Whether you call it the Irish Potato Famine, the Great Famine, or the Great Hunger, it adds up to the same thing: between 1845 and 1849 one million Irish died of starvation and one million left the country. Asenath’s Nicholson’s firsthand account of the famine is the basis for Donnacha Dennehy’s opera The Hunger, directed by Tom Creed and featuring singers Katherine Manley and Iarla Ó Lionáird. In video interviews, Noam Chomsky and Paul Krugman explain that it wasn’t just potatoes, it was politics. —L.J.