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
In Clint Bentley’s adaptation of a Denis Johnson novella, Joel Edgerton plays a builder of bridges who finds himself increasingly cut off from the modern world.
In addition to not being a tell-all, “American Canto” is not a book about Trump, nor is it about politics, as Nuzzi establishes in an author’s note. Rather, “it is a book about life in America as I have lived and observed it, and about the nature of our reality, and about character,” she explains. … Read more
Bion, who was born in 1897, in Muttra, India, to a European father and an Anglo-Indian mother, moved to England for boarding school at age eight. After fighting for the British in the First World War, he attended Oxford, and then University College London for medical school. By the time he entered formal analytic training, … Read more
