Had just finished Kracht’s Eurotrash yesterday, in an edition whose cover sports one of Parr’s photographs.

Today I learned that Art Garfunkel's son, Art Garfunkel, Jr., has released a teutonically-tinged Christmas album and I was not prepared to hear this guy sing "Winter Wonderland" in German.

I just told a friend that I could fill out this entire Anna Netrebko Accountability Advent Calendar quite easily but it seemed like overkill and they responded that people in their 20s have no idea about half of her problematic moments and oh my god 2019 was six years ago

Featuring: – An Alma Mahler Labubu – The Britten Seaside Trauma snow globe – “Fratres” for Cats – The “Anna Netrebko Accountability” Advent Calendar – Lush’s “Shostakovich Panic Attack” bath bomb

Musicologists: Can someone with an AMS Journal subscription help me out with a recent article that's not on JSTOR?

Oh, you all think the "Last Christmas" from Vienna is unhinged? That's cute.

‘“We can’t stay here through the winter,” my mother said. “Our tents are worn out.” I had no answer for her. Even if we had been allowed to cross the Yellow Line to get to Rafah, our home there had been destroyed months ago.’ Hassan Ayman Herzallah reports from Gaza www.lrb.co.uk/blog/2025/no...

Every job will invariably give you transferrable skills: When I was in college I worked answering phones and making bookings for a dungeon, and this week I didn’t have to look up “felching.”

Social media dumbspeak has cooked my brain to the point where I just read “unavailing” as “unaliving.”

‘After two long years during which use of the word “ceasefire” was enough to put you at risk of losing your livelihood, “ceasefire” has become something we are expected to be grateful for, now that “ceasefire” means continued genocide.’ @selmadabbagh.bsky.social www.lrb.co.uk/blog/2025/no...

Unprepared as I was to learn that Tom Stoppard has died, I was even less prepared to learn that he punched up Last Crusade.

Patti Smith is definitely one of the rockers who incorporates religious ecstasy into her performances, only instead of channeling American gospel like the rest of her generation it feels more like she went with Hildegard of Bingen

Is this Etsy description too unhinged or not unhinged enough? www.etsy.com/de-en/listin...

Handing back student work that’s been written by ChatGPT with a 0 followed by the comment “This essay will never stand in authentic wonder before the Beauty of God’s creation.”

"no seriously you think it’s so funny that i saw flowers in winter like oh let’s make fun of the guy who took a risk and put himself out there romantically."

No wonder he sired so many children.

That rest at the start of Beethoven’s Fifth, the silent beat that Epstein insisted “changes the whole dynamic” is an indictment of the world that enabled him. Silence — institutional, social, and cultural — shaped the dynamic of Epstein’s ascent.

I love it when the algo rhymes

This bodes well for the likelihood of mass violence in the future

Someone should show Megyn Kelly this document from the Epstein Files: an email forward of historical photos. The sender instructs Epstein and someone named Warren to ”go directly to photo #9.” The image is of five-year-old Lina Medina after giving birth.

"The history of classical music is not one of peace or universality — it’s one of rupture… When artists today demand that their work hover above the conflicts around them, they’re not defending tradition or history; they’re abandoning it."

When you "believe in people" but you use GPT to write your carousel statement for IG.

Hot take: People who actively profited off of the mindfulness industrial complex and charged members of a school of Buddhism to discuss the SA charges brought against that school’s leader don’t get to take the wheel of this discussion.

‘When Maksym’s father, Zakhar Berkhut (bass Taras Berezhansky), sings about “glorious Kyiv lying in ruins” at the hands of the Mongol-Tatar horde, it has all the subtlety of an FGM-148 Javelin.’ @oliviagiovetti.bsky.social at the Lviv National Opera. www.lrb.co.uk/blog/2025/no...

A few more thoughts on The Golden Crown, Ukrainian opera's place in the repertoire, and the industry's selective solidarity.

I don't think I can handle the pressure of ruining both the workplace AND the Stadtbild.

If there are moments in the first two acts of The Golden Crown that feel disjointed or rushed, particularly to an audience member not familiar with its source work as a cultural inheritance, the opera’s third act blew me away. Some thoughts from last month in Lviv for @lrb.co.uk

Re-upping the dedication of Mahmood Mamdani's 2020 book, 'Neither Settler nor Native'.

Dick Cheney once had an 8-page, single-spaced cease-and-desist letter sent to us at WhiteHouse.Org, which we published but otherwise ignored. He was incensed about his wife's "Biography." I added the following, which was reported on CNN and quoted in The New York Times. #StreisandEffect

Wait who did Cheney endorse in the NYC mayoral campaign

As it turns out I have accumulated a lot of flea market art and objects that are gathering dust and should really be enjoyed by someone so I’m back on Etsy for the first time in 16 years www.etsy.com/de-en/shop/n...

I hate gay Halloween what do you mean you’re not the devil you’re actually Joseph Rouleau in the 1973 Who’s Afraid of Opera version of Gounod’s Faust

And all while building a ballroom.

The only thing that should frighten anyone about Mamdani is his theatre-kid energy.

Bret Stephens is at Google now?

You’re telling me that Curtis Sliwa and JoJo Siwa are two different people

Konzept: All-female Billy Budd and it’s set in a high school a la Jennifer’s Body.

Shevshchenko lassoes the moon, Lviv

In Poland talking in French with my South African cab driver about the political situation in Burkina Faso as he drives me to a meet-up point for my trip into Ukraine. What a world.

Can pre-crime get you pregnant or is that just a myth they teach you in abstinence-only Marxism?

During the curtain call for Verdi’s 1847 Macbeth in Busseto last night, two of the dancers laid a Palestinian flag on the stage. Most of the audience kept applauding though there were a few boos. And you had to wonder which part of ‘gli oppressi corriamo a salvar’ the booers hadn’t heard.

One must imagine Sisyphus redpilled.

I don't know what to say anymore but at least I'm not about to start arguing that Ivan Khovansky was practicing politics the right way.

Gorilla Gluing my head to my desk

Campaigning for the NYT's classical critic gig on the platform of bringing back reads like this line from 1900.

‘When Studs Terkel described her as “a writer of profound compassion and tenderness and understanding”, Parker asked if he was “talking about somebody else”.’ Kasia Boddy on Dorothy Parker: www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v4...

Find someone to hold you the way Robert Redford held a cup

An AI slop remake of The Conformist is the aesthetic we deserve.

friends, a classic: