Culture

The premise is gloriously simple: find something in the public domain, make a song from it. What began in 2023 as a listener-engagement experiment on WNYC’s All Of It has grown into concerts at Lincoln Center and the Brooklyn Public Library, a free centennial album with Rosanne Cash, Rhiannon Giddens, Will Butler, and They Might Be Giants, and a partnership with the Internet Archive. The process is a three-step invitation: ...

Between 1780 and 1850, Britain’s industrial cities filled with the living — and then with the dead. Churchyards saturated and rose above street level, pauper grounds became open pits stacked twelve coffins deep, and anatomists hungry for dissection subjects fed a shadow economy of grave robbers. Roger Luckhurst’s essay, drawn from his 2025 book Graveyards, is social history with a sharp class lens: in death as in life, the poor paid the price. ...

Joseph Saddler — Grandmaster Flash, born in the Bronx in 1958 — spent his life trying to make the best part of a record last forever. Vinson Cunningham reviews his new book “Birth of a Culture” (written with Scoop Jackson): part origin story of the DJ’s break-looping technique, part history of the culture told with later rappers like LL Cool J and Q-Tip. The science of the break: Hearing Curtis Mayfield’s “Move On Up” at his parents’ parties in 1970, the twelve-year-old fixated on its drum break — “the world’s longest,” he claims — and on how dancers sharpened when it hit He built his own DJ set, marked vinyl with crayons to find the breaks, laid felt on the platter, and dragged records backward with his fingers: the Quik Mix Theory “The Adventures of Grandmaster Flash on the Wheels of Steel” (1981) showcased it, cut with three turntables from Queen, Blondie, Chic, and the Incredible Bongo Band’s “Apache” The communal origin story: ...

Harold A. Taylor (1878–1960) arrived in California from England in 1896, at eighteen, and became one of southern California’s most tireless visual boosters. This Public Domain Review collection (text by Thea Applebaum Licht) gathers his autochromes of flowers — the subject closest to his heart, shot with the seriousness most photographers reserved for people. Taylor was among the first generation to work with full-color autochromes, and his floral studies were often made as projectable lantern slides: ...

In the LRB, Colin Burrow reviews Helen Vendler’s posthumous Inhabit the Poem while asking what literary criticism is for at all. The stakes are concrete: Exeter wants to make roughly a third of its English department redundant, Canterbury Christ Church has stopped offering English degrees, and A-level English has lost about a third of its students since 2000. Burrow’s complaint about most defenses of the subject is that they surrender to the market — “don’t worry, it will get you a job” is offered “to the dingy gods of the marketplace.” Criticism’s real value, he argues, is closer to what Vendler practiced for a lifetime: ...

In 1926, James Sibley Watson Jr. — publisher of The Dial, the era’s great American modernist magazine — and his friend Melville Webber started filming Poe’s “The Fall of the House of Usher” in an old Rochester stable, with a cast of locals and twelve kilowatts of lighting. Two years later they had produced one of the first avant-garde films made in the United States. Theirs was a deliberately amateur modernism, and they knew it: “the amateur who tries to compete with the professional producer on his own ground is licked from the start.” So instead of competing with The Phantom of the Opera, they made something stranger: ...

Dissent runs a fictional day through the life of Elena, a hospital worker, to show what algorithmically governed work looks like from underneath. Her phone wakes her before dawn with a shift allocation: base rate recalculated to $29.30 an hour, down from $35 two weeks earlier, with no supervisor to call and only a small blue “learn more” button for recourse. The grocery app prices her eggs by “real-time demand, location, and personalized offer conditions.” Her badge tracks how long she spends in the bathroom; a raise lasts forty-three minutes; charting extra minutes for a patient who seems sicker than his acuity score earns a productivity penalty. The app offers her access to her own earnings for a fee — 391 percent APR equivalent. Nothing in Elena’s day is illegal. That is the point. ...

The story begins as hagiography: Abenner, a Christian-persecuting king of India, hears his astrologers predict that his newborn son Josaphat will either rule the world or become a great holy man. Alarmed, he seals the prince inside a pampered palace, cut off from the outside. On his first escorted trips beyond it, Josaphat encounters a man ravaged by illness, one by old age, and a corpse — and lands in a crisis of faith. A Christian hermit named Barlaam converts him, Josaphat holds to his faith through his father’s schemes, and after Abenner himself converts and shares the throne, the prince finally retreats to the desert to live out his days as a monk. ...

In May 1884 the Buffalo Medical and Surgical Journal published a physician’s first-person account of a drug experience that reads like a modern trip report from 140 years ago. Suffering “general neurasthenia,” New York doctor Frank Dudley Beane (1851–94) wanted to avoid opium and morphia — so he self-administered tinctures of cannabis and ergot, mailed to him by the pharmaceutical firm Parke, Davis & Co. Ross MacFarlane’s Public Domain Review essay places the account in a lineage running from Humphry Davy’s nitrous oxide experiments (1799) to Albert Hofmann’s first LSD ride (1943) to today’s Erowid. ...

Mary Turfah, a surgical resident in the US with family in Lebanon, spends her week of leave flying to Beirut with her mother — in late April 2026, days after Israel and Lebanon signed a ten-day truce ending the latest round of war. The diary is framed by her family friend Samar, who treated war injuries as a medical student during Lebanon’s civil war until her patients became their injuries — names and numbers. Having children changed what she could bear: now she can’t handle the blood, the gore, any of it. “Samar says that she too used to have a heart of stone.” ...

Jay Caspian Kang’s Fault Lines column is starting a series on the decline of shame in the age of social media, and its seed case is N.B.A. tanking. On a February podcast, Domonique Foxworth, the former player-union president, described front offices that openly lose on purpose: “We’ve gone into an optimization culture that removes the guardrails that shame used to provide.” Shame, Kang writes, is how groups mediate their norms without state intervention — not always good, but a community without it needs moral consensus, or it risks splintering into the chaos of personal interpretation and individual will. ...

Sir Kenelm Digby (1603–55), diplomat and natural philosopher, claimed a “powder of sympathy” could cure wounds at a distance — and his treatise sold well enough to run to twenty-nine editions in five languages. This Public Domain Review essay (text by Hunter Dukes) uses the 1669 edition to explore the early-modern line where sympathetic magic shaded into mechanistic science. The origin story is likely contrived, but wonderful: In 1624 the writer James Howell tried to break up a duel and was cut to the bone on both hands; King James’ surgeons proved useless Digby soaked Howell’s bloodied garter in a basin of vitriol (ferrous sulfate) — the patient felt cool relief, and his palms burned when Digby later dried the garter by the fire Re-submerged, the wounds healed; Digby said he learned the powder from a Carmelite friar in Florence who had conveniently retired to Persia, leaving Digby the only European who knew its value The mechanism was “the remembrance of bodies”: ...

Ikat — from the Malay word meaning “to bind” — is dyeing before weaving: artisans tie off sections of unwoven yarn, dip the bundles in dye, and only then set up the loom. This Public Domain Review collection (text by Erica X Eisen) traces the technique’s nineteenth-century golden age in Central Asia, where it was known as abrbandi, or “cloud tying,” for its signature smudgy edges — dye seeping under the wraps turned a methodological shortcoming into a prized aesthetic hallmark. ...

The NYRB reissue of Leslie Fiedler’s Love and Death in the American Novel (1960) brings back one of the great scandals of mid-century criticism: the claim that American literature, alone among the world’s, refuses to grow up. Zoë Hu’s Baffler essay takes the measure of both the book and the man — the Newark-born public intellectual who paid AFTRA dues and told William F. Buckley, live on Firing Line, that America’s greatest cultural achievement was Gone with the Wind. ...

In 1886 the actress Genevieve Stebbins declared it “an age of formulations” — Comte had systematized science, Buckle history, Spencer culture — and set out to do the same for the dramatic arts. Her Delsarte System of Dramatic Expression turned the French movement theorist François Delsarte’s unpublished teachings into a full manual for the actor’s body. Stebbins had learned the system from the playwright Steele MacKaye, who brought it from Paris “like a John the Baptist,” then made a pilgrimage to Nanterre to receive the teachings from the Abbé Delaumosne, one of Delsarte’s surviving apostles: ...

A Labor Day episode of Jacobin’s Confronting Capitalism podcast has NYU sociologist Vivek Chibber arguing that the fate of unions and the Left are one: unions supply the mass base that socialist politics needs, and socialists supply the anti-capitalist horizon that unions lack. The starting point is how weak American labor has become: Overall union density is just below 11%; private-sector density is around 6% — lower than when unions were illegal Public-sector unions (~33% density) are the only reason the number stays in double digits Union approval is at record highs even as membership craters — so the obstacle isn’t culture, it’s employer hostility and “unrelenting class war” The core theory runs straight through Adam Smith and Marx: ...

Before the internet delivered niche knowledge straight to the door, the post office did. Allan Johnson’s essay for The Public Domain Review traces the forgotten industry of mail-order occultism — arcane knowledge sold by correspondence course, at industrial scale, from the 1890s through the Depression. The essay opens with a nice twist on Max Weber’s 1917 “disenchantment of the world” thesis: modernity didn’t erase spiritual practice, it redistributed belief into the privacy of the home. ...

The Public Domain Review’s Hunter Dukes unpacks one of the most enduring images in radical labor iconography: the 1911 Pyramid of Capitalist System, first published in the IWW’s newspaper, the Industrial Worker. It takes Marx and Engels seriously — the bourgeoisie really did accomplish wonders surpassing Egyptian pyramids — and asks what those powers could build in other hands. The poster reads downward as a hierarchy of exploitation: Capitalism itself sits at the top, a giant sack embroidered with $$$, resting on politicians and monarchs (“we rule you”) Below them the priests (“we fool you”), then the military and police (“we shoot at you”), then the rich dining on stolen surplus value (“we eat for you”) At the base, the lynchpin of the whole structure: the workers (“we work for all, we feed all”) — some bent under the load like Atlas, others already waving the red flag The image had a transatlantic genealogy: ...

A century ago, workers in Hong Kong and Canton waged one of the longest continuous general strikes in history — sixteen months that shut down a central British commercial outpost and made Chinese workers, for a time, regional governors. Promise Li’s Jacobin essay on the centennial reconstructs both the strike’s machinery of self-government and why its memory has been flattened into patriotism. The strike ran from June 1925 to October 1926, sparked by the May 30 Shanghai massacre: ...

In 1683 the Dutch physician Willem ten Rhijne published De Acupunctura — the first illustrated European treatise on the Chinese practice, complete with copperplate engravings of acupuncture points. The Public Domain Review collection retells how a seasick samurai’s self-administered needles aboard a ship bound for Edo set a VOC surgeon on a quixotic quest to translate a Chinese manual into Latin. The encounter: on the hofreis — the 1,000-kilometer journey from Nagasaki to the emperor in Edo — an imperial Japanese soldier treated his seasickness by driving four needles into his left abdomen with a small hammer (a Japanese innovation on the roughly 2,000-year-old Chinese tradition); no blood appeared after extraction Ten Rhijne arrived in Japan in 1674, stationed at Dejima — the artificial island off Nagasaki that was the only conduit between Japan and the West until 1854 (the Dutch East India Company took it over after the Portuguese were expelled in 1639) Knowledge flowed both ways: Japanese doctors had eagerly adopted “Caspar-style surgery” from VOC surgeon Caspar Schamberger and studied Dutch texts under the name Kōmō-ryū (“Red-Haired School” surgery) The translation relay: no one on the island could go from Chinese to Latin directly, so Iwanaga Sōko rendered the manual into Japanese, Shōdayū Motogi into Dutch, and ten Rhijne into Latin — “no little accuracy was lost” along the way Qi became a “wind,” an overabundance of which caused swelling needing to be let out — “in the same way, sausages, when they threaten to explode in a heated pan, are pierced”; Galenic humors were mapped imperfectly onto yin and yang as “wet radicals” and “weak primigenial humors”; the charts’ lines were misread as veins The result was more or less unusable as a manual and sparked no European craze — ten Rhijne was even overshadowed by fellow VOC surgeon Engelbert Kaempfer’s more popular 1712 work Still, the essay reads it as “a moment in history when Western medicine was open to the idea of its own partialness”: a surgeon already borrows from carpenters, metalworkers, and tailors — you already have a needle, so why not try something new? The diagrams are beautiful artifacts of a knowledge system crossing an empire’s trade routes and emerging transformed — a case study in how translation is where meaning gets lost. Ten Rhijne was a remarkably generous reader of a tradition he barely understood: he grasped the mechanics, fumbled the metaphysics, and insisted Europe should pay attention anyway.