“An Enemy of the People” Becomes a Spanish Opera
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.…
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Where Dante Guides Us
Hell is nevertheless filled with bloody and horrific torments. In Dante’s eyes, some sinners fully deserve what they get: corrupt clerics, for example—including a Pope—are jammed upside…
What Does “Capitalism” Really Mean, Anyway?
The endgame of capitalism, in his account, is a world where “almost nothing escaped commodification.” Beckert here refers to commodities in the loose, colloquial sense of “products that…
The Obliging Apocalypse of “Pluribus”
The new sci-fi drama from Vince Gilligan posits an end-of-humanity scenario that everyone other than its protagonist can agree on. Source link
“This World of Tomorrow” and “Oedipus” Dramatize the Power of the Past
To write “Tomorrow,” Hanks and Glossman adapted several of Hanks’s own short stories, primarily “The Past Is Important to Us,” which he had long hoped might become a movie. Much of the…
If the Legal Campaigns Against Donald Trump Had Ended Differently
“Injustice” largely ignores those cases. Its drama is tightly enclosed within the D.O.J.—illuminatingly but also, at times, suffocatingly so. Bragg’s prosecution gets a little more than a…
Ruth Asawa’s Art of Defiant Hospitality
“It was the first time in my life I didn’t have to do anything,” Asawa later said. She took drawing lessons from three interned Disney animators in an ad-hoc school for the camp’s…
Solvej Balle’s Novels Rewire the Time Loop
Before Tara Selter, the protagonist of “On the Calculation of Volume,” a series by the Danish author Solvej Balle, gets trapped in a time loop, she is one half of a unit called T. & T.…
Rosalía Doesn’t Want to Take It Easy
Sometimes it seems as if everyone wants to be a pop girlie. Last year, Taylor Swift counted herself among the “tortured poets,” but nowadays she is a self-described “showgirl,” having…
At Ninety, Arvo Pärt and Terry Riley Still Sound Vital
In the spring of 1976, a Latvian architecture student named Hardijs Lediņš organized a music festival at the Riga Polytechnic Institute. The venue was a disused Anglican church where…
A Bulgarian Novelist Explores What Dies When Your Father Does
That’s where time visibly slows down, it dozes off in the corners, blinking like a cat looking through thin blinds. It’s always afternoon when you remember something, at least that’s how…
Anthony Hopkins’s Beckettian Memoir
Hamlet, to say the least, was in a similar pickle, and it’s almost comically appropriate that Hopkins’s memoir should be so father-haunted. “What the hell is wrong with you? You should get…
The Surprising Endurance of Martha Stewart’s “Entertaining”
To most readers, this will seem like fantasy. To Stewart, it was a snapshot of real life. She grew up in a large, middle class Polish American family in New Jersey, with parents who often…
Laurie Metcalf’s Stunning Return to Broadway in “Little Bear Ridge Road”
Samuel D. Hunter’s “Little Bear Ridge Road,” directed by Joe Mantello at the Booth, on Broadway, is a small, quiet drama set in a large, quiet corner of the country. We’re somewhere in…
Why Immanuel Kant Still Has More to Teach Us
That may not exactly sound like a call to arms, but the title of an expert and engaging new introduction to the philosopher encourages us to think otherwise. “Kant: A Revolution in…
How Monsters Went from Menacing to Misunderstood
With the Enlightenment, monsters were brought under the lamp of reason. The Hydra, the unicorn, mermaids—careful observers exposed them as hoaxes or misidentified species. The French…
How Corporate Feminism Went from “Love Me” to “Buy Me”
In retrospect, the book feels like an artifact of a fleetingly optimistic moment, and of a time when the mainstreaming of feminism—recall Beyoncé performing in front of a screen flashing…
Tame Impala Is an Obsessive, Not a Perfectionist
The magic of Parker’s music—what makes his records so restless, dithery, dynamic—hinges on the minuscule yet crucial difference between perfectionism (endlessly boring) and obsession…
The Hunt for the World’s Oldest Story
I read George Eliot’s “Middlemarch,” sometimes hailed as the greatest British novel, in a rain forest in western Indonesia. I was there as a graduate student, spending my days slogging…
Peter Matthiessen Travelled the World, Trying to Escape Himself
But it wasn’t until he arrived in Paris, during his junior year abroad, that he could truly nurture his bohemian streak. The city was still reeling from the Second World War. The power…
A Season of Rage at the Philharmonic and the Met
John Corigliano’s First Symphony, which Gustavo Dudamel and the New York Philharmonic presented early in the new season, begins with a blistering wail of orchestral rage. Strings play a…
The Unexpected Sweetness of Bill and Ted’s “Waiting for Godot”
The jokes started before rehearsals did. “Waiting for Bill and Ted”; “Bill and Ted’s Existentialist Adventure”; “Party On, Godot!” How could we not make cracks after Keanu Reeves and Alex…
Gertrude Stein’s Love Language
Stein’s authority as an arbiter was bolstered by an ambiguously gendered seduction. Genius, she believed, was a masculine trait, and she felt that her own genius was male. After she…
Where the Battle Over Free Speech Is Leading Us
When we think of the history of free-speech rights, we tend to think of the Anglo-American legal tradition. A virtue of Dabhoiwala’s book is that it is transnational, and there are…