Tom Stoppard and Steve Martin have written plays based on the idea, and in a recent New York Times editorial, the ever-pretentious Verlyn Klinkenborg writes, nonsensically, "It is a coincidence that [Richard] Strauss and [Hugo von] Hofmannsthal began to create the Marschallin"—a character in the opera Der Rosenkavalier—"just four years after Einstein published the scientific paper that destroyed the idea of absolute, independent, unvarying time. Yet our knowledge of that proximity is not a coincidence. The Marschallin voices an anxiety about time ... and yet she seems to be saying something utterly new, something that marks her not as a creature of Maria Theresa's Vienna, but as a witness of our modern lives, where space and time bend together."