On Book

August Wilson’s play just hit the big screen, but even greater rewards await on the page

The Baritone as Democrat

How Lawrence Tibbett prophesied the Metropolitan Opera crisis of today

My Cousin Manya

One survivor’s story

Writer on Board

The cruise story from Twain to Shteyngart

Nights at the Opera

Long before he wrote his masterly novels, Stendhal was transformed by the power of music

A Terrifying Delight

Following Robert Frost into the depths

Consummated in Exile

A new recording of Rachmaninoff’s Symphonic Dances conveys the breadth of the 20th-century composer’s life’s journey

The Importance of Being Different

A travel writer’s education

Stereotypes and the City

 What to make of HBO’s attempts to diversify an iconic show?

Ripeness Is All

What may be the fate of classical music’s new superstars?

The Very Elder Statesman

Konrad Adenauer transformed West Germany, doing his best work as an octogenarian

Iris as Pupil

Before this canonical English writer published novels, she was a student of French postwar philosophy

Starving

The feelings of yearning and loss, when faced with an empty nest, can manifest in striking ways

A State of Perpetual Unease

Sartre’s essay on French anti-Semitism cast the problem in existential terms

Keeping House

Clinging to the rituals of home—even when longing to let them go

Philip Gove and “Our Word”

A lexicographer remembers the worst frigging part of the job

Beethoven Underground

One ensemble bids farewell, with another just getting started

The Forgotten Writers of the Shoah

What the work of women survivors can tell us about the horrors of life in the camps

The Humanist in the Laboratory

A personal encounter with J. Robert Oppenheimer

The Decreationist

Simone Weil’s thoughts on the unmaking of the self

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