Culture

Ivan Aivazovsky (1817–1900) was born in Feodosia, Crimea, to Armenian parents, and is remembered as one of the Russian Empire’s great marine painters. Scale was part of it: his seascapes could run past 200 centimetres, and his 1850 The Ninth Wave — dark water tumbling under a livid orange sunset — measures 332 centimetres, close to eleven feet across. In 1887, at a dinner marking his seventieth birthday, he worked at the other extreme and gave each of his 150 guests a unique miniature painting: a seascape embedded in a studio photograph of himself, brush in hand. ...

In 1842 a London compiler signing himself “Henry Edwards of Hoxton” published A Collection of Old English Customs, and Curious Bequests and Charities — a digest of excerpts from the reports of the Commissioners for Enquiring into Charities in England and Wales. That body was set up in 1818 to inspect trusts for educating the poor, soon widened its remit to all charitable trusts, and conducted the first parliamentary survey of English charity. Its institutional descendant, the Charity Commission, still does much the same job. ...

As her oyster shell shudders open, the pearl — gleaming white in a skin-tight body suit — rises reluctantly. She stays curled asleep on the half-shell a beat too long, props herself up on one arm, heaves an immense eye roll, and stands to assume an ambiguous contrapposto: demure, or half-hearted? Frederick S. Armitage’s Birth of the Pearl (filmed 1901, copyrighted 1903) is a clear homage to The Birth of Venus. Thea Applebaum Licht’s text for the Public Domain Review reads Armitage’s pearl less as Botticelli’s golden-haired goddess than as her petulant younger sister. ...

In June 1663, a well-mannered woman who seemed foreign walked into London’s Exchange Tavern carrying jewels and letters addressed overseas. Within weeks she had married the tavern-keeper’s young brother-in-law, a lawyer’s clerk named John Carleton. Within months she was at the Old Bailey on a bigamy charge, and the pamphlet presses had found their story of the year. Laura Kolb’s essay for the Public Domain Review reconstructs Mary Carleton — born Mary Moders in Canterbury, probably in 1642 — and the publishing boom she set off. ...

Texas today bans abortion, requires the Protestant Ten Commandments in classrooms, and gives the country the prosperity gospel of Joel Osteen. David Griscom’s review of Joseph L. Locke’s One State Under God: A History of Religion in Texas makes the case that none of this was inherited. It was built — against two working-class movements that had made religion a language of solidarity. Early Texas was not a Bible belt: ...

Pliny the Elder’s Natural History contains the founding myth of Western art: Butades of Sicyon’s daughter, Kora, in love with a young man about to leave, traces his shadow on the wall by lamplight. Her father presses clay into the outline and hardens it in the kiln. Drawing and modelled sculpture both begin there, in a shadow cast by a lamp. Hunter Dukes’ collection for the Public Domain Review gathers roughly twenty paintings and prints that retell the scene between roughly 1625 and 1850, and reads them as a single argument about what images cost. ...

Frances Stonor Saunders died of a brain tumor on August 31 at sixty. Her 1999 debut, Who Paid the Piper? — published in the US as The Cultural Cold War — documented how the CIA ran the Congress for Cultural Freedom (CCF), a covert front that shaped postwar intellectual life from 1950 to 1967. Joel Whitney, who used her book as a guide for his own Finks, marks both what she found and what it cost her to publish it. ...

Katherine Harvey, a historian of medieval medicine, started from the usual assumption — that the Middle Ages explained mental illness as demonic possession and had no vocabulary for what we now call mental health. Then she read the medical texts instead of the saints’ lives. What she found was a sophisticated argument that mental wellness was the foundation of physical health. Under humoral medicine, health meant balancing blood, phlegm, black bile, and yellow bile. The main lever for that was the “six non-naturals” — diet, exercise, sleep, air, and the emotions. Emotional regulation wasn’t a moral question. It was medical maintenance. ...

In August 1869, the French chemist Gaston Tissandier was on a family holiday in Calais when he saw a poster advertising a balloon launch from the central square. He talked his way onto the voyage, bought a life vest from the Calais Humane Society, and rose 4,000 feet in a single bound in the Neptune — the storm that had already flung a trial balloon out over the North Sea notwithstanding. The Public Domain Review’s collection draws on Travels in the Air, the 1871 anthology edited by James Glaisher, with accounts by Tissandier, Camille Flammarion and Wilfrid de Fonvielle. What unites them, as Kevin Dann writes in the introduction, is the absolute novelty of the endeavor — and the fact that every flight is governed by chance, contingency and caprice rather than command. ...

Sweden’s Social Democrats came first in this month’s election, and Magdalena Andersson is poised to return as prime minister on a one-seat majority — with 28 percent of the vote, the party’s worst showing in more than 110 years. Bhaskar Sunkara uses the result to retell the whole arc of the movement that built what was arguably the most livable society in history, and then lost its grip on it. This is not a story of betrayal, he argues. It is a story about what a strategy for reforming capitalism can achieve, and where it runs into the structure of capitalism itself. ...

“To the child mind,” Percy Collins wrote in American Homes and Gardens in 1911, “two bananas served upon a plate are just what they appear to be and nothing more.” Hardly a birthday dish. But add broken matches for legs, paper tails and ears, and eyes painted in Chinese white on the yellow rind, and the fruit becomes “an object of desire” — in this case a mysterious pair of porkers. The Public Domain Review’s collection reproduces eight of Collins’ creations, with Mathilde Montpetit’s essay on the world they came out of. ...

In 1783 a parish priest in Upper Hungary published a novel in Slovak at his own expense — the first Slovak novel, and the first novel in a minor language anywhere in the Habsburg monarchy. In Central Europe only German and Polish had produced novels by then. Dobrota Pucherová’s essay for the Public Domain Review tells the story of Jozef Ignác Bajza’s René, or: A Young Man’s Adventures and Experiences, a book that was half-printed, confiscated by the Church, destroyed by fire, and finally translated into English for the first time in 2025. ...

The AfD took 44 percent in Saxony-Anhalt’s September 6 state election, and the German commentariat went looking for the one variable: a sprawling bureaucracy, a defective East German political culture, immigration. Gábor Scheiring’s argument in Jacobin is that single-variable diagnoses produce single-variable strategies, and they all fail — because the thing being diagnosed is general, not national. The counter-evidence is mostly the AfD’s own base: Founded in 2013 by highly educated neoliberal economists under Bernd Lucke; a portrait of Hayek hangs in the office of its parliamentary chief whip 41 percent of first-time voters aged 18–24 in Saxony-Anhalt voted for it; 59 percent of workers did Its strongest districts are predicted by density of craft and small industrial businesses, not by immigration — across the eastern states, the share of foreigners and the AfD vote are inversely related Its biggest donors are large entrepreneurs: €1.5 million from Euroimmun’s founder, with a real-estate billionaire the largest known donor Party family, not outlier: Europe’s hard right is now its most popular, polling above 1930s levels, and it governs or leads in India, Turkey, Hungary and the US across completely different institutional designs The strategic half of the piece is a demolition of the three standard responses. A firewall makes defending the establishment the only common ground among the five mainstream parties, which hands “change” to the far right and leaves coalitions paralyzed from birth. Co-optation loses on the far right’s own terrain: Merz relied on AfD votes for a migration resolution in January 2025 and the AfD doubled its 2021 result four weeks later; the Danish Social Democrats collapsed to their worst result since 1903. “Let them govern” rests on the FPÖ’s 2002 collapse, which its 2024 first-place finish demolished. ...

Charles le Brun (1619–90) had a practical problem. Charged in 1669 with decorating Versailles, he had to fill crowded allegorical scenes with emperors and slaves, despots and demimondaines — and make each instantly legible. His solution was physiognomic typology: ox-faced men are dependable laborers, fox-faced men are thieves. Mathilde Montpetit’s note in The Public Domain Review traces where that system came from and what it carries. The object itself has a strange history: ...

The Criterion Channel’s “Southern Gothic” series opens, in Eileen Jones’s telling, on Elia Kazan’s Baby Doll (1956): lurid horns vamping like a strip-show score, then a dilapidated Mississippi plantation house with grimy pillars — a Gone with the Wind facade gone to seed. That single image is the subgenre. The Gothic has always been about the past returning; the Southern Gothic version returns to something recent and monstrous. The form dates to Horace Walpole’s The Castle of Otranto and Ann Radcliffe, and carried through Mary Shelley, the Brontës, Poe, and James. Its enduring subject is entrenched power: aristocracies, generational wealth, and the people they punish. The Southern variation maps that onto antebellum plantations worked by enslaved people, with clergy citing chapter and verse to defend the “peculiar institution.” Faulkner supplies the epigraph: “The past is never dead. It’s not even past.” Baby Doll: a nineteen-year-old “child bride” sleeping in a crib, ogled through a peephole by her bankrupt, racist husband; a cotton-gin arson; a Sicilian outsider with his own vigilante traditions; and an “old boys” network of ruined gin owners who are plainly the Klan. The Beguiled (1971): a wounded Union soldier sheltered by a girls’ school, seducing his way through it, amputated in revenge, with the headmistress’s incestuous plantation past surfacing behind the war. The Night of the Hunter (1955): Robert Mitchum’s self-appointed preacher — “the religion the Almighty and me worked out betwixt us” — modeled on a real serial killer hanged in 1932, hunting a widow and her children for stolen money. Wise Blood (1979), from Flannery O’Connor’s novel, is the series’ most unsettling and least known: Hazel Motes preaching a “Church of Truth Without Christ,” blinding himself with quicklime, wrapping barbed wire under his shirt — then trapped in a dingy room by a landlady who will not let him die a martyr. Wildcat (2023), Ethan Hawke’s O’Connor biopic with Maya Hawke in the lead, is thinner — but it carries O’Connor’s answer to a New York literary type who calls the Eucharist a “beautiful symbol”: “Well, if it’s a symbol, to hell with it.” Jones’s point is that the subgenre is a reckoning: long-running elite abuses of power produce an atmosphere of evil that characters mistake for the supernatural, or answer with their own cruelties and brutal religiosity. Poor white Southerners, ruined by the war, identified upward with the planter class rather than across the color line — and the films keep circling that self-deception. ...

In May 1920, Marcus Garvey’s Universal Negro Improvement Association sent a delegation to Liberia to scout land for settlement, trade routes, and a new UNIA headquarters. Its resident secretary, Elie Garcia, wrote to President Charles D. B. King asking for written assurance of land for “business, agriculture, and industrial purposes.” A confidential report from that trip reached Hubert Harrison. It described the Liberian elite as “degenerated and weak morally” and recommended the UNIA conceal its real intentions. ...

John Wilson made three seasons of HBO’s How To with John Wilson — walking around New York filming fire hydrants and public toilets, narrating in a halting, ingenuous register somewhere between Nathan Fielder and Frederick Wiseman — and then could not get anyone to fund his next project. The project was a feature-length documentary about concrete. He made it anyway. It is called The History of Concrete, and he still does not quite know how to pitch it. ...

In 1810, a Dutch-Surinamese artist named Gerrit Schouten built a small scene — five women preparing cassava under a thatched roof, a chicken at their feet, a blue parrot craning its neck toward the workers — out of what was probably a repurposed crate and papier-mâché, backed by a painted screen of clouds and trees. It now sits in the Rijksmuseum, inside a heavy gold frame. The frame is the story: the diorama was sold to a European collector soon after it was made. ...

Sean Tatol dates the death of the art world’s organizing idea to 2003. That year brought the death of dealer Colin de Land — the last of the “gentleman dealers,” who ran American Fine Arts, Co. and mediated between uncommercial artists and a real collector base — and Andrea Fraser’s Untitled (2003), a video of the artist having sex with a collector who had agreed to buy an edition beforehand. ...

In 1777 the German physicist Ernst Chladni put sand on a metal plate and drew a violin bow along its edge. The grains jumped into symmetrical figures, changing shape with the pitch. Sound had become visible in a way anyone could reproduce with a copper plate, a bow, and some sand. Lucas Thompson’s essay in The Public Domain Review traces what that trick set off: a genre of popular acoustics books written for children and amateurs across the nineteenth century. ...