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Are We Getting Stupider?
For nineteenth-century writers like Gustave Flaubert, the concept of stupidity came to encompass the lazy drivel of cliché and received opinion; one of Flaubert’s characters says that, in mass...
Building a State of Fear in “Extremist”
On November 16, 2023, Sasha Skochilenko, a thirty-three-year-old artist, poet, and musician, stood in court to give what is known in the Russian judicial system as the “last word”—final...
Guanyu Xu’s Powerful Photographs of Immigration Limbo
Also: Alvin Ailey’s annual City Center residency, the D.I.Y. virtuoso Jay Som, Alexandra Schwartz’s Shakespeare-movie picks, and more. 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...
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...
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,...
