Culture

Brady Brickner-Wood’s Infinite Scroll column argues the celebrity sex tape no longer works as a fame engine — and that the people still trying to use it don’t understand why it ever did. The template was Kim Kardashian, whose 2007 tape converted a “mousy, dull girl” into the star of one of the defining reality shows of the century. But that path, he argues, can’t be repeated. The case study is the Newman family — Julian and Jaden Newman, former child basketball prodigies who never made it (Julian topped out at five-foot-seven; Jaden averaged under a point per game at Cal State LA). When an explicit video of Jaden, allegedly from a hacked Snapchat, leaked last month, the family chose to capitalize: podcast tours, live streams, a father joking about the streamer having a threesome with his daughter. ...

Kathryn Schulz’s postscript on Dolly Parton, dead at eighty, opens like a Lincoln address: “Four score and three thousand songs ago, in the middle of a whopping winter storm, a sharecropper and his young wife brought forth upon this continent a baby girl named Dolly Parton.” Born in a one-room cabin in Sevier County, Tennessee, the fourth of twelve children, she went from singing in church at six to a Grand Ole Opry introduction by Johnny Cash at thirteen. ...

Paul Mendes-Flohr spent four decades on modern Jewish thought; his final book, Love Is Strong as Death: A Biography of Franz Rosenzweig, was completed a year before he died in October 2024. Rosenzweig is the “anti-Kant” — a philosopher of comparable depth whose life was lived rather than merely thought: a German-Jewish scion who nearly converted to Christianity, came back to Judaism on Yom Kippur, and kept writing as ALS slowly paralyzed him. ...

In 1928, a 22-year-old Samuel Beckett arrived in Paris as a lecteur at the École Normale Supérieure. Tom MacGreevy, his lifelong friend, introduced him to Joyce — and, at the end of his stay, to Proust, whom Beckett had never read. The result was his first book, Proust (1931), written when he was 25 and now republished by Faber & Faber with a foreword by Eimear McBride. Jon Cook’s review reads it as a rare example of “critical modernism”: ...

Dolly Parton died August 25 at eighty, and the tributes were universal — Empire State Building lit pink, flags at half-staff, politicians from both parties lining up. Jarek Paul Ervin’s eulogy cuts through the niceness: Parton was “one of the most consistent voices for working-class people,” a writer who turned ordinary working-class women into the narrators of heroic ballads. Her songbook did the work: “In the Good Old Days (When Times Were Bad)” — farm families watching their crops beaten by hail, too poor for the doctor. “Coat of Many Colors” — childhood poverty as quiet defiance; “Daddy’s Working Boots” — an ode to toil and sacrifice. “Jolene” — a woman’s fear of being left behind. “9 to 5” — “trapped in a rich man’s game,” written on set and credited for “nails” (her fingernail clicks mimicked a typewriter); number one on three Billboard charts. The 1980 film’s fantasy: three office women kidnap their boss and institute fair pay, better hours, and on-site childcare. Parton was no leftist — she refused politics, and her 2021 Squarespace rework of “9 to 5” (“be your own boss”) was rightly mocked; David Sirota called it the most dystopian ad he had ever seen. Ervin reads that tension as country music’s own: a genre that captures working-class life better than most yet keeps resolving pain into status-quo traditionalism. ...

The Economist, the 1843-founded house organ of free-trade liberalism, recently ran a piece calling Nobel laureate Daron Acemoglu “oddly unconvincing.” Alberto Garzón argues the real offense is political: Acemoglu’s work on technology and AI proposes putting the working class back at the center of economic policy — and that is heresy to the guardians of Big Tech’s untrammeled power. The automation debate is two centuries old: Ricardo’s third edition of Principles (1821) broke with the cheerful orthodoxy that machines always create compensating jobs — machinery could be “very injurious to the interests of the class of labourers.” During the Industrial Revolution, handloom weavers’ real wages fell at least 25 percent; productivity rose, wages did not, and inequality exploded. Prosperity was not shared. Acemoglu’s Power and Progress (2023, with Simon Johnson): technology is not automatically good — whether gains are shared depends on institutions, power, and the direction society forces innovation. What fixed it in the nineteenth century was democratization, unions, and worker-protection law — counterpower that redirected technical change. His latest paper with David Autor and Simon Johnson is literally titled “Building Pro-Worker Artificial Intelligence.” What makes Acemoglu dangerous: he reaches heterodox conclusions from inside the neoclassical mainstream, so he cannot be dismissed as a crank. ...

Vivek Chibber (NYU sociologist, Catalyst editor) walks through the history of industrial policy on Jacobin Radio’s Confronting Capitalism — what it was, why it worked in Korea and Taiwan, why it died, and what a left revival would require. The provocation: the World Bank, which grudgingly acknowledged state intervention in 1993 and fought it for a quarter century, published a largely supportive report on industrial policy in 2026. Industrial policy means two things, both temporary by design: ...

Branko Marcetic on the Democratic Party’s civil war playing out in the Michigan Senate race. Three weeks after progressive Abdul El-Sayed won the primary, centrists turned a clipped Hasan Piker clip into a manufactured scandal — while the real story is their own faction openly helping the Republican. The “scandal”: Piker, in full context, warned that conflating all Jews with Israel makes Jews less safe — a point Ezra Klein, David Klion, Norman Solomon, and Hannah Arendt have all made The real scandal: Michigan Democrats and party bundlers backing Mike Rogers for “purely factional reasons,” and Third Way’s $15 million campaign to “discredit” the Left with El-Sayed name-checked Rogers’s team: students who joked about expelling Jews to North Korea, defenders of “love Hitler” young Republicans, and a faith coalition of homophobic and anti-Muslim extremists Rep. Hillary Scholten refused to back El-Sayed before he even won the primary The centrists’ calculus: if El-Sayed loses, they can blame the Left, discredit socialism, and install a candidate who shares their politics — lockstep support for Israel and corporate-friendly economics. ...

Cosmologists have mostly treated the universe as a rock — complex and beautiful, but shaped by arbitrary accidents. A fringe school of thought says it’s an egg: universes reproduce by spawning black holes, each offspring inheriting its parent’s physics with small variations, Darwin-style. Lee Smolin proposed the idea in 1992. It was ignored for a quarter century, until a novelist with a Substack and the James Webb Space Telescope gave it a second life. ...

Hamilton Nolan on the oddest gap in DSA’s winning streak: organized labor hasn’t decided what to think about it. New York is the preview — big unions backed the establishment until socialist wins forced a rethink. Mamdani entered the mayoral primary a fringe candidate; only UAW Region 9A endorsed him early, while 1199SEIU, 32BJ SEIU, and the Hotel and Gaming Trades Council backed Cuomo or nobody — then lined up behind him after he won Same pattern this year: Claire Valdez, a former UAW organizer, drew only a minority of left-leaning union endorsements while her opponent had the union who’s who — Valdez and seven other DSA candidates won anyway The 2016 echo: unions overwhelmingly backed Clinton over Sanders, “the truest believer in the labor movement, and ended up with nothing” The concrete prize: Valdez’s platform would have the federal government fund union organizing — attacking the biggest obstacle to organizing (resources) without waiting for labor-law reform that never passes Nolan’s case is power politics, not ideology: DSA candidates need union allies, and unions need the energy of a movement that’s actually winning. The window hasn’t closed. ...

Jacobin interviews economic historian Aaron Benanav (Endnotes collective, New Left Review’s “Beyond Capitalism” series) about the question Marx’s “cookshops of the future” line has let the Left dodge for a century: what would a postcapitalist economy actually look like? His answer is a concrete design, not a slogan. Markets survive capitalism — exchange and currencies predate profit-driven accumulation by millennia. What goes is the power of private profitability to direct investment The Soviet five-year plan (a Menshevik invention, purged along with its authors) proved investment can be coordinated; East Asia later paired coordinated investment with markets, though still capitalist Neurath’s lesson: values like sustainability, care, and good work can’t be ranked on one scale, so choosing among futures is a democratic problem — no equation can say which sacrifices are worth making Keynes radicalized: investment needs neither prior saving nor profit. Beveridge’s 75 percent public control becomes Benanav’s 100 percent — decided democratically, not technocratically Split currencies: non-convertible Points for production, Credits for consumption — stops metric-gaming (teaching to the test) and keeps consumption inequality from becoming productive power Democratic sectoral boards (health care: mental health vs. preventive vs. end-of-life) plus mission committees for cross-sectoral shifts like greening the economy Benanav’s closing distinction is the sharpest part: the recipes — how health care, housing, or family life are organized — stay contested political ground. But the cookshop — institutions that let incompatible visions of the good life contend without reproducing capitalism — is exactly what the Left must build. A postcapitalist society’s achievement is giving its conflicts durable democratic form, not settling them in advance. ...

Jacobin writer and DSA-LA organizer Noah Suárez-Sikes on the week-long media frenzy over Gustavo Gordillo, the thirty-eight-year-old former union electrician elected cochair of NYC-DSA. The gotcha: he lives in a Brooklyn row house his father bought. The house was purchased in 2019 at barely above the Brooklyn median price — worth under a third of the threshold for Mamdani’s pied-à-terre tax on second homes over $5 million, and it isn’t a second home The pile-on is a pattern: Cea Weaver got the same treatment; the New York Post attacked DSA volunteer Grace Ryan over her father’s chocolate company; journalists camped outside Gordillo’s row house The class-traitor lineage is long: Engels bankrolled Marx, Marx’s father was a lawyer, Lenin and Castro studied law, Bolívar came from one of the Americas’ wealthiest families, and patrician FDR oversaw the greatest expansion of social welfare in US history DSA’s breadth of class backgrounds is a strength, not a scandal — elected socialists range from street vendors’ sons to people who were once undocumented or homeless. Polling backs the movement: 58 percent of Democrats and 46 percent of Americans 18–34 view democratic socialism positively. ...

Emily Paulson spent seven years inside a multilevel marketing company — indoctrinated, risen to the top, then escaped. Her exit kicked off research into coercive control (behavioral, informational, thought, and emotional), and this is the reading list that came out of it. The throughline: nobody joins a cult, they join what they think is a good thing. Cultish: The Language of Fanaticism — Amanda Montell. How cultism is a spectrum and language is the key to undue influence — from Jonestown and Scientology to SoulCycle, startups, and skincare. Makes you question your strongest affiliations. Scarred — Sarah Edmondson & Kristine Gasbarre. The NXIVM whistleblower’s memoir (of The Vow fame): 12 years inside, 2,000 people enrolled, and the harrowing break with Keith Raniere. “Anyone can fall victim to these scams.” Tears of the Silenced — Misty Griffin. Amish true-crime memoir of childhood abuse and leaving the church — questions “religious freedom” that shields those exploiting women and children. Slonim Woods 9 — Daniel Barban Levin. The Larry Ray / Sarah Lawrence College story (Hulu’s Stolen Youth): how a fragile young mind gets captured by a manipulative cult leader — “disturbingly shows us just how easily something like this could’ve happened to us.” A Billion Years — Mike Rinder. The highest-ranking Scientology defector’s account — signed a billion-year contract, joined the Sea Organization — and the fear that keeps people inside. “A flamethrower of a read.” Hey, Hun — Emily Paulson. Her own memoir of rising to the top of the MLM pyramid, and the argument that MLM culture runs on the same isolation and cult-like ideology as organized scams — into the heart of white supremacy in America, as she puts it. For anyone who’s ever gotten the “Hey Hun” DM: this list is the map of how those systems work, told by people who got out.

Shahid Khan Naeem’s Jacobin essay traces how Silicon Valley turned the “new Cold War with China” into its favorite alibi. The founding text is Leopold Aschenbrenner’s 2024 “Situational Awareness” manifesto — a fired OpenAI researcher who compared AI to the Manhattan Project, then raised ~$100M for a hedge fund that imploded in July when China’s Moonshot AI shipped a cheaper open-weight model. The shield has a documented history: Zuckerberg’s 6,500-word essay this month: obstructing AI energy and data centers is a “national security risk” in the race with China — Altman, Amodei, Thiel, and Andreessen all agree. Palantir’s Alex Karp, quoting Huntington at the Hudson Institute: “There are only two cultures that are going to win in the next year. It’s going to be us or China.” Zuckerberg’s leaked 2018 hearing notes, photographed by the AP: “Break up FB? US tech companies key asset for America; break up strengthens Chinese companies.” 2021: a letter from a dozen ex-national-security officials — including Leon Panetta — arguing antitrust would “cede U.S. tech leadership to China.” The bipartisan bills died anyway. The essay’s sharpest contrast is between the two states that produced these industries. China torpedoed Jack Ma’s $37B IPO and split Alibaba six ways, wiping $2 trillion from the sector; the US blessed state-sanctioned monopolies — Microsoft-OpenAI profit-sharing, Nvidia’s 90% grip on AI chips. Neither is democratic. ...

A New Yorker Critic’s Notebook on Natalie Harp, Trump’s thirty-five-year-old executive assistant, known as “the Human Printer” for following the President around with a printer and curating his media diet. The essay opens not with Washington but with Concord, 1987: Vietnam-vet pacifists lying on the rail to block a Contra weapons train, and S. Brian Willson, who lost both legs that day. Harp’s estranged brother Preston left the States for Nicaragua to work with Willson — the same household produced a pacifist and Trump’s most devoted aide Harp testified at the 2020 RNC that the Right to Try Act saved her life; the Washington Post found the timeline “unlikely” to support her story She lived in a Bedminster locker room for a summer (per Michael Wolff), anchored at One America News, and sent Trump letters that alarmed the Secret Service The essay compares her to Mao’s secretary Zhang Yufeng and Reagan’s astrologer Joan Quigley St. Félix’s reading: Harp is driven not by ambition but by a replacement-father fantasy, working out a psychic need in the epistolary form. The piece doubles as a portrait of a broken political family and a gerontocratic court in decline.

A New Yorker interview with Meg Stalter, currently playing Mary Todd Lincoln in the Broadway hit “Oh, Mary!” after breaking out as Kayla on “Hacks.” The conversation covers her real pop album “Crave,” her red-carpet bits with Paul W. Downs, and the Pentecostal Ohio childhood that fuels her star vehicle “Church Girls.” She was bullied daily in middle school, then found her people in drama club; improv in Chicago came after community college nursing classes The pandemic years: nightly Instagram Live and cheap custom Cameo videos “saved” her — she didn’t fall into “the deepest depression” On mission trips from her own near-miss in Peru: “to think you’re going to go and be a savior, that’s dangerous” On faith: raised Pentecostal, she “never felt at all judged by God about being a queer person, ever” “Crave” is not a joke, she insists — real pop songs written with Jesse Thomas, because “every comedian wants to be a musician” The throughline is the blur between bit and reality, Kaufman-style: an art project where you never tell people exactly what’s fake. Everyone’s laughing either way.

Edward Rothstein, the Wall Street Journal’s critic at large, reviews Daisy Dixon’s Depraved: The Story of Dangerous Art — a Cardiff philosophy lecturer’s survey of works that are morally perverse rather than merely badly made. The review quickly becomes a fight over a genuinely hard question: can we judge the immorality of art across eras, or are we just imposing today’s pieties on the past? Dixon’s book tries to categorize artistic offense: ...

Joshua Rothman’s Open Questions column opens with a mundane catastrophe: a sinkhole left by roadwork sends him over the handlebars of his e-scooter, breaking his fibula. Months of bed rest and a wheelchair follow — and the essay turns into a meditation on what chance does to a life, and whether “fate” is anything more than a story we tell afterward. Rothman reads the small-stuff literature of contingency from his confinement: ...

Ledio Cakaj — now a former U.S. State Department officer — recalls the night in March 1999 when he crossed from Paris to London on the Eurostar, undocumented and barely twenty-one. He had bought a Kosovar birth certificate in Fier for about twelve dollars, claimed to be seventeen, and rehearsed a borrowed story of war and flight. At Calais, the conductor pulls an African family off the train; the narrator watches and still wonders where they ended up. In the tunnel he flushes his Albanian passport piece by piece — “corner by corner, bite, rip, flush.” A journalist on the train listens to his story, offers him half a sandwich, and presses her business card into his hand. At Waterloo, a policeman silently brings him a sandwich; a map of Kosovo drawn on a toilet-stall wall teaches him the geography the interviewers will test. The interpreter speaks Albanian with a Kosovar accent, almost certainly knows the truth, and gives nothing away. The essay turns on small decencies and on the guilt of a borrowed identity — “whose suffering I was borrowing to save myself.” The ending is unsentimental: language classes, a place at St. John’s College, Oxford, then a denied asylum claim, a confession, and a return to Albania.

Ned Rust reviews the Equality Action Center report by Joan C. Williams and Jared Abbott on why progressives keep losing working-class voters — and how to stop. The core finding is a priority mismatch, not a values catastrophe: workers don’t reject the left’s agenda, they reject it when it ignores rent, wages, and safety. The biggest gap: “defending democracy” polls 90% among college-educated liberals but only 50% among no-degree working-class voters — 19th of 25 priorities for the latter. Working-class voters prioritize jobs, wages, housing, health care, and personal security — the predistributive side of affordability, not just consumer prices. The classic wedge issues (LGBTQ+ rights, immigration, climate, abortion — each 26-32 points more valued by college grads) are real gaps, but not majority hostility. Tested messages move numbers: universal childcare +28 points, climate action +24, trans girls on sports teams +23, citizenship paths for immigrants +22. The report’s practical lesson: stop assuming consensus, speak to material insecurity first. Workers live without a credit-line buffer; the college set does not. Lead with the mortal impacts of low wages and high rent, and the Left can take populism back from the Right.