Well into his adult life, right after the birth of his twins, Andrew Lipstein started experiencing O.C.D. “I wasn’t always like this,” he writes. “The suddenness of it all was terrifying, even paralyzing, and yet, at the same time, oddly relieving.” If such a severe thing could come on so quickly, perhaps it could go away just the same way. “No, it wouldn’t—that quickly became apparent,” he continues. “As did the fact that, unless I got help, I might lose the ability to function in everyday life. How could I return from my parental leave in this state and keep my job? How could I write books? How could I possibly be a parent and husband?” Lipstein chronicles the ongoing process of learning to live with severe O.C.D.—while writing a book, going to exposure therapy, and caring for his family: newyorkermag.visitlink.me/Oo…

Today’s Daily Cartoon, by Habiba Nabisubi.

The Korean filmmaker Lee Chang-dong talks about his work in terms of exigencies: “Is this really necessary? Does this really need to be a film?” He’s referring not to the time, money, and labor necessary to sustain a feature-length film but to the social necessity of a particular story. “I like to think, both for me and the audience, What is an important issue that we’re struggling with right now?” he tells E.Tammy Kim. Lee’s most recent film, and his first feature in eight years, “Possible Love,” tells the story of a group of laborers who have recently been laid off from their factory jobs, and of the woman who is attempting to direct a documentary about their story. It is both a reflection on a real confrontation, from 2009, when a Korean car company fired a third of its workforce, and a tale of a violent betrayal which probes at the value of filmmaking itself. At the link in our bio, Kim spends time with Lee, and talks to him about his relationship to filmmaking. newyorker.com/magazine/2026/…

The first locks that resemble the ones we have today were created in ancient Egypt, but it wasn’t until the 18th and 19th centuries that locks started evolving, rapidly, with moving parrots and anti-picking booby traps. So, too, did the pastime of locksport: recreational, group study of how locks work, and how to pick them. Confronted with a dilemma—a six-slotted mailbox with just five keys—Shayla Love attended a meeting of the Open Organization of Lockpickers, and learned how to open a host of locks without any keys. “Once I could pick a lock, I saw the locks in my life differently,” Love writes. Read her essay: newyorkermag.visitlink.me/gf…

Whatever book you pick up, it’s likely to make you feel better—maybe even a whole lot better. “In a secular age, I suspect that reading fiction is one of the few remaining paths to transcendence, that elusive state in which the distance between the self and the universe shrinks,” Ceridwen Dovey writes, in “Can Reading Make You Happier?,” which was published in 2015. Dive into the research behind the therapeutic effect of books: newyorkermag.visitlink.me/Wv…

The newly minted Nobel Prize winner Anne Carson shared a book recommendation and some timeless writing advice at the 2024 National Book Awards.

In a new story by Joyce Carol Oates, a young girl named Kit is left outside the elevator doors in a hospital, waiting for her father to emerge. As a middle-aged woman, Kit—now Katherine—retells the story of her childhood abandonment, on the anniversary of the last day she saw her father. “He said, Come with me! Take Daddy’s hand,” Oates writes. “How all the stories begin. A large hand lowered, your small hand lifted.” Read Oates’s new short fiction: newyorker.com/magazine/2026/…