I have a friend.

She’s watching Arsenic and Old Lace tonight.
And so am I.

I know she’s watching it because it’s her tradition — and it’s a tradition she passed on to me. She’s the one who introduced me to this movie and, really, to my deeper love of classic Hollywood and theater, which this absolutely is.

There’s no coordination, no plan, no reminder. At some point during the night, she presses play, and I do too. The same film, the same glow, the same laughter, shared across the quiet.

She’s always loved the golden age — that whole era where style met timing, where everything was performance. She’s that part of me that still loves the shape of old light, the confidence of an era that believed in pace. And so, every October 31st, we share this small act of keeping it alive.

And make no mistake — Arsenic and Old Lace is a Halloween movie.
Not a curiosity, not an offbeat pick. It takes place on Halloween night in Brooklyn. Cool air. Rustling leaves. A bugle upstairs and a secret under the window seat. Two sweet old ladies serving poisoned wine with a smile. It’s gothic and farcical, cozy and unhinged — the perfect Halloween contradiction.

The story began on Broadway in 1941, written by Joseph Kesselring and produced by Howard Lindsay and Russel Crouse. It ran for more than 1,400 performances at the Fulton Theatre — an instant hit. Boris Karloff, fresh from Frankenstein, originated the role of Jonathan Brewster, the murderous nephew whose face was said to “look like Boris Karloff.” That in-joke became legend. When Frank Capra adapted the play for Warner Bros., he kept almost the entire stage cast — except Karloff, who was contractually bound to keep performing on Broadway. Capra even delayed the film’s release until the play’s run finished, out of respect for the production still filling seats on 42nd Street.

And into that world stepped Cary Grant, as Mortimer Brewster — a role meant to feel like a Broadway leading man caught inside a mad farce. Grant was perfect for it.

He’s a storm in this film — completely unrestrained, all motion and disbelief. He flails, folds, argues with reality. His body tells half the story before the words arrive. There’s a scene where he’s tied to a chair, and even then he turns it into a piece of choreography.

Grant began his career as an acrobat in vaudeville, performing flips, balancing acts, and stilt-walking. You can still see that lineage here — the control, the rhythm, the way he moves like someone who understands gravity intimately. Over the years he refined that energy into charm, but this might be the last time he truly let his acrobat’s body drive the performance. It’s physical, chaotic, funny — a farewell, maybe, to that earlier version of himself.

The movie’s rhythm comes from that same physical pulse. It’s all timing. Every line lands a half-beat early. Jokes overlap. Tension rides the edge of panic. The camera doesn’t cut to keep things moving — the people do. Capra built it like stagecraft: long takes, slow pans, wide shots that hold while the actors fill every inch of the set.

And then there’s “Teddy Roosevelt” Brewster, charging through the house like punctuation. He isn’t just comic relief; he’s the metronome. Every entrance resets the room, turns fear into laughter, and resets the tempo again.

When I learned that much of the cast came directly from the original Broadway company — Josephine Hull, Jean Adair, John Alexander — it all clicked. Of course it feels that way — big, alive, projected. These weren’t film actors yet; they were stage performers still playing to the back of the house. You can almost sense the proscenium just beyond the camera.

That’s what makes this film special. Theater isn’t supposed to last. It exists, it vanishes, and the next night is something new. But this — this one stayed. Capra managed to trap a performance that should have evaporated. It’s why Arsenic and Old Lace still feels kinetic instead of quaint: it’s not a movie about theater; it’s theater, caught mid-breath.

If you close your eyes while watching, you can almost place yourself there: eight rows back at the Fulton Theatre, 1941. The orchestra tuning fades. The house lights dim. The audience leans forward. And then Cary Grant steps into the glow, already unraveling, already halfway to panic.

It’s alive. It still is.

If you haven’t seen it recently — or ever — Criterion released a 4K restoration in October 2022, and it’s stunning. Sharp, patient, luminous. You can see the grain of the film, the brush of stage lighting baked into every frame. If they’re paying attention, you should be too.

So tonight, maybe press play too.
Make it your ritual. Share it with a friend.

Let the film move the way it wants to — fast, funny, theatrical, alive.
And somewhere in the middle of it, maybe you’ll feel what we feel: that sense that you’re eight rows back in 1941, watching a Broadway night that somehow never ended.

The Memory of Procedure

If you’ve been reading me for a while, you already know The West Wing has a hold on me.
If not, here’s the short version: it’s one of my all-time favorite shows—one I can’t bring myself to rewatch. Not because it lost its shine, but because it came from a country that still believed knowing the rules was enough to do something good with them.

There’s one episode that always stays with me.
Season Two.
The Stackhouse Filibuster.

An old senator stands alone on the Senate floor to protect funding for autism research. The White House staff, watching from their offices, assume it’s just performance. They keep working, write notes home, talk about their kids, and wait for him to collapse. Then someone notices the pattern: Stackhouse isn’t grandstanding. He’s pleading.

When they finally understand, they don’t move to end the spectacle—they move to help. They send in a friendly senator to ask a single question, broken into thirty-seven parts. Under Senate rules, a senator may yield to a question without surrendering the floor. It lets him rest, sip water, and keep speaking.

They didn’t rewrite the rulebook; they read it so precisely they found mercy inside it.

That was the old faith: that empathy could still be legislated by syntax.

You can see the same instinct woven through our mythology—through the camera of Frank Capra’s Mr. Smith Goes to Washington, where decency survives exhaustion, and in real life when Fred Rogers quietly faced a hostile Senate committee and turned skepticism into funding with nothing more than patience and grace.

Both moments, fiction and fact, reflect the same American impulse: to speak long enough, and calmly enough, that even power begins to listen.

We still have those rules.
What’s changed is what they’re used for.

Law That Outlived Its Spirit

The House is silent.
The Speaker says there’s no reason to reconvene until a deal appears. Technically lawful. Perfectly constitutional. A chamber allowed to stop breathing.

Paralysis as strategy isn’t new; every shutdown has been one.
What’s different is how severe this one has become—and how willingly both sides are testing its limits. We are rapidly approaching past the outer edge of the longest shutdown in U.S. history.

Federal employees are entering their fourth week without pay. Capitol Police still guard a building that won’t meet. Custodians keep cleaning its empty halls. Roughly 33,000 National Guard members continue to serve without compensation. A one-day token payment from Trump’s allies made headlines but didn’t change the principle: the armed forces cannot depend on private charity. That’s not patriotism; that’s privatization of the republic’s bodyguard.

People work on faith until faith stops paying for groceries. Patriotism runs on blood sugar. When the law demands service but withholds sustenance, it’s not order—it’s conscription by starvation.

Each unpaid week pushes essential workers closer to the line where survival outweighs obedience. It begins with guards, cafeteria workers, and janitors in Washington and spreads through every office that actually runs the government. From there, it reaches the sky.

The Speaker understands all of this.
He’s learned that the last lever of power in a democracy isn’t policy—it’s time. By refusing to act, he controls the tempo. Every day of stillness centralizes authority in his hands. Each week that passes trains the country to confuse silence with stability.

The Democrats know it, too. They just don’t know what to do with it. Their messaging has been what it always is: defensive, scattered, wrapped in the language of the ACA. They’re fighting for something that mattered—but not enough. The ACA saved lives, yes. But it’s a decade-old compromise people barely recognize by name, especially in the deep red states most dependent on it.

You can’t keep fighting for what was. You have to fight for what’s next.

Tempo is now the last legal move left. Whoever learns to wield it without breaking the law will shape the next decade of power.

Two exits remain.
If Democrats fold first, they confirm that inaction belongs to him—that he owns the country’s clock.
If they match his endurance but aim it at a moral horizon, they can flip the polarity. Both choices are lawful. Only one restores legitimacy.

The Pressure Point Economy

Government can idle; physics can’t. The next inflection point isn’t ideological—it’s kinetic.

Airports are America’s circulatory system: forty-five thousand flights a day, three million passengers aloft, a national heartbeat of engines and faith. Now imagine that hum faltering.

Air-traffic controllers, unpaid for weeks, start calling out. Safety inspectors are home. TSA lines double because half the staff can’t afford the gas. The Secretary of Transportation assures cameras that ninety percent of controllers are still working—as if that number meant safety instead of imminent failure.

It doesn’t take a strike. It takes exhaustion. One missed hand-off, one empty tower, and you find out what “continuity” actually costs.

Thanksgiving will be the pressure point.
The week when motion itself becomes sacred—families, executives, donors, delegates, all dependent on the same fragile infrastructure. When that motion halts, even for a day, pain finally travels upward. Pressure always seeks its author.

The Speaker is betting that pain breaks the opposition first. The Democrats have to learn that pain can also be direction—the one variable they can control.

If they can hold long enough to make the stillness mean something—to stand for something larger than gridlock—they can tell the country that the pause has purpose.

We’re not waiting for nothing; we’re waiting for you to be seen.

That’s how you flip a weapon into a covenant.

The Moral Line in the Sand

Whoever wins this standstill will prove one of two things: either legality can still expand protection, or it’s been permanently repurposed to contain it.

The Democrats can’t promise a return to normal—normal is what failed. They can’t campaign on restoration. They have to campaign on momentum. Forward progress. The promise of America was never stasis; it was motion.

If the right wants to “make America great again,” the left should remind the country that America was built to move forward.

That’s why the ACA can’t be the rallying cry. The fight can’t be for the compromise of a previous decade. It has to be for something that fulfills the original promise: Medicare for All.

If America can legally suspend paychecks for millions, it can legally guarantee care for everyone.
If the government can survive on emergency protocols, it can build a permanent one for survival itself.

That’s the moral line in the sand. This is no longer a contest of budgets. It’s a contest of endurance—and imagination.
The Speaker proves that delay equals power. The Democrats must prove that endurance equals mercy.

Politically, the timing matters. If elections remain secure, the midterms are the hinge. The gerrymandering clock is already ticking.

If Democrats can frame this shutdown as the moment they held the line for survival, they can run on that momentum—the party that stood still so the country could move again.

With that platform—progress, care, motion—they could plausibly reclaim both chambers, introduce Medicare for All, and then let the veto become the spectacle.
Let Trump veto care. Let the country watch it happen.

That’s not just strategy. That’s moral theater at scale—the same kind of theater that once made Stackhouse stand until his knees buckled.

The Lawful Mercy

When Stackhouse finally yielded, he didn’t win the bill.
He won proof that the law could still listen.

That’s what’s missing now. We’ve mastered procedure so completely that we can stop the nation cold, but we’ve forgotten how to hear through it.

Mercy is still legal. Survival is still constitutional.

All that’s required is someone willing to keep standing long enough to make the law remember why it exists.

Where law ends, tyranny begins—carved above the doors of the Department of Justice as warning, not prophecy. We haven’t reached the end yet.

There’s still one lawful act left that can redeem the system that forgot its purpose.

Someone just has to decide to use it.

Every Fourth of July I watch 1776. It’s corny, theatrical, too long. But this year I couldn’t do it.
I couldn’t sit through two hours of men arguing about independence while ours was quietly disappearing.

For years it was a ritual — the overture swelling as Franklin and Adams trade barbs, the heat of Philadelphia making their powdered wigs sag. I used to find comfort in the idea that the country’s birth was messy and loud, that maybe the arguments themselves were the point. But lately it just feels like watching ghosts rehearse a script we stopped believing in.

I’m not sure why it came to mind — maybe because I’ve been thinking back to other times when America faced great uncertainty or because of this Saturday, when people will take to the streets for the No Kings protest.

And that’s when I read an essay by Christopher Armitage from “The Existentialist Republic.”
He had done the research I’d been afraid to do — studied every nation that slid into fascism to see if anyone had ever stopped it once it took power.

The answer was no.
Not once. Not ever.

Germany, Italy, Spain, Hungary — the list reads like a roll call of repetition. The pattern is perfect in its cruelty: conservatives panic about progress, ally with fascists to contain it, then get purged once the fascists win.
Democrats write editorials. Fascists consolidate power. Thirty to fifty years of darkness follows.

His conclusion was the part that finally broke me:

Once fascists win power democratically, they have never been removed democratically.

I’d known it in my bones. Armitage only gave it a name.
The window isn’t closing, he said — it’s closed.

And yet, he argued, this moment is different.
Not because we’re stronger, but because we’re stranger.

No fascist regime has ever ruled a nuclear superpower with the world’s reserve currency, satellite surveillance, and social media engineered to reinforce delusion.
No fascist state ever had an AI boom standing behind it — one poised to erase a third of its own labor force in a decade.

A Senate report released this October estimated that automation could eliminate up to 100 million U.S. jobs by 2035. That’s nearly a third of the entire economy.
Historically, it’s only taken a small fraction of workers walking off the job to grind a nation to a halt. But when those jobs vanish—replaced by code and circuitry—what leverage is left?

You can’t organize a general strike when no one has a job.

So power recalibrates. The government doesn’t need to outlaw protest when exhaustion does it for them.
And while we argue online about which billionaire said what, ICE vans idle quietly at the edges of blue cities.

The budgets are shifting, too. States are cutting social programs and funneling funds into “election security.” Translation: voter suppression with a badge.

The Supreme Court just lifted a restriction that had barred ICE from using race, language, or workplace as grounds for suspicion. The majority called it a question of “reasonableness,” not race — which means ethnicity can now count as one factor among others. In practice, that’s all the permission they need. Because “reasonable” is elastic: location becomes context, and context becomes cause.

Under the pretext of protecting elections from “illegal voting,” they’ll use that elasticity where it matters most — at the polls. Knowing full well that undocumented people can’t vote, they’ll still frame it as prevention. A few units stationed near polling sites in California, Arizona, or Texas are enough to keep thousands of legitimate Latino voters home. No need to falsify ballots; fear does the work. Suppress enough votes, seize enough state legislatures, and you can call for a Constitutional Convention. Two-thirds of the states are all it takes to rewrite the document completely.

The founders wrote checks and balances. The modern version is running balance sheets.

This is how fascism works now: not by marching on Rome but by freezing payrolls, hollowing pensions, and deputizing despair.
The point isn’t to convince you; it’s to exhaust you.

Every day the news reads like a systems log — institutions flickering offline one by one.
Congress traded oversight for immunity.
The courts sanctified corruption as precedent.
The press normalized collapse as coverage.

And the economy? It’s not collapsing so much as calcifying — automating the labor of millions while pretending it’s progress.

What do you call a country where the machines are thriving and the people are terrified?
We used to call it science fiction.
Now it’s a line item in a quarterly report.

I keep thinking about Armitage’s last section — the one where he tries to imagine the impossible: what resistance looks like after democracy.
He outlined four paths: coordinated blue-state coalitions ignoring federal edicts, silent mass non-compliance, secession, or international intervention.
Each of them reads like fiction. Each of them might also be the truth.

But before any of that, he writes one sentence that still sits in my chest:

The question isn’t whether these options are extreme. The question is whether we’re ready to admit that normal is already gone.

That’s the line that brought me back to 1776.

There’s a scene — you’ll know it if you’ve ever watched it — where Judge Wilson argues against independence. “There’s no legality here and certainly no precedent,” he says.
And Franklin, exasperated, shoots back that of course there isn’t —

“Because it’s a new idea.”

That’s it. That’s the whole American experiment in three words. A new idea.
The courage to invent a structure that didn’t exist yet.

If fascism is the oldest idea — the belief that fear and obedience can hold the world together — then our only answer is still the opposite: invention.

We are overdue to remember who we were when we built the thing in the first place.
Not the myth, not the anthem, but the audacity — the willingness to sign something no one else believed could work.

I don’t know if we can save this version of America.
Maybe Armitage is right and the window has already closed.
But the act of naming it still matters. Writing still matters.
Every fascism depends on forgetting; every rebirth begins with someone refusing to.

So maybe that’s why I’ll watch 1776 again next year.
Not because it will make me feel patriotic.
Because it will remind me what it looked like when ordinary, frightened people signed their names to an impossible future and called it freedom.

America invented the idea of democracy once.
If it falls, we can invent it again.
We just have to remember who we are.

I run a Plex server. Every October, it transforms. I load it with Halloween collections — goofy staples like Hocus Pocus, a rotation of slashers, the serious canon of horror classics. This year more friends are on it, which is fun, but honestly, I’d do it even if it were just me. Because for me October isn’t October until I put on The Shining.

I’ve seen it more times than I can count, and it still terrifies me. Not because of the hedge maze, or the elevators of blood, or even the twins in the hallway. Those are window dressing. What makes it terrifying is Nicholson — Jack Torrance — maybe the most accurate portrait of a father as monster ever put on film.

And here’s where I have to pause and say: apologies to Stephen King. He hated Kubrick’s adaptation. Said it was cold. Said Jack was crazy from the first frame. Said Wendy was reduced to a shrieking prop. In the ’90s he even wrote the teleplay for Stephen King’s The Shining, directed by Mick Garris, which stuck closer to his novel. He said he preferred that version. I’ve tried three years in a row to sit through it. I can’t. Kubrick’s film endures because what King thought was a flaw — the lack of agency, the coldness — Kubrick turned into the point.

The Facade (Already White-Knuckling)

From the very beginning — even in the car on the way to the hotel — Jack’s performance isn’t warmth. It’s curt, dismissive, slightly hostile. Danny says he’s hungry, and instead of comfort, Jack snaps back with a reprimand. The best he can do as a father is scold. Wendy, by contrast, reassures Danny they’ll eat soon. That little triangle in the car tells you everything: Wendy is the buffer, Jack is the disciplinarian, and Danny absorbs the tension.

This is Nicholson’s brilliance. Even Jack’s facade — his version of “trying to be normal” — is already shot through with irritation. Sobriety isn’t freedom here, it’s white-knuckling. He’s been on the wagon five miserable months, and it shows. The hostility is always there, right under the skin. The hotel doesn’t have to create it. It only has to strip away the last shred of restraint.

The Typewriter (Drunk Without the Drink)

Then there’s the typewriter scene. Wendy interrupts him, and he just detonates. “Whenever you come in here and you hear me typing…” It’s drunk rage, sharp and venomous, even though he hasn’t touched a drop. And the cruel joke? He isn’t writing anything at all. Later, we’ll see it: All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy. Page after page of gibberish. His “work” is a sham, and the strain of pretending wears him down. When his focus breaks, the mask breaks. And the hotel slips in through the cracks.

The First Drink

And then Lloyd appears. The empty bar, suddenly glowing, suddenly full. Jack lifts a glass and says, “Here’s to five miserable months on the wagon.” It’s a confession disguised as a toast. Sobriety wasn’t noble; it was suffering. And with that drink in his hand, Nicholson relaxes. He’s smoother, looser, more himself. This isn’t possession. This is relapse. And here’s the cruelest part: Jack Torrance is never more at ease than when he’s drinking.

Dissociation

Right after that, Wendy confronts him about Danny. And Jack looks wasted. Slurred speech, slack face, pure hostility. Whether the liquor is “real” doesn’t matter. It’s real to him. And that’s all it takes.

The Green Room

Then Room 237. The woman in the tub. Desire that curdles into horror. Jack stumbles out of the room hollow-eyed, vacant. This is the hinge. Not just relapse anymore — possession. Jack’s gone.

The Bathroom with Grady

And then Kubrick makes it explicit. Jack meets Delbert Grady in the red bathroom. “You chopped your wife and daughters into little bits,” Jack says. And Grady doesn’t deny it. He reframes it: “I corrected them, sir.” Domestic violence, repackaged as duty.

Then comes the line that collapses everything: “You’ve always been the caretaker. I should know, sir. I’ve always been here.”

This isn’t Jack becoming possessed. It’s Jack being told he’s always belonged here. The eternal role. The father who destroys his family, again and again.

The Pantry

For a moment, Wendy seems to win. She knocks him out, drags him to the pantry, latches the door. He’s trapped.

But then the voice returns. Grady. Calm, steady, instructing him. And the door unlatches by itself.

That’s the moment Kubrick refuses to let you rationalize. Up to now, you could argue it’s all madness — hallucinations, drunk rage, a man unraveling. But no delusion opens a locked door from the outside. That’s the hotel. That’s the supernatural. And from then on, Jack is finished.

The Descent

The finale is nightmare fuel. Jack with the axe, chasing Wendy and Danny through the hotel, through the maze, grin stretched wide. The facade is obliterated. No fake civility, no discipline at the typewriter. He’s free — and freedom here means annihilation.

And that’s exactly why King hated it.

Kubrick vs. King

King wanted a tragic arc. A decent man undone by the hotel, corrupted step by step. Kubrick gave us no arc at all. No redemption. No agency. Wendy doesn’t “save the day.” Danny doesn’t defeat the evil. They just survive. And Jack isn’t a good man lost. He’s a bad man revealed.

That’s the coldness King despised. But Kubrick knew: that coldness is the point.

The Eternal Return

Because once you strip away choice, what’s left is the loop. Jack has always been the caretaker. The hotel isn’t haunted by ghosts; it’s haunted by cycles. Fathers terrorizing their families. Violence repeating, over and over.

Hell isn’t fire and brimstone. Hell is being locked in that role forever.

Or Maybe…

But maybe that’s too bleak. Because Jack does die. Frozen in the maze, pathetic, beaten by his own incompetence. Wendy and Danny do make it out alive. Maybe that’s the story — a mother clawing back just enough strength to protect her son. Maybe it’s proof the cycle can break.

Or maybe it’s just a haunted house flick. Sometimes October doesn’t need a thesis. Sometimes you just want a scare.

And that’s Kubrick’s genius. The Shining holds all of it at once. It’s addiction. It’s possession. It’s the eternal return. It’s survival. It’s just a damn good horror movie. However you read it, it never lets you out clean. It keeps you circling.

Closing

That’s why I keep coming back. Every October, my Plex server fills up with the usual horror lineup, but The Shining is always the centerpiece. Because every time I put it on, it’s something different. Sometimes it’s about addiction. Sometimes it’s possession. Sometimes it’s a cycle that never ends. Sometimes it’s a mother and son breaking free.

And maybe that’s the point. It doesn’t settle. It doesn’t close. It just keeps pulling you back.

That’s the real Overlook Hotel.

And that’s why I’ll keep pressing play every October — right after Hocus Pocus.

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I wasn’t looking for anything profound—I was doom-scrolling Reddit, the stand-up clips were on autoplay. A comic was doing crowd work: “what do you do?” “we’re in theatre.” “what are you producing?” “Ragtime.” That one word hit a tuning fork I didn’t know was still sitting on the shelf.

I flashed back to the first time Ragtime cracked my own world open: a touring production in South Florida. West Palm Beach, velvet seats, the first musical that didn’t feel winky or campy to me. It was tragic and braided—three Americas on the same stage, singing past and into each other. I didn’t know E. L. Doctorow yet, just that someone had put a feeling I had about this country into a story that moved. (Doctorow’s novel really did change the weather for historical fiction when it arrived in 1975.)

If you’ve ever tried to describe Ragtime to someone who hasn’t seen it, you end up either underselling it (“a big period musical!”) or over-intellectualizing it. It is a score that lifts you up by the lapels (Flaherty & Ahrens), a book that refuses to blink (McNally), and staging that—at least in 1998—went for broke. The original Broadway production opened at the brand-new Ford Center for the Performing Arts on January 18, 1998, and ran 834 performances. It was also, infamously, very expensive—roughly $10–$11 million at the time—and came with onstage fireworks and a working Model T. Depending on your taste that was spectacle, poetry, or both.

The show led the Tonys with 13 nominations and won four—Score, Book, Orchestrations, and Audra McDonald’s devastating Featured Actress turn as Sarah—while The Lion King took Best Musical.

If you found Ragtime the way I did, you might have come in through PBS. There was a Great Performances documentary, Creating Ragtime, that aired in January 1998, with Whoopi Goldberg hosting and the creative team and Doctorow front and center. It isn’t a pro-shot of the full show (I wish); it’s an hour that captures the electricity of building something that big from the ground up.

There was a revival in 2009 that transferred from the Kennedy Center to the Neil Simon. Critics praised it, but the run ended after just 65 performances. Commercially unlucky, artistically admired—the paradox that keeps following this show.

And now: the tuning fork again. After last season’s sold-out City Center gala, Ragtime is officially set to return this fall at Lincoln Center Theater—the Vivian Beaumont—headlined by Joshua Henry, Caissie Levy, and Brandon Uranowitz for a 14-week limited run.

Why bother, in 2025, with a musical that looks backward? Because Ragtime doesn’t really. It looks at the present through the back door. The immigrant’s camera, the White family’s carefully ordered home, Coalhouse’s car—every object is a motive. We like to tell ourselves that the America of the early 1900s is gone; that the heat we’re feeling now is novel. Ragtime doesn’t agree. It insists that the collisions—race, class, capital, celebrity, gender, labor, the machinery of progress—are not an era but a loop. (“Make them hear you,” indeed.) Some critics found the original staging overwrought. I thought it was magnificent. Maybe even extravagant, sure—but it carried conviction. And more than that, it carried optimism: that even through heartbreak, the future of America is still possible, as long as we actually want it.

When I think “great American musical of the modern era,” I put it in the small circle with Porgy and Bess—works that refuse to flatter the version of America we put on brochures. Doctorow’s novel was ahead of its time in the way it jams historical celebrities into the mundane lives of ordinary people and asks what’s performance and what’s power. The musical doubles down: it lets the orchestra argue with the libretto, the choreography argue with the set, and the people on stage argue with the times that made them. That friction is the point.

So yes, I want to see Ragtime again—this time with more mileage on me and less tolerance for sentimental shortcuts. I don’t need the fireworks or the car (though the car is dramaturgically perfect); I want the argument. I want to sit in a room with strangers and listen to the country talk to itself in harmony and dissonance. I want to be reminded that “back to before” is a fantasy lyric, not a policy. And I want the arts moving, not because they make us feel good, but because they make us see straight.

If you’re going, I’ll see you at the Beaumont. If you’re not, the PBS documentary is still a fine way to remember what it felt like when this music first found you.

If You Go

• What: Ragtime (Second Broadway Revival)

• Where: Lincoln Center Theater at the Vivian Beaumont

• When: Fall 2025, 14-week limited run

• Cast: Joshua Henry (Coalhouse Walker Jr.), Caissie Levy (Mother), Brandon Uranowitz (Tateh)

• Tickets: Lincoln Center Theater