Culture

The Delivery Protection Act is simple: if you deliver packages under Amazon’s brand, wear Amazon’s uniform, and drive Amazon’s vans, Amazon should employ you. Right now, Amazon insulates itself through Delivery Service Partners (DSPs) — subcontractors who employ the drivers while Amazon dictates every term of the work. The bill, introduced by socialist Council Member Tiffany Caban and endorsed by Mayor Zohran Mamdani, would require direct employment, facility licensing, and safety standards for last-mile delivery centers. ...

Joshua Rothman’s “Open Questions” column reviews Annie Lowrey’s The Time Tax — a book about how government bureaucracies systematically waste poor people’s time — and expands into a meditation on time valuation under capitalism. The essay opens with the DHS-1171 form: Michigan’s 40-page, ~1,000-question welfare application during the Great Recession, complete with questions about applicants’ weight and hair color. A quarter of applicants failed to complete it. The state designed the form to prevent fraud, treating “Michiganders in distress” as “potential criminals.” In 2018, Louisiana “disenrolled 15,689 children” from public health insurance for paperwork non-compliance. ...

Peter Ackroyd’s new biography of W.H. Auden has a thesis most Auden admirers won’t like: the early poetry that T.S. Eliot hailed as genius was “fresh and striking, but not particularly coherent or good.” Christopher Caldwell’s review in the Washington Free Beacon takes that skepticism seriously, and it makes for a more interesting portrait than hagiography ever could. Auden’s career in phases: Early 1930s — praised by Eliot at 22, but full of “deliberate obscurity,” hectoring politics, and pompous self-importance Mid-1930s turning point — “Letter to Lord Byron” (1936), written in rhyme royal on an Iceland trip, freed him from the need to be political Peak (1936–1955) — from Look, Stranger to The Shield of Achilles, Auden in full command of formal technique Later years — increasingly self-critical, revising early poems into ruin, chasing sincerity The biographical details are as vivid as the literary ones. Auden was the grandson of two clergymen who embraced Anglo-Catholicism in his 30s, a leftist who never joined the Communist Party, a British poet who moved to the East Village and Ann Arbor. He lived openly as a homosexual across a range of environments — bourgeois institutions and the tawdry edges of society alike. ...

After a minor late-20th-century renaissance, narrative poetry is being eclipsed by lyric poetry — and Steve Knepper argues that’s a shame. Storytelling was a poetic art for most of human history: Gilgamesh, the Homeric epics, the Ramayana and Mahabharata, and the bardic traditions of rhapsodes, skalds, griots, and balladeers. Today, journals cap line lengths, prizes bypass narrative verse, and MFA workshops ask why not just write a short story. The essay’s answer — the distinctive virtues of narrative verse: ...

A Jacobin review of Michael Byrne’s Beyond Generation Rent makes the case that the housing crisis is not a generational story — it’s a class story. The real divide is between renters and property owners of all ages, and treating housing as a boomer-vs-millennial fight is a political dead end that blocks class solidarity. Byrne’s political economy of the private rental sector: Landlordism is a social relationship built on a power asymmetry between asset owner and resident — landlords profit from “home rent,” including the value tenants create by making a place feel like home. The crisis is between renters and (especially multiple) property owners of all ages, not between generations; the “generation rent” framing is a barrier to solidarity. Homeownership stabilizes capitalism two ways: housing concentrates in ever fewer hands, while just enough people keep a material stake to maintain consent — “late homeownership societies.” Rent is central to the system: real estate is a core source of stable returns under neoliberalism, and internationalized landlordism means central-bank rate decisions ripple into renters’ lives everywhere. The hopeful half is tenant organizing. Scotland banned no-fault evictions and introduced rent controls; Berlin’s “Expropriate Deutsche Wohnen & Co.” referendum proposed what Byrne calls “one of, if not the most, radical forms of housing redistribution ever undertaken in a capitalist society.” Peggs flags the book’s blind spot — social housing, which offers security outside the housing-wealth system — and endorses its program: more nonmarket housing, restrictions on private landlordism, and direct redistribution. ...

Until well after the Second World War, British publishing had no “editors” as we know them. The person who examined manuscripts was a “publisher’s reader” — a low-status functionary who worked from home, served multiple firms simultaneously, and left minimal commentary. Evelyn Waugh’s brother Alec, working at Chapman & Hall in the 1920s, would simply scrawl “NBG” (“No bloody good”) on a rejected title page. D. J. Taylor traces this history through the rise of the professional editor, which happened only as publishing firms grew too large to absorb risky bets and needed to maximize every title’s quality. ...

Providence, Rhode Island is one of the least affordable cities for renters in the US — rent costs relative to income rival New York City’s, but without any rent stabilization laws. A 4% cap on rent hikes passed the city council in 2026, but Democratic Mayor Brett Smiley vetoed it; the override attempt fell one vote short. State Representative David Morales is challenging Smiley in the September 9 Democratic primary on a democratic socialist platform: ...

Andrew Hartman reviews Devin Thomas O’Shea’s The Veiled Prophet: Secret Societies, White Supremacy, and the Struggle for St Louis — a history of one of the strangest and most revealing elite institutions in American history. The Veiled Prophet Society was founded in 1877 by Alonzo Slayback, a Confederate veteran who fled to Mexico after the Civil War seeking help from Emperor Maximilian I before receiving a pardon and returning to St Louis. Its purpose: to reassert elite control after the St Louis Commune — a brief but real workers’ uprising led by the first Marxist party in the United States — had seen the city’s proletariat seize power for about a week. ...

Before Atlantic City was casinos, it was a booming Edwardian seaside resort with the first boardwalk in America. And before sand sculpting became a competitive art form sponsored by tourism boards, it was a busking trade — “sand men” who sculpted life-size tableaus in the dunes just off the boardwalk and lived on tips. Thea Applebaum Licht’s collection on The Public Domain Review gathers the postcards that preserve this vanished trade: ...

Joshua Judd Porter attended the 2026 NBA draft at Barclays Center and filed a dispatch that treats the event less as a sports ceremony and more as an autopsy of the league’s soul. The piece lands on n+1, which means it arrives with the left-literary sensibility Hitesh explicitly values: attention to labor, to racialized exploitation, to the way capitalism dresses up extraction as entertainment. The draft, Porter notes, is “an industry event presented as public spectacle” — a stage where teenagers orbited by middlemen wait to embrace a very tall, very pale man (Commissioner Adam Silver) and put on a hat. The real action happens elsewhere: ...

A new study in the American Journal of Political Science tested whether Left and Right really have irreconcilable ideas about exploitation. The short answer: they don’t. People across the political spectrum agreed on what exploitation is — even when they disagreed about how much of it exists. The researchers used abstract vignettes about mug production (to strip out partisan bias) and tested hundreds of professional philosophers and ordinary people in the US and UK. The results were remarkably consistent: ...

The question sounds technical — “who counts as an employee?” — but it determines whether a worker can unionize, collect overtime, get workers’ compensation, or claim unemployment. Paul Osterman traces the legal fight at the core of the gig economy and why it matters far beyond the 1.9% of the US workforce currently classified as gig workers. Uber’s CEO made $24 million in 2022 while only 13% of drivers earned $30,000+. Yet the company insists drivers are “driver-partners,” not employees. FedEx, Amazon Flex, and Walmart’s Spark delivery system are all pushing the same boundary — reclassifying as much of their workforce as freelancers as the law allows. Two competing federal legal tests (DOL’s “suffer or permit to work” standard vs. NLRB’s common law test) cycle with every administration: Obama (broad) → Trump (narrow) → Biden (broad) → expected Trump reversal again. The ideal fix is the ABC rule, already used by 30+ states: presume everyone is an employee unless the employer proves (A) no direction/control, (B) work outside the usual business, and (C) the worker has an independent business doing that work. The 2021 Protecting the Right to Organize Act would have codified it nationally — but it died in Congress. ...

Paul Elie reviews Isaac Butler’s The Perfect Moment: God, Sex, Art, and the Birth of America’s Culture Wars — a book that tracks three iconic cultural battles: the campaign against Scorsese’s The Last Temptation of Christ, the furor over Andres Serrano’s Piss Christ, and the Mapplethorpe photography controversies that brought down the NEA’s house of cards. But Elie’s review is really about what made that era different from ours. What characterized the late-80s culture wars was not just ideology. It was that art itself still mattered. ...

On a Jacobin Radio episode of Confronting Capitalism, Vivek Chibber takes on Milton Friedman’s foundational claim that capitalism is the ideal system for democracy. His answer: partly right, mostly wrong. Capitalism did make democracy possible by separating economic power from political power — unlike feudalism, where lords needed direct coercion over peasants and political equality was structurally impossible. But possibility is not destiny. Capitalists fought universal suffrage, unionization, and every democratic expansion for 400+ years. Democracy was won by organized working-class movements between 1880–1920, not bestowed by the bourgeoisie. After democracy is installed, the tension never resolves: capitalists keep weakening unions, labor parties, and the franchise itself through campaign finance, voter suppression, and attacks on collective bargaining. The US is “by far the least democratic country in the advanced capitalist world” — policy tracks the preferences of the top 10%, turnout is heavily skewed by income, and nonparticipation is concentrated among the poor. Both Democrats and Republicans participate in the hollowing out; the only difference is that Democrats care about legitimacy while Trump cares only about power. ...

Greg Afinogenov uses the 2026 Boghossian “Report on the State of Scholarship in Humanities” — a reheated batch of 80s theory-war grievances — as a springboard to examine something more interesting: what he calls hyperpolitics, borrowing Anton Jäger’s term from New Left Review. The condition: everything has become political. TV habits, food choices, interpretive approaches to 19th-century literature. All of it reads as political sign, and all of it requires competitive position-taking. ...

A creature that sprouts from the earth on a stem, hatched from no egg and born from no mother: this is the Vegetable Lamb of Tartary, or Agnus scythicus, a half-plant half-animal that European naturalists seriously debated from the fourteenth century to the Enlightenment. Thom Sliwowski’s essay traces the myth from its first European appearance in The Travels of Sir John Mandeville (where it fruits as a gourd containing “a little beast, in flesh, in bone, and blood”) through a Renaissance who’s-who of skeptical inquiry — Cardano, Scaliger, Duret, Francis Bacon, Athanasius Kircher — who debated whether the creature could bleed without a heart, whether its wolf predator was plausible, and whether the “figure made the fable.” The turning point came when Sir Hans Sloane dissected a preserved specimen and found nothing but fern rhizomes “shap’d by Art to imitate a Lamb,” followed by Engelbert Kaempfer’s theory that the myth was a euphemism for the slaughtered fetal Karakul lambs whose pelts became astrakhan wool, and Henry Lee’s definitive 1887 case that the whole thing began as a garbled European reaction to cotton — “wool as white as that of a lamb grew on trees” became “lambs grew on certain trees.” The myth survives in Linnaeus’s taxonomy (Cibotium barometz, the fern species used to craft the fakes) and in Diderot’s encyclopedia, which deployed it as a case study in how to distinguish testimony from evidence.

In the summer of 1956, a broke Jack Kerouac ascended Washington State’s Desolation Peak to serve as a fire lookout — room and board for $230 a month, the meditative isolation that never quite materialized, and a “panoramic” circular map that oriented him to his elevated universe. Thea Applebaum Licht’s collection for The Public Domain Review presents the very same kind of map: hand-drawn by civil engineer Archie G. Norcross for the Maine Forestry Department between 1918 and 1922, each one taking a specific fire tower as its epicenter and annotating the full 360-degree horizon with named landmarks for triangulating wildfire plumes. The maps were used with an alidade (a simple sighting device Kerouac called his “firefinder”) atop steel towers 12 to 48 feet above craggy Northeastern summits, erected after devastating fires in 1903 and 1908. By mid-century the network of 8,000 towers was superseded by cameras, thermal satellites, and aerial patrols; most fell into disrepair, the Doubletop Mountain lookout “notorious for getting struck by lightning” and dismantled before 1972. What remains is a quiet cartographic record of a vanished human practice — analog GIS drawn in ink, where the observer was the sensor and the map was a custom rendering of that one specific vantage point.

In the 1890s, Massachusetts inventor Moses G. Crane looked at a football field and decided the problem was obvious: the ball was too small. His solution was a leather-covered wooden sphere six feet three inches in diameter, weighing 70 pounds — a ball so large that “a player on one side could not see who was on the other,” guaranteeing “much merriment, as well as skill.” Pushball was born, and for about fifteen years it captivated American colleges, then crossed the Atlantic. At Harvard, 20,000 people watched the first exhibition match during halftime of a football game against Penn in 1895. Spalding published official rules, complete with plays like “the flying wedge,” and British promoter E. V. Hanegan called it “a game for giants — such a game as the gods on Olympus might have played.” The British improvised variants on horseback and in cars; a hay-stuffed replica left out overnight in the rain swelled from 50 to 500 pounds. At Miami University in Ohio, pushball replaced a banned brutal capture-the-flag tradition, fielding thirty students per side who shoved the borrowed ball (from the University of Michigan, 240 miles away) across the field. But the fad faded fast: by 1912 the students were back to tug-of-war, and World War I finished what practicality had started. Today, Miami’s “Traditions” page is silent on the battle of the giants.

In 1870, a twenty-year-old compositor at The New York Times named George Arensberg — nicknamed “The Boy” — set 2,064 ems of solid minion type in a single hour, the four-minute mile of hand typesetting. His peers dubbed him “the Velocipede,” and his record launched a decade-long craze: typesetting races that drew crowds in the thousands, offered prize purses up to $1,000 (half a year’s wages for a typical compositor), and turned “Swifts” like William C. Barnes (who set type blindfolded with his cases reversed) into minor celebrities. By the 1880s, the races had moved from printshop backrooms to dime museums alongside vaudeville and circuses. The 1887 booklet Fast Typesetting codified official rules and promised silver composing-stick trophies to future champions. But the most dramatic contest happened in 1886 at Boston’s Austin & Stone’s Dime Museum, where Miss L. J. Kenney set a women’s record of 24,950 ems — beating every man who had competed the day before. Officials refused to acknowledge her result, claiming “much latitude was allowed the ladies” without a shred of evidence, but the genie was out of the bottle: women compositors, paid 25–50% less than men and largely excluded from unionized newspaper composing rooms, had proven themselves on the same stage. As Alex Wright recounts in this adaptation from his forthcoming book Empire of Ink, the velocipede’s twilight came with Linotype’s arrival in the 1880s, but not before the Swifts had their moment in the spotlight — and used it to challenge the boys’ club that ran America’s newspapers.

The Brahan Seer — Coinneach Odhar — is Scotland’s most famous prophet, a 17th-century figure whose second sight was supposedly granted by a drowned Norwegian princess instructing a Lewis woman to give her son a magic stone. Alexander Mackenzie’s 1877 book The Prophecies of the Brahan Seer fixed the oral tradition in print, organizing predictions into categories: unfulfilled, doubtful, shrewd guesses, and those that came true. The most famous foretold the extinction of the Seaforth male line — the deaf-and-dumb last lord losing four sons, a white-hooded daughter returning from India, a sister killed in a carriage accident — details that align eerily with the real biography of Francis Humberston Mackenzie (died 1815). Yet as historian Alexander Sutherland notes, the Seer “is not a person so much as a concept.” His “black rain” prophecies have been read as nuclear fallout, oil spills, acid rain, or Highland prosperity. In 2001, 2,360 people attended a Brahan Seer Festival complete with operas, ceilidhs, and scholarly seminars on second sight.