April 23, 2026 On Music The Art of the Libretto: A Conversation with Nilo Cruz By Sophie Haigney Photograph courtesy of Zenith Richards / Met Opera. In May, the opera El último sueño de Frida y Diego will open at the Metropolitan Opera. The opera centers on the artists Frida Kahlo and Diego Rivera—but not exactly as themselves. On the Day of the Dead, after Rivera prays for Kahlo’s return, she travels back from the underworld to visit the land of the living. There she finds Rivera, about whom she feels ambivalent; in life, their relationship had been characterized by his infidelity and emotional turmoil. The one rule: she can’t touch anyone, not even him. What happens between them when she exists only in spirit form? And what is it like for one of the great painters of the body to be back in the world without one? This opera explores mortality, pain, and the afterlife of a difficult love. It also manages to be sometimes funny and surprising, with a dynamic cast of other characters, including a feisty keeper of the underworld named Catrina and a young actor named Leonardo, who is enamored with Greta Garbo. Read More
April 21, 2026 On Architecture Empire Plaza State of Mind By Charlie Dulik The Egg under construction circa 1976., via Wikimedia Commons. Public domain. Entering Albany by highway from the south, as a fleet of buses did in late February, requires weaving through a nest of interchanges between the city and its waterfront, then shuttling west along a series of dingy arteries, before emerging onto a plaza the New York Times once said looked more like “the planet Krypton than the capital of the state of New York.” The Empire State Plaza, as it’s called, does indeed seem like something from another world, or perhaps from several others. The Capitol building, a hulking castle of rough, gray stone capped with ruddy terra-cotta, sits at the north end of the square; the other three sides are lined with eleven anonymous, modern structures, a mix of squat blocks and slim vertical slabs, all sheathed in shining white marble, over forty thousand tons in total. This odd assemblage of vaguely sinister buildings looks down on three reflecting pools and one enormous oblong entity—a bizarre, six-story Brutalist construction known simply as the Egg, which officially serves as a performing arts center but resembles nothing so much as a newly landed UFO. Read More
April 17, 2026 At Work The Conundrums of Jan Morris: A Conversation with Sara Wheeler By Jamie Lauren Keiles Mount Everest. Photograph by Nir B. Gurung, via Wikimedia Commons. Licensed under CC BY-SA 4.0. Jan Morris rose to fame in 1953 as a reporter working for the Times when she carried the news of the first ascent of Mount Everest back to base camp, England, and the world on the eve of Elizabeth II’s coronation. It was arguably the British Empire’s last triumph. Over the course of the next seven decades, Morris—at that time publishing as James—traveled widely through the empire’s dwindling dominion, writing sumptuously about colonial decline and the rise of a new postwar global order. After changing her sex in 1972 at Georges Burou’s famous Casablanca clinic, she published the best-selling memoir Conundrum (1974), a finely tuned and deeply felt account of the perils and strange delights of self-creation. When the scandal of her transformation had settled, Morris resumed her literary career, writing on Venice, Hong Kong, Trieste, the political rise of Abraham Lincoln, the history of Japanese battleships, and other geopolitical engrossments, until her death in 2020. Her life and work brought her into contact with many significant plot arcs of the twentieth century—not just the rearrangement of the world order but also the birth of LGBT civic consciousness. Despite this serendipitous proximity, she presents, in death, as a weak candidate for entry to any known saintly canon. Blithely humanistic, avowedly bourgeois, and often romantic to a point of equivocation, she’s suitable neither as a pride-month “trancestor” nor as a great literary firebrand. A new biography, Jan Morris: A Life—authorized by her children, who manage her estate—tries to figure out what to do with these loose ends. Its author, Sara Wheeler, is also a travel writer. She called me on Zoom with a shaky connection from “the ancient Atlantic Forest in central Paraguay,” where she was on assignment. We talked about Morris’s splintered legacy and the challenges of summing up a life. Read More
April 16, 2026 Making of a Poem Making of a Poem: Jeffrey Angles on “Memory of a Three-Year-Old” By Jeffrey Angles The writer in 1936. Nakahara family, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons. For our series Making of a Poem, we’re asking poets and translators to dissect the poems they’ve contributed to our pages. Jeffrey Angles’s translation of “Memory of a Three-Year-Old” appears in our new Spring issue, no. 255. This is one of two poems you’ve translated for this issue by Nakahara Chuya. To start, could you tell us a little about Chuya and the poem’s backstory? Nakahara Chuya (1907–1937) was a Japanese avant-garde Modernist poet. Although he had a short life and career, today he is one of the best-known twentieth-century poets, remembered for his intensely personal poems and unusual, striking diction. He is routinely included in Japanese-literature textbooks, and his poems have been set to music countless times. “Memory of a Three Year-Old” is a strange little poem that first appeared in the April 1936 issue of Bungei hanron (Literary counterarguments) and was included in Chuya’s second book of poetry, Arishi hi no uta (Songs of days that were, 1938), which was published not long after Chuya’s premature death from tuberculous meningitis. The memory described in this poem seems to date from Chuya’s early childhood, shortly after he returned to Japan after a couple of months spent in Manchuria, where his father, a high-ranking military doctor, was stationed following the Russo-Japanese War. Whether or not he had a roundworm infection like the one described in this poem is a fact lost to history, but there was a persimmon tree in the courtyard of his home at that time. In a letter to a friend, dated April 12, 1936, Chuya comments that his son had recently turned eighteen months old. He fantasized about withdrawing to the countryside, where he could relax and play with his boy. It seems that thinking about playing with his son prompted Chuya to reflect on his own past. Read More
April 15, 2026 Dispatch Between Wild West and Far East By Nastassja Martin Reindeer herders’ house in Bystrinsky Nature Park, Kamchatka. Photograph by NadezhdaKhaustova, via Wikimedia Commons. Licensed under CC BY-SA 4.0. Snowflakes whirl in the white daylight, and we advance with difficulty beneath the dense canopy. Dasho and Clint in front, me behind. Sweat drips down our foreheads. The snow crunches under our feet. Keep within the tracks! I think, every time I sink once more up to my thighs. After an hour’s trudging, bent over and with our shoulders hunched up to our ears, the landscape changes; the black spruce woods become sparser. The wind picks up as we lose the trees’ protection, and I muffle my face with my shapka’s earflaps. “Will you tell me where we’re going?” I shout to Dasho, trying to reach him over the wind’s bluster. “Nearly there,” he replies. “A little more patience and you’ll soon see.” We come out into a clearing, Dasho and Clint stop, and I follow suit. I look to the right and the left, and my gaze at last picks out a shape that’s blurry but discernible through the snowfall. Something large and white; something that is neither a house nor a tree. “Come,” Dasho says. “We’re here.” We walk towards the object, the contours of which become clear as we approach. It is a white, multifaceted sphere of imposing scale, perched on a metal structure that holds it suspended in the air. The structure must be between eight and ten meters high. At its foot, a ladder extends up towards a hatch in the sphere’s underside. I catch my breath and the boys light cigarettes, visibly pleased with themselves. “What is that?” They’re expecting my question; we have come all the way here precisely so I can ask it. “That,” Dasho says, “is America making sure the Russians can’t take Alaska back off them!” Read More
April 10, 2026 Arts & Culture Among the Antigones By Rhoda Feng Alessandra Lopez in Antigone in Analysis, March 19, 2026. Photograph by Marina Levitskaya. For a few weeks this spring, you couldn’t swing a thyrsus in New York without hitting a play about Antigone. Perhaps it started with Robert Icke’s Oedipus, the Broadway production from February, which featured a modern-day Antigone as a sulky teen who little suspects that her father is also her brother. Soon after, four different theaters across the five boroughs staged their own renditions of Sophocles’s famous play, reimagining his two-thousand-and-five-hundred-year-old mythic figure as, variously, a pregnant teenager, an analysis patient, an incestuous home renovator, and a freedom fighter in a fascist regime in the future. The latter, in a bid to underscore the theme of rebellion across the ages, went so far as to include audio from the ICE raids in Minneapolis. Read More