In August 2026, Santa Fe Opera put on an American premiere that Hollywood never quite managed to get right. The opera is called Lili Elbe, it's scored by a Grammy winning composer, and its libretto was written by a working neuroradiologist who spends his days reading brain scans and his evenings, it turns out, correcting the historical record. His reason for writing it was blunt: he'd seen The Danish Girl and decided Lili's actual life deserved better than the film gave it. H

The Mabinogion is Wales's great collection of medieval prose tales, eleven stories of shapeshifting kings, cursed queens, talking heads and giants with impossible demands, and it's one of the strangest survival stories in British literature. The stories themselves are older than Britain's oldest surviving copies of them by centuries, the modern title everyone uses for the collection was basically a mistake, and buried inside one of its tales is the same fighting dragon that e

Somewhere in south Wales, most likely between Christmas and Twelfth Night, a dead horse might knock on your door. Its skull has been stripped, dried and mounted on a pole, its eye sockets are stuffed with baubles or old bottle bottoms, and someone is crouched underneath a sheet controlling its jaw so it can snap at you while its friends sing for their supper. If you can out-rhyme it, it leaves. If you can't, it comes inside. This is the Mari Lwyd, and it's one of the stranges