World

Samuel Beckett on the Couch
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...
What We’re Reading
“Train Dreams” Is Too Tidy to Go Off the Rails
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. Source link
Does Olivia Nuzzi Make Good Copy?
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...
Now Watch Me Read
Performing personhood has perhaps never been as panoptical, and top of mind, as it is today. Social-media platforms prioritize the fastidious maintenance and monitoring of online personas, creating spaces...
The Best Podcasts of 2025
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...
What Makes Goethe So Special?
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 High-Born Rebel Who Took Up the Cause of the Commoner
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...
Klaas Verplancke’s “White House of Gold”
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...
The Best Albums of 2025
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...
Tim Robinson Finds Humanity—and Tests It—in “The Chair Company”
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...
“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...