The Cultural Season: What We're Watching, Reading, and Attending

New York City in the autumn is, for those who love culture, almost unbearably rich. The galleries reopen. The performance season begins. The literary world convenes. There is more to see, hear, and read than any one person could possibly absorb — which is, of course, part of the pleasure.

Our editors have been paying attention. Here is what we are watching, reading, and attending this season.

At the Met, the new textile exhibition is extraordinary — a meditation on craft, labor, and the invisible hands that have made beautiful things throughout history. We have been twice and expect to return.

The New York Philharmonic's opening program includes a new commission from a composer whose work we have followed for years. The piece is difficult and rewarding in equal measure.

In fiction, we are reading a debut novel that has been quietly passed among our members for the past month. It is the kind of book that makes you want to call someone immediately after finishing it.

The Brooklyn Academy of Music has programmed a dance company from São Paulo whose work we saw in preview last spring. It is unlike anything else currently on a New York stage.

We are also paying attention to the smaller venues: the gallery in the West Village showing work by three painters whose names you do not yet know but will; the reading series in a bookshop on the Upper West Side that has been running for twenty years and remains, improbably, one of the best literary events in the city.

Culture is not a luxury. It is how we understand ourselves and each other. Go out. Pay attention. Let it change you.