Style
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...
“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
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
The Offices Only a Newsperson Could Love
There is something inspiring about an ugly building. I don’t mean high-concept ugly, like a brutalist tower, but rather a place that’s provisional, and purely functional, if barely—your Meadowlands,...
