What it's like to be a prisoner of snow. The view from our living room window.

CBS News = See BS News? Go, Nikki Glaser!

Hyper-intensity in one hyper-intense closeup after another -- from the second row, no less. "Marty Supreme" was nearly sold out this afternoon so I watched it within spitting (sweating) distance of the screen. Exactly the right way to see it. As Sandler would say, "CHALAMET!"

Farewell to Tina Packer, the English-born founder of Shakespeare & Company. Visiting her theater in Lenox, Mass., was long one of my summer highlights. Her work brimmed with energy, wit and a vital command of the language that made Shakespeare make sense to anyone who listened.

I step out of the subway at nightfall, and this is the first thing I see.

This makes my heart sing. www.nytimes.com/2026/01/09/t...

I'm a bit late to the skate party. But I would like to thank Jacob Tierney for creating a show that a lot of us turned out to really need. I never expected to identify with, much less cry for, two hockey bros -- or that romance TV could honor its genre and still feel truthful.

The first moon of 2026. It looks like it's burning, doesn't it? On the ground, all is cold -- really, really cold.

Farewell to Jacqueline de Ribes, the French countess who became a fashion designer and a swan-necked emblem of a rarefied, vanishing elegance. I knew her a bit in Paris in the 80s, and her rigor of style was set off by a schoolgirl's joie de vivre. She giggled (elegantly).

Farewell to 2025, a year of many horrors and an inkling of hope. May that balance shift, please, in 2026.

Farewell, my comrades. The snow is falling fast and thickly.

There comes a moment for me every December, when family ghosts hover insistently, when floodgates open into a rush of tears. Today, that catharsis was triggered by Bess Wohl's wonderful "Liberation," which exults in the power of theater to imagine and connect with the past lives that shaped our own.

An energizing double header off-Broadway yesterday: a sweet, cozy "Baker's Wife" (my first) with Ariana DeBose soaring through "Meadowlark"; and a fast, flashy "Richard II," with Michael Urie, who speaks the speech with athletic brio, as a hedonist king who loses his right to party.

Something solid and bright shines through the stage fog of O'Neill's "Anna Christie" at St. Ann's Warehouse: Michelle Williams. She endows the title role of a lost woman among loutish men with sensitivity, complexity and a dawning proto-feminist conviction; she earns her rebirth.

I got to hang out with my new favorite couple. www.nytimes.com/2025/12/19/t...

The New York Times' Year in Pictures portfolio for 2025 is harrowing. As you scroll through, what unfolds is a tapestry of ever-darkening destruction and inhumanity. A portrait of a world on fire. Or in ashes. www.nytimes.com/interactive/...

Someone has planted a Swiftian chip, or perhaps a virus, in my brain. I was driving along with the radio on, when somehow I found myself doing the hand gestures to "The Fate of Ophelia" and drifting off the road. I didn't even know I knew those gestures.

This morning, emerging from the forsythia....

We won't be going anywhere today.

"Wake Up Dead Man" is the most likable of Rian Johnson's "Knives Out" series, partly because Josh O'Connor gives it an affecting emotional core. Despite the gore, it's great winter comfort food, with its gathering of familiar faces, like a deluxe episode of "Murder, She Wrote."

Just finished Ian McEwan's "What We Can Know." I might have admired it more if I hadn't recently been revisiting Tom Stoppard, whose journeys between past, present and future are more passionate and profound. But it's juicy, full of rueful cleverness in its nostalgia for today.

I give you some fairly photogenic falling snow.

"La Boheme" is like "Casablanca" for me, in that whenever I come across it, I can't turn away. Just now I sat in my driveway for seven minutes, so Mimi could breathe her last on the wings of violins in the (sumptuous) Met live broadcast. Sigh.

I'd forgotten the thrill of hearing a single actor subdue a Broadway audience into a silence so intense it vibrates. That's what Lesley Manville achieved tonight during a monologue in Robert Icke's "Oedipus," the sense that we didn't dare to breathe for as long as she spoke.

Like crocuses in snow, theater erupts, giddy and bright, in harsh places in Anne Washburn's work. Now, in the great tradition of the "Simpsons" operetta in the post-apocalyptic, "Mr. Burns," comes blazing fairytale theater from rustic communards in her new "Burning Cauldron of Fiery Fire."

Back from "Little Bear Ridge Road" and astonished again by how fully yet subtly Laurie Metcalf physically inhabits a character. Her stiff-legged, restless walk in Samuel D. Hunter's quietly heartbreaking play is in itself a marvel -- a determined locomotive battle against gravity and loss.

It's the birthday of Julie Harris, who had a knife-edged delicacy and an undimming ardor. This made her an almost sacred presence on stage. Of course she was Joan of Arc and Frankie Addams, martyrs to a passion, tough and fragile. She was the embodiment of theater as religion.

It is World Aids Day. I worked as a volunteer for Gay Men's Health Crisis for six years, late 80s on, as an all-purpose dogsbody for people who were sick. You became close to your clients very fast and then, all too often, you lost them almost as quickly. A truly tragic time. No, we cannot forget.

I remember Stoppard, for the New York Times. www.nytimes.com/2025/11/29/t...

Farewell to Tom Stoppard, who as a playwright made words dance, explode, soar to the heavens and acknowledge their own limitations as they did so. And always glowing within the cerebral fireworks was a questing, rueful, empathic wonder. He took us to Arcadia and Utopia and back.

Good evening.

Because it's Thanksgiving, I paused to watch Kate Bush out on the wily, windy moors, a performance that never fails to make me grin like a fool. An 18-year-old genius was exactly who was needed to translate "Wuthering Heights" into pop, as a hypnotic trance of angry rapture.

The stuff that dreams are made on: I take a walk on the transcendentally wild side with my favorite productions at the explosively fertile St. Ann's Warehouse, where theater rocks and roils. www.nytimes.com/2025/11/25/t...

Farewell to the seductive, propulsive Jimmy Cliff, whom I first saw on screen in a Chelsea movie theater at midnight amid the smoke of a hundred spliffs. The film was "The Harder They Come," with Cliff as a charismatic Jamaican outlaw; I have been dancing to his voice ever since.

Recipe for a relaxing Sunday afternoon: Reread Tracy Lett's (superb) script for "Bug," which takes conspiracy theory logic to its extreme conclusion. Then watch Kathryn Bigelow's (superb) "House of Dynamite," which counts down to a nuclear attack. Or: Just run nerves through shredder.

A most useful new word: "gloomth," meaning a gloomy warmth, associated with Horace Walpole, the progenitor of the Gothic novel. This I learned from a piece by Jon Day in the London Review of Books. My own house is steeped in gloomth on this dark November day.

Happy birthday to Goldie Hawn. I interviewed her for Vanity Fair in 1989 and found her shrewd, self-aware and willfully, enchantingly delightful. Robert Towne observed that for her happiness is a "very existential thing, a deliberate choice," which doesn't mean it's not real.

I return to the country, where I awake to find I have been sleeping with ladybugs.

Has any movie in recent years been as truly bad as "The Love Machine" from 1971? Paper-doll characters, push-button cynicism, acting so affectless it might be from a porn movie. It's so unspeakably bad that it's not much fun, except when Dyan Cannon sets fire to a lot of clothes.

Farewell, Dublin, to which I came for the Abbey Theatre's invaluable conference on criticism in crisis and from which I depart tomorrow. I hardly knew ye, though I already know enough to say you're my kind of town.

Dropping in on old friends in Dublin at twilight.

Watching "Casablanca" again and fascinated, as always, to watch how it confirms Humphrey Bogart as a brave new romantic lead. Everything feeds this perception: its not just how Ingrid Bergman looks at him (as he has said): it's how everyone, including Claude Rains, looks at him.

"Isn't this wine a little bitter?" asks Joan Caulfield, a blur of blondeness. "Dry is the word," answers Claude Raines, who has poisoned her. Why did nobody tell me about "The Unsuspected"? It exaggerates the formula of "Laura," and out-camps camp. Why, here's Audrey Totter and Hurd Hatfield!

And now, Manhattan, wrapped in mist at midnight. The view from the 64th floor.

It was that final fantasy of entering the afterlife that most enchanted me when I belatedly read C.S. Lewis's Narnia Chronicles for the first time -- the idea of moving "farther up and farther in": "You couldn't tell whether he was swimming or climbing." www.nytimes.com/2025/11/06/b...

This is where the curfew tolls the knell of parting day, and all that...

Now here's a quartet of faces to smile for. The team for the new Miss Piggy movie.

I woke up to headlines that somehow made me flash on Cyd Charisse singing (or lip syncing) "I see a new sun, up in a new sky" in "The Bandwagon." Savor the moment.

Is it too early to say "Yee-haw!"?

Done.