The New Yorker

In the past few years, Gillian Anderson has come by a significant new tranche of fans, thanks to her role on “Sex Education,” in which she plays Jean Milburn, a sex therapist with shaky personal boundaries and a fondness for chic jumpsuits. To the fictional teens in the show—and to the show’s TikTok-using core audience—Anderson’s character is an unfamiliar and appealing kind of parent figure: nonjudgmental, forthright, and startlingly hot. What Anderson has discovered—somewhat to her surprise, but also to her delight—is that the show’s themes have bled into her own life. She, no less than Jean Milburn, has become an icon of sexual frankness. The meme “Gillian Anderson made me gay” has been adopted by L.G.B.T.Q. people who credit the appeal offered by Anderson’s characters and by her own public persona. Anderson has wryly embraced the elision. For the past few years, her social-media accounts have featured images of suggestively phallic or vulval forms accompanied by the hashtags #penisoftheday or #yonioftheday. Earlier this year, at the Golden Globes, she wore an off-white dress that was embroidered with what the Telegraph referred to as “barely-there vaginas.” Last year, Anderson launched a range of sparkling soft drinks called G Spot. This fall, Anderson is upping the ante by publishing “Want,” a collection of women’s sexual fantasies that were anonymously submitted to her publisher, after she put out a public request for submissions. The experience of working on the book made Anderson think about her own sexual identity in terms she had never before considered. “Now, at the age of 55, I am thinking, Oh, am I pansexual? Am I bisexual?” she said. Anderson has achieved a new kind of symbolic relevance “as an avatar of the scrupulously careful, identity-affirming, progressive sexual politics of today,” Rebecca Mead writes. Read her full Profile of Anderson: https://lnkd.in/gBW7zjZP

Nanette Burstein’s documentary “Elizabeth Taylor: The Lost Tapes” is built around a series of audio interviews with Taylor from 1964, by the Life magazine journalist Richard Meryman. “The Lost Tapes,” which streams on Max starting August 3rd, not only unfolds the inner life of a movie star but also puts under intense scrutiny the very nature of Hollywood—the distinction between the art of movies and the distortions wrought when studios transform that art into big business. Burstein keeps the movie’s focus on its main source—Taylor’s voice. “The method is effective,” the film critic Richard Brody writes. The movie “is no radical advance in documentary form, but its emphasis on the auditory over the visual subtly suggests the disconnect between a private individual and her public image.” Read the full review: https://lnkd.in/guv27sYU

Today’s Daily Cartoon, by Farley Katz. #NewYorkerCartoons https://lnkd.in/gyRNDgTk

A cartoon by Pia Guerra and Ian Boothby. #NewYorkerCartoons See more from this week’s issue: https://lnkd.in/gxzPrC6B

A cartoon by Habiba Nabisubi. #NewYorkerCartoons See more from this week’s issue: https://lnkd.in/gM96c8xd

Administrators at many Catholic institutions, before shutting their doors, have mailed to Amy Surak—the archivist at Manhattan College—whatever material they felt needed to be preserved. Now, Surak is sifting and sorting through thousands of boxes of relics and floppy disks. In a wooden box on a shelf, she keeps a gumball-size chunk of the iliac bone of Jean-Baptiste de La Salle himself—a 17th-century French priest and educator. This relic is one of the few for which Surak has something like a chain-of-custody record. The provenance of most of the others is obscure. “If something is so powerful in your belief, and you think it heals you, or it provokes deeper spirituality, does it matter if it’s truly what it says it is?” she said. https://lnkd.in/gTPyniPE

A cartoon by Liana Finck. #NewYorkerCartoons See more from this week’s issue: https://lnkd.in/gn_vTVnd

The story of Emily Brontë, who was born on this day in 1818, and her sisters has long been one of sensational legend. The truth is less grim—but more beguiling. https://lnkd.in/gbXbNYvN

“Isn't food, after all, simply love boiled down to a concentrate?” In a new comic, Angie Wang illustrates her experience trying to get her parents to stop overstuffing her toddler. Read the full story: http://nyer.cm/M4CVwUk

Who will win the election in November? Will we lose our jobs because of A.I.? Will the planet boil or merely simmer? “We’re not in the dark about these questions; we can make educated guesses or predictions,” Joshua Rothman writes. “But there’s an odd way in which, the more informed our speculations become, the more they serve to highlight what we don’t know.” The philosophical subfield dedicated to the study of ignorance is called “agnotology.” This might seem abstract and even a little contradictory—but because ignorance is a condition from which we all suffer, the study of it is quite down to earth. There’s even a term, “ignoration,” which describes the condition of people who are unaware of how little they know. “In a broad, almost existential sense, we all live in ignoration all the time,” Rothman writes. “Recognizing this makes knowing what you don’t know feel like a step forward—even an opportunity to be seized.” Read his article about what we can learn from our ignorance, the first in his new column, out every Tuesday: https://lnkd.in/gMF5en62