seems to have only dabbled in such ideas. And, in any case, Kaczynski’s story might be read as the opposite of Mangione’s. The former’s manifesto was an elaborate, long-gestating screed against modern technological society, and his bombing campaign killed three and injured twenty-three, including low-level university employees and people who happened to be aboard an American Airlines flight. Mangione’s case against health insurance was brief and lately acquired, and his single target was strategically chosen. Mangione read and reviewed Kaczynski’s manifesto but set himself against the Unabomber and his methods: “Ted K makes some good points on the future of humanity but to make his point he indiscriminately mailbombs innocents.”

Where Mangione’s act does become legible—indelible, really—is in the reaction to it. Some of the glamorization of Mangione and the crowing about the death of Thompson was, it’s true, dumb and callous internet stuff. But a lot of it represented real pain and legitimate anger about the health-care system that we live (and die) under. “All jokes aside, no one here is the judge of who deserves to live or die,” wrote one Facebook commentator whom Richardson quotes. “That’s the job of the AI algorithm the insurance company designed to maximize profits on your health.” To some people, Thompson’s killing was, like Heydrich’s, an honorable assassination. In a University of Chicago NORC poll conducted shortly after the shooting, seven out of ten American adults said the health-care and insurance industries bore at least “some moderate responsibility” for it.

Nearly a year after the killing, Mangione’s legal-defense fund has raised more than a million dollars. According to the F.A.Q. page for his defense, he receives between ten and a hundred and fifteen letters a day, each of which he logs, and many of which he responds to. The volume of photos that people send him is such that he “kindly asks” for “no more than five” at a time. Richardson suggests that the “long-term results of Brian Thompson’s shooting” could deliver the universal health care many people want. Maybe. But what’s required for real progress on that front is a social movement and an exertion of political will. So far, all we’ve got is a cult of personality, and a whole lot of fan mail to show for it. ♦

Nico Harrison, the former general manager of the Dallas Mavericks, made many head-scratching comments after he inexplicably traded Luka Dončić to the Los Angeles Lakers, last February. He claimed that exchanging the twenty-five-year-old Dončić, one of the best basketball players in the world, for the thirty-one-year-old Anthony Davis, a decorated yet injury-prone big man nearing the end of his prime, would help the Mavericks “win now and win in the future.” The season prior, Dončić had led the Mavericks to the N.B.A. Finals in one of the more dominant individual playoff runs in recent memory. Was the franchise with Dončić not already in position to win now and in the future? In Davis’s first game with Dallas, he suffered an adductor strain that sidelined him for several weeks; a month later, the team’s All-Star point guard, Kyrie Irving, tore his A.C.L. “Next year, when our team comes back, we’re going to be competing for a championship,” Harrison said after the Mavericks finished out the rest of the season with thirteen wins and twenty losses, missing the playoffs. A month later, Harrison received a lifeline: in a historic stroke of luck, Dallas won the N.B.A. draft lottery despite having just a 1.8-per-cent chance of doing so. (Only three other teams in league history had won with worse odds.) “Fortune favors the bold,” Harrison said, repressing a smile, after the team selected phenom Cooper Flagg with the first pick in the draft. He added later, “I think the fans can finally start to see the vision.”

This past Tuesday, after a 3–8 start to the season, the Mavericks fired Harrison. Davis, naturally, is hurt again, and the timeline for Irving’s return remains unclear. Dončić, meanwhile, has electrified Los Angeles, posting gaudy box scores and producing awe-inducing highlights in a bid to win his first league M.V.P. award. Mavericks fans, forced to watch their beloved Slovenian point forward foster another city’s championship dreams, have revolted. The rallying cry “Fire Nico” has become a staple at Mavericks home games, a stadium-wide salvo loud enough to pierce through any televised broadcast. (Last year, during Dončić’s first game against the Mavericks in Los Angeles, the crowd cheered “Thank you, Nico!”) The home crowd’s displeasure was on display the night before Harrison’s termination, in a game against the Milwaukee Bucks. With 1.2 seconds left, and the Mavericks down by three points, the Dallas forward P. J. Washington was at the free-throw line with a chance to send the game to overtime. But the fans seemed not to care, and, despite the high-stakes moment—Washington had three free throws—the familiar refrain of “Fire Nico” echoed through the stadium. The Bucks star Giannis Antetokounmpo smirked while preparing to box out, and Washington made one but missed his final two free throws. After the loss, the Mavericks’ head coach, Jason Kidd, said that his players felt “disrespected” and that it was “hard to keep guys here when they start to think the home team is not home.” Harrison, meanwhile, was still waiting for fortune to favor his boldness. “Time will tell if I’m right,” he had conceded the day after the Dončić trade. Now, nearly ten months later, time seems to have run out.

The trade, of course, never made any sense. Perhaps the only analogous transaction in professional-sports history, as Louisa Thomas identified in her post-mortem of the trade for The New Yorker, is when the Boston Red Sox sold Babe Ruth to the New York Yankees for cash. Harrison’s rationale for trading Dončić appeared to be twofold. “Defense wins championships,” he argued, referring to Davis’s élite rim protection and on-ball switchability, and no doubt spurning Dončić’s subpar, occasionally dreadful, defensive performances. (Last year, in the Finals, as the Mavericks fell three games to none to the Boston Celtics, the ESPN reporter Brian Windhorst had described Dončić as being “a hole on the court” defensively and claimed that the team had “pleaded with him” to be better.) The other related, though less explicitly explained, reason for the transaction was that Dončić was often accused of not taking his conditioning seriously—he had repeatedly arrived at training camp overweight—arguably resulting in a higher probability of injury. (Dončić was rehabbing a left-calf strain when the trade occurred, though he has mostly been healthy throughout his career.)

What’s confounding about Harrison’s justifications is that the Mavericks had already architected an above-average defense to surround the brilliance of Dončić’s heliocentric offense—it boasted two shot-blocking centers and a plethora of rangy perimeter stoppers. The offense, then, was the differentiating factor for the Dončić-led Mavericks. In the 2024 playoffs, Dallas defeated two of the fiercest defensive teams in the league, the Minnesota Timberwolves and the Oklahoma City Thunder, before finally falling to the Celtics, a group of relentless switching wings who stifled opposing teams’ transition opportunities and perimeter attacks. Dallas reached the Finals, and the Western Conference Finals two years earlier, owing to Dončić’s ceaseless heroics: game-winning step-back threes and ostentatious cross-court passes, his uncanny ability to marionette a defense and create advantageous spacing for his teammates to score. Conversely, the perception that Dončić was a beer-loving, hookah-smoking Luddite—habits that would make his impending five-year, three-hundred-and-forty-million-dollar supermax extension at Dallas an albatross when he inevitably got hurt or too fat—failed to resonate, largely because he was swapped for Davis, a player who had missed nearly thirty-five per cent of his games in the past five seasons.

Conspiracy theories began to emerge. Was Dončić enmeshed in legal trouble? Did he have a collapsed lung from all the hookah, or a knee injury that Dallas had kept secret? Were the Mavericks, who had recently been purchased by Miriam Adelson, a casino magnate and major G.O.P. donor, planning to ditch Dallas and move to Las Vegas? As alluring as these possibilities were, the truth was more banal. Harrison, working, it seemed, mostly in isolation, had brokered a deal with Rob Pelinka, the Lakers’ president of basketball operations and general manager, without canvassing the league to assess Dončić’s trade value. Here became another point of contention for skeptics of the deal. If Harrison was indeed set on moving off of his franchise star, for whatever reason, why not shop around to garner the most favorable trade package? Would the San Antonio Spurs have traded him their coveted trove of assets, including Rookie of the Year Stephon Castle, playmaking wing Devin Vassell, and every first-round pick they possessed? Would the Houston Rockets have dispensed with future superstars Amen Thompson and Alperen Şengün? Instead, Harrison prioritized privacy: he and Pelinka “kept it between us,” he said. “We had to.” Pelinka said that he thought Harrison was joking when he initially proposed the trade; Patrick Dumont, Adelson’s son-in-law and a Tom Wambsgans-style character who is the team governor, “laughed” at Harrison when the possibility of the trade was first mentioned. Perhaps Harrison should’ve taken these responses as a clue to the impending public reaction: bafflement, humiliation, shock at the audacity (nay, stupidity) of even considering such an absurd idea.

Normally, when an N.B.A. superstar is traded—a common occurrence in the league’s player-empowerment era—a confluence of conditions foretells the eventual decision. Often the player demands a trade, whether owing to clashes with the coaching staff, testy contract negotiations, or a desire to play for a team in a better position to contend for a championship. The script for these trades is predictable: reporters leak discontent; passive-aggressive press conferences commence; podcasts and sports talk shows speculate on possible trade partners and probable destinations; the player begins to miss games or make cryptic social-media posts; and when the trade is executed, sometimes in an unexpected fashion, the breakdown of who won and lost the trade becomes feverish, ravenous, deliciously shortsighted. It’s often impossible to immediately determine who comes out on top in these transactions, considering the unknown value of future draft assets and the uncertainty around player health. What made the Dončić–Davis trade such a bewildering spectacle, aside from the lack of draft picks Dallas received, was the stunning absence of this preamble, and the instantaneous, universal agreement that the Mavericks had been fleeced. Dončić, for his part, never requested a trade; after arriving in L.A., he told the media that he had planned to spend his career with the Mavericks, much like his mentor, Dirk Nowitzki. He mournfully acknowledged that he would “always” call Dallas home.

It is tempting to wonder why nobody in the Mavericks’ organization intervened to prevent the trade from happening. In its aftermath, attention fell to Dumont, who Harrison said green-lit the deal. “When you want to pursue excellence in an organization, you have to make the tough decisions and stand by them and keep going,” Dumont told the Dallas Morning News after the trade, repurposing Harrison’s defense that the “easiest thing for me to do is do nothing”—despite that “nothing” having resulted in an N.B.A. Finals berth just months before. With more time to consider the trade’s magnitude, Dumont developed further justification for it: “We got to the championship games and we didn’t win and so we had to decide: how do we get better?” But Dumont misses the obvious point that the team reached the Finals almost exclusively because of Dončić, and that any decision to improve the team should have been contingent on amplifying his generationally rare skillset.

It now appears that Dumont, clearly no basketball scholar, was had by Harrison’s hubristic delusions, and he’s sought to rectify the embarrassment that’s befallen him and the organization. The day before he fired Harrison, he sat courtside through waves of “Fire Nico” chants. As the third quarter began, he was seen chatting with an eighteen-year-old from Dallas named Nicholas Dickason, who wore a bright-yellow Dončić Lakers jersey in an act of protest. According to reports, Dickason explained to Dumont the destruction of the Dončić trade—namely, the heartbreak incurred by lifelong Mavericks fans, some of whom have disavowed their fandom in protest of the transaction. While there have been far-fetched rumors that Dickason was a plant, an actor tasked with offering Dumont the occasion, and pathos, needed to relieve Harrison of his duties, there’s nonetheless a poetry in how the scene unfolded. Dickason was a child when the team drafted Dončić, and he was likely giddy with the hope that he would spend his adolescence into adulthood rooting for one of the world’s best players. There was no rationale Harrison could have provided that would have convinced a kid like Dickason, let alone an army of diehard, obsessed fans, that abandoning the dream of Luka Dončić was ever worth it. Even if Davis does manage to win a title in Dallas—the only outcome that could even partially mitigate this disaster—it would feel like a betrayal, like toasting to a parent’s second marriage after they had abandoned the family.

One has to look no further than Nowitzki’s turbulent, triumphant career with the Mavericks to understand the mystical properties of sports fandom. As championship-focussed as professional-sports discourse tends to be—“hashtag #rings culture,” baby!—the true joy of rooting for a team is not to simply win a title but to endure the requisite pain before potentially experiencing the thrill of a trophy being hoisted. Nowitzki spent twelve years with Dallas before he brought the city its first Larry O’Brien trophy, in 2011. Before that, in 2006, the team lost a championship in epic fashion to the Miami Heat and, the following year, flamed out in the first round of the playoffs to a far inferior Golden State Warriors team despite the Mavericks owning the league’s best regular-season record and Nowitzki winning the M.V.P. It would’ve been tempting to blame Nowitzki, who was not a lockdown defender himself, for these collapses, for not fulfilling his destiny as a franchise-saving superstar. But when he did finally win a championship, the beauty was irreplicable. He stumbled off the court, holding his jersey over his face on the way to the locker room so that the cameras wouldn’t see him cry. When Harrison traded Dončić, he robbed the city of this possibility. Who’s to say if they’ll ever get it back. ♦

In theory, buying gifts for children is a snap. If they’re old enough to talk, but not old enough to ignore you completely, they will likely tell you what they want. And, if your kids run in the same kinds of circles as mine, they all seem to want the same things: fidget rings, slime, a Labubu key chain, a Squishmallow, a Sephora gift card, a digital wad of Robux, a hoverboard, and maybe a puppy. The adult who strives for a more bespoke level of gift-giving—or simply to find something with no connection to screens, mirrors, or fads—risks coming off as presumptuous and pretentious. Why dare to second-guess the desires of a generation not your own?

Then again, with a lot of research and a little luck, you might just guess right. I spent years foisting various knitting and bracelet-making projects on a moderately crafty young friend, with varying degrees of success, before stumbling on a loom kit ($33) that locked in perfectly with the warp and weft of her developing brain; she has found a dopamine-delivery system that is almost as reliable as 99 Nights in the Forest, and it is the act of weaving a sturdy, stretchy, rainbow-colored pot holder. (I use all four of mine!) Among the items that follow, I hope that readers can find their own version of the rainbow-colored pot holder for each of their favorite kids this holiday season.

For Architects, Artisans, and/or Gearheads

Arckit eco model-house kit 

$170

Shop Now

Many a grade schooler’s home—my home, in fact—is a Lego home: Lego racecars, Lego streetscapes, Lego giant birds and dirigibles and spacecraft everywhere. But the intrepid shopper can go further afield to satisfy everyone’s building-and-assembly needs. Young architects can tinker with the four-in-one eco-friendly home ($170) from Arckit, an Irish company whose modern-minimalist designs are an ideal complement to the colorful chaos of the Legoverse. Budding mechanics with some Lego Technic cars on their résumés might be ready for a challenging CaDa Supercar (from $180), which is crafted from more than three thousand bricks. For a lower-stakes, breezier project, try a camellias-lilacs-and-sunflower wooden bouquet ($40) or a faintly Lovecraftian punch-out assembly kit for a venomous blue-ringed octopus ($40). But remember that there is no shame in buying what you know. If the tween in your life is fluent in “Simpsons” references, you can make them the latest franchisee of a Lego Krusty Burger ($210).

For Scientists and/or Spies

Spy Labs master-detective tool kit 

$49.99

Shop Now

One of the delights of the early elementary-school years is how kids grasp that being alive means being an investigator of sorts—that a walk to school or an afternoon milling around your apartment can instantly turn into a science experiment or a spy mission, or both. My household has had good fortune with the National Geographic geology labs that are commonplace in big-box stores, including the build-your-own-volcano set ($15) and the crystal-growing gear, like this glow-in-the-dark number ($37). When my kids were in first and fourth grade, they wore out this detective tool kit ($50), which includes fingerprint-dusting paraphernalia and invisible ink, and they trained as entry-level cryptographers using Spy School Secret Ciphers ($24). The eminently reliable Snap Circuits line also has a spy kit ($53) with nifty gadgets, including a voice changer and a motion-detector alarm.

For the Child Who Understands That A.I. Can’t Draw and ChatGPT Can’t Write

“The Boy Who Became a Parrot” 

$14.99

Shop Now

Among the many doomsday scenarios parents must contemplate, one is Gen Alpha’s coming to the irreversible consensus (if it hasn’t already) that A.I. image generators and large language models have obviated the vital imaginative acts—the foundational developmental experiences!—of drawing and creative writing. To assuage such anxieties, I buy things, and so can you. One of the most well-thumbed titles in our family library is a giant, six-books-in-one binder called “Draw Really Cool Stuff” (the stuff includes antelope, spiders, velociraptors, and a Subaru Outback); it’s out of print, but you can easily find it secondhand (here it is for under five bucks). For workbooks of a newer vintage, there’s this make-your-own-comics kit ($32) and this guide to drawing anime ($11). And, for artistic inspiration that isn’t overly instructional, turn to two new titles from Enchanted Lion Books, the superb Brooklyn-based children’s publisher: “The Forgotten Teachers” ($25), a whimsical atlas of the evolution of life on Earth, and my favorite children’s book of 2025, “The Boy Who Became a Parrot” ($23), a stunningly beautiful illustrated biography of the great ornithological artist and bard of the limerick Edward Lear.

For the Unicorn Phase

3-D unicorn head 

$30.99

Shop Now

Like the Disney-princess phase, it comes for us all. You can probably find the costumery secondhand, but, in a pinch, there’s this Great Pretenders bundle ($58). The French company Omy has a kit for making a 3-D unicorn head ($30) that may put you in mind of this Beach House video. Another French concern, Djeco, makes a giant jigsaw puzzle out of a medieval unicorn tapestry ($28), and the Metropolitan Museum of Art, home of “The Unicorn Rests in a Garden,” offers a crystal-stippled gold unicorn brooch ($115).

For a Cozy Yet Stylish Late-December Idyll

Ceramic-bear wall hook 

$95

Shop Now

School breaks often entail at least a day or two of slouching around the house doing nothing in particular, and for that one needs the correct attire: maybe a perfectly thick and nubbly Aran sweater ($60), or some terry slippers ($52) in Dusen Dusen’s trademark bright stripes. Staycationers may get the itch to tweak their bedroom décor, which might demand some crocheted lily-of-the-valley string lights ($35) or ceramic wall hooks in the shape of a congenial bear ($95). If the unscheduled hours call for some budget glamour, consider a Depression-glass pendant ($38) or a dainty wishing bracelet ($16); if the Sephora gift card has been purchased, consider placing it inside this cheeky and colorful makeup bag ($18).

For a Stocking Full of Critters and Ice Cream and Possibly a Human Brain

Kikkerland ice-cream skipping rope 

$15

Shop Now

The Venice Biennale of children’s retail is Tantrum, an effervescent mom-and-pop store with two locations in the Bay Area; its online emporium has the ambience of a Montessori school as brought to life by Oliver Jeffers or Tove Jansson. I’m especially grateful for Tantrum’s embarrassment of stocking stuffers, a category of gift that, for me, often falls victim to procrastination. For youngsters of a performative bent, there are juggling balls ($12) and circus capes ($42). For those with a high disgust threshold, there’s a grow-a-brain kit ($14) and fossilized poop ($9). For young emperors of ice cream, there’s a jump rope that has ice-cream-cone handles ($12) and a pencil sharpener shaped like an ice-cream truck ($24). For the nocturnal child, go to the T-rex flashlight ($16). If a kid has a bike, the bike will need a vase for flowers ($9). If a kid has a set of keys, the keys will need a fuzzy mushroom keychain ($19). And every child, of course, deserves some glowing slime ($22). ♦

Listen and subscribe: Apple | Spotify | Google | Wherever You Listen

Sign up to receive our twice-weekly News & Politics newsletter.

The Washington Roundtable discusses the trove of Jeffrey Epstein correspondence released by Congress this week, the fractures it has caused in the Republican Party, and the potential political ramifications for President Trump. Their guest is the investigative reporter Michael Isikoff, who has spent decades reporting on major scandals in American politics, including the affair between President Bill Clinton and Monica Lewinsky, and Russian interference in the 2016 election. The panel considers the factors that made other scandals in the past, such as Watergate, break through the public consciousness and change the course of Presidencies.

This week’s reading:

“The Epstein Scandal Is Now a Chronic Disease of the Trump Presidency,” by Susan B. Glasser

“Did Democrats Win the Shutdown After All?,” by Jon Allsop

“Socialism, But Make It Trump,” by John Cassidy

“Governments and Billionaires Retreat Ahead of COP30 Climate Talks,” by Elizabeth Kolbert

“Laura Loomer’s Endless Payback,” by Antonia Hitchens

“J. B. Pritzker Sounds the Alarm,” by Peter Slevin

Tune in to The Political Scene wherever you get your podcasts.

Listen and subscribe: Apple | Spotify | Google | Wherever You Listen

Sign up for our daily newsletter to get the best of The New Yorker in your inbox.

When President Donald Trump began his tariff rollout, the business world predicted that his unprecedented attempt to reshape the economy would lead to a major recession, if he went through with it all. But the markets stabilized and, in recent months, have continued to surge. That has some people worried about an even bigger threat: that overinvestment in artificial intelligence is creating a bubble. Andrew Ross Sorkin, one of today’s preëminent financial journalists, is well versed in what’s happening; his début book, “Too Big to Fail,” was an account of the 2008 financial crash, and this year he released “1929: Inside the Greatest Crash in Wall Street History—and How It Shattered a Nation.” He tells David Remnick that the concern lies in the immense borrowing to build the infrastructure for a future A.I. economy, without the sufficient revenue, currently, to pay off the loans. “If I learned anything from covering 1929, [and] covering 2008, it is leverage,” Sorkin says, “people borrowing to make all of this happen. And right now we are beginning to see a remarkable period of borrowing to make the economics of A.I. work.” Sorkin is the co-anchor of “Squawk Box” on CNBC, and the founder of DealBook, the New York Times’ business section.

New episodes of The New Yorker Radio Hour drop every Tuesday and Friday. Follow the show wherever you get your podcasts.

The New Yorker Radio Hour is a co-production of WNYC Studios and The New Yorker.