Keke Palmer showed Architectural Digest her house and called it “Full House — except instead of three uncles, we’ve got three aunts.” TikTok is full of sisters touring homes they bought together; one Toronto pair has exactly one house rule, “No boys,” with boyfriends required to keep their own place. Kelly Marie Coyne’s New Yorker piece reads the trend against two numbers moving in opposite directions: housing costs up, marriage rates down. ...
Work began on Gustave Eiffel’s tower in January 1887 and finished in time for the 1889 Exposition Universelle. At 330 metres it was the tallest thing humans had built, and Paris hated it before the foundations were set: a “monstrous” eyesore that would overshadow Notre Dame, a “hole-riddled suppository” (Huysmans), a “truly tragic streetlamp” (Léon Bloy). Henri Rivière answered the fight with thirty-six prints instead of a manifesto, modelled on Hokusai’s Thirty-Six Views of Mount Fuji: ...
Abū Zayd, the protagonist of al-Ḥarīrī’s Maqāmāt, is a man of many wiles like Odysseus — except that his aim is less to get home to his wife than to talk strangers out of their money. The fifty episodes follow him across the Islamic world, met again and again by a narrator who is repulsed and fascinated in equal measure. What made the work canonical was the prose: in one episode Abū Zayd dictates a letter using only undotted letters, half the Arabic alphabet. ...
Two books, published into the same catastrophe, reach opposite conclusions about where to put the blame. Benjamin Moser’s “Anti-Zionism: A Jewish History” argues that American Jews were raised on a benevolent story about Israel they never examined, that this naïveté let the community accommodate US empire, and that if the marriage of American exceptionalism with liberal Zionism produced genocide, then Zionism itself has to be abandoned. Omer Bartov’s “Israel: What Went Wrong?” refuses the same move in the other direction. Bartov served in the Israel Defense Forces during the Yom Kippur War; he argues the war on Gaza was genocidal. But he treats Gaza’s destruction, the West Bank apartheid, and the rise of the Israeli far right as products of political choice rather than national essence. ...
Sixty years before Gregor Samsa woke up as an insect, an off-kilter gentleman in a three-piece suit falls backwards in his chair, swinging an ax and a pair of shears at a pale-yellow Pulex irritans the size of a dog. The scene is a glass slide for magic lanterns — the eighteenth-century-to-early-twentieth entertainment, lit by gas lamp or limelight and thrown across a lecture-hall screen. The details behind the image are as odd as the picture: ...
It took Napoleon’s failed Egyptian campaign to make the Moorish Revival fashionable in Europe — English travellers broke off the Grand Tour for Andalusia, and capitals from Munich to Sintra sprouted horseshoe arches. The style landed everywhere except Italy, where the new nation’s Risorgimento found its lineage in Greco-Roman culture and treated Arabised notes as foreign eccentricity. Two aristocrats made it their life’s work anyway. Iván Moure Pazos tours both in a new PDR essay: ...
The Public Domain Review’s latest film collection is Autobiography of a “Jeep” (United States Office of War Information, 1943), a short propaganda picture narrated by the vehicle itself. The gimmick is exact: an “auto”-biography, complete with wounded vanity and a conversion narrative. It opens on the insults that once shook its confidence — “Can this be an automobile?” “Looks more like a four-wheeled beetle” — then reframes them as virtues. In a prewar world of elegant coupes “more debutante than machine,” a boxy open-topped thing had nothing to brag about. Then the army gets tough, and so must cars: ...
Twenty-five years after 9/11, the anniversary passed with almost no public ceremony of belief. Historian Daniel Bessner, in an excerpt from his new book Imperialist Realism: Politics and Culture at the End of the American Century, reads that quiet as evidence of something larger: Americans have stopped believing in the empire, and still cannot imagine it ending. His concept, built on Mark Fisher’s capitalist realism, names that failure exactly — it is easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of US empire. Why the empire feels permanent: ...
Gail Rego’s Jacobin interview with two European cleaners — Hayat Elhore at the European Parliament in Brussels, Lisa Stenson at an Irish hospital — is really about what procurement rules do to a job. Since the late 1970s, cleaners once employed directly by municipalities and public authorities have worked for private contractors competing on price. EU public bodies now spend over €2 trillion a year, about 15 percent of GDP, buying goods and services from private firms, and the rules governing those awards have produced a race to the bottom. ...
Peter Kropotkin (1842–1921) was born a prince, served as Tsar Alexander II’s personal page, and died the most famous anarchist in the world. His Memoirs of a Revolutionist — serialized in The Atlantic in 1898, published in two volumes in 1899 — is the account of how one life moved from the palace to the prison cell to the revolutionary press. Mathilde Montpetit’s note for The Public Domain Review treats volume one as a Bildungsroman for the anarchist intellectual, and it’s a good argument: the whole book is built so the break with his own class looks almost inevitable. ...
Clement Lindley Wragge (1852–1922) spent the 1880s and 1890s building weather science across Australasia — founding the Royal Meteorological Society of Australasia, running stations from Mount Lofty to Mount Kosciuszko, serving as Queensland’s government meteorologist — and then spent his last two decades on the lecture platform. The Public Domain Review collects 350 surviving slides from his talks, held in wooden boxes at the Auckland War Memorial Museum, labelled by lecture series and sometimes only by a single letter. ...
In the fall of 1909, Max Hayes — typographical worker, editor of the Cleveland Citizen, and leader of the socialist opposition inside the American Federation of Labor — told Cleveland’s labor delegates that the union movement itself was at stake: “The American Federation of Labor will stand or fall as events issue.” Philipp Corfman’s Jacobin essay reconstructs the fight that followed, in which Cleveland’s socialists came closer to capturing the AFL than anyone before or since. ...
David Remnick’s conversation with Colin Kaepernick, ahead of the memoir “The Perilous Fight,” is less a football interview than an account of how a league disciplines its labor. Kaepernick walks through the combine, the blackballing, and the politics he declines to disown. On the combine: prospects walk onstage in compression shorts to be photographed. “There’s an understanding that this has parallels to slave-auction blocks. There’s no reason for us to walk onstage.” No other sport does it, and it has no bearing on the job. The interviews were worse — questions about players’ sexuality and their mothers, and after 2016, “What do you think about Colin Kaepernick?” Illegal questions in any labor engagement, which he reads as obedience screening: “Is this player obedient? Are they going to conform?” He sat during the anthem for three preseason games alone in 2016. Eric Reid, a safety from Baton Rouge, proposed kneeling so the protest could not be framed as distancing himself from the team. He was not protesting the league. The league made it about itself anyway: owners who raised millions for Trump, a reported call saying “this is a winning issue for me,” and, from one teammate, “My owner told me that I can’t protest.” Kaepernick: “an unfathomable sentence.” Seattle brought him in but ran no workout — “we already know you’re a starter” — and asked only about his politics. The business case for punishing him was false: his jersey was the No. 1 seller, and Nike’s 2018 “Dream Crazy” campaign added roughly six billion dollars to the company’s stock. On the C.T.E. finding that one in four players will develop it: “I think that’s very generous framing at twenty-five per cent.” He describes each collision as a thirty-five-mile-an-hour car crash, sixty to seventy plays a game, seventeen weeks. Asked about A.O.C.’s “Woke 1 was crazy” remark, he refuses the frame: it did not come from the communities doing the work, and years of that work created the conditions that let a Mamdani win. He will not denounce it. His political education reads like a syllabus — Malcolm X, Baldwin, Fanon, Huey Newton, Angela Davis, and a decolonization class he audited at Berkeley, all before he ever took a knee. That is why he can say the policing he grew up with was never a run of bad individual moments but a system with an origin in slave patrols. ...
In 1594 the engraver Jacques de Fornazeris produced a flight of nine bird portraits — owls, a rooster, a peacock, a pheasant, a duck, an eagle, and a pelican-like bird labelled sacco marino. The Public Domain Review has put the set up in full from the Rijksmuseum. They are beautiful etchings, and slightly absurd ones: the birds pose, glare out of the frame at the viewer, and share their space with frogs, crabs, butterflies, caterpillars, and smaller birds. ...
D. Graham Burnett’s essay for The Public Domain Review traces a forgotten apparatus — the “pursuit test,” built during the First World War to measure whether a man could hold his attention on a machine. His argument is that the attention our feeds now price so relentlessly was engineered in military psychology labs a century ago, and that what we call an attention crisis is really about which kind of attention we have left. ...
Rachel Cusk’s Life of M, a roman à clef transparently about Natalie Portman, was published in late August and reviewed badly. The New Yorker called it her weakest novel; the New York Times Magazine called it “a lost little book — undisciplined, unfocused and instantly forgettable.” Colton Valentine’s essay in The Drift does not defend the novel so much as ask what its critics refused to say about it: that it belongs to a genre with rules of its own, and that judging it by the standards of autofiction guarantees the verdict before the reading starts. ...
Sara Weiss was a St. Louis housewife in her mid-fifties when, during a convalescence, “people in the spirit world” began visiting her and dictating a treatise on Mars and its fauna. Her 1901 interview in the St. Louis Post-Dispatch ran the drawings her guides helped her make — Martian flowers, captioned in the Martian language. The book followed in 1903, a year before she died. Colin Dickey’s PDR piece reads it as the bridge between two eras we usually keep separate: Spiritualism’s séances and Summerland, and the post-war world of spacecraft and men from Venus. ...
Leslie Fiedler’s Love and Death in the American Novel (1960) is being republished by NYR Books, and Vivian Gornick rereads it for The Nation. His thesis: American fiction is structurally adolescent. Love sits at the center of the Western novel, but the American hero marries or flees. So does the American novelist. “The moment at which Flaubert was dreaming Madame Bovary was the moment when Melville was finding Moby Dick.” ...
In January 2021, Bob Hoffman aimed a short argument less at ad fraud than at the confidence of the people who insist it is handled. The SolarWinds breach had just been revealed — state-sponsored hackers inside roughly 250 US government agencies and companies, undetected by Cyber Command, the NSA, and the Department of Homeland Security. If systems defended at that level can be entered without anyone noticing, what should we assume about the software auditing a $300 billion ad marketplace that runs on machines? ...
Between about 1905 and 1915 the United States had a postcard golden age: cheaper mail, “divided back” cards that freed the whole front for an image, and better commercial printing. In the same window, “tall-tale” or “exaggeration” postcards peaked — cut, collaged, and re-photographed to produce absurd scales. The most popular subgenre was produce. This Public Domain Review collection centers on California, and on one publisher: Each card in the featured series shows a single rail car rolling through lush farmland, loaded with gargantuan produce — dimpled navel oranges, a dusky bunch of grapes, mottled walnuts. The publisher is Edward H. Mitchell of San Francisco, prolific and product-driven. Laid end to end, the cards make “a colorful train crossing California’s fertile valleys.” Unlike the busier tall-tale cards with farmers, fishermen, and children for scale, Mitchell’s are empty of people. Sharply lit, the colossal cargo leans toward artwork rather than gag. Thea Applebaum Licht’s introduction notes the best of them: “A Carload of Mammoth Apples,” green-yellow and gleaming, “could have been plucked from René Magritte’s The Son of Man.” ...