When French president (then-candidate) Emmanuel Macron waxed lyrical about his passion for the composer Gioachino Rossini in spring 2017, the transatlantic chattering classes gushed in admiration (and made snide comparisons to Donald Trump). But when British foreign minister Boris Johnson was…

For an institution in crisis—and the Metropolitan Opera, contending with multiple allegations of sexual abuse of minors against longtime conductor James Levine, as well as a years-long decline in ticket sales, is just that—the Met’s fundamentals are remarkably sound.

What does it do to casually assumed theories of cultural equality if a civilization is founded on the idea that the gods require the ritualized butchering of human beings? When Mel Gibson released his twilight-of-the-Maya epic Apocalypto in 2006, some scholars of Mayan culture felt that the film’s…