On October 26, 2025, the actor Sarah Jessica Parker took the stage with the New Yorker staff writer Rachel Syme for a conversation at the 26th annual New Yorker Festival, a weekend of conversations, screenings, performances, and more. The Festival, which is the magazine’s signature event, was held in New York City and brought together leading voices in literature, film, comedy, television, politics, and medicine.

Sarah Jessica Parker is an actor, a producer, and a businesswoman, who has received six Golden Globe Awards, three Screen Actors Guild Awards, and two Emmy Awards. Parker currently stars in the series “And Just Like That . . .,” a sequel to the series “Sex and the City,” in which she starred while also serving as an executive producer. She has performed in the films “Footloose,” “L.A. Story,” “Honeymoon in Vegas,” “Ed Wood,” “Miami Rhapsody,” “The Family Stone,” and “State and Main,” among others. Onstage, Parker recently played opposite her husband, Matthew Broderick, in a revival of Neil Simon’s comedy “Plaza Suite,” for which she earned a nomination for Best Actress at the 2024 Olivier Awards. She is the co-founder of the award-winning company Pretty Matches Productions.

Rachel Syme, a staff writer for The New Yorker, has covered Hollywood, style, television, books, theatre, music, city life, and other cultural subjects since 2012. Her cultural criticism and reported features, which focus primarily on women’s lives, artistic production, history, and fame, have also appeared in the New York Times Magazine, GQ, New York, Vogue, Rolling Stone, and Vanity Fair, among other publications. She is the author of “Syme’s Letter Writer,” which was released in January of this year, and is now at work on a nonfiction collection for Knopf.