The New YorkerModify

As the breeze cools down, the culture season heats up, with many new shows confronting our current moment, alongside escapist entertainments that may just help us forget. Social media and tech billionaires seem to be on artists’ minds, with a television reboot of “Carrie” for the Snapchat age; the playwright Anne Washburn’s take on a Texan TikToker; Alex Gibney’s documentary about a certain Tesla mogul; and Aaron Sorkin’s fictional uncovering of the dark underbelly of Facebook Likes. MOMA trains a lens on both the work and the relationship of Abstract Expressionism’s most famous couple; the Australian Ballet premières a dance about an Irish literary rapscallion; new-world boundary pushers Kim Gordon and Charli XCX grace the stage; the New York Philharmonic accompanies a scary Jordan Peele classic, just in time for Halloween.

Diverting delights also abound: Matthew McConaughey and Woody Harrelson play versions of themselves on TV; Jocelyn Bioh’s Ghanaian boarding-school satire comes to Broadway; Tom Cruise stretches his comedy wings as a schlumpy Southern billionaire in a disaster movie by Alejandro González Iñárritu; the synth-pop queen Robyn brings catharsis to the stadium; Fall for Dance diversifies brilliantly (and, as ever, affordably); the art and accoutrements of Brancusi arrive from Paris; Steve Reich turns ninety. Enjoy our critics’ picks for what to see this fall, and start making plans.—Shauna Lyon

Jump to: Television | Art | The Theatre | Movies | Dance | Contemporary Music | Classical Music

Illustration by Lucy Jones; Source photographs from Getty

In the trailer for the new Russell T. Davies drama “Tip Toe” (Oct. 2), a flamboyant gay elder sums up today’s social revanchism when he says, “I used to walk into a room and just go, Ta-da! Now I tiptoe—just in case.” The TV shows that aim to capture the Zeitgeist this fall are few but brimming with potential. Davies, who came to prominence with the original “Queer as Folk,” set in Manchester, England, returns to that city’s night-life scene with the Starz series, in which Alan Cumming plays the owner of a gay bar contending with a homophobic neighbor whose bigotry is stoked by online radicalization. Internet cruelty also features in CBS’s “Cupertino” (Oct. 8), the latest legal procedural from the “Good Wife” creators Robert and Michelle King. Mike Colter stars in the ripped-from-the-headlines drama, which centers on a new law firm that sets out to advocate for the victims of Silicon Valley’s most powerful companies. In the case of HBO’s divorce drama “War” (Oct. 1), the destructive pettiness of a tech mogul (Dominic West) is matched by that of his movie-­star wife (Sienna Miller).

The next few months also offer up some offbeat premises. Foremost among them is Apple TV’s meta-comedy “Brothers” (Sept. 23), which stars Matthew McConaughey and Woody Harrelson playing versions of themselves who discover that they may be related. The pair move in together, as McConaughey contemplates a Texas gubernatorial run. The immortal disapproval of the in-laws gets a supernatural spin with CBS’s “Eternally Yours” (Oct. 8), in which a married vampire couple look askance at their daughter’s human partner. And, on the heels of the surprise popularity of “Widow’s Bay,” the Netflix thriller “Below” (Oct. 8) finds a Newfoundland fisherman (Josh Hartnett) trying to stave off an enigmatic under­water creature from his coastal village.

But just as many shows seem to be betting on familiarity and nostalgia. Muhammad Ali gets the inspirational treatment in Prime Video’s “The Greatest” (Nov. 4), starring Jaalen Best as an up-and-coming Ali. “A Different World” (Sept. 24), the “Cosby Show” spinoff set at a historically Black university, gets a Netflix reboot with returning fan favorites Jasmine Guy and Kadeem Hardison. Martin Lawrence, too, reprises his “Martin” character, in a new spinoff of that legendary sitcom; starring Tommy Davidson, Paramount+’s “The Varnell Hill Show” (Sept. 1) looks at the mayhem of TV production, from the point of view of Davidson’s local talk-show host.

Late autumn reliably brings Halloween programming. The “Friday the 13th” franchise gets an A24-produced prequel in Peacock’s “Crystal Lake” (Oct. 15), starring Linda Cardellini. And, despite three prior screen adaptations of “Carrie,” the Stephen King character—a mal­adjusted high-school girl who takes bloody revenge on her bullies—anchors a new Prime Video series (Oct. 7) from the horror honcho Mike Flanagan, set in the present day. This time, Carrie’s harassment is amplified by technology—but her rage remains timeless.—Inkoo Kang

Illustration by Kati Szilágyi

Fall is arguably the biggest season for New York’s museums, the time when they mount their most ambitious and scholarly shows—and this year does not disappoint. The highest-profile shows can largely be grouped into two categories: exhibitions that engage with canonical figures and those which spotlight long-working living artists.

Among the former, the Museum of Modern Art’s “Brancusi: The Artist and His Studio” (opens Oct. 25) looms large. The modernist sculptor worked in the same studio, in Paris, for more than forty years; when he died, he left its contents to the French state, which built a replica of the space to display them. That site is temporarily closed, and many of the items—pedestals and furniture, photographs and tools—are coming from Paris for this show, giving Brancusi’s cool, abstract sculptures a rich, human context.

The Whitney Museum is betting on a big name, too. “Roy Lichtenstein: Like New” (Oct. 11) reëxamines the prescience of the renowned Pop artist in our digital world. Lichtenstein’s paintings are highly recognizable, but many people may not realize how much labor went into re-creating images from mass media by hand. This exhibition surveys the breadth of his practice, and includes a reproduction of his first Pop-art show, in 1962. A small companion exhibition at the Whitney, “Roy Lichtenstein: 1997” (Sept. 5), focusses on the last year of his life.

The Metropolitan Museum of Art is taking a slightly different approach to revisiting history. “Krasner and Pollock: Past Continuous” (Oct. 4) isn’t the first exhibition to put the storied Abstract Expressionist couple side by side, but it may be the most comprehensive. Jackson Pollock was more famous, but Lee Krasner outlived him by almost three decades. The show navigates these complexities while moving through their lives, including the twelve years that they were married. It places them on equal footing—a feminist corrective that’s been a long time coming.

In the contemporary camp, the New Museum leads the charge with “Arthur Jafa: I Am Tony” (Sept. 24), the artist’s largest exhibition yet. Jafa started out as a cinematographer, working on films such as Julie Dash’s “Daughters of the Dust,” from 1991, before transitioning to his own projects. He broke through in 2016 with the short video montage “Love Is the Message, the Message Is Death,” which captures the painful contradictions of African American life. This expansive show features not just moving-image work but also paintings, sculptures, and installations.

Though they come from different backgrounds, Jafa and Teresa Margolles are kindred spirits of a kind: artists of similar ages transmuting sociopolitical realities into potent art. MOMA PS1 is mounting a survey of Margolles’s work (Sept. 24), which is rooted in her training as a forensic pathologist. The exhibition’s centerpiece, “La promesa” (2012), is a neat rectangular sculpture made of rubble from an abandoned house in Ciudad Juárez, a place infamous for high rates of femicide. In tandem with the show, MOMA is displaying a new work by Margolles in one of its collection galleries (Sept. 17).

Taryn Simon takes a similarly conceptual approach to complex subjects. This fall, she’s filling the Guggenheim Museum’s rotunda with “Father Country I Do Love You” (Sept. 18), a project that’s been in the works for nearly a decade. It tracks the life and times of a bureaucratic federal agent, but obliquely, in Simon’s typical style, using photographs, text, and other works to reveal a refracted narrative. If you prefer more straightforward storytelling, visit the Brooklyn Museum’s “Art of Manga” (Oct. 3), which explores the popular Japanese comics form primarily through the work of eight seasoned artists.—Jillian Steinhauer

Illustration by Lucy Jones; Source photographs by
Rodrigo Vaz / Getty; Smith Collection / Gado / Getty

This fall’s stages brim with families, each exquisitely disconsolate in its own way. The parents in Jon Robin Baitz’s drama “Other Desert Cities” (Hudson; previews begin Sept. 29), which stars Julia Louis-Dreyfus, Ed Harris, and Allison Janney, face a threat to their social standing in the form of a daughter’s forthcoming memoir. The new musical “Wanted” (James Earl Jones; Oct. 15) adapts the story of outlaw twins on the lam. Simon Stone’s reupholstered “The Cherry Orchard” (Park Avenue Armory; Sept. 16) transposes Chekhov’s squabbling aristocrats into Korean tycoons in Seoul. Daniel Fish directs Anne Carson’s translation of Sophocles’ grimmest masterwork, “Elektra” (Polonsky Shakespeare Center; Nov. 10), based on the ancient tale of familial revenge. A young woman chases her mysteriously vanished father (Frances Jue) through San Francisco’s Chinatown in Lauren Yee’s surrealistic comedy “King of the Yees” (Signature Theatre; Oct. 6). In Nick Payne’s “The Unbelievers” (Manhattan Theatre Club at City Center; Oct. 13), with Lauren Ambrose, a family reckons with the disappearance of a beloved son, while “2:22: A Ghost Story” (Lucille Lortel; Oct. 20) suggests that empty houses are rarely as vacant as they appear. Richard Nelson adds another installment to his Rhinebeck political play cycle; “We’ll See” (Public; Oct. 25) follows the Apple family on Election Night of the 2026 midterms.

Classics get a reboot at several venues. A revival of “The Fantasticks” (Hayes; Oct. 22) remixes the longest-running Off Broadway musical ever as a gay romance for Broadway. Steven Pasquale makes his directing début with Clifford Odets’s “Waiting for Lefty” (Classic Stage Company; Oct. 15), turning a Depression-­era cab-strike drama into an immersive union-hall vote. A clubby “Much Ado About Nothing” (Winter Garden; Oct. 31), directed by Jamie Lloyd, stars Tom Hiddleston and Hayley Atwell as the sparring singletons. Emma Rice brings her company back to St. Ann’s Warehouse with her determinedly upbeat “Tristan & Yseult” (Nov. 1). Molière’s “The Imaginary Invalid” (Todd Haimes; Sept. 25) features Bill Irwin as the titular patient, whose gibbous self-regard and baroque health rituals are exfoliated for our looksmaxxing age. Life is both lived and understood backward in the première of a musical adaptation of “The Curious Case of Benjamin Button” (Public; Oct. 8), starring Andrew Durand. The cast of August Wilson’s bluesy “Seven Guitars” (Mitzi E. New­house; Nov. 5), directed by Ruben Santiago-Hudson, includes Roslyn Ruff and John Douglas Thompson. A slick military lawyer uncovers a coverup in “A Few Good Men” (Vivian Beaumont; Oct. 8), with Bradley Whitford as the iconic antagonist.

Contemporary conversations drive many new works. Maria Dizzia directs Marin Ireland’s play “Pre-Existing Condition” (Greenwich House; Sept. 1), about the aftermath of domestic abuse, with a rotating cast that includes Susannah Flood, Hari Nef, Lupita Nyong’o, and Phillipa Soo. Else Went’s “Degenerates” (Playwrights Horizons; Sept. 16) ventures into an incel community. Anne Washburn’s “ANON—a tempest at our kitchen table” (MCC; Sept. 25) finds a TikToker at odds with her Texas neighbors after a Pride flag is unfurled on a suburban street. Sarah Jones débuts her solo show “America, Who Hurt You?” (Polonsky Shakespeare Center; Sept. 10), and Billy Crystal, in “860” (Imperial; Oct. 1), tells us about his house that was consumed by the Palisades Fire.

For those looking for a good time, “Ms. Blakk for President” (Vineyard; Oct. 15), co-conceived by Tina Landau and Tarell Alvin McCraney, resurrects the gleefully insurgent 1992 Presidential campaign of the drag queen Joan Jett Blakk (Wayne Brady). And Jocelyn Bioh’s joyous “School Girls; or, the African Mean Girls Play” (Samuel J. Friedman; Sept. 8) thrusts a class of Ghanaian boarding-­school seniors into open combat over a beauty crown; Denée Benton, Patina Miller, and Jasmine Amy Rogers star.—Rhoda Feng

Illustration by Kati Szilágyi

Creature features arrive from around the world, starting with the South Korean director Na Hong-jin’s science-fiction drama “Hope” (Sept. 9), in which a small-town police officer joins with local hunters to fight reptilian monsters from outer space. Alex Huston Fischer and Eleanor Wilson’s comedic fantasy “Wicker” (Oct. 23) stars Olivia Colman as a medieval fishmonger who, when she can’t find a real-life husband, commissions one (Alexander Skarsgård) made of the titular material. Takashi Yamazaki’s “Godzilla Minus Zero” (Nov. 6), premièring at the New York Film Festival, brings back the kaiju icon, in a drama set in Japan in 1949.

The season’s wide-ranging documentaries include John Wilson’s first feature film, “The History of Concrete” (Sept. 18), an idiosyncratic exploration of the ubiquitous substance, which leads him from Queens to Rome, Ohio, and Las Vegas. The first part of Julia Loktev’s “My Undesirable Friends” showed the filmmaker’s journalist friends in Moscow facing persecution; in “Part II—Exile” (Oct. 9), she shows many of the same people continuing their work outside Russia. “Once Upon a Time in Harlem” (Oct. 16), filmed in 1972, by the late William Greaves, gathers many of the then elderly luminaries of the Harlem Renaissance for discussions and reminiscences that bring the era’s personalities and achievements to light; the film was completed posthumously, in 2025, by his son, David Greaves. Little is known about “Musk” (Oct. 16), Alex Gibney’s investigative portrait of Elon Musk, other than its four-hour running time.

New literary adaptations include “Virginia Woolf’s Night and Day” (Sept. 4), based on the author’s 1919 novel, about a wellborn woman (Haley Bennett) who, in order to pursue a career as an astronomer, rejects an arranged marriage; Tina Gharavi directed. Georgia Oakley’s “Sense and Sensibility” (Oct. 16) gives Jane Austen’s novel, about the romantic tribulations of the financially straitened Dashwood daughters, a fresh workout; the cast includes Daisy Edgar-Jones, Esmé Creed-Miles, Caitriona Balfe, and Bodhi Rae Breathnach. The thriller “Verity” (Oct. 2), based on a novel by Colleen Hoover, stars Dakota Johnson as a writer who comes to suspect that a successful author she’s been hired to ghostwrite for (Anne Hathaway) has committed murder.

Comedy is joined with the megawatt celebrity of Tom Cruise in Alejandro G. Iñárritu’s “Digger” (Oct. 2), about an oil tycoon who is summoned by the President (John Goodman) to head off an environmental catastrophe. In Josef Kubota Wladyka’s “Ha-Chan, Shake Your Booty!” (Sept. 25), set in Tokyo, a widowed ballroom dancer (Rinko Kikuchi) becomes infatuated with a married dance teacher (Alberto Guerra). Maude Apatow directs her mother, Leslie Mann, in “Poetic License” (Oct. 16), about a middle-­aged woman who audits a class at a local college and becomes romantically entangled with two younger students (Cooper Hoffman and Andrew Barth Feldman).

The season’s bio-pics veer between mind and body, modern times and history. “By Any Means” (Sept. 4), directed by Elegance Bratton, is based on the true story of the mobster Gregory Scarpa (Mark Wahlberg), who, in 1966, collaborated with an F.B.I. agent (Yahya Abdul-­Mateen II) to investigate the murder of civil-rights activists in Mississippi. Michael Dowse’s “The Stunt Driver” (Sept. 25) stars Jay Baruchel as the daredevil Ken Carter, who sought to drive a rocket-powered car across the St. Lawrence River in the nineteen-seventies. “Primetime” (Sept. 25) dramatizes the development of the TV program “To Catch a Predator,” featuring Chris Hansen (Robert Pattinson); Lance Oppenheim directed. Aaron Sorkin’s “The Social Reckoning” (Oct. 9), a sequel to “The Social Network,” stars Jeremy Strong as Mark Zuckerberg, whose former employee (Mikey Madison) discloses internal workings at Facebook to a journalist (Jeremy Allen White).—Richard Brody

Illustration by Kati Szilágyi

Much of the excitement coming to dance stages this fall arrives via visiting companies and artists; New York is, after all, a crossroads. A case in point: the season’s opening salvo, the Fall for Dance Festival (New York City Center; Sept. 22-Oct. 3), features a bulería (a joyful, fast-paced solo), performed by the spectacular young flamenco star Juan Tomás de la Molía, a proponent of the raucous side of the Spanish dance. It also includes an appearance by Miami City Ballet, in Alexei Ratmansky’s “Roses from the South,” a playful and tender new ballet set to Strauss waltzes.

On a grander scale, the Australian Ballet returns for the first time since 2012 (City Center; Oct. 8-11), now under the direction of the former American Ballet Theatre star David Hallberg. The company performs “Oscar,” an ambitious new ballet inspired by the life, writings, and notorious trial of the Irish wit Oscar Wilde. The choreography is by Christopher Wheeldon, of “MJ” fame. It is, notably, one of a very few story ballets to delve into the subject of same-sex love.

In “The Surge” (Joyce Theatre; Sept. 16-27), the choreographer Sonya Tayeh creates a different kind of homage—to an artist, Sinéad O’Connor, whom many of us associate with the angst of our teen-age years. Rather than tell O’Connor’s story, Tayeh channels the singer’s ferocious energy through the bodies of her ten dancers, all women over forty, all with something to say.

A visit by the Bangalore-based company Nrityagram—which brings “Khankhana” to the Joyce (Oct. 13-18)—is always an event, because the troupe’s resident choreographer and leader, Surupa Sen, is one of the greatest interpreters of the Indian classical dance Odissi. Sen’s choreography extends this ancient form, adding partnering and dynamic range; her dancers, all trained under her tutelage, move with extraordinary clarity and incisiveness.

Since the former company member Michael Novak took over the Paul Taylor Dance Company, he has expanded the repertory beyond Taylor, both by adding new works and by digging into the archives. At the David H. Koch Theatre (Nov. 4-22), the group performs “Tensile Involvement” (1953), an example of the latter, an experiment in electronica and physical abstraction by the now seldom-performed Alwin Nikolais. The piece is like a trippy cat’s cradle, in which the dancers become colorful parts of a machine. The company is also bringing back “Byzantium” (1984), one of Taylor’s nightmare pieces—an evocation of the folly and decadence of man, past and present.—Marina Harss

Illustration Lucy Jones; Source photographs by Stephen J. Cohen / Getty; NBC / Getty

Pop music has come to encompass so many different things in the social-­media age, and you can see all the ways its definition has expanded in the past decade across the fall slate of contemporary-music shows. If pop is a genre with its own sound, that sound can be heard in the tunes of Robyn, the Swedish dance-floor sensation (Barclays Center; Sept. 4, 10). If pop is an amalgamation of all things popular, its many contours are reflected in the songs of the French singer Lolo Zouaï, who fiddles with sonic and language boundaries (Blue Note Jazz Club; Sept. 9), and in those of the Pasadena performer Tinashe, who has been at the center of indie-pop’s genre-bending efforts since 2014 (Brooklyn Paramount; Oct. 24). If pop is an idea that picks apart what it means to be cool and influential, look no further than Charli XCX (Barclays Center; Sept. 14-15) and Phoebe Bridgers (Barclays Center; Sept. 24-26), artists who have parlayed relatively fringe styles and indie stardom into arena-filling cult followings.

But pop is bigger than even those confines. The realms of roots music and Americana are also rife with pop possibilities. The singer-songwriter Brandi Carlile eases through reflective folk rock that offers the personal as an extension of activism (Forest Hills Stadium; Sept. 26). The New Zealand artist Aldous Harding makes indie folk feel like a one-woman revue, her magnificent new album, “Train on the Island,” greatly adding to her cast of characters (Brooklyn Steel; Sept. 12). At Radio City Music Hall, Alabama Shakes returns with soulful Southern rock and its first album in eleven years, “I Must Be Dreaming” (Sept. 2), and Shaboozey, the country-rap fusionist whose single “A Bar Song (Tipsy)” stormed the charts in 2024, goes full outlaw (Oct. 3).

Hip-hop tilted the pop axis at the turn of the millennium and remains an arbiter of its taste. The trap melodicist Don Toliver leans into his star turn at Barclays Center (Sept. 6), and the punk-trap trailblazer Rico Nasty returns to form at Knockdown Center, on the back of her mosh-ready new album, “RX” (Sept. 13). Brooklyn Paramount welcomes EsDeeKid, a phenom of the U.K. underground scene (Sept. 15), and ScHoolboy Q, who has been reinventing gangsta rap since the early twenty-tens (Oct. 3). The same could be said of Vince Staples (Brooklyn Steel; Oct. 27); his latest record, “Cry Baby,” takes him to a more explicitly political place, while also pushing into blues rock and post-punk.

At another point on the pop spectrum, artists are toying with the conception of rock music in the popular imagination. At Warsaw, on Sept. 15-16, the noise icon Kim Gordon extends the reaches of the punk tradition. The virtual British group Gorillaz tests the boundaries of what a band is, as it has been for decades (Madison Square Garden; Sept. 29). At the same venue, the grungy, lo-fi pop smelter beabadoobee and the shoegaze revivalist Wisp team up for a show that puts young people at the center of those lost arts (Oct. 5), and the avant-R. & B. mold-breaker Kelela blends those sounds with her œuvre to create a new avatar at Brooklyn Paramount (Oct. 9-10). Then, on Oct. 16, at the New York Society for Ethical Culture, Phil Elverum performs as Mount Eerie, with poignant meditations on life and death perfectly reflecting autumn melancholy.—Sheldon Pearce

Illustrations by Lucy Jones; Source photographs from Getty

Time is the great mystery of music: songs and sounds are always ephemeral, yet they exist beyond their moments. The pioneering minimalist Steve Reich has done as much as any composer to bend time’s arrow into a circle, but not even he can make it stand still: he turns ninety in October, and his home town is taking note. At the Park Avenue Armory, ­Reich’s eponymous ensemble is joined by Alarm Will Sound for a staged, expanded version of his kaleidoscopic “Music for 18 Musicians” (Oct. 14-18). At National Sawdust, Erik Hall presents his immersive take on the same piece, paired with the more florid but equally hypnotic “Canto Ostinato,” by Simeon ten Holt (Sept. 26). Sō Percussion brings “Drumming,” in which Reich weaves pulsating rhythmic nets using techniques he learned from Ewe drummers and Balinese gamelan players, to 92NY (Oct. 28). Bryce Dessner and Nico Muhly are among the performers in an all-Reich program at Carnegie Hall (Oct. 22) which includes two U.S. premières. And Trinity Church anchors three lunchtime choral concerts (Sept. 23, Sept. 30, Oct. 7) around Reich’s settings of Hebrew Biblical texts (“Tehillim,” “Traveler’s Prayer,” “Jacob’s Ladder”), before a dedicated evening on Oct. 7.

It’s knives out at the Metropolitan Opera, where three tragic heroines sing of what drove them to murder: ambition (Verdi’s “Macbeth,” opening Sept. 22, with Lise Davidsen and Quinn Kelsey as the treacherous Scots), jealousy (Cherubini’s “Medea,” opening Oct. 30, with Sonya Yoncheva in the title role), and desperation (Puccini’s “Tosca,” which begins another season-spanning run on Nov. 1). Expect a more quixotic take on tragedy, and fewer stabbings, from Missy Mazzoli’s long-anticipated setting of George Saunders’s novel “Lincoln in the Bardo” (world première Oct. 19).

Opening night at the Chamber Music Society stays on theme with an all-American program that includes a concert version of the “Psycho” score (Oct. 13). At the Miller Theatre, a different sort of tension animates the violinist Jennifer Koh’s assault on Bach’s complete sonatas and partitas (Sept. 24). Eleanor Alberga, a subtle British Jamaican composer, will be at the keyboard to present her new piano quintet (National Sawdust; Oct. 30). Meanwhile, the New York Philharmonic celebrates having Gustavo Dudamel all to itself—finally, no sharing with Los Angeles—with several new commissions. Zosha Di Castri’s “Invisible House” and Tania León’s “Imágenes mestizas” première alongside the fifth symphonies of Prokofiev and Mahler, respectively (Sept. 16-19; Sept. 25-27, 29). And, for its contribution to the spooky season, the orchestra will play the soundtrack to Jordan Peele’s “Get Out,” while the movie screens (Oct. 28-31).—Fergus McIntosh

P.S. Good stuff on the internet:

• Young life on the lam
• Time travel to the nineties
• The cat is always the boss

Welcome to the session. Let’s start by finding a comfortable, seated position. Allow your arms to rest gently by your sides. Keep your back straight and your face soft, and let our serene rainstorm soundscape envelop—

Sorry. I’m so sorry. Does anyone have an umbrella? Sure, rhythmic, pattering rain can help regulate your nervous system, and trigger your autonomous sensory meridian response, but me? I’m wet. Like, soaked. There’s water in my shoes.

Also, I think I may have seasonal affective disorder.

Obviously you’re not doing great, either—that’s why you’re on the Calm.com meditation app, trying to listen to “Soothing Droplets of Rain Falling Over Wildflower Field Near Peaceful Waterfall in Yosemite National Park” while simultaneously riding a screeching 6 train.

The point is, I’m not blaming you. But have you ever visited a wildflower field near a peaceful waterfall in Yosemite National Park? The pollen is titanic. My nose is clogged, my eyes are red, and I’ve eaten so much Zyrtec my mouth tastes like pennies. It’s miserable.

I am, like you, a city person. But this damn app is all about “Dreamy Deciduous Forest with Celtic Harp Interludes” and “Cherry Blossom Grove Featuring Fluffy Cloud Visuals for A.D.H.D. Support.” Would it kill them to upload a “Snowy Holiday Cityscape with Faintly Swearing Gift Seekers”? A “Summer’s Eve in Times Square Featuring Wind-borne Bootleg ‘Hamilton’ Lyrics”? I spend so much time in the woods, I probably have Lyme disease. The only infrastructure around here consists of Thomas Kinkadesque brick cottages, tranquilly drifting dhows, or yurts.

Maybe I’m depressed. But look at who I have to talk to—no offense.

Sure, there’s always the white-noise rooms, but jumping into a pocket dimension filled with five hundred IcyCool 4 USB fans really isn’t my vibe.

Sorry, that was my stomach growling. I haven’t eaten in—well, ever, really. God, those “Peaceful Antelope Grazing in African Savannah” look absolutely delicious. But, no, we apparently need their gentle clopping and chomping sounds to bring you a “tingly, anxiety-reducing A.S.M.R. experience.”

Also, all those lazy lions you hear purring in the background? You wanna know why they’re so chill? It’s because they’re worn out from chasing me, the poor sucker whose only source of water is the dew licked off ferns in the “Verdant Rain Forest Filled with Croaking Red-Eyed Tree Frogs to Fall Asleep To”!

Look, I get it, you’re trying to carve out a moment of calm. I applaud your commitment. Life where you are seems hard. War, rising gas prices, literary discourse on BookTok—we don’t have any of that here in the Calm.com meditation app. I know I’ve got it better than most. It’s just, I need a mental-health break, too!

Yes, I have met a ton of celebrities here. Kevin Bacon coasts by on his dhow all the time. Harry Styles borrowed a Tibetan singing bowl from me last week (he still hasn’t given it back). But all these guys want to do is share sleep stories about “The Sheep Who Discovered the Northern Lights,” or “The Cozy Journey of a Nordland Night Bus.” Why’d you take so long to drop your album, Harry? Quit recording another beditation about your “Moonlit Sojourn to a Babbling Brook” and give us the indie-pop banger we deserve!

You don’t think I’ve lodged an official complaint? I’ve gone all the way to the top, to the big boss himself. But all Matthew McConaughey had to say was, “The only way to escape your suffering is to become one with the alpha waves, to become a weightless, bodiless, bilateral stimulus emanating throughout the Calm.com ether—all right, all right, all right?” Not all right, Matthew. Now I have to whisper subliminal messages like “Let’s take a mindful breath break,” “Keep calm and carry on,” and “Come hither, dear lambs, join us in our wondrous serenity forever—for a very reasonable onetime fee of $499.99” all day. Is that a life?

Curse my voice for being so authoritative yet reassuring! David Attenborough is my great-uncle, thrice removed. I’ve got to get out. Does Audible need someone to record any hockey erotica? ♦

In Detroit, during the Great Recession of the late two-thousands, about a third of families experienced unemployment. One in three properties entered foreclosure. The State of Michigan offered financial assistance, but to get it people needed to fill out a form called the DHS-1171. This was the longest form of its kind in the country, the journalist Annie Lowrey writes, in her new book, “The Time Tax: How the Government Wastes Our Time—and How to Fix It,” and its questions were often unrelated to the provision of financial assistance. “The state queried applicants on their weight and hair color,” Lowrey reports. Many questions focussed on preventing fraud, treating “Michiganders in distress” as “potential criminals.” It all added up to a forty-page form with around a thousand questions printed in tiny type. Roughly a quarter of those who tackled the DHS-1171 failed to complete it.

In “The Time Tax,” Lowrey explores the disastrous consequences of the government’s complete disregard for citizens’ time. Few agencies or programs track how long it takes people to navigate their bureaucratic mazes. Instead, they prioritize “procedural” goals, such as the proper completion of forms. The result isn’t just inconvenience. If a bureaucratic process exhausts whatever time a citizen has available, then benefits are lost or rights are denied. In 2018, Lowrey writes, the State of Louisiana “disenrolled 15,689 children—children!—from its public health insurance program” because of “failure to comply” with paperwork requirements. She describes an entrepreneur who gave up on starting a business, and bereaved relatives unable to access their inheritances, because bureaucracies refuse to discipline themselves.

The point of Lowrey’s excellent book is to urge reform—and to show that reform is possible. (In 2018, the DHS-1171 “contained 80 percent fewer words.”) But government is only one participant in a much larger conspiracy to waste our time. Co-workers e-mail us with trivial requests. H.R. insists on endless online “training.” Insurance companies screw up our claims, then demand that we tell them what went wrong. Cashiers pester us to enroll in loyalty programs (unless we scan our own purchases). Traffic is bad, and housing is scarce, so we work far from home.

We’re part of the conspiracy, too. We fritter away our own time with social media, doomscrolling, video-gaming, and binge-watching, and we procrastinate and over-parent, making commitments that we can’t sustain. Surveys about how Americans experience their time basically show that there isn’t enough of it. Supposedly, we live in an age of convenience. “With a few swipes of my thumb,” Lowrey observes, she can order an Uber, or even “a closet’s worth of clothes for overnight delivery.” But many conveniences also have hidden time-wasting downsides. Instead of simply buying things, we often subscribe to them, and so we must manage our subscriptions. We wait while our smoke detectors or cars download their software updates. The other day, I bought movie tickets online, with reserved seats, and that was nice—but then I had to sit through twenty-five minutes of previews and commercials before the movie began. Those who giveth convenience taketh it, too.

A further irony is that we live in an analytical, financialized age. All around us, systems calculate, markets churn, and clever people find ways to monetize seemingly everything, from Pokémon cards to the likelihood of a U.S. invasion of Iran before 2027. (As of this writing, Polymarket has the odds at eighteen per cent.) You can look up the cost of real estate per square foot on a particular street half a world away; you can price a sentence of A.I.-generated thought. But your hours are thrown away and used up randomly. Time, our scarcest resource, feels beyond our reckoning.

We grapple with time, of course, finding ways to domesticate it. Professionals with hourly rates, for instance, value their time precisely. A typical hourly rate has a floor, determined by what clients will pay. If a would-be client makes a lowball offer—forty-five dollars an hour, say, instead of the usual sixty—it can be rejected in the certain knowledge that more can be made working for someone else. Economists describe this dynamic using a concept called opportunity cost. They say that, whatever you happen to be doing right now, you’re paying an opportunity cost equal to the best alternative thing you could be doing instead. The opportunity cost of working for forty-five dollars when you could be making sixty is fifteen dollars. The lowball offer is, quite literally, not worth your time.

Opportunity costs can be measured in dollars, but don’t have to be. You can decide on the “best” alternative use of your time however you’d like, and consider all sorts of candidates. Instead of reading this column, for example, you could be napping, working, strolling through the park, or browsing Hinge. Is one of those alternatives better? That depends on your goals. You might decide, given those goals, that a walk in the park would be preferable. Now another concept, switching cost, comes into play. Your opportunity cost (the value of a walk in the park) is lowered by your switching cost (the work of getting there). Bundling is a good way to diminish switching costs: if you read in the park, you get the best of both worlds.

Could we use opportunity cost as a general-purpose tool for valuing our time? Unfortunately, it’s most useful in context. At work, it’s easy to see that hours spent in meetings could be better deployed elsewhere. At the gym, you can reasonably conclude that you’re doing too much lifting and not enough stretching. But life, as a whole, is made of apples and oranges. The Sunday afternoon you spend filling out important forms might also be devoted to tending your garden. Two seasons of “Severance” account for nearly sixteen hours—enough time for you to learn how to play the piano at a rudimentary level. If you give up hours at work to spend time with your kids, you contribute less to their college fund. In these sorts of comparisons, opportunity cost is of little help. You have to make decisions intuitively, and are likely to end up distributing your time in an ad-hoc way.

You might respond by ascending in altitude, and seeking the broadest possible context—an existential, long-term view of the value of your time. In the book “Four Thousand Weeks: Time Management for Mortals,” the writer Oliver Burkeman looks at our use of time from this perspective. Typically, people who do this argue for focussing on what really matters—leading “purpose-driven” lives. Yet Burkeman reaches a surprising conclusion, observing instead that life is finite, plans fail, and few endeavors are ever truly complete. “There’s no reason to believe you’ll ever feel ‘on top of things,’ or make time for everything that matters,” Burkeman writes. Accordingly, “the core challenge of managing our limited time” is figuring out “how to decide most wisely what not to do, and how to feel at peace about not doing it.” This approach almost inverts the logic of opportunity cost. Suppose there’s something else you think you ought to be doing. Why not simply decide not to do it? Enjoy “Severance.” Forget the piano! How good were you going to get, anyway? (Alternatively, you might plonk on the keyboard without worrying about whether you’ll ever achieve your musical goals.)

The fact that both of these approaches can be persuasive reflects how flexible we can be in valuing our own time. And, in fact, a lot of evidence suggests that we’re outrageously suggestible when it comes to our temporal attitudes. Decades ago, psychologists showed that we often judge the value of an experience by our impressions of two moments: the peak and the end. This suggests that a wasted day might be “rescued” if you can engineer a great final hour. Two business-school professors, Sanford DeVoe and Jeffrey Pfeffer, have explored how the more we are primed to keep track of our time, the more we become “stingy” with it. (The habit of tracking your hours at work can make you less likely to volunteer outside of it.) Maybe it’s partly for this reason that we’re most temporally satisfied when we lose track of time. There’s not always a good answer to the question of whether we’re using time well—and so, ideally, we forget to ask.

A truly effective conspiracy involves not just people, but a climate of thought, a vibe. In a book called “The Harried Leisure Class,” from 1970, Staffan Burenstam Linder, a Swedish economist, proposed a theory of time-vibes. Why, Linder asked, despite a proliferation of convenience that promised to create “an increasing amount of ‘free time,’ ” did there appear to be an “increasing scarcity of time”? The problem, he argued, was simply that “time, unlike other resources, cannot be accumulated.” It was true that labor-saving devices, such as washing machines, made work easier, and that new technologies let us do more, more quickly. But all these gains in convenience and productivity had an unexpected effect: they endowed each hour with greater potential. They increased the opportunity cost of time.

In Linder’s view, modern life is characterized by a desire to bring “the yield on time in all other activities” into “parity with the yield on working time.” Suppose that you’re a professional who earns a healthy wage at work. What will you do when you’re at leisure? You’ll want your off time to be as valuable as your on time. One way to raise the value of your off time is “to increase the amount of consumer goods to be enjoyed per time unit.” So, instead of drinking a domestic beer on your deck after work, you might drink an imported beer. Instead of playing video games on your phone, you might play them on a state-of-the-art gaming console. Instead of cooking with your old pans, you might decide that you need new ones. An “acceleration of consumption” begins, in which your goal is to more fully realize the potential of each hour. And yet the overarching problem remains: there are only so many hours in a day. Increasing the value of any one hour increases the opportunity cost for all the rest.

In this sort of time regime, pointless, aimless time becomes a rarity, even a luxury—and an object of nostalgia. We recall with fondness the unjudged hours of our childhoods. And yet, oddly, the source of our time poverty is that, now, we have too many useful and rewarding ways to spend our time. The most valuable hours in our lives came when we couldn’t do anything with them.

Is there any connection between the “time tax” that Lowrey describes and the one we levy on ourselves, when we muddle through our use of time? The linking thread might be a horror of waste. A bureaucracy can overload its forms with questions meant to prevent fraud and abuse; in its determination not to get duped, it loses sight of its goals. A person, similarly, can obsess over not wasting time, cultivating a suspicion that every hour could be better spent. But this is its own form of waste. Real efficiency prizes momentum over perfection. It understands that acceptance is the price of progress. ♦

In the 1952 “Looney Tunes” short “Operation: Rabbit,” Bugs Bunny encounters another member of the cartoon-critter pantheon. “Allow me to introduce myself,” the figure says, brandishing a business card. “My name is Wile E. Coyote, Genius.” It wasn’t quite the character’s first appearance—he’d made his début three years earlier, chasing the Road Runner, in “Fast and Furry-ous” (1949)—but it was the first time he’d been given a name and the gift of words (delivered by the voice actor Mel Blanc). The name would stick; the words would fade. Bugs, with his carrot-chomping patter, naturally brought out the character’s talkative side in their occasional matchups. But it was the Road Runner who swiftly became Wile E. Coyote’s nemesis, and they shared a commitment to muteness—“Beep-beep!” notwithstanding—that gave their hunter-and-hunted dynamic a primal undertow. They didn’t need dialogue to define them, especially since their chases played out to such an expressive soundtrack of crashes and booms—the music of a predator’s disastrously ill-advised attempts to capture his prey.

One of the modest but telling charms of “Coyote vs. Acme,” a new feature-length comedy from the director Dave Green and the screenwriter Samy Burch, is that the eponymous canine never breaks his vow of silence—a nod to tradition that also serves a narrative purpose. In a story that draws loose inspiration from Ian Frazier’s brilliant humor piece “Coyote v. Acme,” which was published in this magazine in 1990, Wile E. Coyote needs someone who can speak on his behalf. He finds that someone in Kevin Avery (Will Forte), a bumbling personal-injury lawyer from Albuquerque, who reluctantly agrees to represent him in a lawsuit against the Acme Corporation, the manufacturer of the many, many products that his client has ordered by mail over the years to help catch the Road Runner, to worse than no avail. The movie’s early passages are an epic ode to buyer’s remorse, reminding us, with a mix of newly shot action scenes and excerpts from classic “Looney Tunes” shorts, that every one of the plaintiff’s Acme purchases—they include rocket-powered roller skates, electromagnetic gloves, tiny slingshots, enormous catapults, and anvils and explosives galore—has malfunctioned and backfired, with hilariously punishing results.

For all that, Kevin—whose law practice is named for the Warner Bros. animation legends Tex Avery, Chuck Jones, and Michael Maltese—doesn’t think his client, whom he addresses as Wile E., has much of a case. Especially against a mega-conglomerate like Acme, which is variably described as “the biggest corporation in the world” and “a family-values company that values its family . . . of companies.” Kevin, hapless and lazy, is no match for Acme’s army of super-slick lawyers, who are led by Buddy Crane, a heavyweight in every sense; he’s played, with beefy swagger, by the actor and former professional wrestler John Cena. But Kevin is fortunate to have an ambitious intern, Paige (Lana Condor)—she’s also his niece—who takes one look at Wile E.’s sky-high pile of Acme junk and sees not just a damning mountain of evidence but also signs of a sinister conspiracy. The film, blending animation and live-action footage, takes the form of a detective story, following such precursors in this hybrid medium as “Who Framed Roger Rabbit” (1988) and “Looney Tunes: Back in Action” (2003). Truth be told, the plotting isn’t quite up to the strength of the premise, but the slight slackness of structure has the benefit of being able to accommodate an array of “Looney Tunes” characters in bit parts, with narrative priority for the birds: here’s Daffy Duck as a fount of mournfully deranged backstory, Tweety as a kind of diminutive double agent—a canary trap—and, most effectively, Foghorn Leghorn as a preening, menacing Acme overlord.

The revelations hinge, unsurprisingly, on a cruel double standard in the ways humans and toons are treated. In a richer version of the story, the dubious codes and customs of this animation-apartheid society might themselves have become a compelling source of mystery, the way they did in “Who Framed Roger Rabbit,” but no matter. It’s a relief to note what “Coyote vs. Acme” isn’t and a pleasure to celebrate what it is. It isn’t a flailing, content-regurgitating C.G.I. shit storm in the manner of “Space Jam: A New Legacy” (2021), one of the latest studio movies to attempt this kind of mashup, but, rather, a fleet, funny, often elegant throwback, made by artists with an obvious but not overweening reverence for the original “Looney Tunes” universe. (At one point, the filmmakers playfully sound a note of righteous contempt: Pepé Le Pew gets about a second of screen time, just so he can be cancelled as an odious sex pest.) The film has a gorgeous, crisply delineated surface; the hand-drawn lines of the animations both pop out from and mesh seamlessly with their live-action environments. The toon characters mine the intersection of those modes for inspired bursts of comic mayhem, whether in the various signs that Wile E. holds up to communicate or in the recurring spectacle of falling cartoon projectiles crashing into actual, physical property.

Forte has always had something of a cartoon-ready constitution, with his rubbery physicality and goofball charm. His performance here is all sheepish grins and Gumby limbs, jutting out of a tan suit that, juxtaposed with his scraggly dark hair, makes him almost a visual correlative to the brown and beige of Wile E. Coyote himself. Both characters are deeply acquainted with the stench of failure. The crucial difference is that Kevin has allowed it to define and crush him, whereas Wile E. sees it as a source of renewal—a kind of reverse Kryptonite. This lean, mean, yellow-eyed desert canine remains among the leading optimists of his era, and “Coyote vs. Acme” casts his back-to-the-drawing-board tirelessness, his single-minded pursuit of his obsession, in unabashedly heroic terms. More than once, the script references Sisyphus, one of the few characters in fiction who can rival its protagonist for bad luck with boulders. Even when he’s holed up in a fleabag motel in Albuquerque before and during the trial, Wile E. has no use for downtime. As industrious as ever, he spends night after night poring over blueprints and devising Rube Goldberg machines, including one to insure that Kevin, snoozing away next door, will be awake, dressed, and ready to go in the morning. Genius never sleeps.

At the beginning of “Coyote vs. Acme,” we see a logo for Warner Animation Group, one of the film’s production companies, which is pointedly described onscreen as “a wholly owned subsidiary of the Acme Corporation.” Near the end of the closing credits, there’s a dedication “to everyone who posted, shared, held up signs, and spoke out when it counted. This film made it to the big screen because of you.” The target of these two bookending messages is the film’s original distributor, Warner Bros. Discovery, which abruptly shelved the movie in 2023, in exchange for a tax writeoff. It wasn’t the only occasion in recent years that the company, ridden with debt, had pulled the plug on its own product, squandering the time and talent of all involved; the never-completed movies “Batgirl” and “Scoob! Holiday Haunt” were fellow-victims. But “Coyote vs. Acme” was a finished work, and the looming probability that the film would never see the light of day provoked an industry-wide outcry. Three years later, “Coyote vs. Acme” is finally being released in theatres by another distributor, Ketchup Entertainment—a name that can only be properly honored, I’d suggest, by a trip to the Warner studio gates, with a basket of rotten tomatoes at the ready.

“Coyote vs. Acme” may not be a great movie, but, as a story that pits a scrappy underdog against the forces of soulless corporate malevolence, it does come equipped with a pretty great metaphor for its own Hollywood misfortunes. The movie’s final showdown takes place at a U.S. Senate hearing, presided over by none other than Elmer Fudd. I couldn’t help but think of the congressional proceedings that have already happened, and of the federal trial that looms, as Paramount Skydance—the bloated, Trump-aligned Acme of the media landscape—seeks to devour what remains of Warner. It’s a merger that doesn’t bode well for movies, cartoons, or humans. Amid such real-world bleakness, the ending of “Coyote vs. Acme” manages an unexpected wallop: a quietly moving reaffirmation of the immortal bond between Wile E. Coyote and the Road Runner, comic adversaries who turn out, beneath the fur and the feathers, to be kindred spirits. I was reminded, of all things, of Barbara Stanwyck in “The Lady Eve” (1941), one of the finest movies Paramount—indeed, Hollywood—ever produced, summing up her character’s love for Henry Fonda’s dopey dreamboat: “I need him like the axe needs the turkey.” But which is the axe, and which is the turkey? And does Acme carry either? ♦

Phoebe Bridgers has a filmmaker’s eye for a cold open. Sometimes her songs disorient from the jump, dropping you into an alien landscape or the middle of an argument. Other times she draws you in with a dreamy establishing shot—and then snaps it into sharp, unsparing focus. “I was the belle of the Governor’s Ball,” begins one song on her new album, “Lost Weekend.” Then she continues, in her usual hushed head voice: “Hiding in the bathroom like Shelley Duvall.” The reference to the climactic scene in “The Shining,” delivered delicately over a lullaby in waltz time, comes off as both foreboding and gently self-mocking. For a certain type of person, having a terrible time at a party can feel like being pursued by an axe murderer.

These kinds of seemingly effortless lines, lines that take a small shard of experience and hold it up to the light, offer some clues as to how the thirty-one-year-old Bridgers earned her reputation as one of her generation’s standout songwriters. Over the past decade, across three solo albums and a raft of collaborative projects, she has honed one of the most distinctive songwriting voices in indie rock today—wryly observational, ruthlessly introspective, downcast but never wallowing. Her 2020 album, “Punisher,” featured her sharpest songs yet, and it arrived at the perfect time. Depression—its little humiliations and stretches of nullity, but also the unexpected flashes of insight it can produce—is Bridgers’s chief subject. The stride she made on “Punisher” was to telescope her songs’ depression outward, transforming it from a state of isolation to, paradoxically, a state of receptivity to the world outside. That first pandemic summer, songs such as “Chinese Satellite” and “I Know the End” captured something about the texture of life in lockdown, the combination of stultifying routine and longing for a wider ambit of experience.

“Punisher” was a star-making album for Bridgers. In the years since, though, she has kept a lower profile, pouring much of her energy into collaborative projects, including boygenius, her band with the singer-songwriters Julien Baker and Lucy Dacus. Life happened: She was reportedly engaged to the actor Paul Mescal, and then she was not; in late 2022, her father, the subject of some of her most brutally ambivalent songs, died. Sometime around then, she began dating the musical comedian Bo Burnham. Meanwhile, her work has become a stylistic reference point for a younger generation of artists in the increasingly hazy middle zone between indie music and chart pop. In Olivia Rodrigo’s tragicomic abjection, in Audrey Hobert’s neurotically self-undercutting lyrics, in just about everything on the slick surface of Gracie Abrams’s studiously crafted pop product, Bridgers is a presiding spirit.

“Lost Weekend” announces itself as a return from time spent in the wilderness. “WIFE IS HOME FROM WAR,” read one typically parasocial fan comment on a promotional Instagram post. “Lemme up my medication in advance,” read another—Bridgers’s fans like to joke about the emotionally devastating effect of her music. Yet the album begins not with catharsis but with dissociation. On the opening track, “The Outside,” Bridgers sings through a vocoder, multiplying her voice into a metallic swarm. From this alien-drone perspective, she narrates two scenes: in the first verse, her father’s funeral; in the second, performing onstage. The song is about not being able to inhabit either experience fully. “I am on the outside, watching,” goes the uncharacteristically laconic chorus, as the vocoder drops away.

Bridgers’s great trick, though, is to set these two experiences against one another as a diptych. A “fist through the drywall” in the first verse glances off a “fist in the air” in the second; “I’ll watch him get carried away,” already suggestive of both a funeral procession and a violent outburst, is answered in the second verse with “Ohio, carry me away.” This is an image of crowd-surfing, but it is also a nod to a song by Sun Kil Moon, a formative influence on Bridgers whose creator, Mark Kozelek, has himself been known to fly into nasty tirades in public. (Separately, Kozelek has been accused of sexual misconduct by several women. He denies all allegations of wrongdoing.) Zoning out and leaving your body starts to look less like a defense mechanism and more like a poetic device for revealing hidden patterns of experience. Dissociation becomes its opposite: a kind of imaginative association.

In an early interview, Bridgers mentioned wanting to be “one of those artists that . . . could release an electronic record or a country record next, and nobody would be surprised.” Some eight years later, no one would exactly describe her in those terms. Her first two albums have distinct sonic identities, but the songs sometimes bleed into one another. She has a finely tuned ear for melody, but she is not a writer of earworms; her melodies tend to follow the lateral, associative chain of her lyrics. They take hold after repeat listens. Listening to her music again and again, in fact, is the key to seeing the larger shape of her ambition. Bridgers is not a serial self-reinventor like David Bowie or even Joni Mitchell—she is a polisher and a honer. She is the kind of artist who seems to have two or three basic musical templates for songs and is constantly creating new versions of them. (The clearest-cut case is boygenius’s “Letter to An Old Poet,” which interpolates and updates the earlier “Me & My Dog,” Bridgers’s signature song on the band’s first album.)

“Lost Weekend” is the first Bridgers album to take full advantage of her music’s extreme consistency. It is also the most cohesive and sonically immersive of her records, thanks to her intricate co-production with her usual collaborators Tony Berg and Ethan Gruska, along with the newcomers Jack Antonoff and Alex G. A crowded room of guests fills out the sound; some even briefly steal the show, as in the poignant harmony vocals by one “Son-John Johnson,” which can only be a pseudonym for the wobbly-voiced indie-rock singer Cameron Winter. The atmosphere of the album is not too far off from the soft-focus glow of “Punisher,” but some of the dials are cranked way up: Bridgers has said that she’s been listening to a lot of ambient music, and it shows. Dreamy interludes pad the space between tracks with humming synths and strings; sometimes songs dissolve into floating mood pieces, anchored by a drone or loop. If you give “Lost Weekend” the right kind of attention, you might get the sense that it does not consist of individual songs so much as a vast nebula of sound, from which fragments of music flash out, and into which they eventually subside. Appropriately, leading up to the album’s release, Bridgers organized special listening sessions in planetariums.

Figures go down into the cosmic foam, only to turn up later in different forms. “Lost Boys,” the album’s first single, gathers a whirl of images of prolonged adolescence: speeding motorcycles, violent tantrums, twin beds. Each verse seems to address a potentially different “you,” or perhaps a composite person who comes off as a charming but exasperating man-child. But then the triumphant final chorus embraces every possible nettlesome “you” at once: “Lost boys / Come find me / Yeah!” It’s an incredible moment of rock-and-roll reconciliation, on par with the climactic “You are forgiven!” in the Who’s “A Quick One, While He’s Away.”

Redemption feels just around the corner throughout “Lost Weekend.” This, too, is something new in Bridgers’s catalogue. “This could be the end of wanting,” she sings on “Bobby,” the album’s most raucous track, which is also a tender love song. “Thank you for everything,” she sings at the end of “Still Standing,” which up to that point has been an unsparing catalogue of traumatic memory fragments. But the most potent redemption on the record is enacted musically. Two melodic themes recur throughout the album: a lilting wordless “ooh,” part waltz and part dirge, and a more energetic fanfare. Each gets elaborated across several songs, gathers associations along the way, and finds its ultimate expression in the final two tracks. In “As Above,” the fanfare gains words, seeming to herald the future: Bridgers sings, at the very top of her range, and in full chest voice for once, “You don’t have to believe in magic / Leave it to me and I’ll make it happen.” At the end of the final song, “Lost Weekend (Reprise),” the waltz theme whirls in one more time to send off the past. It’s less a final resolution than an acknowledgment that things keep moving. The stars wink out on the screen, but you can still feel the sky spinning. ♦

The inauguration of Colombia’s new far-right President, Abelardo de la Espriella, was attended by a cast of his ideological fellow-travellers from around the region. Present at the ceremony, held in the southwestern city Cali, on Friday, were the Argentinean President, Javier Milei; the Ecuadorian President, Daniel Noboa; and the Chilean President, José Antonio Kast—whose electoral victories, combined with de la Espriella’s success, in June, and triumphs for the right in Peru and Bolivia, seem to cement a broader shift in Latin American politics. Leading the American delegation was Todd Blanche, a former personal lawyer to President Donald Trump who was still awaiting confirmation as the U.S. Attorney General. Also among the dignitaries present was the Israeli foreign minister, Gideon Sa’ar, who came to Colombia amid a wider mission to shore up support for his nation.

He did not leave disappointed. By Monday, de la Espriella had already restored diplomatic ties with Israel—which the previous leftist administration of President Gustavo Petro had severed in response to Israel’s devastation of Gaza—vowed to move the Colombian Embassy to Jerusalem, and recognized Israeli sovereignty over the disputed Golan Heights. That last move, one of de la Espriella’s first decisions in office at a time when his country is reeling from a deadly earthquake, made Colombia the only nation in the world apart from the United States to view the annexed territory as part of Israel. De la Espriella’s government is also planning to withdraw Colombia from supporting South Africa’s ongoing genocide case against Israel at the International Court of Justice. Sa’ar, on X, described the Golan Heights recognition as a “historic” act in support of Israel. After meeting with de la Espriella a day before the inauguration, he had hailed a new “golden age in relations between Colombia and Israel.”

For Sa’ar, it was likely a welcome change. Israel has been fighting a losing public-diplomacy battle on many other fronts, including in the United States. Much of the good will and sympathy that was extended to Israel after the horrific attacks of October 7th has dissipated, and antipathy toward Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s right-wing government and the ruinous legacy of its war against Hamas in Gaza, as well as the ongoing dispossession and harassment of Palestinians in the West Bank by Israeli settlers, is reshaping Democratic Party politics and has influenced the outcomes of some primary elections. A Pew poll earlier this summer found that almost two-thirds of Americans surveyed have an unfavorable view of the Netanyahu government, while, according to a recent Washington Post-Ipsos poll, the majority of Americans want U.S. military support for Israel reduced or ended. That includes nearly three-quarters of Democrats surveyed. Some Democratic candidates in the upcoming midterms openly describe Israel’s conduct as genocidal, reflecting a view currently shared by much of the Democratic base.

There’s friction among Republicans, too. Last month, Vice-President J. D. Vance, who had been tasked with negotiating a way out of the war with Iran launched by Trump and encouraged by Netanyahu, called out figures within the Israeli “system” for “manipulating and trying to change American public opinion” in favor of continuing the conflict. When some Israeli cabinet members were agitating against U.S. diplomacy with Tehran in June, Vance scolded them, arguing that Trump was “the only head of state in the entire world ‌who is sympathetic to the nation of Israel at this ‌moment in time.”

In July, at an event hosted at the Council on Foreign Relations, in Washington, D.C., I asked Yechiel Leiter, Israel’s Ambassador to the United States, about Vance’s remarks and the impression that Israel is gradually becoming more isolated. He said he hadn’t “detected a scintilla of antipathy towards Israel” after “dozens of meetings” with Vance. He blamed Israel’s travails in the court of global public opinion on a young generation overly influenced by social media. “People’s minds are being poisoned by all sorts of ideas,” he said, and rejected the suggestion that Israel was alone. Leiter pointed to burgeoning defense ties with India and close coöperation with the United Arab Emirates and Azerbaijan. “We have many friends,” he said.

But the ranks of Israel’s detractors have unquestionably grown. Pew also surveyed public opinion about Israel in thirty-five other countries and found broadly negative attitudes toward Israel prevailing. The numbers of respondents in major Western countries, such as the United Kingdom, Germany, and Italy, who disapprove of Israel spiked by almost ten points from when Pew had conducted the same survey last year. Various governments have tried to impose consequences on Israel, largely through symbolic measures. Countries such as Brazil and South Africa recalled ambassadors; Spain and Norway recognized a Palestinian state at the U.N. and cajoled European partners to ratchet up sanctions on Israeli settler entities and to reconsider existing agreements with Israel. Others, including a coalition of Global South countries known as the Hague Group, urged embargoes on weapons sales and the enforcement of International Criminal Court warrants, and have repeatedly called out Israel’s alleged violations of international law as well as U.S. hypocrisy in shielding Israel from censure and helping equip its military.

Netanyahu and his allies dismiss criticism as the product of entrenched antisemitism and cast institutions like the United Nations as irredeemably biased. They also launched social-media broadsides at a host of foreign leaders, including nominally pro-Israel centrists such as the French President, Emmanuel Macron, who had irked Netanyahu by trying to restore international attention to the moribund two-state solution for Israelis and Palestinians. Israel has traditionally avoided official dialogue with far-right parties in Europe, where many factions have direct antecedents in post-Second World War neofascist movements. But last year Sa’ar instructed Israeli diplomats to set up channels to France’s National Rally, Spain’s ultranationalist Vox party, and the far-right Sweden Democrats—all of which espouse virulently Islamophobic platforms.

The fact that Israel’s current leadership apparently feels more solidarity with European nationalists than with the Continent’s political establishment is a strange irony of the moment. The country’s diaspora minister, Amichai Chikli, lamented the “post-national” cosmopolitanism of Jewish communities in the West, arguing that it was better for Israel to court far-right activists in Europe, who are supposedly closer to “ordinary people” and who may find common cause with Israel in their animus toward Muslim immigration and political Islam. Last month, members of Netanyahu’s Likud Party, including Sa’ar and the defense minister, Israel Katz, hosted a visit by the Dutch far-right leader Geert Wilders. He posted an image of himself eating falafel in Jerusalem and toured an illegal West Bank settlement alongside a well-known settler leader against whom the Dutch parliament had passed a resolution urging European Union sanctions. Sa’ar called Wilders “a courageous leader and a true friend of Israel.”

In Latin America, Israel plays into the region’s profound political polarization: leftists still summon a Cold War history of Israeli assistance to a clutch of U.S.-aligned military dictatorships; the right sees both the Palestinian cause and armed groups such as Hamas and Hezbollah (which is linked to deadly terror attacks in Argentina) in the same light as the anarchic, leftist militants it has long sought to quash. The dynamic is leading to foreign-policy whiplash. Last December, Bolivia’s new right-wing government restored ties with Israel that had been suspended by its leftist predecessors. Chile’s Kast, who took office in March and is an admirer of the late dictator Augusto Pinochet, sent an ambassador to Israel to take the place of the one his center-left predecessor had recalled a couple years earlier. Milei has visited Israel three times since taking office in 2023, and earlier this year, in Jerusalem, he was presented with the Presidential Medal of Honor, the country’s highest civilian award. In March, during a speech at Yeshiva University, in New York City, Milei said that he was “proud to be the most Zionist President in the world.” A month later, he and Netanyahu announced the advent of the Isaac Accords, a vague framework of agreements aimed at deepening ties between Israel and Latin America and inspired by the Trump-led Abraham Accords between Israel and a handful of Arab states. In the past two years, several right-wing Latin American politicians have made their way to the Western Wall in Jerusalem, including Flavio Bolsonaro, the son of the jailed former Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro. The younger Bolsonaro is running for the Presidency in October. If he defeats the current President, the leftist Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva—who infuriated Israeli officials when he compared the war in Gaza to the Holocaust—he has vowed to follow some of his neighbors and move Brazil’s Embassy to Jerusalem.

There are a number of factors driving these agendas. The growth of evangelical Christianity across Latin America has deepened commitments to Israel on the right. In 2018, Jair Bolsonaro was baptized by a far-right Brazilian evangelical pastor and politician in the River Jordan. Oliver Stuenkel, a Brazilian German senior fellow at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, suggests that Israel’s rejection of the United Nations, the International Criminal Court, and other elements of the international system fits into the politics of Latin America’s new right. “The support for Israel is an important element of a broader criticism of multilateralism, of ‘globalism,’ ” he told me. Then, of course, there’s Donald Trump. “If you are a Latin American President and you want the U.S. to support you in the fight against organized crime, to broaden security coöperation, to have access to U.S. intelligence and weapons, or if you want to have a bit more leverage to perhaps reverse some of the tariffs that the U.S. imposed on you, then embracing pro-Israel rhetoric may be a relatively cheap way to be seen as an ally by the Trump Administration,” Stuenkel said.

Netanyahu himself faces an election in October. Opposition politicians claim that ousting his government is necessary to rehabilitate Israel’s reputation, and that a post-Netanyahu foreign policy won’t engage in the partisan politics of other countries. “Israel’s foreign relations have never been at such a low point,” the former Prime Minister Yair Lapid said last month at an Israeli security summit. But he expressed hope that “there is an understanding around the world that Israel’s problem is not the country, but the government.” Alon Pinkas, a former Israeli diplomat and foreign-policy adviser to the late Israeli leader Shimon Peres and to former Prime Minister Ehud Barak, is less sure. “For over fifteen years, Netanyahu has destroyed Israel’s brand and self-value,” he told me. “His politics, demagoguery, and sycophantic affinity to every and all illiberal quasi-democratic autocrats have not only devalued Israel but are a toxic mutation of Zionism.” He added: “The damage and degradation they have caused the Israeli brand may be irreparable.” ♦