“Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead,” his 1966 Shakespearian meta-theatrical puzzle, about tertiary characters grappling with their inexorable fate, mainstreamed conversations about probability and droll ennui (“Life is a gamble, at terrible odds. If it were a bet you wouldn’t take it”). It hit the theatre like a comet. Even in an alternate reality in which … Read more
Perhaps Rigola should have been more willful in his handling of the text, since his libretto unfolds more like a selection of highlights from the play than like a freestanding adaptation. Ibsen’s five acts are compressed into two, with a total running time of less than ninety minutes. As a result, the collapse of Stockmann’s … Read more
For the cover of the December 8, 2025, issue, the cartoonist Klaas Verplancke wanted to capture how, as he put it, “shiny gold pales in comparison to the charm of Christmas lights.” The image also highlights the dissonance between the seemingly endless demands and executive orders coming from the White House, and the spirit of … Read more
Much like her childhood identification with communism, her writing began as something of a joke. She was utterly devoted to the Party’s ideals, but she also had a keen eye for grandstanding, and she noticed that some of her comrades seemed more committed to social climbing than to curing society’s ills. As a provocation, she … Read more
Looking back at the songs I played the most in 2025, I can sense my own hunger for music that felt wounded, carnal, unfamiliar, tactile, and askew—far from the uncanny sheen of A.I., far from the devastated feeling I get when I must scan a QR code to see a menu. I have listed fifteen … Read more
In this outline, “The Chair Company” could be a sketch premise: “guy loses it after embarrassing himself at a big meeting.” This was the problem that bedevilled “Friendship,” an A24 movie starring Robinson, released earlier this year, whose premise is “guy loses it after a neighbor rejects him socially.” It’s harder than it looks to … Read more
On his return to Frankfurt, he found it: the life of Götz von Berlichingen, an early-sixteenth-century knight with a prosthetic iron hand, whose autobiography Goethe had stumbled upon in the city library. In six weeks, he drafted his first major work: “Götz von Berlichingen,” a sprawling history play in five acts, which staged its hero’s … Read more
“The Diversity of Morals,” “Night People,” “Venetian Vespers,” and “Television.”
Is the term a new way of calling people pretentious, or does it reflect a deprioritization of the written word?
Ah, 2025—yet another heck of a year! In the audio realm, as elsewhere, inventiveness is essential during challenging times—so when video-chat podcasts predominate, celebrity-hosted podcasts won’t stop proliferating, and our old friend public radio is under attack, high-quality audio shows, against all odds, persist. Jonathan Goldstein’s wonderful “Heavyweight,” done wrong by Spotify in late 2023, … Read more