ArteFact

Commissioned for the opening of the 2024–25 Metropolitan Opera season, Grounded is an adaptation of George Brant’s widely acclaimed play of the same name. Created and composed by Jeanine Tesori, the opera was originally performed at the Washington National Opera in 2023 with Jess played by mezzo-soprano Emily D’Angelo and tenor Ben Bliss as Jess’s husband Eric. The opera serves as a powerful commentary on power and those who both wield it and are controlled by it in turn.

Peaky Blinders is a popular and well-written crime drama from creator Steven Knight that aired on BBC Two and One from 2013–2022. It is exciting, intricate, sexy and thrilling. But it is more than a historical gangster drama. It is also a thoughtful reflection on freedom, the possibility of redemption, and living in death's shadow.

Ruth Ozeki’s novel, The Book of Form and Emptiness, is a conundrum—at turns enraging, confusing, impenetrable, intriguing, luminous, and beautiful. Its protagonist, Benny Oh, is the precocious child of an American mother and an Asian father. His mother, Annabelle, though insecure and unassertive, has found happiness in the cocoon of her family. His father, Kenji, is a jazz-clarinetist and is a loving but free-spirited and somewhat irresponsible husband and father. Benny is kept safe and is content in the closed circle of his family group. This happy domesticity is destroyed, however, when Kenji, drunkenly returning home from a gig, lies down in the alley behind their house and is killed by a truck hauling live chickens.

Naoki Urasawa’s 74-episode anime series Monster (directed by Masayuki Kojima) provides a slow, graphic, confronting, blow-by-blow account of a person’s relationship with past, future, and others. In keeping with the title, the series provides a visceral portrayal of both the personification of monsters, and of how close a person—even one we consider “good”—can be to becoming a monster themselves.

It is not easy to convey the notion of vocation in a secular world. Modern men and women tend to think of life as consisting in a series of choices, to be made by the individual in a linear fashion, according to what attracts or repulses them...

By the time the massive Three Gorges Dam was nearing its completion in the mid-2000’s, whole towns and villages had already disappeared beneath the waters of the Yangtze River...