Alliance Defending Freedom is on a winning streak. Once considered so extreme that its claims “bordered on the frivolous,” as one legal expert put it, the Christian advocacy group has now won 15 Supreme Court victories to date, including overturning Roe; its revenue has soared to more than $100 million a year; and its emboldened lawyers are taking on less explicitly religious concerns, including a recent battle over teaching about racism in schools. Any interest group mobilizes support more easily when there’s a looming threat, and in the past three decades, A.D.F. has found a perfect villain in the gay-rights movement. They’re “hellbent on eradicating L.G.B.T.Q. people from public life,” Sarah Warbelow, the legal director of the Human Rights Campaign, told David D. Kirkpatrick. At A.D.F.’s headquarters in Virginia, Kristen Waggoner, the group’s chief executive and general counsel, told Kirkpatrick that the organization’s next priority is fighting “the radical gender-identity ideology infiltrating the law”—that is, transgender rights. Waggoner—who’s featured in the illustrated children’s book “She Is She” as a “justice-seeking lawyer”—said that her group has been inundated by complaints from parents about liberal policies regarding trans issues, many of them asking, “I just learned from the school district that they’re calling my daughter by a different name—what can I do?” Pushing to establish “parental rights” as a constitutional principle, A.D.F. has now taken on suits across the country opposing liberal policies about children and adolescents who identify as transgender. “I have tried to bring to A.D.F. a spirit of offense rather than defense,” Waggoner told Kirkpatrick. “I’d rather have the A.C.L.U. and Planned Parenthood worried about what we are doing—not the other way around.” At the link in our bio, David D. Kirkpatrick reports on how A.D.F.’s lawyers have played the culture wars to win legal battles. Photo illustration by Joan Wong (@jningwong); Source photographs from Getty.

The cover for this week’s issue, “On the M Train,” by @nicolerifkin. #NewYorkerCovers

#twins #NewYorkerCartoons 🖊️ Zachary Kanin

Since the mid-1970s, Lydia Davis’s fiction has often taken as its subject matter the mistakes that creep into writing, or the misunderstandings that arise from speech and silence. Her painstaking attention to how the smallest units of language can be used or misused scales up to momentous questions about errors or missteps in human relations. On and off the page, Davis is reserved, droll, precise, and principled. She does not fly, eat meat, kill insects, or buy anything on Amazon; her newest collection of short stories, “Our Strangers,” will be available for purchase only at independent bookstores or through bookshop.org. “Even as a young writer, I never said, ‘I want to reach a large audience. I want to be famous,’” Davis says. “It was more like ‘I want to do something as good as Beckett.’ I would have high ambition, but it was not for fame and glory. I don’t think you can chase after that. My ambition was to do something really good, like my heroes.” Tap the link in our bio to read the full interview, on writing misunderstandings, singing with strangers, and living with principle. Photograph by @barth_lila for The New Yorker.

Today, the word “Luddite” is used as an insult to anyone resistant to technological innovation. But the new book “Blood in the Machine” argues that Luddism stood not against technology per se but for the rights of workers in the face of automation. “The book offers plenty of satisfying imagery for the 21st-century reader experiencing techlash,” @kchayka writes. It “argues that the message of Luddism is just as relevant today, as our lives become increasingly enmeshed with digital platforms, from TikTok to Uber and Instacart, that translate our labor and attention into profit.” Tap the link in our bio to read about how the Luddites fought against the forces of mechanization, and the lessons we can take from their struggle. Illustration by Nicholas Konrad (@iguessnick) / The New Yorker; Source photographs from Getty.

Olivia Rodrigo’s new album, “Guts,” is about being open and honest about the mistakes she’s made. On #NewYorkerRadio, Rodrigo talks to David Remnick about being inspired by role models who are unapologetically themselves.

“A falling off can indicate decline or diminishment, often gradual—the petering out of a business, for instance, or the decay of a once marvellous building,” @nicole_rudick writes. “Or it can refer to something abrupt, absolute. . . . Both senses haunt Barbara Mensch’s photographic history of lower Manhattan, in particular the Fulton Fish Market, which, for a time, was an island unto itself.” Newly collected into the book “A Falling-Off Place: The Transformation of Lower Manhattan,” Mensch’s images document the southern tip of the island across more than 40 years, beginning in the early 1980s. Tap the link in our bio to read about her immersion in the waterfront-market scene, and see its final years before its demolition and move uptown. Photographs by @menschphoto.

In the late aughts, decision-making researchers drawn from the ranks of social psychology and behavioral economics suggested that everyone was vulnerable to very subtle manipulations, and that benign alterations of our environment led to better outcomes: when the buffet items were rearranged to put the treats out of reach, for example, people seemed to consume fewer calories. Dan Ariely was at the forefront of this movement. “I wouldn’t say he was known for being super careful, but he had a reputation as a serious scientist, and was considered the future of the field,” a senior figure in the discipline said. Ariely would come to owe his reputation to his work on dishonesty, publishing a famous paper with his colleague, Francesca Gino, which included an experiment that used honesty pledges to reduce instances of cheating. The Obama Administration included the paper’s findings in an annual White House report, and government bodies in the U.K., Canada, and Guatemala initiated studies to determine whether they should revise their tax forms. Years later, a group of young professors known as Data Colada noticed that both professors’ contributions to the experiment seemed fishy. “We were, like, Holy shit, there are two different people independently faking data on the same paper,” Joe Simmons, a professor at Wharton and Data Colada member, said. “And it’s a paper about dishonesty.” Ariely and Gino both deny any wrongdoing. At the link in our bio, Gideon Lewis-Kraus unwinds the story of two behavioral scientists who became famous for their work on lying—and who now stand accused of bending the truth. Illustration by @brycewymer.

A cartoon by @carolitajohnson. #NewYorkerCartoons

A cartoon by @michaeljcomics. #NewYorkerCartoons

Sex can be awkward, sometimes for the people having it and sometimes for the people next door. “I’ve always been drawn to stories of unexpected or surprising intimacy,” the theatre director @mikemdonahue says of his film début, “Troy,” which depicts a New York City couple and their sexually active neighbor. But though the action begins in Unit 4-A, where two men are, from the sound of things, really enjoying themselves and each other, the film’s trajectory has more to do with the evolution of the couple in 4-B. Tap the link in our bio to watch it in full.

Some of the world’s most interesting authors, artists, and thinkers will join us at this year’s #NewYorkerFest. Here’s what to read to prepare—see the full lineup at the link in our bio.