Category: Plays

It’s that time again, with the end of the year approaching, I am looking back at 2025 and reviewing the books I read, places I have been to, and plays I have seen. This process helps me appreciate the year more fully and experience it again in fast-forward mode. I relied on both ChatGPT and Claude to help me compile the list and the summaries.

Books and Short Stories

Hawking Hawking: The Selling of a Scientific Celebrity, by Charles Seife.

I learned about this book from Peter Woit, of the Not Even Wrong fame. He has a review of the book here. Since I know close to nothing about modern (post 1920s) physics and cosmology, my interest in the book is similar to most people, who are trying to understand the man himself, and not so much his work. It is refreshing to read a biography that separates the celebrity from the scientist and gives an honest account of the man’s life. As Frank Wilczek in his New York Times review sais:

Seife has performed an important service by documenting Stephen Hawking’s life as it actually happened. It is what a great scientist deserves, and should expect.

Me Talk Pretty One Day, Calypso, and Happy-Go-Lucky, by David Sedaris.

This year I got on the Sedaris train, and it’s hard to get off. Listening to him read the stories is an intimate experience particularly since all he does is talk about himself, his husband, and his family. One thing I have in common with David is that both of our dads are very conservative, Fox News loving people, but David seemed to manage his relationship with the Sedaris senior much better than I do with mine.

Me Tealk Pretty is split between stories of his growing up in the US and his struggles with adopting to his life in France.

Here is a characteristic quote:

Every day we’re told that we live in the greatest country on earth. And it’s always stated as an undeniable fact: Leos are born between July 23 and August 22, fitted queen-size sheets measure sixty by eighty inches, and America is the greatest country on earth. Having grown up with this in our ears, it’s startling to realize that other countries have nationalistic slogans of their own, none of which are ‘We’re number two!

Love Letter and Tenth of December: Stories, by George Saunders

This year was my first forey into the American master of short stories. I first heard of him on the New Yorker Fiction podcast, where David Sedaris read Love Letter, a story published in the New Yorked in 2020. The chilling thing abour the Love Letter is that it was written during Trump 1.o, but it reads like it was written during Trump 2.0, although the fascist autocracy that it describes is not yet upon us. A grandfather is writing a letter to his grandson using all kinds of abbreviations so not to expose the people to the censor who will read it before presumably forwarding it to the intended recepient. A must read, particularly for immigrants from the Sovient Union.

The story that stands out for me in the Tenth of Devember is Escape from Spiderhead for reasons that have mostly to do with my day job — it is about a kind of biotech/drug experiement designed to manipulate human emotions and, at least partly, is a reference to famous, but considerably less lethal Milgram experiments.

Saunders gives me DFW vibes, not so much in the writing style, although I think there is something to that as well, but his observations of an American life, in all of its consumerist glory.

Meditations for Mortals, by Oliver Burkeman

This is an anti-self-optimization book. I know a bunch of people who optimize everything in their life, and I must admit, I am a little jelous sinve I could never really do it. There is a funny Shouts and Murmurs about this trend in a recent New Yorker. If you are like me, this book will give you a satisfying excuse not to try, while still feeling like you are living a purposful life.

Careless People: A Cautionary Tale of Power, Greed, and Lost Idealism, by Sarah Wynn-Williams

Careless People, from the corporate-greed-gone-wield genre, is a first-person acocunt of the author’s professional journey at Facebook (now Meta) depicting a toxic culture that is well-matched to the early “go fast and break things” mantra, if “things” include not only products but the product users, employees, and the work environment. The following episode with Sheryl Sandberg, the then COO of Facebook and author of Lean In, is emblimatic. The action takes place on the corporate jet, where according to Wynn-Williams, Sandberg pressures her to share a bed and “cuddle.” The request is framed as friendly, intimate, and non-sexual, which functions to downplay how inappropriate it is given the professional context and the power imbalance.

When Sarah resists, Sandberg does not immediately accept the refusal. Instead, she persists through casual language, implying that the request is normal and that discomfort is unnecessary. The pressure is subtle, not coercive in a physical sense, but sustained — and critically shaped by hierarchy: Sandberg is a senior executive with immense influence over careers.

Blind Spots. When Medicine Gets It Wrong, and What It Means for Our Health, by Marty Makary

This book was written before Makary was appointed as the FDA commissioner. Medicine is a unique set of products — we are all customers and Makary wants us to be educated consumers of medicine. Makary doesn’t claim the modern medicine doesn’t work, rather that it susceptible to the same forces that afflict other industries — fads, group-think, conflicts of interest, misaligned incentives and so on. Even so, modern medicine is a remarkable achievement and most treatments are net positive, but Makary is zooming in on particularly harmful cases. Examples include pausing HRT for women, low fat diets, PSA screening and other cancer screenings, opioids, antibiotics for viral infections, and many more. Here is more complete list compiled by ChatGPT.

The Happiest Man on Earth, by Eddie Jaku

The Happiest Man on Earth is a Holocaust memoir with a paradoxical premise: that the man who survived Buchenwald, Auschwitz, and a forced death march during the Third Reich’s final collapse chose, upon liberation, to smile every single day for the rest of his life. Eddie Jaku — born Abraham Jakubowicz in Germany, a country he loved without reservation before it turned on him — structures his story around the shock of that betrayal. He had considered himself a German first and a Jew second; the violence of Kristallnacht in 1938 dissolved that identity in a single night. What follows is not simply a testimony of atrocity but a meditation on what a person can choose to preserve of themselves when everything external has been stripped away.

The emotional core of the book is Jaku’s friendship with a fellow prisoner named Kurt. It is this relationship — the shared scraps of food, the whispered conversation in the dark, the simple commitment to see each other again the next morning — that Jaku credits with keeping him alive. The argument the book quietly makes is that survival is not merely biological but relational: it requires someone to survive for. Jaku lived to 101, became a founding member of the Sydney Jewish Museum, and received the Order of Australia Medal. His account, assembled with the help of writer Liam Pieper, retains the warmth and directness of a spoken voice — a deliberate choice that makes the horror it describes land all the more forcefully.

Tomorrow Is Yesterday: Life, Death, and the Pursuit of Peace in Israel/Palestine, by Hussein Agha and Robert Malley

Hussein Agha, a longtime adviser to Palestinian leaders, and Robert Malley, who advised three American presidents on the Middle East, spent decades at the center of efforts to negotiate a resolution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Tomorrow Is Yesterday is their reckoning with why those efforts failed — and it is not a comfortable book for anyone who found comfort in the Oslo framework. Their central argument is that the peace process was built on a category error: it treated an existential conflict rooted in history, memory, and religious claim as a technical dispute about borders and recognition. In doing so, it resolved none of the underlying tensions while creating the illusion of progress.

The tone is elegiac rather than polemical. These are not outside critics but participants who believed in what they were doing and now must account for the results. They are candid that both sides — Israeli and Palestinian — were complicit in the failure, and they treat the Hamas attacks of October 7, 2023, not as a rupture but as the latest expression of forces that the peace process consistently failed to address. Named a Best Book of 2025 by The New Yorker, Foreign Affairs, NPR, and Foreign Policy, this is essential reading for anyone trying to understand not just the history of the conflict but why the frameworks used to resolve it kept producing the same impasse.

All Life Is Problem Solving, by Karl Popper

This slim collection gathers essays and lectures from the last twenty-five years of Popper’s life, many of them occasioned by the collapse of communism and the questions it raised about the relationship between science, democracy, and historical progress. The title essay makes an argument that is at once simple and far-reaching: that the same basic logic underlies the amoeba navigating its environment and Einstein revising his equations. Both are engaged in a process of trial, error, and elimination — the difference being that in science, it is the hypothesis that gets eliminated rather than the organism. Popper saw in this parallel the foundation of an open society: one that builds in mechanisms for correcting its own mistakes rather than suppressing the evidence that mistakes were made.

The second half of the collection turns to history and politics, where Popper is characteristically bracing. He is skeptical of any theory that claims to know where history is going, seeing such theories as the intellectual predecessors of totalitarianism. What he offers instead is more modest and more durable: the idea that progress is possible not through grand design but through the persistent, humble correction of specific wrongs. For readers new to Popper, this is an accessible entry point into a body of thought that has lost none of its urgency. For those already familiar with The Open Society and Its Enemies, the collection offers a late-career view of a thinker still actively refining his positions.

The Impossible Man: Roger Penrose and the Cost of Genius, by Patchen Barss

Patchen Barss spent six years writing this biography of Roger Penrose, speaking with him almost every week for five of those years, and the intimacy shows. Penrose — who won the Nobel Prize in Physics at 89 for proving that black holes must inevitably form from dying stars — is one of the most original mathematical minds of the twentieth century, the inventor of Penrose tiling, a collaborator with Stephen Hawking, and the author of ideas that still sit uneasily at the edge of what physics can explain. Barss gives us the full arc of that intellectual achievement with clarity and genuine enthusiasm. But the book’s real subject is announced in its subtitle: the cost of genius.

The cost, in Penrose’s case, was borne largely by the people around him. His longing for abstract knowledge was matched, Barss argues, by a corresponding difficulty in understanding — or prioritizing — the emotional needs of those close to him. The book draws on previously unopened personal archives and interviews with family and colleagues to present a figure whose final years were spent largely alone, by his own preference, with his research. The Impossible Man does not resolve the tension between Penrose’s gifts and his limitations, and it doesn’t try to. What it does instead is ask the question that runs beneath every great-mind biography: who makes the sacrifices that allow one person to be exceptional?

Khrushchev: The Man and His Era, by William Taubman

William Taubman spent nearly two decades researching this biography, and the result — winner of both the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Critics Circle Award — stands as the definitive account of Nikita Khrushchev and, through him, of the Soviet system itself. Khrushchev’s life is, in miniature, the entire Soviet experiment: he was born a peasant, rose through the machinery of Stalinism to become one of its most effective instruments, and then, after Stalin’s death, staked his authority on denouncing everything he had helped build. The contradiction is not incidental. Taubman argues that it was constitutive — that understanding Khrushchev requires holding both facts simultaneously, without resolving the tension into a cleaner story.

Drawing on newly opened archives in Russia and Ukraine, interviews with Khrushchev’s family, and his own visits to the places where Khrushchev lived and worked, Taubman gives sustained psychological attention to a man who was genuinely difficult to read — impulsive, charismatic, capable of great brutality and surprising humanity, driven by a guilt he could never fully articulate. The chapters on the Cuban Missile Crisis are particularly arresting: here was a man who had spent his career mastering the Soviet system now trying to manage a confrontation for which no system had prepared him. Taubman’s narrative is brisk and confident across 650 pages, and the portrait that emerges is irreducibly human — which is, perhaps, the most unsettling thing about it.

Gambler: Secrets from a Life at Risk, by Billy Walters

Billy Walters grew up in poverty in rural Kentucky, was adopted into a family that offered little stability, and became — by most accounts — the most successful sports bettor in American history, at his peak overseeing more than a billion dollars in annual wagers. Gambler is his memoir, and it is at its best when it explains how he actually did it: by treating sports betting not as gambling in the colloquial sense but as applied information theory, analyzing line movements, injury reports, and market inefficiencies with the rigor of a quantitative investor. The analogy to value investing is one Walters makes explicitly, and it holds. He won because he worked harder and thought more carefully than the houses he was beating.

The memoir is less successful when it turns to the personal and legal catastrophes that punctuated his career — the federal insider-trading conviction involving Phil Mickelson, the cycles of enormous gain and devastating loss, the brushes with organized crime. Walters is candid but not always deeply reflective, and the book can feel, in its second half, more like a settlement of scores than an accounting. Still, as a portrait of a mind that found its sharpest expression in a domain most people dismiss, Gambler is genuinely interesting — and as a window into the economics of professional sports betting before legal markets transformed the industry, it is nearly irreplaceable.

Plays

Conversations with Mother, by Matthew Lombardo

Matthew Lombardo’s semi-autobiographical two-hander opened at Off-Broadway’s Theater 555 in February 2025, directed by Noah Himmelstein and starring Caroline Aaron (The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel) and Tony winner Matt Doyle (Company). The play moves across five decades in the relationship between Maria Collavechio, a fiercely opinionated Italian-American matriarch, and her gay son — cycling through the particular rhythms of that bond: the guilt, the tenderness, the ancient arguments that never quite resolve. At 85 minutes with no intermission, the pacing is brisk enough that the emotional register shifts often, from broad comedy to something that caught at least part of the audience audibly weeping on the night I saw it.

The reviews were divided, and that division is telling. Critics who wanted the play to be something more — a sustained dramatic arc, a genuine reckoning with the mother-son dynamic — found it thin. Critics who came for the performances found them more than enough. Aaron in particular is doing something that looks effortless and isn’t: she makes Maria funny and maddening and recognizable without tipping into caricature. The play is not trying to say anything new about the difficulty of loving difficult people; it is trying, more modestly, to render that difficulty with warmth and precision. On those terms, it largely succeeds.

Silence! The Musical, by Jon Kaplan and Al Kaplan

Silence! The Musical began life as an internet curiosity — a parody album imagining what a Broadway adaptation of The Silence of the Lambs might sound like — before its stage incarnation became an unlikely off-Broadway hit, winning the Outstanding Musical prize at the New York International Fringe Festival and Best New Musical from the Off Broadway Alliance. The conceit is exactly what it sounds like: every character from Jonathan Demme’s 1991 film has been given a showtune. Buffalo Bill dances a hoedown while kidnapping Catherine Martin. A chorus of floppy-eared lambs narrates the action. Hannibal Lecter, in his plexiglass cell, sings about the life he’d like to lead someday outside the prison walls. The premise sustains itself considerably longer than it has any right to.

What makes the show more than a one-joke concept is its surprising fidelity to the source material. The Kaplan brothers clearly love the film, and their parody works precisely because it takes the original seriously — the lambs, the claustrophobic procedural pacing, the specific texture of Clarice’s ambition and vulnerability. It is irreverent without being contemptuous, which is a harder balance to strike than it appears. For theatergoers who know the film well, there is the additional pleasure of watching something you thought was unstageable get staged, absurdly but with real craft.

Purpose, by Branden Jacobs-Jenkins

Purpose won the 2025 Pulitzer Prize for Drama and the Tony Award for Best Play, and both distinctions feel earned rather than dutiful. Branden Jacobs-Jenkins — whose previous work includes Appropriate and Gloria — has written a family drama set in an upper-middle-class Chicago household over the course of a weekend reunion that was supposed to be celebratory and becomes something else entirely. The Jasper family is Black, financially comfortable, and in the process of discovering how successfully they have repressed everything they would prefer not to examine. The snow falls outside. The play does not raise its voice.

What is remarkable about Purpose, and what distinguishes it from similar family-drama premises, is its interest in the gap between self-perception and reality — not as a psychological problem afflicting any one character, but as a structural condition of the family itself. Directed by Phylicia Rashad with what reviewers called a “steady, unshowy hand,” the production trusts its silences. Kara Young, who won the Tony for Best Featured Actress, delivers a performance of remarkable economy. The play is not interested in catharsis in the traditional sense; it is interested in recognition — the colder and more lasting experience of understanding exactly how you arrived where you are.

Blind Runner, by Amir Reza Koohestani

Performed in Farsi with English supertitles at St. Ann’s Warehouse in January 2025, Blind Runner is the work of Iranian playwright and director Amir Reza Koohestani, and it begins with a situation that is already almost impossible: a man in Paris receives a plea from his wife, a political prisoner in Iran, asking him to help train her friend — a blind woman — to run through the Channel Tunnel from France to the United Kingdom. The run is real. The politics surrounding it are real. And the question Koohestani builds the play around — whether an act of extreme physical endurance can also be an act of protest, and who that protest is for — is one that the play refuses to answer cleanly.

Koohestani’s signature, developed across thirty years of work, is the weaving of the personal and the political into a single strand that cannot be separated without losing both. Blind Runner is also, at its core, a play about marriage and about the particular form of love that requires one person to hold the world together while the other is detained. The production ran only three weeks, which is not unusual for the scale of work St. Ann’s Warehouse typically presents — but it is a genuinely rare piece of theater, “mesmerizing” and “stunningly performed,” and one that carries the weight of the ongoing struggle for women’s rights in Iran without reducing that struggle to backdrop.

Glengarry Glen Ross, by David Mamet

David Mamet wrote Glengarry Glen Ross in 1983, and the play won the Pulitzer Prize the following year. The Palace Theatre’s 2025 revival — directed by Patrick Marber with a cast headed by Kieran Culkin, Bob Odenkirk, Bill Burr, and Michael McKean — arrives at a moment when the play’s argument about American capitalism feels less like a critique and more like a weather report. The two acts unfold over two days in the lives of four Chicago real-estate salesmen competing to close leads on worthless plots of land, and the methods they are willing to use — flattery, manipulation, theft, betrayal — are not presented as exceptional. They are the job. The company’s brutal sales contest, which offers a Cadillac to the top performer and a pink slip to the bottom two, is the engine that drives everything, and Mamet never lets you forget that the men who devised the contest are nowhere on stage.

The 2025 production divided critics in ways that illuminate something real about the play itself. Those who found it flat were responding, I think, to a genuine tension in Mamet’s design: Glengarry is built around verbal bravado — its overlapping, profane, staccato dialogue is one of the most recognizable sounds in American theater — but the characters are also, beneath the patter, profoundly defeated men. When the star power of the cast draws attention to the performance rather than the desperation, the play’s mechanism misfires. Odenkirk’s Shelley Levene, a once-great salesman now running on fumes and false confidence, is the production’s anchor: he understands that the character’s real subject is not ambition but humiliation, and he plays it with an ache the fireworks elsewhere occasionally obscure. The play itself remains one of the sharpest things written about work in the twentieth century.