World
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...
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...
Tom Stoppard’s Radical Invitation
“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,...
How the Ceramicist Alev Ebüzziya Siesbye Makes Bowls That Hold Time
Each pot takes six to seven hours to build, with coils that she flattens into thick bands. She starts a new series by drawing the forms she has in...
