Culture

When Christopher Latham Sholes debuted the typewriter in 1872, he wouldn’t pose with it. The first press photos show his daughter Lillian at the keyboard instead — the machine is so easy, a woman can do it. That framing stuck, and it flattened a century of skilled labor into “just typing.” Christine Jacobson’s essay in The Public Domain Review recovers the literary amanuenses: the women who took dictation, cleaned up handwritten drafts, argued with their authors, and got the manuscripts out the door. Before 1880 women were four percent of clerical workers. By 1920 they were half. The work they did was routine only in the telling: ...

Before photography could catch a snowflake, an Edo-era Japanese lord spent two decades drawing them by hand. Sekka Zusetsu (雪華図説), published in 1832, collects the results — eighty-six firsthand observations of “snow flowers,” plus a dozen reproduced from a 1779 German natural-history primer. The author was Doi Toshitsura (1789–1848), a daimyō who ruled the Koga Domain in what is now Shimōsa Province, and probably the first person in Japan to study ice crystals under a microscope. ...

Twenty-five years on, Jacobin asks what “Never Forget” was ever supposed to mean. Remembering the dead, yes — but also holding the perpetrators accountable and learning enough to avoid repeating the choices that followed. On the last two counts, the argument runs, we have forgotten almost everything. The only government with direct complicity in the attacks was never made to answer for it: Saudi Arabia faced nothing resembling justice, and successive administrations actively covered up its role while arming its war in Yemen. Washington instead bombed and invaded almost every Middle Eastern country except the implicated one — Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria, Libya, Yemen, Pakistan, Somalia, and now Iran. The costs ran far past the intended targets: roughly five times more American lives than were lost on 9/11, at least 4.5 million deaths across the region, and 38 million people displaced. In North Africa, terrorism reportedly exploded 100,000 percent after the US military arrived to “fight terror” there. The essay’s sharper point is about what the war became domestically. “Terrorist” no longer describes someone who kills for political ends — it is a catch-all slur aimed at people who vandalize a billionaire’s car, criticize capitalism, protest, film law enforcement, or hold office while Muslim. The Department of Homeland Security, created in the aftermath, now describes its own mission as a literal war against enemies within. ...

This Jacobin essay is written from inside the union it criticizes. The author is an IATSE member who went to the union’s quadrennial convention with CREW, an insurgent reform caucus. Some 168,000 behind-the-scenes workers are represented there, from stagehands to below-the-line film crews. Many speakers expressed pride in their craft. Nobody talked about working on a good movie — and the reform caucus, for all its fruitful debate about democratic reform, never took up film as an art form either. ...

BnF Français 22971 is a Middle French translation of Pierre Bersuire’s encyclopedic Reductium morale (ca. 1340), illuminated around 1485 by Robert Testard for Charles d’Angoulême. Fifty-six miniatures gather the marvels of the world, and the Public Domain Review collection essay by Mathilde Montpetit walks through them. The founding confusion of the genre is that time and space collapse entirely. Alexander the Great, as fictionalized in the Roman d’Alexandre, is as reliable a source on India as Odoric of Pordenone — an actual missionary who went there. Terrestrial Paradise and China are equally remote and equally real; the Paradise may be the easier of the two to reach. ...

Earlier this year, three novelists — Phil Klay, Sean Thor Conroe, and Daniel Lefferts — took the stage at the 92nd Street Y for a panel called “The Trouble with Men”, billed as a roundtable on “what the crisis in American masculinity means for our culture.” T. M. Brown’s New Yorker essay argues the panel was missing the one writer who has been working the problem longest from the only angle that works: Danny McBride, of Eastbound & Down and The Righteous Gemstones, whose debut story collection Thrilling Tales of Modern Men came out this summer. ...

Hannah Glasse’s The Art of Cookery, Made Plain and Easy first appeared in 1747 and stayed a bestseller for nearly a century — the dominant English cookbook of the Georgian era, written as a working manual rather than a display of taste. The Public Domain Review has reproduced the fourth edition of 1751, scanned from a copy at the US National Library of Medicine. Its author’s stated audience is the giveaway: she wrote so that “every Servant who can but read will be capable of making a tolerable good Cook.” ...

In the Tale of King Mu, Son of Heaven (Mutianzi zhuan, ca. 475–221 BCE) — considered the oldest extant travelogue in Chinese literature — the ruler journeys to the mythical Kunlun mountains, his chariot drawn by eight faithful horses toward the Queen Mother of the West. On arrival he releases the steeds into a paradisiac meadow, payment for carrying him to the land of eternal life. The trope became immortal in its own right, turning up on jade snuff bottles, silk sleeve bands, seal-paste vessels, and Qing porcelain plates. For painters, the eight horses offered a showcase: unlike the placid animals of stable-groom portraits, these gallop, gambol, and leap in celebration of their liberty. ...

Ben Burgis watched the first night of the Republicans’ midterm “convention” — an event where nobody was nominated and no official business of any kind was conducted — and noticed something strange: the one subject that reliably fired up the room was socialism. Not taxes, not immigration, not the war. Socialism. The rhetoric was maximal: Steve Scalise claimed there had been a “Bolshevik Revolution in the Democrat party.” Tom Emmer denounced “the Communist Party, uh, excuse me, the Democrats,” along with the “Marxists, communists, and anarchists” who want to “destroy” America. Trump’s keynote: “They call themselves Democrat socialists, but actually they’re communists. . . . It’s going to be a communist country if they win.” What none of them said is the interesting part. Across the whole night: ...

In 1929, Franz Hessel published Spazieren in Berlin — a book Walter Benjamin called “a memorization while strolling,” praising its steps as creating “an astonishing resonance in the asphalt he walks over.” It was a great year for German publishing, and a catastrophic one for Germany. Paul Sullivan’s essay reads Hessel’s Berlin against what his Berlin left out. The year Hessel’s book appeared: The Wall Street Crash hit Germany harder than almost anyone, as recalled US loans collapsed into mass bankruptcy and unemployment lines In May, a police crackdown on illegal Communist demonstrations became Blutmai — more than thirty civilians killed, over two hundred injured Weeks later the Young Plan settled war reparations, feeding resentment that the National Socialists harvested Hessel shared the year’s shelf with Döblin’s Berlin Alexanderplatz, Remarque’s All Quiet on the Western Front, and Tucholsky’s Deutschland, Deutschland über alles Almost none of that reaches the page. What reaches the page instead is gorgeous: mannequins in shop windows, an esoteric whale exhibition on a barge, “cement sacks shimmer[ing] springtime green on the autumn street,” and Berlin treated as a Proustian madeleine that unlocks the author’s own childhood. The chapter list reads like a guidebook and veers off like a memoir — “I Learn a Thing or Two,” “Lust For Life,” “The Animal Palaces.” ...

Metamorphosis, or, A Transformation of Pictures, with Poetical Explanations is an early modern “moving book” — a harlequinade of paper flaps, reproduced by The Public Domain Review from American editions printed between 1816 and 1857. Pull the flaps and Adam becomes Eve becomes a mermaid; a lion becomes a griffin becomes an eagle. Mathilde Montpetit’s essay makes clear the transformations were never the point. The book is a memento mori for children, and the last panel shows a skeleton standing over a dying man, arrow poised. ...

John Livesey’s review of Tom Overton’s John Berger From Life (Allen Lane, 2026) is a good excuse to remember how improbable Berger’s career was. A self-professed Marxist art critic became a national television phenomenon in Britain — and did it in a 10 p.m. Saturday slot, right after the football scores. Ways of Seeing (BBC, 1972) dismantled the “great man” theory of art for a mass audience. Berger, in a patterned shirt with a mane of gray hair, looked more like a rock star than an art historian, explaining Lukács, Gramsci, and Benjamin in plainspoken English. His question was never “is this good” but rather how economic forces determine what meanings art is allowed to produce. ...

Hua Hsu reviews Brian Dillon’s Ambivalence: An Education, a memoir that narrates its author’s late teens and early twenties — Ireland in the late 1980s, graduate study in England by 1995 — in the third person. The younger self is “B,” examined at a distance, as a specimen. Few people intervene in his trajectory; he mostly dreams and turns newly discovered ideas over until they feel like his own. The formal choice is the argument. First-person memoir implies the writer has already made sense of everything before sitting down to write; third person lets the teenager meander and fumble, without the adult’s earned wisdom. ...

Javanese shadow puppetry has been drawing audiences for over a thousand years, in performances that can run from night until morning. This Public Domain Review collection (text by Erica X Eisen) centres on the 1919 Darah Bharata, an illustrated encyclopedia of main characters from the wayang kulit repertoire, with plates by Raden Soelardi. Wayang kulit is a physical medium, not an ethereal one — the “shadow” in the name misleads: ...

Garrett Langley, the founder of Flock Safety, frames surveillance as a Faustian bargain: if we want “crime to be a thing of the past,” we must “sacrifice our privacy.” His origin story is a 2017 phone call to an Atlanta police precinct and some homemade license-plate cameras built from Android phones and solar panels. By 2020 the cameras were on public roads in police partnerships. Today: Roughly 130,000 Flock cameras monitor roads in every US state but Alaska Around 40% of US law-enforcement agencies hold contracts with the company The company was recently valued at more than $8 billion, with Andreessen Horowitz its biggest investor The cameras have outgrown their name. They record make, model, and colour along with plates, and police can use the data to make arrests or present evidence in court with no warrant and no judicial approval. Flock touts the wins — a Brown University mass shooter was tracked with its data, from a man already dead when he was found — and the International Association of Chiefs of Police calls automated plate readers a “crime-fighting star.” ...

Charlotte Perkins Gilman serialized Herland across twelve monthly instalments in 1915, in a magazine she wrote, edited, and published entirely by herself. The Forerunner (1909–1916) was her mouthpiece for socialism, humanism, and social reform — and this was its centrepiece: a novel about a country of women sealed off at the top of a South American mountain for two thousand years. Gilman’s Greeks knew the Amazons, a society of women that was simply the world of men turned over — women warriors, women kings, war and strife intact. Herland is not that. It is a country where: ...

A book editor’s newsletter, surfaced by Arts & Letters Daily, argues that nonfiction — long the stable, predictable half of publishing — is collapsing. In 2015, 6 of the top 25 hardcover bestsellers were fiction; in 2025, 18 were. One recent week, the entire hardcover nonfiction list sold 42,000 copies while just the top two fiction titles sold 52,000. Nonfiction’s old logic: predictable demand, higher advance floors, and authors with built-in “platform” — celebrities and experts sold on a proposal rather than a finished manuscript. The platform model is breaking: fragmented media and parasocial connection now outsell national TV coverage — but the deeper problem is falling demand for nonfiction’s core promise of information and learning. Root cause, per Sean deLone: a breakdown in trust of education, expertise, and authority. Gallup puts trust in media at an all-time low (28%), with “no trust at all” up from 24% to 34% in five years. It is not simply a “male reading crisis” — fiction readership is ~80% women while nonfiction is near parity — but the nonfiction chart skews male: 15 of the top 25 titles in 2025 were by men. The chart turned unserious: celebrity properties, political books (“Hollywood for ugly people”), Guinness World Records, NYT Puzzle Mania. Consequences are structural: money flows to fiction, big publishers corner celebrity supply, and fiction writers stay anonymous — which is why self-publishing and new entrants keep rising. The midlist — publishing’s middle class — is the bellwether of literary seriousness, and by that measure both fiction and nonfiction have gotten less challenging. If nonfiction represented the authority of the book, its market collapse signals the book’s slipping authority as a cultural object. ...

Between the fifteenth and nineteenth centuries, European medical records filled with people convinced their bodies were made of glass. The most famous sufferer was a king of France; the last was a Bavarian princess who believed she had swallowed a grand piano. Tamara Sanderson traces the delusion as a cultural idiom — distress speaking in whatever language its era makes available. Charles VI of France had iron rods sewn into his clothes after the Bal des Ardents of 1393, where four courtiers burned alive at his own masquerade — months after he had killed four of his own knights in a psychotic break and remembered none of it. The casebooks are wonderfully strange: a man whose buttocks were windowpanes, a nobleman shaped like a glass pitcher who slept in straw, a patient who wanted to leap into a glazier’s furnace and emerge as a glass jug. Cervantes turned the delusion into a kind of freedom in “El licenciado Vidriera” (1613): a man of glass has nothing left to conceal, so he speaks transparently — a pointed fable for Inquisition-era Spain. Descartes invoked the glass man in the Meditations as the boundary of reason; Foucault and Derrida later fought over what that exclusion did to philosophy itself. Why glass? Murano’s new, nearly invisible clear glass had just remade human sight — lenses, telescopes, microscopes — while the delusion traveled by contagion among the literate men who read the casebooks. The last great case was a woman: Princess Alexandra Amalie of Bavaria (1826–1875), who turned sideways through palace doorways for twenty-five years to protect the glass piano she believed she carried. A body made of glass cannot be sent to war, married off, or held to courtly expectation. Alexandra never married, never played — exemption dressed as affliction, and it did real work. ...

Literary feuds are eternal — Hemingway vs. Faulkner, the sub-tweet as a genre. But in 1797 two giants of German letters, Goethe and Schiller, published what may be the most elaborate work of literary insult ever written: the Xenions, 675 epigrammatic distichs aimed at their critics. The title comes from Martial, who ironically named poems against his enemies after the Greek for “host-gift” Published in Schiller’s Musen-Almanach with a mission statement: annoy the philistine, ridicule bigots, smite hypocrites The 1896 English edition, translated by Paul Carus (Open Court, Chicago), prunes the items “of mere transitory importance” The favorite targets: ...

In 1559 the French humanist Pierre Boaistuau arrived at the English court with a pitch for the newly crowned Elizabeth I: a lavish illuminated catalogue of the world’s marvels and monstrosities, prepared so an English printer could turn it into a book. He had pedigree — his Histoires tragiques (1559) would supply the source Shakespeare later turned into Romeo and Juliet. The result, Histoires prodigieuses, sits halfway between a medieval bestiary and a scientific treatise on birth defects: ...