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More than a decade ago, Isaiah Rashad received a two-word review that has followed him ever since. It was 2013, and Rashad was a twenty-two-year-old rapper from Chattanooga, Tennessee, who was just starting to build an audience. The review came from Kendrick Lamar, who was on his way to becoming perhaps the most acclaimed rapper of all time. Even then, Lamar generally avoided public pronouncements, so people paid attention when he posted a brief commendation on his Twitter page. The tweet read, simply, “Raw Talent,” and included a link to “Shot U Down,” a new track by Rashad, which made it clear why Lamar was so excited. The rhymes arrive in a joyful cascade of syllables, muscularly enunciated: “They ain’t popping shot, these niggas is Papa Doc / Fine as the shine, beam me up, and I’m riding Spock.” (In this couplet, “Papa Doc” is the wannabe gangster rapper from “8 Mile,” rather than the former Haitian President.) In the song’s music video, which landed two days after Lamar’s tweet, Rashad prowls and poses his way through a boarded-up housing project in East Chattanooga, looking a lot like an emerging hip-hop star.

In some ways, Rashad has fulfilled that promise. He is signed to Top Dawg Entertainment, known as T.D.E., the record label that nurtured Lamar, and he just released his third or fourth album (the first was officially a demo), which earned admiring reviews and drew a long line of fans to a storefront on Broadway, downtown, where Rashad was selling merchandise. The fans were, of course, thrilled to get a few seconds with a rapper they loved, although many of them had sad stories to share. “It’s always, ‘Somebody died,’ or, ‘My homie passed away and loved your shit, so I’ll buy a CD for him,’ ” Rashad told me. He is grateful for these interactions, and is in no way surprised by them. His new album is called “It’s Been Awful,” and the title seems to refer to the turbulent life he has led in the five years since his previous release. “I’m trying not to be a downer,” he said, a few hours after the meet and greet. He was sitting in a midtown restaurant where a collection of friends and associates had taken over a few tables. Friends call him Zay, and anyone who looked closely at him might have suspected that he was somebody: he had a mouth full of gold teeth, meticulously buffed fingernails, and an oversized Goyard bag that he dropped onto a chair next to him. He was a few days into a busy week of promotion. “Everybody thinks rappers are fucking indestructible, until they kill themselves,” he told me.

Rashad knows that even now, at this late stage in hip-hop’s evolution, rappers are expected to guard their reputations carefully. And so he knows that his reputation was forever changed on the day, in 2022, when a pair of videos appeared online that seemed to show him having sex with men. Contemporary scandals typically involve allegations of wrongdoing, but this one was about a different kind of transgression: there are still very few prominent male rappers who have talked or rhymed explicitly about same-sex attraction. (A notable exception is Tyler, the Creator, who once rapped, “I’ve been kissing white boys since 2004.”) In the aftermath, Rashad sat for an interview with Joe Budden, a rapper turned podcaster, during which he described himself as “sexually fluid,” although he hadn’t said much more since then. On “It’s Been Awful,” the opening stanza includes a pithy summary of a difficult time: “Ask me who I’m fucking / I been fucking up.” It’s a slouchy, moody album with lenient rhyme schemes and boasts that sound more like confessions:

Baby, these bumps killing me softly

Burning my lungs, burning my car seat

Burning through funds with my crystal love

I’m starved and defenseless

Free from harm with detoxes

Peace upon us, be cautious

Rashad has always had a confessional streak. His 2014 début, “Cilvia Demo,” included a track called “Heavenly Father,” which chronicled drug abuse, self-harm, and life as a second-generation alcoholic. But it also had a sweet chorus from Rashad’s friend and labelmate SZA, and the clarity of Rashad’s rhymes encouraged listeners to hear strength and wisdom in him—he sounded like someone who had already survived the worst. Nowadays, Rashad is more likely to emphasize uncertainty. He got serious about rapping while attending Middle Tennessee State University, in Murfreesboro, and within three years, he was discovered, on SoundCloud, and then signed by T.D.E. It was an L.A. label known for L.A. hip-hop, and Rashad was an outsider, working hard to keep up. “Being in T.D.E., you either a sponge or brick,” he said, in an interview around the time that “Cilvia Demo” was released. While Kendrick Lamar was conquering the hip-hop world, Rashad was honing an introspective style inspired by Southern hip-hop pioneers like Lil Wayne and OutKast. On Rashad’s 2016 album, “The Sun’s Tirade,” he and Lamar collaborated on a track called “Wat’s Wrong,” which set Rashad’s slightly raspy drawl against Lamar’s precise, pellucid rhymes. “When he put his verse on there, I was like, ‘Oooh, he didn’t really kill me,’ ” Rashad told me, showing a bit of hip-hop bravado. (Lamar recently left T.D.E., but the two have remained friendly.) “Because if he could have, he would have, that’s how I looked at it.” He paused to laugh at himself. “I be talking shit too much—I’ve got to chill.”

Rashad was sitting in a Zaxbys restaurant in Chattanooga, in 2022, when his phone began to vibrate with messages from record executives and his manager about the leaked videos. As the story spread, many people seemed to say that they supported Rashad, or that they didn’t care, though, of course, there were commenters making jokes, and worse. Rashad worried that he had embarrassed his family members, and embarrassed himself. “I shouldn’t have been doing that,” he told me, referring less to the sex than to the fact that he had taped it and then, apparently, sent the footage to someone he couldn’t trust. “I was on meth. I was out of my mind. I was on, like, more drugs than I could count.” The word he uses to describe himself now is “bisexual,” and on his new album, he asks, “What is love, when I don’t trust a boy or a girl?” He is hoping for a trade-off: he is willing to make his sexual orientation public, so long as he can keep his dating life private. He turns thirty-five this weekend, and he is a family man, of a sort. He has three children: two live with their mothers; the third, who is autistic, lives in California with Rashad and his younger brother Timothy Hakeem Vance, known as Keem the Cipher, who helped produce about half the tracks on “It’s Been Awful.”

Rashad also refers to Vance as his “sober buddy,” and he says that sobriety—or, at least, a cannabis-friendly version of it—has become central to his life. “Never been sober, but I’m trying / Last time that I told ya that I was, I was lying,” Rashad raps, on the new album, and he told me that this is the first time he has completed a record without feeling compelled to celebrate by getting wasted. “At my worst, I’m a junkie, so I knew where to find drugs,” he said. He would drive to Long Beach and find himself smoking crystal methamphetamine, or he would go through his iPhone backups until he found an archived version of his contacts that included a number for a cocaine dealer. He crashed multiple cars, sometimes in an attempt to end his life. At times, the people at T.D.E. basically put him on suspension, saying that he couldn’t resume his career until he got help. Like many people in recovery, he has resolved to be more honest, and not to present himself as less damaged than he really is. “Being an addict sucks so bad,” he said. “And knowing that I have to work on myself every day, it’s tiresome.” His new album is introverted and often insular, but it also includes a pair of high-profile collaborations. One, “Cameras,” features Dominic Fike, a popular young singer and actor (he currently appears in “Euphoria”) who has talked about being inspired by the way Rashad raps. The other is “Boy in Red,” with SZA, a kind of indie-rock love song that Rashad has said was influenced by the Norwegian singer-songwriter known as girl in red, and also by “If I Was Your Girlfriend,” by Prince. “See, maybe stay the night, then I could be your boyfriend / And if that doesn’t work, then I’ll just be your girlfriend,” Rashad sings, and it doesn’t sound awful at all.

Rashad seemed somewhat out of step with the hip-hop mainstream when he first surfaced, and the gap has only grown in the years since then. Those OutKast albums he loves are about as old today as the Beatles’ albums were when OutKast was recording. Rashad’s previous release, “The House Is Burning,” had some tracks that tried to channel the rowdy energy of Generation Z hip-hop, but “It’s Been Awful” is more engrossing, partly because it seems to more carefully reflect the climate inside Rashad’s brain. Anthony (Moosa) Tiffith, Jr., is the president of T.D.E., and when I asked him to describe Rashad’s fan base, he said, “vibers,” though he conceded that this term might be a euphemism for stoners. To promote the album, Rashad’s team scheduled events not only in Los Angeles and New York but also in Dallas and San Diego—not traditionally strong hip-hop markets, but places where Rashad does especially well. Rashad told me that he knows the people at T.D.E. are particularly enthusiastic about his more aggressive, syllabically dense tracks, and Tiffith confirmed it. “I mean, we are a rap label,” Tiffith said. “He’s got this laid-back thing that he’s been doing real heavy, but we still want to hear him rap.”

On the day after the event on Broadway, Rashad and his team made their way out to Elsewhere, a night club in Bushwick, where he was performing a couple of free sets to celebrate the album. The crowd was enthusiastic and somewhat glassy-eyed, and people lined up patiently to buy records and merchandise, and to get a chance to meet Rashad. Selling music in person is generally not a great way to make money, but it’s a good way to make an impression on Billboard, which weighs physical album sales much more heavily than streams. In the end, “It’s Been Awful” made its début at No. 18 on the Billboard chart—a respectable number, but also a decline relative to its predecessor, which arrived at No. 7. For a successful but not world-conquering rapper like Rashad, making a living relies on making sure that fans continue to feel connected to him. More than one person at Elsewhere reminded him of a rainy concert at Pier 17, in 2021, when SZA showed up. SZA and Rashad were signed to T.D.E. around the same time. Their careers have lately diverged, though, as SZA has emerged as probably the best and most important R. & B. singer of her generation. On this night, as Rashad posed for pictures in Bushwick, SZA was a few miles away in Manhattan, walking the red carpet at the Met Gala. Tiffith told me that he was hoping “Boy in Red” could be a breakthrough for Rashad—the label had made accommodations to make sure that SZA had time to record her part. But he said that he wanted to be patient, and to encourage Rashad to be patient, too. “I think he’s got as much time as he needs,” Tiffith said.

Rashad seems happy, for now, to be working his way toward a sustainable life, and perhaps a sustainable career. Later this year, he is planning to go on tour, and he told me that, in order to make sure his lungs are at full strength, he plans to stop smoking cannabis. At Elsewhere, though, this prohibition was definitely not yet in effect, and he seemed to be in a good mood, despite the arduous promotional schedule, and despite the rather uncheerful tenor of the album he was promoting. After nearly an hour of signing and posing, he headed upstairs to the roof deck, where the sun was setting, and fans were waiting. A hip-hop show is almost invariably a celebration, no matter the subject matter of the rhymes, and Rashad seemed energized by the sight of a packed audience, ready to rap along. Halfway through, he performed “M.O.M.,” from the new album, which has bleak lyrics about something resembling cocaine psychosis, matched to a suitably frantic beat. “I know y’all ain’t got a lot of room, but if you can find it, and you feel like it, dance,” he said. People started moving, and near the end of the song, Rashad retreated to the d.j. booth to watch them, and for a moment he looked satisfied. ♦

Ukrainian officials have suggested that the slice of the country’s Donbas region that Russia is still fighting for could be named “Donnyland.”

—The Times.

NOT PICTURED: JorDon; Mar-a-Lagos; I Really Don’t Care, Do Uganda?; the Donube River; PennsylMelania; the New Jersey Pine Barrons; SuDon, Jr. ♦

Nate Cohn is the chief political analyst at the New York Times, where he also oversees the newspaper’s polling operation. I wanted to speak with him this week about another subject he writes about, though: the redistricting wars. They have once again tilted in the Republicans’ favor in recent weeks, after a controversial Supreme Court decision and a setback for Democrats in Virginia, where they were blocked from pushing through their own gerrymander in the hopes of offsetting successful redistricting efforts in Republican-majority states across the country. I also wanted Cohn—with whom I worked at The New Republic, and who remains a friend—to give a sense of how battles over redistricting are likely to play out in the next several election cycles, and what those battles may mean for 2028 and beyond. Our conversation, edited for length and clarity, is below.

Over the past month, we have had a Supreme Court decision about the Voting Rights Act, and several moves by Republican states to create safe congressional districts.

So, as you may recall, in 2025, Donald Trump began a highly unusual, if not unprecedented, mid-cycle campaign where he sought to encourage Republican states to redraw their maps to the advantage of Republicans. A whole series of Republican states followed through on that over the ensuing months, with Texas, North Carolina, and Florida chief among them. And this will likely net the Republicans a meaningful number of seats in the House. What I think the Republicans didn’t expect was that, earlier this year, the Democrats seemed like they were mostly able to cancel out those likely-to-be-lost congressional seats with their own gerrymanders in Virginia and in California. But, over the last two weeks, that basic picture of Republican gerrymanders mostly cancelled out by Democratic gerrymanders has changed.

First, the Supreme Court substantially narrowed the power of the Voting Rights Act and specifically gave states the ability to dismantle minority-majority districts, as long as it was being done for a “partisan” purpose. That’s allowed a number of Southern states to move forward with an entirely new wave of gerrymandering, beyond what they were able to attempt previously. We’ll see what the final tally is, but it’s possible that as many as five or more seats currently occupied by Democrats could be flipped by this effort.

And then the second half of this is that the Virginia Supreme Court struck down the state’s newly gerrymandered map, which has the potential to cost Democrats up to four seats. So between those two things, the balance of gerrymanders has lurched pretty abruptly toward the right. The stalemate that existed has been broken, and the Republicans now seem likely to obtain a meaningful edge heading into the midterms.

There are a couple of states still working things out, but you calculated that, as it stands now, Democrats will likely need to win the national House popular vote by about four points to capture it, right?

That’s right. In that calculation, the Republicans will have followed through with dismantling Democratic-held majority-Black districts in South Carolina, Alabama, and Louisiana. In all three of those states, it’s not necessarily a foregone conclusion that the Republicans will eliminate every one of those Democratic seats, but given the conduct of Republicans at this point, I would expect that at least some of those Democratic districts will be eliminated.

There is only so much more that can happen before the midterms, because we are so close to the election, but is there more that Southern Republican states can do in future elections to erase other minority-majority districts and give themselves even more seats?

There are many more districts that the Republicans can try to eliminate ahead of the 2028 election that they will not attempt to eliminate before this one. One reason is that there are a number of Southern states where Republicans control the redistricting process, but where primary elections have already been held, like Texas and North Carolina.

A second factor is that the 2026 election is shaping up to be a pretty good one for Democrats, which may induce some amount of caution in Republican gerrymandering efforts to this point.

Right. In Texas, Republicans gave themselves what they thought would be five more likely seats, but polls suggest that there may be a Democratic wave this year, so it’s possible that not all five of those seats will vote Republican. And other states might not want to take similar risks.

Yeah. They could have gone further if the Supreme Court had narrowed the power of the Voting Rights Act requirement before they had redistricted. They could have insured that several of the state’s majority-Latino districts were even more Republican and put them essentially out of play. And then the second thing to consider is that because the 2026 midterm election is poised to be so Democratic, the Republicans might not want to stretch too far, out of fear that doing so would endanger some of their own seats.

What can Democrats do going forward, and what do you expect them to do? I’ve heard ideas suggesting that blue states could go even further in places like California—which already created more blue districts last year—could try to pass a map where all fifty-two districts are likely blue. How realistic is all this?

It’s a tough question to answer because, in most blue states, the Democrats face meaningful constitutional obstacles to drawing even more serious gerrymanders. Just to take the California example you mentioned: California had to amend the state’s constitution already in order to create more blue districts last year. There are other blue states where more aggressive redistricting efforts would take similarly aggressive steps. New York and Colorado are good examples of states where the Democrats could potentially create more blue seats, but to do it, they would have to amend the state constitution, and we don’t know whether they can do that, and how soon they could do it, because many states have different provisions about how to amend their state’s constitution. Some of those processes don’t allow them to do it quickly.

We just saw that in Virginia. Virginia attempted to amend its state constitution, and the state Supreme Court intervened and said that they didn’t follow the correct procedure in doing so, so Democrats will go back to the drawing board. They are appealing to the Supreme Court, but I think they have an argument, which is at least interesting, that the Virginia Supreme Court’s decision depends on an interpretation of what “election day” means; there’s maybe a one-per-cent chance or a tenth-of-a-per-cent chance that the Supreme Court would hear out their case on it. Much more likely is that the Virginia Democrats will have to try again in the next election cycle with another vote to amend the state constitution and another referendum to try to get voters to draw a more aggressive map.

You have mentioned red and blue states, but not purple ones. What about states like Michigan, Wisconsin, or Pennsylvania?

In the swing states, there are at least three factors that immediately come to my mind. One is whether a party can take full control of the state government. To take an example that would be potentially devastating to the Republicans, imagine that the Democrats took full control of the state government in Georgia. If they did, maybe the Democrats would attempt to redraw that state’s congressional map, and if they did, they could easily flip four or more Republican-held seats there.

In Georgia, Governor Brian Kemp just announced that he’s going to call a special session later this year to draw new congressional maps for 2028.

I suppose that’ll bring me to my second point about purple states, which is that it is harder to draw aggressive gerrymanders there than it is in a solidly red or blue state. It is possible to draw a congressional map with fifty-two Democratic seats and zero Republican seats in California by drawing fifty-two districts that were approximately Harris plus twenty. If you try to draw a Georgia map that is fourteen Republican seats to zero Democratic seats, you would draw fourteen districts that are just Trump plus two, and Republicans would be in danger of losing many of them or all of them in that particular scenario. So the Republicans will be somewhat limited in a state like Georgia in terms of obtaining too many more seats beyond what they already have. And the third thing is that we still have the state constitutional issues to consider. Michigan, Arizona, and Pennsylvania: these are all states that, in various ways, have either passed state Supreme Court decisions or constitutional amendments that have set restrictions on opportunities for partisan gerrymandering.

It seems like blue and purple states have more restrictions on gerrymandering than red states. Is that accurate?

That’s mostly true. There are some exceptions. Florida and Ohio, both red states, each have limitations on gerrymandering that have been enforced to varying degrees, but, other than that, most of the red states give the state legislature full control to draw the map however they’d like. And the same can’t be said for most blue states.

If Democrats lose the House because of gerrymandering, or even if they don’t, it seems to me that there will be incredible, incredible pressure on Democrats around the country to do whatever they can to match Republicans in terms of gerrymandering blue states. Do you agree?

That seems entirely right. I think that if Donald Trump’s initial effort to redraw maps in the G.O.P.’s favor didn’t insure that, then certainly the Supreme Court’s decision on the Voting Rights Act insured it. The advantage that Republicans might hope to obtain by this November, could, hypothetically, grow even more if the Democrats did nothing before 2028. Looking back, I think that 2008 is the last time that a party won the House popular vote by more than four points in a Presidential-election year. So, if the Democrats were to do nothing, the Republicans would be pretty clearly favored to win control of the House in 2028, even in an election they might have otherwise lost reasonably clearly. I find it very hard to believe that there won’t be an enormous amount of pressure for Democrats to retaliate. And they have every incentive to retaliate, too, because otherwise they might be shut out of government.

Look, America’s not a stranger to one party winning the popular vote and losing the election. The Democrats in particular aren’t strangers to that, but I think this would feel pretty different because it would come on the heels of a deliberate effort to redraw the national map in the G.O.P.’s favor, and it would come on the heels of a Supreme Court decision that made it possible for the Republicans to eliminate majority-Black districts. And I think that would be a very difficult pill for the Democrats to swallow.

How would the Democratic caucus likely change if it started losing seats in the South and winning them in New York and Colorado? Would it get more white?

It does seem to me that the number of Black representatives in Congress will take a big hit. It’s not as obvious to me that other non-white voting groups will see a significant decline in their representation because Democratic districts can routinely elect non-white representatives even when non-white voters are not a majority of the population. So I think it’s at least conceivable that the total amount of non-white representation in Washington doesn’t take an enormous hit even as the number of Black representatives falls, and the number of Southern Black representatives plunges.

Something that occurred to me is that one consequence of Democrats matching Republicans in the redistricting game is that the only way you could likely get a bipartisan bill banning gerrymandering through Congress would be if there was a sense that redistricting wasn’t helping either party. Do you agree, and what would such a bill look like?

I think you’re absolutely right. I think it’s pretty hard to imagine that the Republicans, in particular, would accept a ban on gerrymandering if the Republicans had a significant structural advantage in the House. And maybe the Democrats would push it through on partisan grounds in a scenario where the Democrats had narrowly managed to win the House even while the Republicans had a significant structural advantage. But, yeah, I think that it would be hard to pull that off if one party was obviously going to benefit from it.

In terms of what a hypothetical bipartisan bill to limit gerrymandering might look like, there are a number of different proposals for how to accomplish something like it, and there are at least a few different levers that reformers could potentially pull. One is: who draws the maps? Can you take it out of the hands of politicians and put it in the hands of a nonpartisan commission? I’ll note that Republicans have traditionally been skeptical of this. They think these commissions are either composed of liberals or can be influenced by liberal-interest groups.

A second thing you can do is create really strict limits on what kinds of maps can be drawn. You can limit the number of times that you split counties and municipalities, and so on. And you would do that in the hope that even if partisans were able to redraw maps, they would be constrained by these rules in ways that would limit their ability to draw the most extreme gerrymanders.

And, finally, you can change the criteria. You establish legal standards that a map needs to meet in order to be legal. Those could be explicit requirements for a map to appear to be fair by certain statistical measures of partisanship. Historically, Republicans have been fairly skeptical of this as well, partly because they think those measures are, on balance, to their disadvantage, given that they typically enjoy some kind of structural advantage in the House of Representatives. But, also, there are cases where it is challenging to draw maps that comply with these kinds of statistical tests. I think Massachusetts is a nice example from a Democratic point of view. The Democrats have a nine-to-zero map there. It’s really challenging to draw even one Trump district, let alone the three you might think that Republicans are entitled to based on their share of the popular vote in the state.

I think that if you’re trying to cobble together a bipartisan bill, the second option, where you limit what states can do, is the most tenable one for both sides. But given the way politics is going right now, I find it challenging to believe it would happen. Still, you never know, and although all these issues are really fraught, the truth is that it wouldn’t really make too much of a difference which of these options you chose. I think that all of them would yield more or less the same map: one that’s relatively fair and perhaps slightly Republican-tilting, but not one that’s so biased that you would feel compelled to have an interview about it.

Have you taken out a map and looked at every state and thought, “If partisan redistricting efforts are pushed maximally in every state, what is this going to look like nationally in a couple of years”?

I’ve sort of done that exercise. But I think that once you do that exercise, you find that you start asking yourself whether what you’re working through is worth the effort or not, for a few reasons. I’ve already mentioned that so much of this hinges on what kind of state constitutional changes you can make, so I find it hard to believe that the Democrats can pull off what they would need to do.

And the second factor is that it’s very difficult to judge what really counts as a maximum gerrymander. Take the state of Texas, for instance. The Republicans hypothetically could draw a thirty-eight-to-zero map there, but if they did that, they would probably risk some districts by spreading out reliably Republican voters. So what’s their level of risk tolerance? How far are they willing to go? And that’s a matter of speculation.

The main thing I would say is, if Democrats could really seize control of the process in every state where they reasonably could, they would have control over the fate of more Republican-held seats than the other way around. I don’t know whether people realize that or not, but it is the case that the Democrats could hypothetically, with the right combination of legal changes, eliminate more Republican-held seats than the Republicans can eliminate Democratic seats. But whether that’s possible and whether that’s realistic are very different questions.

Taking everything you’re saying, I suspect we’re going to be on the other side of 2028, and Republicans will still have an advantage in the House. Not a gigantic seven-point advantage or something like that, but some sort of advantage, like the one they have now, maybe a little less or a bit more.

I think that’s right. Republicans clearly have more easy opportunities to draw friendly districts going forward. The opportunities for Democrats to do that are more questionable to my mind. I think that if you assume that the Democrats will succeed in some, but not all, of those efforts, they’ll probably be able to cancel out much of what the Republicans would be expected to do between now and 2028, and leave us more or less where we are today. ♦

On a hazy morning in November, a group of aid workers with Médecins Sans Frontières (M.S.F.), known in English as Doctors Without Borders, crossed into Gaza for a two-month mission. Jennifer Hulse, an emergency physician from the U.K., led a medical team. “We all had as many bags as we could physically carry,” Hulse said. Inside were essential supplies such as surgical tools and engine oil for generators. Her assignment was to help the Gaza Health Ministry restore access to health care in the north, where Israeli attacks had flattened nearly every building in sight.

The team first spent several days at Gaza’s sole remaining hospital focussed on pediatrics—Al-Rantisi, in Gaza City, which was barely operational after Israeli air strikes. The roof had collapsed in places. Doctors were seeing patients in a waiting room with only a few cots. “It was very cold, even inside the buildings,” Hulse told me. When a storm blew through, she mistook thunderclaps for explosions. She learned that parents sometimes arrived with the bodies of infants who seemed to have died of hypothermia. Her team quickly put together a plan to help coördinate repairs, secure new electrical generators, implement a triage system, and organize trainings for staff. “We were just trying to get it functional again,” she said.

Next, Hulse travelled to Jabalia, in the northern reaches of the Gaza Strip, where the situation was even worse. She was driven through rutted streets in which not a single building remained intact. The area had previously been served by several health-care facilities, including a primary-care center—now destroyed—and the Indonesian Hospital, which I visited during a temporary ceasefire, in early 2025. But this past October, as part of another ceasefire agreement brokered by the Trump Administration, Israeli forces effectively divided Gaza in two, pushing the population toward the sea. Nearly all of the surviving health-care facilities in the northernmost area fell on the wrong side of the partition. “No one can reach them now,” Hulse said. To get proper medical care, she went on, an injured person would have to make it to a crossroads and flag down a donkey cart to Gaza City, which could take hours. As a stopgap, the M.S.F. team and Gaza’s health ministry had decided to open a temporary clinic in the area.

Hulse and her colleagues spent several days searching for a suitable location. At one point, she saw a group of children playing on what had once been the roof of a building. They climbed into a cardboard box and slid down the sloped surface as though they were sledding. “There was nothing, absolutely nothing,” she told me. “Even finding a flat piece of ground that wasn’t covered in rubble was difficult.” Still, within a few weeks, they picked a spot, dug latrines, installed generators and water tanks, and erected tents. The clinic was close to the partition, where Israeli soldiers often fired their weapons. The team piled sandbags around the perimeter for protection.

The temporary clinic opened after Christmas, and soon they were seeing up to four hundred patients a day. The staff did their best to treat all sorts of conditions: infections, heart attacks, diarrhea, gunshot wounds, shrapnel injuries. “It was a tiny clinic amid the rubble, and we didn’t always have the medications we needed,” Hulse said. “But people were still so grateful for it.” Meanwhile, about a kilometre away, workers began clearing debris from the old site of the primary-care center, making room for a permanent replacement.

Then, just before New Year’s, the Israeli government released a statement. It had previously instructed all international humanitarian organizations that operated in Gaza to submit detailed information to maintain their registration, including financial statements, the identities of all donors, and a full list of employees, with passport numbers, dates of birth, and, for Palestinians, the names of spouses and children. Organizations that refused would be expelled. “We were briefed on the issue,” Hulse said. “It was really hard to believe it was actually happening.” Thirty-seven organizations—including M.S.F., the International Rescue Committee, the Norwegian Refugee Council (N.R.C.), and Action Against Hunger—received notice that they had failed to comply and would no longer be allowed in Gaza, the West Bank, or East Jerusalem. They were given sixty days to cease operations and withdraw all international staff.

Hulse’s rotation was due to end in January, just before her fortieth birthday. She’d originally planned to hand off the Jabalia project to a new team. “But, after the statement came out, everybody was denied access,” she said. “We couldn’t get any new people or supplies in.” Hulse’s team decided to stay for as long as they could. They would have to race to finish the permanent clinic in time. In a single evening, she and a colleague hurriedly drew up a design. Hulse took the plan to the health ministry, which approved it. “We needed to at least get it started before we left,” she told me. She remembers thinking, I hope this works.

Al-Rantisi Hospital, in Gaza City.Photograph courtesy Jennifer Hulse

Israel seized control of the Gaza Strip and the West Bank during the Six-Day War, in 1967. After that, Israel’s Ministry of Labor and Social Affairs took responsibility for registering non-governmental organizations (N.G.O.s) and endorsing visas for aid workers. This system reportedly began to break down in recent years, when the ministry stopped issuing new registrations. On October 7, 2023, Hamas led a wave of attacks on Israel, killing about twelve hundred people. After that, the ministry stopped endorsing visas, preventing many humanitarian workers from entering Gaza and the West Bank. In October, 2024, Yotam Ben-Hillel, an Israeli human-rights lawyer, petitioned Israel’s Supreme Court on behalf of a coalition of international aid groups in an effort to force the Israeli government to address the situation. In December, Israel announced that it planned to overhaul the registration process and transfer it to a different agency: the Ministry of Diaspora Affairs and Combating Antisemitism. It released its requirements for registration in March, 2025.

The Coordinator of Government Activities in the Territories, a military unit that enforces Israeli policies in Gaza, defended the new restrictions on N.G.O.s as necessary to insure Israel’s security. “Israel is committed to allowing and facilitating the entry of humanitarian aid into the Gaza Strip,” COGAT told The New Yorker in a statement. It invoked a longstanding allegation that many humanitarian groups are compromised by militants. In 2021, Israel began designating Palestinian civil-society groups as terrorist organizations; United Nations human-rights experts said that the charge lacked “concrete and credible evidence.” In 2024, Israel barred UNRWA, a sprawling U.N. agency with tens of thousands of employees who served millions of Palestinians, from working in Gaza and the West Bank, asserting that fourteen hundred of the agency’s employees in Gaza were members of terrorist organizations, and that at least nineteen had participated in the attacks on October 7th. An internal U.N. investigation found evidence that nine employees “may have been involved” in the attacks, and their contracts with the agency were terminated.

That same year, an Israeli air strike near a medical clinic killed a Palestinian physiotherapist employed by M.S.F. The Israeli military said that he was an operative with Palestinian Islamic Jihad (P.I.J.), a militant group aligned with Hamas; M.S.F. released a statement condemning the targeting of a health-care worker and noting that hundreds of health-care workers, including six M.S.F. employees, had been killed in Gaza since the beginning of the conflict. P.I.J. eventually confirmed that the physiotherapist had been one of its commanders. “We would never knowingly employ people engaging in military activity,” M.S.F. said in a subsequent statement. “Any employee who engages in military activity would pose a danger to our staff and patients.”

Amichai Chikli, the right-wing Minister for Diaspora Affairs and Combating Antisemitism, has used such cases to argue that “much of the activity of so-called humanitarian organizations serves as a cover for hostile and sometimes violent actions.” When M.S.F. ultimately refused to share a list of its employees, he said, “We are aware that MSF employs individuals who are active in terrorist organizations, which is why it hides its employee lists.” (He also said that Rahma Worldwide, an organization that I volunteered for in Gaza, was going to be designated a “terrorist consortium.”)

Humanitarian organizations have sharply challenged these claims. Alan Moseley, a country director for the Danish Refugee Council (D.R.C.), another barred N.G.O., said that organizations like theirs have experience insuring that staff members remain neutral. “We work in conflict zones around the world where it’s very common to be faced with armed groups present,” Moseley told me. “Of course we don’t want Hamas fighters on our staff.” Mohammed Abu Mughaiseeb, a physician and an M.S.F. medical adviser, told me that the organization has employed thousands of people in Gaza, and that no one else has been proved to have participated in military activity. All M.S.F. staff go through a comprehensive vetting process, he added. By limiting humanitarian access to Gaza, Abu Mughaiseeb said, Israel was “punishing the population, not Hamas.”

Many N.G.O.s have raised concerns that lists of their employees could be used to target their Palestinian staffers. More than five hundred aid workers, including fifteen M.S.F. employees, have been killed in Gaza since October 7, 2023. (The Israeli military has said that it does not target medical personnel.) Felipe Ribeiro, a head of mission for the organization, told me that M.S.F. asked for safety assurances from a committee headed by the Ministry of Diaspora Affairs. “We asked repeatedly, ‘What will you do with this list? How can we be sure it won’t be used to harm our staff?’ ” he told me. “We never received an answer.” (When approached for comment, the Ministry of Diaspora Affairs said that it would not be able to meet The New Yorker’s deadline.) Shaina Low, a communication adviser for the Norwegian Refugee Council, said that a strict E.U. data-privacy law barred organizations from sharing employee information. “We’ve gotten opinions from authorities in the E.U.,” she told me. “They have said, yes, handing over these employee lists could violate the law.”

Not long after N.G.O.s received notice that they would be expelled from Gaza, the U.N. released a statement urging Israel to reconsider. “Humanitarian access is not optional, conditional or political,” it said. “It is a legal obligation under international humanitarian law.” Eighteen Israeli N.G.O.s described the new registration framework as a “weaponization of bureaucracy.” In early January, fifty-three international humanitarian groups called on Israel to halt the expulsion process, noting that N.G.O.s run or support sixty per cent of all field hospitals in Gaza and furnish the majority of shelter aid. Ribeiro told me that M.S.F. is one of the only organizations providing Gazans with orthopedic surgery, reconstructive surgery, and burn care. “It’s another catastrophe for the people of Gaza,” Mughaiseeb said. Finally, in February, Ben-Hillel filed a suit in Israel’s Supreme Court on behalf of numerous humanitarian organizations, including M.S.F., the D.R.C., and the N.R.C. He cited an opinion by the International Court of Justice asserting that, under the Geneva Conventions, Israel had an unconditional obligation to facilitate the “rapid and unimpeded” delivery of aid, security concerns notwithstanding. He also told the court that, under the Oslo Accords of 1993, the Palestinian Authority—not Israel—had jurisdiction over these N.G.O.s. The court recommended that the petition be dismissed, and that the organizations be given one month to submit the employee lists. A final decision is pending.

Although discussions of the new N.G.O. requirements have focussed on security, concerns about militants occupy only a small part of the Ministry of Diaspora Affairs’ written guidelines. Organizations can also be barred for promoting what the agency calls delegitimization campaigns against Israel; for denying the existence of Israel as a democratic state; or for employing an officeholder who has called for a boycott of Israel. I asked Gerald Steinberg, the founder of an Israeli group called NGO Monitor, what would justify barring humanitarian groups from providing services. He responded by citing the politics of N.G.O.s: “These are very powerful organizations, and their political agendas have major influence.” As an example, he cited an M.S.F. social-media campaign that characterized the war in Gaza as a genocide. “They are not the altruistic, neutral organizations that they claim to be,” he said. N.G.O. workers considered these arguments chilling. Hulse pointed out that M.S.F.’s mission includes témoignage, or testimony—bearing witness to human suffering. “In a conflict where the balance of power is so unequal, the number of civilian casualties is so huge, just talking about what is happening can make it seem as though you’re not being neutral,” she told me. Low, at the Norwegian Refugee Council, was more direct. “This is about silencing organizations that are documenting human-rights violations,” she said.

During Hulse’s last days in Gaza, she and her team hurried to complete as much of the Jabalia clinic as they could. Israel prohibits many construction materials from entering Gaza, so the structure was created by welding sheets of metal together and painting them white. “It’s basically a fancy shipping container,” Hulse said. It would have sinks, toilets, and electricity, with room for wound care, pediatrics, women’s health, and a small E.R. “It looked like a clean, bright island in the middle of the rubble,” Hulse told me.

Before the team’s departure, the staff gathered for a final walk-through. “Everyone was so excited about it,” Hulse said. The head pharmacist, a local health-ministry employee, talked enthusiastically about how she would arrange the pharmacy. Then she pointed out a crumpled structure next to the clinic; it had once been her family’s home. Hulse felt both hopeful and uncertain. “We had no idea if we would still be able to get them the medications and supplies they need,” she told me. Patients were concerned too, and some asked Hulse what would happen to the new clinic after her team left. “We didn’t really have answers for them,” she said.

The clinic finally opened in April, and it now treats up to five hundred patients daily. In a cell-phone video of the opening, the space was thronged with people. M.S.F. intends to provide support from afar, but Raed Abu Warda, a doctor who directs the clinic, told me that the expulsion of the international team has put the clinic under enormous strain. “They facilitated everything,” he told me. Hulse and her colleagues had provided a cache of medications, but the clinic no longer had any antibiotics. It didn’t even have chairs for patients.

After Hulse’s rotation in Gaza ended, she boarded a bus with about thirty other international M.S.F. staffers. As they drove toward the border crossing, everyone sat in silence. At their next stop, in Amman, the team had one day off—Hulse’s first in four months. Then they held a debrief meeting to discuss their experiences. In the middle of the session, they heard explosions. Iranian missiles, a response to Israeli and American attacks, were being intercepted overhead. It was the twenty-eighth of February, and the next war had just begun. ♦

This month, Rostam Batmanglij will release “American Stories,” his third solo record since leaving Vampire Weekend, the rock band he helped form in 2006, when he was an undergraduate studying classical music at Columbia University. Batmanglij, who records under his first name, was born to Iranian parents in Washington, D.C. In the past two decades, he has built an enviable career as a polymath producer and multi-instrumentalist, making visionary, searching pop songs for a roster of indie-leaning artists, including Clairo, Maggie Rogers, and Haim, as well as cult favorites like Carly Rae Jepsen and Charli XCX. (Batmanglij, who is queer, has also worked with Frank Ocean; he arranged and produced the distorted, quivery guitar on “Ivy,” perhaps the most poignant and incandescent song on “Blonde.”) “There is a desire to push the form—to push what can be in a pop song,” he told me recently. His production style is verdant but gentle: sticky percussion, a dreamy mix of acoustic and synthesized instruments, layers, mystery. He is exceptionally good at drawing something raw and unmediated out of a vocalist. For a listener, this can feel like stumbling into a room where something interesting is happening. Throughout the past ten years, especially, that sound—breathy, close, a little woozy—has become synonymous with a certain artful, confessional, cool-girl aesthetic.

As a solo artist, Batmanglij writes in a style that is baroque and sophisticated, and lightly warped in a way that recalls both Paul Simon and Radiohead. “American Stories” is a lush and thoughtful album about an evanescent romance and the ephemeral, sometimes flashing nature of love. On the chorus of “Like a Spark,” the record’s first single, Batmanglij sings of trying to excise any possessiveness from his feelings of devotion:

Everybody
Wants you
Tied down easily except for me
I only ever wanted you to feel freed of it.

This spring, Batmanglij has been finishing renovations on a recording studio in Manhattan’s Chinatown, and one recent afternoon we met there to talk. The space is airy and blank: white walls, blond wood, sunbeams. We removed our shoes. In conversation, Batmanglij is attentive and soft-spoken, and generally adheres to a philosophy of saying less. I began to tell him that I found the new record rich with a kind of muted sadness, but, midway through the thought, I trailed off. “You can say it,” he offered, laughing.

“There’s heartbreak here,” I finished.

“Yeah,” he said. “That’s a thread of the record. Or, I don’t know if ‘heartbreak’ is the right word. It’s disappointment, perhaps. What do we do when a relationship ends? How do we feel about that era of our lives?”

“American Stories” consists of just nine songs, and clocks in at around thirty minutes. The last few tracks on the record take a political turn, especially “The Weight,” which seems to address the pro-Palestine encampments and associated arrests at his alma mater. (“Eyes glowing in the heat lamps / Calling out a broken government,” he sings.) Batmanglij cited Mayor Zohran Mamdani’s election as a moment that made him rethink the contours of the future: “I started to feel a lot of hope, actually, about the American project.” He added, “I think all art has an inherent politics. A friend of mine said, ‘Well, an artist should just be able to make something that they think is beautiful.’ I don’t know if I agree. But I’d be lying if I said I didn’t like making beautiful things.”

Other songs on “American Stories” are more personal. “Like a Spark” opens with a blues riff played on a nylon-string guitar, offset by the appearance of a saz, a long-necked Turkish lute that’s omnipresent in Middle Eastern music. The combination is dizzying, but lovely. “At some point, I started bringing in pedal steel, and that stuff and the Persian stuff started living next to each other,” Batmanglij told me. “That was the tipping point for me, where I was, like, ‘Oh, this record, it could be both your most American record and your most Persian record.’ ”

The album reiterates the argument that almost all American music is a hybrid of sorts, and that every American story is also a story about someplace else. The idea of self-creation feels central to the record’s gestalt. “A thing I think about is, What is American music? What makes music sound American?” he said. “With pedal steel, if we’re to believe the origin story, that’s a Hawaiian instrument. And yet we think of it as Southern. It has such a strange beauty.” He carries that sense of expansiveness and possibility to other facets of his life. “Sometimes the words mean what you like,” he sings on “Back of a Truck,” a jangly breakup song about ripping down the interstate.

“I think melody can be important, and the same lyric could mean different things in a different melodic context,” Batmanglij said. “I would even say that the same lyric could mean different things in a different harmonic context.” Though he’s fluent in music theory, he still values spontaneity and uncertainty. “I try to forget about it when I’m making music,” he said of his classical education.

At times, he can’t help himself. A new song called “Hardy” features a guest verse from Clairo and a sample of the French composer Georges Delerue’s “Chorale,” from the film “Day for Night” (1973), performed by Hugh Wolff and the London Sinfonietta. The strings are jubilant and hyperkinetic; Batmanglij’s voice is gritty with resignation. Sounds can be recontextualized; love can transform. “I loved you, honey, and you loved me as much,” he sings. “Don’t feel bad we couldn’t have another year.”

Batmanglij left Vampire Weekend after the release of “Modern Vampires of the City,” the group’s third album, and its second to début at No. 1 on the Billboard chart. (“Modern Vampires” was named the best album of 2013 by both Pitchfork and Rolling Stone, and it won the Grammy for Best Alternative Music Album; Batmanglij co-produced it with Ariel Rechtshaid.) The band seemed primed for enormous success; by any metric, it was a bold time for someone to split. “I was very committed to that life until I was thirty, when I pressed the Reset button on everything,” Batmanglij said. “I moved to L.A., I left Vampire Weekend. I had this opportunity to restart, and I took it.”

In recent months, Batmanglij has been posting short videos to his YouTube channel, talking about the process of writing and recording “American Stories” and offering revelatory details about a few old Vampire Weekend tracks. (His discussion of “Campus,” a beloved cut from the band’s self-titled début, highlights the ways that the vocalist Ezra Koenig’s slightly wilder, more improvisational style balanced Batmanglij’s erudition and exactness.) “Someone commented on this video I posted, ‘I loved your music for years, and I grew up listening to Vampire Weekend. I had no idea you were in Vampire Weekend,’ ” he said. “And I responded, ‘That’s probably because I haven’t talked about Vampire Weekend publicly for ten years.’ There’s a new context, I think, to revisit some of those old stories. I think enough time has passed.”

I told him that the pockets of nostalgia on the new album felt interconnected to me, even if the sources were different—an old band, a past love affair, a sense that the world used to be at least slightly less heinous and terrifying than it is now. “I think they’re different for me,” he said, laughing. He sees his solo music as a way of arriving somewhere new. “When I work as a producer, I feel an obligation to get to the end of the process, because ultimately that’s what the producer is there to do,” he said. “When I’m making a Rostam album, I want to get lost. I don’t really wanna know exactly where I’m going.” “American Stories” has a curious, journeying quality—it seems less interested in conclusions or codas than in forgiveness and the slow accumulation of knowledge. This, too, feels fundamental to an American life: the capacity to take a wrong turn but just keep going. ♦

Since the seventies, the famed Nuyorican Poets Café has blossomed on the Lower East Side as an essential hothouse for arts movements of many stripes, perhaps most crucially as a launching pad for an emergent literati straddling the realms of soul and hip-hop. The venue’s performances and readings—from artists including Paul Beatty and Reg E. Gaines, the artist formerly known as Mos Def and Erykah Badu—became a means to tap into the slam continuum. The same scene nurtured the evolution of the Brooklyn-born poet and activist aja monet, who became the café’s youngest-ever Grand Slam champion in 2007, and who has spent her career navigating the many creative forms of a blues people—collaborating on Saul Williams’s book “Chorus: A Literary Mixtape,” performing as a part of the Smoke Signals collective, and releasing the poetry collection “My Mother Was a Freedom Fighter.”

aja monet.Photograph by Daniel N. Johnson

After years of dazzling spoken-word circuits with her intense and poignant wordplay, monet has seamlessly transitioned into the role of bandleader and music artist. The spirits of blues and rap have always haunted her work, but her début album, “when the poems do what they do,” from 2023, made the relationship palpable, introducing her poetry to a jazzy new context when performed alongside such artists as Chief Xian aTunde Adjuah, Samora Pinderhughes, and Marcus Gilmore. Monet, who has referred to herself as a surrealist blues poet, has a new LP, “the color of rain,” out May 22, which truly commands the distinction with its dreamlike tangle of genre-blurring ideas. Performing with the keyboardist Brian Hargrove, the bassist Micah Collier, and the drummer Myles Martin, monet commemorates the album’s release at Carnegie Hall on May 20.—Sheldon Pearce

Noël Coward’s “Fallen Angels” is a retro gem that gives froth a good name. The plot is pure Fluffernutter: two pretty, rich wives spend a day freaking out, primping, and getting royally hammered after they learn that the French snack they hooked up with as single gals abroad has turned up in London. The play was naughty stuff in 1925, when the show, starring Tallulah Bankhead, got banned. You can still see why it shocked people: Coward’s cynical farce is devoutly unjudgmental about these shrewd bubbleheads, dipsomaniacs determined to find wiggle room in their vows. In 2026, the play is primarily an opportunity to see Rose Byrne and Kelli O’Hara lounge all over the gorgeous set like bejewelled Slinkies, chugging champagne and slaloming off sofas. A sweet profiterole.—Emily Nussbaum (Haimes; through June 7.)

Not long ago, the New York City Tap Festival appeared to be on its deathbed. When the 2024 edition of the annual event, also known as Tap City, didn’t attract enough funding and was cancelled, it looked like the end. But the Joyce Theatre came to the rescue, and now Tap City is back, celebrating its twenty-fifth anniversary with a week of shows there. The lineup displays some rebounding strength, with such returning favorites as Caleb Teicher, Jason Samuels Smith, Soles of Duende, and Michelle Dorrance, who will perform a vintage solo by the festival’s matriarch, Brenda Bufalino.—Brian Seibert (Joyce Theatre; May 19-24.)

“Touch,” from 1975.Art work © Joan Semmel / ARS / Courtesy Alexander Gray Associates / Xavier Hufkens

It’s not an exaggeration to say that Joan Semmel revolutionized the female nude. For centuries, naked women were depicted in art by men as mythic beings and/or sex objects, but in the nineteen-seventies some feminists began reclaiming their eroticism, including Semmel. She first painted couples having sex, and then images of her own body, which became her longtime focus. Semmel’s paintings are simultaneously tender and unflinching, especially those that portray her point of view, looking down at smooth, detailed skin or folded, expressionistic flesh. The Jewish Museum’s thrilling mini-survey highlights her formal experimentation, while an accompanying gallery show features new work—including a remarkable, front-facing, nude self-portrait by the nonagenarian titled “Here I Am” (2025).—Jillian Steinhauer (Jewish Museum, through May 31; Alexander Gray Associates, through May 30.)

The English singer, producer, and d.j. Nia Archives stands at the forefront of the modern U.K. rave scene, working primarily in jungle and drum and bass. A rare star in a behind-the-decks profession, she is both bellwether and ambassador for one of the more niche music communities. Her 2024 début album, “Silence Is Loud,” sought to blend jungle with the Britpop of bands such as Blur and Oasis, and its more reined-in sound allowed for the kind of clearheaded introspection that most hit the dance floor to avoid. In 2025, she launched her label Up Ya Archives for “everything new gen junglism,” and, later this year, she’s releasing “Emotional Junglist,” which promises to continue her long-running subversion of raver norms.—Sheldon Pearce (Bowery Ballroom; May 21.)

Kara Young and Mallori Johnson in “Is God Is.”Photograph by Patti Perret / Amazon MGM Studios

For her first feature, Aleshea Harris adapted and directed her 2018 play “Is God Is.” The movie is a furious revenge thriller, in which two young women, fraternal twins, Racine (Kara Young) and Anaia (Mallori Johnson), who have grievous burn scars from early childhood, are summoned to the bedside of their mother (Vivica A. Fox), whom they call God, and who is similarly scarred. God reveals that the perpetrator is their long-absent father—and she orders them to find him and kill him. The sisters’ mission involves a dangerous and violent road trip; the fierce Racine outdoes the sensitive Anaia in her bloodlust, and the drama, reminiscent of classical tragedy, resounds with mythopoetic overtones. If the results are longer on action than on substance, they’re nonetheless harrowing and haunting.—Richard Brody (In wide release.)

The sardonic comedy “Clockwatchers,” from 1997, observes office life from the perspective of four secretarial temps whose daily tribulations reveal bureaucratic absurdities and cruelties in action. Iris (Toni Collette), a new temp at a credit company, quickly bonds with her colleagues: Margaret (Parker Posey), whose derision is matched by ambition; Paula (Lisa Kudrow), an aspiring actress whose optimism masks despair; and Jane (Alanna Ubach), whose dreams center on her impending marriage. The women are blithely dismissive of their tedious work, but their relationships fray under new stresses—including intrusive surveillance. The director, Jill Sprecher, films these antics like a live-action cartoon, with giddy images and spritzy performances that are nonetheless poignant.—R.B. (Metrograph, May 17, introduced by John Early, and streaming on the Criterion Channel.)

Liza Minnelli in 1969.Photograph by Burt Glinn / Magnum

1. The singer, actor, and dancer Liza Minnelli has had a legendarily stormy life. Several marriages, her addiction struggles, not to mention having Judy Garland, herself legendarily stormy, as a mother: it’s been a lot, and it’s all laid out in her new memoir, “Kids, Wait Till You Hear This!” What could have easily made for an overwrought and even tragic read, however, is presented with a surprisingly light touch. Minnelli writes, “When you’re down and out, just shake off the dust and get back up.” A good note to self!

2. “The Real Housewives of Rhode Island,” the newest offering from Bravo’s “Real Housewives” franchise, is only in its first season, but it is already, in my eyes, a slam dunk. Once you get over the initial confusion of telling the ladies apart from each other (deep tans and long brunette extensions seem to be de rigueur in the Ocean State), you’ll love their straight-shooting, ballsy approach to life. Cheating husbands, money woes: it’s all discussed directly and openly, God bless them.

3. Now that Madonna is in an album-promotion cycle again, this time for the July release of “Confessions II,” it’s fun to reminisce on an earlier period in her career by watching the 1991 documentary “Truth or Dare.” Directed by Alek Keshishian, the movie follows the singer’s Blond Ambition tour, and, on top of lots of great live-concert footage, it includes a ton of behind-the-scenes deliciousness, including skirmishes with her then boyfriend Warren Beatty and sassy girl talk with her bestie at the time, Sandra Bernhard.

Illustration by Clay Hickson

I was raised in New Mexico, which means that I know my way around a craft fair. Growing up, I spent my summers bouncing between various folk-art festivals and artisan markets, where my parents would placate me with sugar-dusted funnel cake or a green-chile cheeseburger while they spent hours swanning around looking at rugs and pottery and hand-woven textiles. My aunt and uncle, who live in Santa Fe—home to the International Folk Art Market, one of the largest such festivals in the world (the next one is July 9-12)—are devoted flea-market pickers and collectors of antique oddities. (My aunt is the type of woman who gets genuinely excited to excavate a rusty turn-of-the-century weathervane from a random pile of jetsam.) This is all to say that I come by my obsession with bazaars honestly. Swap meets, church-basement sales, antiques expos: give me a chance to rummage through beautiful and strange things while engaging in chipper small talk with passionate venders and I’m in my element. My other true love is vintage clothing, and so summer is a dangerous time for me—it’s the high season for pop-up secondhand markets, where some of the best vintage dealers from around the country gather to sell their wares. Earlier this month, I dropped into the Pickwick Vintage Show at Grand Central Terminal—a thoughtfully curated annual fair that moves to L.A. on May 16, to San Francisco on May 17, and to Chicago on June 21—and scored some truly fantastic pieces. From Jessica Barr, the owner of Messy Jessy Vintage, I bought a diaphanous peach gown from the nineteen-sixties that felt straight out of “Valley of the Dolls,” and, from a Connecticut-based dealer who sells under the name Joyous Closet, I bought a velvet Escada smoking jacket, embellished with sequin clocks. Ridiculous? Definitely. But that’s the point of a vintage fair—you go in with a set spending cap, then let joy guide you. More markets are coming: The Vintage Market NY happens in Chelsea on May 23. Then, starting June 6, the vintage collective Thx It’s Thrifted will team up with the Lucky Flea to put on a thrift extravaganza in Williamsburg, continuing every other weekend through August 23. If you’re into nineteen-twenties garb, the Jazz Age Lawn Party, which takes over Governor’s Island June 13-14, features several venders who specialize in the era. Or, if you have any will power at all, you can spend the summer saving up for A Current Affair, perhaps the best archival fashion market in the city, which takes place every November in Industry City, Brooklyn. Whatever you choose, it’s so much better to buy vintage in person from knowledgeable purveyors. Old clothes come with stories. Don’t you want to hear them?

P.S. Good stuff on the internet:

• The charm of intercoms
• Last night’s sunset
• Pedro Friedeberg’s cat is called Netflix