Culture

Leszek Kołakowski (1927–2009) is a hero in Poland — Order of the White Eagle, buried with military honors, a minute’s silence in parliament — yet almost unknown in the Oxford, Berkeley, and Montreal that sheltered his exile. Kit Wilson’s essay argues that remembering him only as the author of Main Currents of Marxism misses the point. What makes Kołakowski worth reading: The range: treatises on Spinoza, Husserl, and Bergson; The Presence of Myth, Religion: If There Is No God, Metaphysical Horror, God Owes Us Nothing — plus essays on liberalism, exile, genocide, snobbery, boredom, and gardening. “In Praise of Inconsistency” (1958): absolute consistency is impossible and disastrous — “it is only thanks to inconsistency that humanity has kept alive on this earth.” “Modernity on Endless Trial” (1986): modern culture abandoned God but refuses nihilism, so its “explicit orthodoxy… consists of patching up” — Marxism, History, Existentialism, and Nature as surrogate religions. The twist on rationalism: the most “rational” systems (Descartes’s cogito, positivism’s verification principle) betray a craving to stop thinking — “automatic thought is not really thought: it is the antithesis of thought.” His fear for modernity: the “disappearance of taboos” — rationality that corrodes the taboo system “corrodes its ability to survive.” Kołakowski was an “inconsistent atheist” who called the gospel “the great power” he was attached to; asked directly about belief, he replied “God knows.” ...

Canadian municipal elections are notoriously barren territory for the left: turnout hovers around 30 percent, and cities are “creatures of the provinces” whose powers conservative premiers like Doug Ford routinely gut. Yet in October’s elections, a groundswell of socialist candidates is running — inspired in part by Zohran Mamdani’s New York City victory, which has made winning power locally feel possible again. Three candidates anchor James Adair’s Jacobin piece: Damian Mikhail (Waterloo Ward Six) — “socialist minimalism”: universal snow clearing, a renters’ protection office, and a municipal housing corporation as public builder and operator. The incumbent won last time with just 896 votes cast. Solomon Yi-Kieran (Vancouver, on the COPE line) — municipal Wi-Fi, universal metro cards, banning surveillance pricing, and a citywide at-large campaign grind. Their acceptance-speech line: “We didn’t start this class war, but we’re going to win it.” Chiara Padovani (Toronto, York South–Weston) — tenant organizer who helped lead one of Toronto’s largest tenant strikes; lost 2022 by 94 votes, then kept her campaign office open as an organizing hub funded by CA$5–10 monthly donations. The historical backdrop is sobering: Winnipeg elected a socialist mayor and labor council in 1934, a generation after the 1919 General Strike — and it was the last. Sewer socialism never took root in Canada the way it did in the US; the left chased provincial power instead. ...

AOC’s “Woke 1 was crazy” on ABC’s This Week set off a two-week left debate over the excesses of 2020-era cancel culture. Jacobin’s Branko Marcetic concedes those excesses were real — then flips the frame: the Left is re-litigating a private-sector moral panic while the MAGA movement runs a state-powered version that is worse by every measure. The “Woke 1” excesses, acknowledged without nostalgia: A professor removed from his course for a Mandarin word that sounds like an English slur; a data analyst fired for posting protest-tactics research; a biracial makeup artist fired for singing along to a rap lyric Streaming purges of scenes, episodes, and films; Paw Patrol condemned for depicting police; Barbara Ehrenreich piled on over a misread tweet “MAGA Woke” is a different order of magnitude: ...

Washington Irving was once adored by Dickens, Byron, and Mary Shelley (who pursued him by letter), and his biographies of Columbus and Washington were bestsellers. Today he survives on two stories — “Rip Van Winkle” and “The Legend of Sleepy Hollow.” Philip Lopate’s new book, A Washington Irving Sketch Book (Princeton, 2026), is the tribute of one self-described minor writer to another: Irving, Lopate says, “was always preparing himself to be forgotten.” ...

Patrick Iber (a historian and Dissent co-editor) reviews Dave Zirin’s The People’s Historian: The Outsized Life of Howard Zinn — an admiring biography that mirrors both the strengths and the flattening habits of A People’s History of the United States. The life is genuinely admirable: Born 1922 in Brooklyn to poor Eastern European Jewish immigrants; beaten by police at a peaceful 1939 demonstration; learned the importance of unions in the Brooklyn Navy Yard Served as a bombardier in WWII — bombed Royan with napalm two weeks before Germany’s surrender, then concluded “there could be just causes, but no just wars” and labeled his mission files “Never Again” A Woody Guthrie song about the 1914 Ludlow Massacre (strikers’ families killed by Colorado militias at a Rockefeller mine) convinced him the teaching of history was full of gaps At Spelman College his students included Alice Walker and Marian Wright Edelman; he was fired despite tenure for backing civil-rights activism Sheltered Daniel Berrigan, helped Daniel Ellsberg store the Pentagon Papers, and gave high grades to keep students out of the Vietnam draft But Iber presses the left critique of A People’s History (1980–2010: sold more copies every year; in Good Will Hunting and The Sopranos): ...

Lucy Ives reviews two new books: Rosmarie Waldrop’s translation of Celan’s collected prose, Conversation in the Mountains (New Directions), and Anna Arno’s biography Paul Celan: A Life (Belknap). Together they frame a poet whose German was so thoroughly reshaped that it verges on a fictional idiom — a “form of tuning” in agonized dialogue with the other languages of his childhood. Celan’s biography does the heavy lifting of the essay: ...

Naomi Kanakia went to review one novel — Stacey Yu’s Kitten, about a young woman obsessed with her boyfriend’s cat — and ended up reading the whole “weird girl literature” canon, the BookTok-born genre (term coined around 2020) for novels about detached, anhedonic young women in dead-end jobs. Her verdict, against her own expectations: the books are strikingly good. The high points, in her telling: I Who Have Never Known Men (Harpman, 1995) is “a masterpiece” — women trapped in a cage on a dead planet, walking a perfect line between incident and emptiness; it flopped in English for thirty years until a 2022 reissue went viral Sky Daddy (Kate Folk) is her favorite American entry — a protagonist sexually attracted to airplanes who still has social intelligence, inside a world that is alive and bigger than her Ripe (Sarah Rose Etter) is “an accurate description of the post-rebellion mindset of the millennial office worker — like Fight Club, except there’s no fight club” Convenience Store Woman reads as a sardonic inversion of Sartre’s bad-faith waiter: Keiko’s embrace of her role is the authentic choice The real target of the essay is literary snobbery. Kanakia dismantles The Point’s takedown of BookTok (“Common Readers”), which condemns how ordinary readers talk about books rather than the books themselves. Her counter: judge a literary community by its fruits, and here the fruits are excellent — a genre barely five years old is reliably elevating books of real quality. ...

Shane Burley argues the June indictment of fifteen Minneapolis union members and leaders — on charges that can carry decades-long sentences — is the administration’s clearest acknowledgment that organized labor, not “antifa,” is what actually threatens its ICE crackdown. In Minneapolis, no officer was injured. The alleged “conspiracy” is standard organizing: planning demonstrations, encrypted chat threads, blockading roads, and — in one case — moving a box of zines. What separates the fifteen from millions of other protesters is that they are union members and leaders in a city where the labor movement anchored resistance: ...

Kate Bronfenbrenner retired this year from Cornell after 25+ years of research that reshaped how the labor movement organizes. Her core finding: union tactics matter more than employer behavior in determining campaign outcomes. The building blocks she identified are strikingly basic: Representative committees, personal contact with workers, escalating pressure tactics, rank-and-file volunteers, and dignity/fairness framing Campaigns led by women and organizers of color had substantially higher win rates than those led by white men Unions must prepare for the first contract during the organizing campaign itself She pioneered strategic corporate research — teaching organizers to think like the company (Who owns it? Where does it borrow? Which customers matter?) before asking where workers might exercise leverage. ...

Jacobin reports on the disclosure that the Department of Homeland Security ran a sweeping undercover investigation in Minnesota early this year — codenamed “Operation Puppet Master” — targeting labor unions alongside climate and racial justice groups. Undercover agents infiltrated meetings of CWA Local 7250 and SEIU, used Clearview AI facial recognition to build photo dossiers on activists, and subpoenaed union financial records. The investigation followed the killing of two people — Renée Good and union nurse Alex Pretti — by federal agents in January, which sparked mass protests and a January 23 strike. Fifteen people were indicted in June; their attorney calls it a “political prosecution.” ...

The Public Domain Review features a remarkable artifact of Zoroastrian folk religion: the Mâr-Nâmeh (“Book of Snakes”), a late-15th-century divination text translated in 1892 by a British surgeon addressing the Bombay Anthropological Society. It lists the thirty days of the Zoroastrian calendar and what encountering a snake on each day portends. The twist? Zoroastrians considered snakes khrafstar — noxious spawn of Ahriman, the evil principle, to be killed on sight. Believers carried a “snake-killer” stick. The Shahnameh’s demon-king Zahhak has snakes growing from his shoulders, eating human brains. Yet the Mâr-Nâmeh is full of auspicious readings. ...

Liza Featherstone argues that capitalism is systematically destroying summer — through climate crisis fueled by fossil fuel capital, the privatization of beaches and public spaces, and a work culture that denies most Americans paid vacation (the US is the only rich country that doesn’t mandate it). New York City stands as a counterexample, thanks to New Deal-era WPA infrastructure and a socialist administration: 11 public pools built in one summer under Mayor LaGuardia (1936), all still open today; 50,000 people attended the Sunset Park pool opening ...

Jacobin ran three waves of polling across the first half of 2026, tracking the durability of Donald Trump’s 2024 coalition. The headline: more than a quarter of 2024 Trump voters are now “waverers” — not committed to voting Republican in 2028. The erosion is class-skewed and accelerating: Voters earning under $50K waver at 32% vs 18% for those earning over $100K Black Trump voters waver at 40%+ — highest of any group White working-class wavering jumped from 18% (Feb) to 24% (July), closing the gap with voters of color Biden-to-Trump switchers are the most unreliable: 63% now say they won’t back the GOP in 2028 The catch: fewer than 5% of all 2024 Trump voters say they’d vote Democrat. Most waverers name “unsure” or a third-party candidate. ...

Recent left wins in Michigan, Colorado, Minnesota, and New York are real momentum — but the Wisconsin primary defeat and a judge’s stay of New York City’s pied-à-terre tax are reminders that every movement breeds its own reaction. University of Chicago law professor Aziz Huq argues that the scaffolding for that backlash is the legal system: insiders play for the rules themselves, not just for outcomes. Two legal fronts are converging to concentrate power and insulate incumbents: ...

A weekend-essay meditation on the moment middle age arrives without ceremony — announced not by ritual or celebration but by your inability to read a text message without holding the phone at arm’s length. Key facts about presbyopia (Greek for “old eyes”): 1.8 billion people have it currently; projected to hit 2.1 billion by 2030 Not an eyeball-shape problem (like myopia) but lens rigidity — the lens stiffens, ciliary muscles malfunction, everyone loses ~1/3 of accommodation amplitude by middle age No cure — just treatments: glasses, multifocal contacts, drops (Qlosi, Vuity), Lasik, and eventual cataract surgery The essay’s framing is its strongest move: “A repertoire of cultural sacraments marks our passage into biological adulthood, but the yawning decades beyond it unspool without ceremony.” Puberty is ritualized; middle age just happens to you between the Costco food court and an optometrist saying “Yup, you’re at that age.” ...

Florence Hazrat’s “On the Mark: From Periods to Interrobangs, How Punctuation Remade the World” (Basic Books) is a microhistory that traces the small markings that structure written language from Mesopotamian cuneiform to the emoji era. The WSJ assigned a conservative columnist to review it, and the tension is illuminating. The timeline of punctuation innovation: The period emerged ~2,000 years ago when Alexandrian librarian Aristophanes of Byzantium introduced dots to distinguish sentence beginnings, ends, and pauses The question mark entered the repertoire over the 8th and 9th centuries The exclamation point arrived in the mid-14th century — “a welcome infusion of emotion onto the page” Parentheses and apostrophe joined in the 15th century Nothing new has stuck since ~1600 — the interrobang (a 1960s ad man’s invention) never caught on What makes the book interesting is that Hazrat doesn’t treat punctuation as politically neutral. She argues that the Folger Shakespeare Library’s added exclamation points in Cleopatra’s speeches “racialized as the exotic, seductive, and overly emotional other from the ‘magical’ East.” She critiques the hyphen in “Israel-Palestine conflict” for failing to “hold apart the colonizer and the colonized.” She describes the “war on terror” as “a lawless bombing campaign across several countries in the Middle East.” And she argues the Constitution’s Second Amendment comma should go. ...

Barbara Kopple — two-time Oscar winner for her labor-dispute documentaries “Harlan County U.S.A.” and “American Dream” — spent the summer of 2001 filming the Hamptons. The result, recently re-streamed on Le Cinema Club, is an observational mosaic that catches a world on the edge of transformation. Naomi Fry’s Critic’s Notebook piece reads the documentary as a time capsule of pre-9/11, pre-Botox, pre-smartphone America: Kopple’s cast includes farmers descended from whaling captains, local fishermen, Irish waitresses, party-hearty city professionals, and celebrities like Paris Hilton, Christie Brinkley, and a pre-scandal Diddy The film refuses the talking-head formula — Kopple lets meaning emerge slowly from everyday scenes Fry contrasts the relatively modest 2001 Hamptons (Christie Brinkley’s party serving on paper plates) with today’s ultra-lavish billionaire culture designed for Instagram flexing The Lizzie Grubman incident — a publicist backing her SUV into a crowd after telling a bouncer “Fuck you, white trash” — is read as an early signal of the class aggression now normalized in American life The article’s sharpest observation: the documentary was shot months before 9/11. Watching the heaving crowds of tan, drunk youths at Neptune Beach Club, Fry notes the dramatic irony of knowing what’s coming. One character muses on-camera that “this one second in time is gonna be looked back on as a really golden age.” ...

Karl Marx’s critique of capitalism gets the attention — his vision of what a good society would actually look like is usually dismissed as naive or unrealistic. Jan Kandiyali, a political theorist at Durham University, thinks that dismissal rests on a misreading. The standard view, from analytical Marxists Jon Elster and G. A. Cohen, treats Marx’s communism as an individualistic affair: everyone gets to develop their own powers freely, and other people are just a convenient means to get the goods and services you need. Kandiyali calls this the “parallelist interpretation” — like children playing side by side but not together. If God rained manna from heaven, nothing essential would be lost. ...

Anna Russell’s New Yorker essay takes Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s public egg-freezing — documented on Instagram, shots in a greenroom between interviews — as a starting point for something sharper than the predictable right-wing outrage. The conservative reaction split predictably: Matt Walsh called it “totally backwards and ridiculous”; Katie Miller blamed the “feminist lie” for women delaying childbearing. But Russell’s interest is elsewhere. The numbers behind the story: Egg-freezing in the US for nonmedical reasons: ~4,000 in 2014 → ~40,000 by 2024 Only ~6% of women who freeze eggs later return to use them (UCLA) Apple and Facebook cover elective egg-freezing; most insurance policies, including AOC’s, do not Russell presses on the “empowerment” framing that surrounds the procedure. The word “badass” stuck in her head like an off note. Egg-freezing is expensive (storage costs, no insurance), physically demanding (daily hormone injections), and far from guaranteed — yet it’s the market-friendly “solution” to a structural problem: the years when women feel ready to start a family are the same years as career peak, and society has built no accommodation for that collision. ...

In 1892, George Waters — a British surgeon and president of the Bombay Anthropological Society — delivered a lecture on an esoteric Persian manuscript: the Marnameh, or “Book for Taking Omens from Snakes.” Written in the late 15th century, it belongs to the Zoroastrian revayat tradition: opinionated narrations on religious and practical matters, not scripture but authoritative enough to consult for divination. The text lists the thirty days of the Zoroastrian calendar and what the sighting of a snake portends on each. ...