Culture

Lorraine Daston, director emerita of the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science, reviews Roopika Risam’s Data Empire — an 11,000-year history of information as an instrument of organization, control, and domination. Risam’s subtitle is her thesis: “The Power of Information to Organize, Control, and Dominate.” “We are the data species,” she writes. The earliest written texts were not epics but ledgers: Sumerian clay tablets listing sheep, barley, and wine to be taxed and shipped Imperial accounting that tallied labor and materials for irrigation, walls, roads, and pyramids Suriname’s colonial land surveys earmarking profit in sugar and timber The Atlantic slave trade’s ledgers and insurance policies on human cargo Risam’s ambivalence runs through every era: data curses the governed but blesses historians. A Theban land dispute between a deed-holding Khay and a memory-rich Mose; Qin Shi Huang standardizing weights and burning records; the Spanish casta system’s racial taxonomy; Frances Perkins assigning Social Security numbers from a former Coca-Cola factory. Even the Dewey Decimal system, Daston notes, smuggles in ethnocentric prejudice — more numbers for Christianity than for other world religions. ...

Chad Harbach — co-founder of n+1, author of the 2011 phenomenon The Art of Fielding — is back with a new novel, The Brightness, out in October from Little, Brown. n+1’s fall issue (“Power Play”) runs an excerpt set at Westish College, the fictional Lake Michigan campus of his debut. It opens the college’s legendary season-kickoff blowout: the Parties. The opening view is an omniscient narrator with a knowing wink: “such as existed in the 19th century, or one of those camera-equipped drones that exist in the 21st, which certain male students love to fly” Kegs trucked in, a two-story bouncy castle inflated, holiday lights strung in the maples — and bedsheet banners across the manors reading “we are one” Irma, who has “on principle, never been to the Parties,” gets swept up by her glamorous, chronically late friend Dahlia — tasseled prismatic dress, fire-engine-red lipstick, “the word siren leaped to Irma’s mind” The teaser line under the title: “You picked the wrong guy. I don’t hate women” — a hint of the power dynamics the novel is circling The excerpt is a small study in belonging and its rituals: a mass party’s manufactured “we are one” against one woman’s principled refusal to join. The remainder is paywalled, but the opening page does a lot — logistics, friendship, and the gravitational pull of a campus institution, all in a few hundred words.

n+1’s fall 2026 Intellectual Situation essay updates its own 2008 manifesto on NYRB Classics (“the characteristic publishing project of the decade”) for the age of the reissue boom. The zeitgeist, it argues, has been “a series of geists from zeits past” — Babitz bubbles, Hardwick hurricanes, Helen Garner sweeping book clubs, a Nancy Lemannaissance. The old-new writer: unknown in their time, for reasons of sexism or ahead-of-its-time-ism, recently resurrected by a reissue outfit The NYRB template, per the 2008 essay: buy cheap rights “from a dead writer’s nephew,” package handsomely, get an introduction by somebody important The readerly appeal: “These books are old, but not classics; to read them is illuminating, but not credentialing” Reading reissues is “like listening to Spotify” — patchy sampling, rarities before the full discography — “and in plenty of discographies, the rarities are the best parts” BookTok now outpaces the new-new: Harpman’s I Who Have Never Known Men outsold all of Transit’s Jon Fosse titles; Penguin’s White Nights is narrated by a Bridgerton actor The structural backdrop: Bezos gutting the Post’s Book World, “canon editor” as a job title, conglomerate publishing that hedges every bet A pointed political note: of ~150 NYRB Classics authors since 2020, about a tenth are writers of color, and just one is a Black American novelist The sharpest observation is that reissues are weatherized against the death of criticism — they don’t need to be rereviewed, they can trend. But the essay ends by rejecting the nostalgia it describes: the novel can still bring the news, and the reader’s job is to be their own canon editor — “for every rediscovered treasure, read a book published in the past five years.”

In fall 1980, Mark Bauerlein declared an English major at UCLA and bought the two green volumes of the Norton Anthology of English Literature — “2,500 flimsy pages in each,” the only visuals being maps of England and London. The required yearlong survey ran from Beowulf to Auden for three hundred sophomores at a time. He still has the books, fifty years on. The essay is a memoir of what that curriculum gave a drifting, nihilistic nineteen-year-old who bounced between math, film, psychology, and philosophy, hawked newspapers at Del Mar, and read Nietzsche and Freud “on my own”: ...

Amber A’Lee Frost’s Jacobin eulogy for Dolly Parton tells her story through class and labor, anchored in 9 to 5 (1980) and the working-women’s movement that inspired it. Dolly never forgot the poverty of her Tennessee cabin — and never treated anyone as beneath her. The movie gave voice to the “pink-collar ghetto”: Underpaid, overworked, harassed office women, surveilled and stolen from by shitty bosses The fantasy office takeover: equal pay, daycare, flex hours, rehiring the unfairly fired Jane Fonda produced it after meeting 9to5, National Association of Working Women (Nussbaum and Cassedy, founded while both were Harvard secretaries — later SEIU District 925) Organizers used “actions,” not “demonstrations” — too radical a word for their members Dolly’s labor solidarity was quiet and consistent: ...

In October 1552, fifteen-year-old Felix Platter left Basel for Montpellier to study medicine — and kept a diary about everything that happened to him. He later reworked that teenage daybook into a memoir, now republished as Beloved Son Felix: Coming of Age in the Renaissance (translated by Seán Jennett). Erin Maglaque reviews it in the London Review of Books, reading the diary as both a record of adolescent appetite and a document of the confessional age. ...

A Public Domain Review collection (text by Erica X Eisen) of cover art from Amauta (1926–30), the Lima magazine José Carlos Mariátegui launched to “create a new Peru within the new world” — reading the global avant-garde through a socialist, Indigenous lens. Thirty-two issues, outlasting nearly every independent outlet around it. Mariátegui, later the founder of the forerunner of the Peruvian Communist Party, spent two years in exile after the 1919 coup — NYC, Paris, Venice, Berlin — and came home, per art historian Natalia Majluf, probably Latin America’s foremost expert on contemporary European art. Amauta was the outlet he built: ...

Unlearning Economics — the pseudonymous economics blogger, writing in Current Affairs — takes on the profession’s most confident claim. In a 2012 poll, 81% of economists said rent control in cities like New York and San Francisco had not helped affordable housing; the strongest statement was Assar Lindbeck’s: rent control is “the most efficient technique presently known to destroy a city — except for bombing.” The essay’s job is to show that unanimity rests on a textbook diagram, not the evidence. ...

Giorgos Gouzoulis reads the administration’s debt policy as one coherent class project: capital’s debt is provisional and forgivable, workers’ debt is a disciplinary mechanism. The White House touts credit-card spending as consumer strength while subprime auto delinquencies hit a thirty-two-year high and personal debt passes $18.8 trillion. The comparison that makes the argument: PPP: $792.7 billion in forgivable business loans, roughly 92 percent written off — including an estimated $64 billion in fraud — with no wage garnishment and no op-eds about how “debt doesn’t go away” Student debt: the SAVE plan terminated July 1, 2026; collections and credit reporting resumed after a five-year pause; 20.5 percent of borrowers ninety-plus days delinquent — the highest rate ever recorded Close to 2.2 million borrowers saw their credit scores drop more than one hundred points; Education Secretary McMahon’s logic is explicit — a degree can’t be collateral, so the seizure happens in credit scores and garnished wages The CFPB, under Russell Vought, rescinded sixty-seven guidance documents in 2025; Trump’s 10 percent credit-card cap was announced and never enacted (the average rate stands at 20.94 percent) The thesis: personal debt is not a passive symptom of stagnant wages — it is an active mechanism of labor discipline. A worker carrying a mortgage, car payment, student loan, or medical bill has a narrower set of choices about jobs, schedules, and walking away; wage garnishment is a legal claim on labor power that follows the worker into the next job. Student loans become debt bondage with the career itself as collateral. ...

On the thirtieth anniversary of the July 27, 1996 Kudatuli attack, a bronze statue by sculptor Dolorosa Sinaga was unveiled at PDI-P headquarters in central Jakarta: a woman screaming, arms wrapped around five bowed figures. It is the first large, permanent monument in the capital that explicitly condemns an act of Suharto’s New Order state violence. Kudatuli was one of the New Order’s final crimes: Government-backed party officials ousted Megawati Soekarnoputri as PDI chair; her supporters held a month-long Free Speech Forum at the seized headquarters On July 27, soldiers and hired thugs stormed the building while riot police stood aside — five killed, 149 wounded, twenty-three disappeared The regime blamed the small left-wing PRD as a “new PKI,” the red scare that had justified the 1965–66 massacres of suspected communists The contrast with New Order monumentalism is stark: Lubang Buaya’s Sacred Pancasila Monument enshrined the army’s account of 1965 while erasing millions of victims. Survivors’ memorials — Taman 65, Trisakti, Pondok Ranggon — are small and peripheral, and the republic still has no national museum of New Order crimes. ...

Amanda Petrusich’s New Yorker interview with Rivers Cuomo lands as Weezer drops its twentieth studio LP, the Gold Album — and it turns into more than album promo: a conversation about memory, biography, and the stories we inherit. It opens with Cuomo asking the interviewer to read Macbeth aloud with him. His current obsession is “Lore,” a project collecting every experience he’s ever had — journals, letters, interviews — in strict chronological order: ...

Stephen Diehl — the anti-crypto tech critic — on the modern internet as a predatory grift economy. His frame: predation used to be an abuse of the network; now it is the network’s organizing principle. The scammer once had to find a victim — the platform now finds one, profiles the weakness, optimizes the pitch, processes the payment, and recommends the next scam. The grift economy is participatory Ordinary people are conscripted into the downline: promoting investments they barely understand, products that don’t work, and political claims they’ve never examined — often earning nothing, as unpaid distributors for someone further up the pyramid. The pyramid is social before financial: the affiliate marketer buys a course about affiliate marketing and recovers the cost by selling it to the next marketer; the life coach coaches new life coaches. Grifters are often marks themselves — belief makes the selling bearable, and admitting the product is worthless would mean admitting years of life were worthless. “The fraud sustains the faith, and the faith sustains the fraud.” The business model Satisfaction is churn; misery is recurring revenue. A normal trade ends when a need is satiated; an online grift must preserve the need that feeds it. Recommendation systems are “vast reinforcement-learning loops that continuously experiment on human weakness” — calm accuracy loses; threat, transgression, and impossible promises win. The honest financial adviser explains diversification and gets twelve views; the crypto lunatic predicts a thousandfold return and gets twelve million. Crypto as the apotheosis Crypto synthesizes alienation, precarity, gambling addiction, and “a thick slurry of libertarian derp” into the ultimate predatory investment product — a pyramid scheme with a podcast department. Its recursive structure: promotion creates price movement, price movement is presented as proof of adoption, proof recruits new buyers. The asset comes with its own volunteer propaganda network. AI makes it cheaper LLMs drive the cost of producing plausible lies to zero: one person can generate a landfill of articles, videos, testimonials, and synthetic experts before breakfast. The grift no longer needs conviction or charisma — just a model, an affiliate account, and a population whose critical faculties have been sandblasted by twenty years of algorithmic media. The closing argument Contempt isn’t analysis: precarity supplies the recruits, alienation supplies the audience. The grift offers agency where ordinary life offers delay, community where society offers isolation. Reality supplies friction — a conversation ends, a pub closes, a book runs out of pages — and friction is one of the few remaining defenses against appetite without limit. “The final grift is letting the loop decide what your life should be.”

Hakeem Jeffries’s plan to install Jared Moskowitz as chair of the House Middle East and North Africa subcommittee — if Democrats retake the House — hands party foreign policy to an AIPAC favorite who backed Trump’s Iran war. Branko Marcetic argues it’s the establishment openly at war with its own voters. The record: Polling from YouGov for the IMEU Policy Project: majorities of 60%+ of Democratic voters across key states want their 2028 candidate to cut off weapons for Israel and sanction it Moskowitz was one of 16 Democrats to vote to reverse Biden’s pause on the largest US bombs, opposed a ceasefire for months, led an effort to conceal Gaza’s civilian death toll, and voted to defund UNRWA He declared “From the river to the sea” an antisemitic call for violence, voted to censure Rashida Tlaib, supported deporting a green card holder critical of Israel, and wrote a bill to punish Americans who boycott Israel On Iran he put himself “to the right” of Vance and Witkoff, closer to Graham and Cotton; he refused to back the Khanna–Massie War Powers Resolution (calling it the “Ayatollah Protection Act”) and now insists “we have to get the uranium. We can’t just go home” Jeffries himself backed the War Powers Resolution — yet picked Moskowitz anyway That last point is the tell. Marcetic reads it as evidence the leadership’s opposition to the war was always half-hearted: centrists are committed to unpopular hawkishness for ideological and donor reasons, and Moskowitz is the cover — a figurehead who takes the heat while the party pretends it shares voters’ anti-war convictions.

On August 25, Starbucks Workers United called a nationwide boycott of Starbucks — the latest escalation in a first-contract fight now nearly five years old. The union is asking individuals, organizations, and unions to stop patronizing the chain and avoid its catering and sponsorships until a contract is signed. The AFL-CIO has already signed on, and the 25,000-strong Chicago Teachers Union voted to boycott on August 26. The context, in brief: ...

Naomi Fry on “The Girls: a Khloé Kardashian Project,” the six-part Hulu reality show that gathers Khloé’s “incredible real-life circle of besties” — six LA influencer-businesswomen — for another installment of the family’s two-decade content empire. The tradition of women-group narratives is rich; the Kardashian version is a husk. The cast: WAGS LA veterans with a hair-extension line, a Sports Illustrated model married to an ex-NFL player, a lash-extension-and-children’s-deodorant entrepreneur, and Khloé’s twin BFFs Malika and Kadijah. None would see each other again without the Hulu paycheck. The deadness: cast members clock in at the reality-show office; filming schedules, promo shoots, and advertiser showcases become the show’s actual content. The AI-era barb: the show feels “created by Khloé throwing the terms ‘reality show,’ ‘Kardashian,’ ‘women,’ ‘BBL,’ and ‘money’ into Claude and hitting Enter.” The ideology: bodies and money prized above everything — a $250,000 surrogate is rejected in favor of “fifty K for my titties”; a too-small bouquet is declared unromantic. Fry’s point isn’t just that the show is bad — it’s that the Kardashian machinery has run so long it now produces only the appearance of drama, with the women themselves admitting they feel dead inside. The spinoff is the family business as pure, hollow process: making and promoting the show has become the show.

Becca Rothfeld flies to Los Angeles for the premiere of Neil Breen’s seventh feature, “Dire Duplicity,” and comes back with a theory of cinema’s most misunderstood category: trash. Trash is badness raised to a sublime, singular art — distinct from camp, from prestige failure, and from the formulaic “slop” that defines our era. Trash is not merely bad: it’s monumentally, inspiredly incompetent — scrambled plots, amateur actors, nauseating camerawork, dialogue that makes no sense. Canon: “Plan 9 from Outer Space,” “Manos: The Hands of Fate,” “The Room,” “Troll 2,” “Birdemic.” Breen is the ultimate trash auteur: seven films since 2005, all written, directed, produced, financed, and starred in by one man — a mysterious ex-architect who plays savior figures fighting shadowy cabals of bankers, CEOs, and politicians (“Isn’t that corrupt?”). Sincerity is the secret: “When somebody makes an attempt at comedy and pretends they’re in on the joke, it’s not interesting. Sincerity is what sells.” Breen never winked — unlike Wiseau and Nguyen, who sold out. Trash fandom is communal: sold-out screenings, standing ovations, “Breen mitzvahs” (watching a Breen movie thirteen times), an affective community of cinephiles. The real distinction Rothfeld draws is trash versus slop. Slop is formulaic and impersonal, “the aggregate of everything that is already imitating everything else”; trash is jarringly personal, its failures human. To paraphrase Tolstoy: all slop is alike, but every piece of trash is trashy in its own oddball way. ...

Stuart Trew, a senior researcher at the Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives, argues that Canada’s walkout from trade talks with Washington was the right call — and a rare opening for the left. PM Mark Carney wanted a deal, but the deal on offer would have been terrible for Canadian workers. What made the deal impossible to accept: A 15 percent US tariff on finished vehicles imported from Canada (effective 7–9 percent after deducting US parts) — a permanent incentive to close factories Steel and aluminum tariffs cut only to 25 percent from 50 percent; lumber lowered by just 10 percent Further concessions on digital and cultural policy, echoing the “reciprocal” deals other countries have signed Unifor, which represents Canadian autoworkers, and the premiers of Ontario, Quebec, British Columbia, and Manitoba all pushed back Public opinion backs the line: a poll from August 23 shows 76 percent support for ending negotiations, with nearly two-thirds of respondents saying Canada will emerge stronger in the long run. Even Pierre Poilievre and Conrad Black are urging Carney to hold the line — while business groups and right-wing think tanks push a “grand bargain” of minerals, energy, and military procurement. ...

Adrian Woolfson reviews Harvard paleoanthropologist Daniel E. Lieberman’s Fed Up: What Evolution Reveals About Food, Diet, Health, and Eating Well — an evolutionary case against dietary absolutism. Lieberman’s thesis: the question of what we should eat is “far too complex to be solved by a single Big Idea,” and every grand dietary theory crashes into the same fact — for most of human existence we lived in the shadow of starvation, so our bodies evolved to stockpile energy rather than shed it. ...

Hating data centers has gone mainstream — a Jason Kelce ad asked Americans to mail jars of pee to the nearest AI facility, and opposition polls jumped from 49 to 75 percent this year. Governors have noticed: Hochul’s moratorium, Abbott’s audit, Shapiro’s guardrails. But the groundswell is splitting the labor movement down the middle. Building trades are all in: data centers are 2.3% of US construction spending (quadrupled since 2020), about one-third union — three times the industry rate — with NABTU partnerships at OpenAI, BlackRock, and Meta and a Stargate labor agreement Opposition wing: National Nurses United and the AAUP back the Sanders–AOC moratorium — “a public health crisis, an environmental crisis, and a workers’ rights crisis” The wedge is blue-collar vs white-collar: builders today vs displaced professionals tomorrow — a moratorium’s pause “lands entirely on the people who build” Water fears are often overstated (closed-loop cooling, under 1% of national consumption) but real in water-stressed regions; many impacts are design choices, not inevitabilities Meanwhile community opposition blocked or delayed seventy-five projects worth roughly $130 billion in Q1 alone — record construction and record obstruction at once. The federal government won’t regulate AI directly, so construction became the battleground. ...

Michigan’s Senate race has been consumed by Abdul El-Sayed’s Hasan Piker ties while Republican Mike Rogers’s career-long war advocacy goes unexamined. Branko Marcetic assembles the two-decade record — and it is far more relevant to Michiganders’ struggles than old tweets. The pattern, from the House Intelligence Committee chair’s perch: 2006 staff report claiming Iran “is seeking nuclear weapons” — the IAEA called it “outrageous and dishonest,” and Rogers admitted one caption claim was false; the AP compared the clash to the WMD fight before Iraq The 2007 National Intelligence Estimate judged with “high confidence” that Tehran had halted its weapons program — Rogers kept repeating the claim dozens of times for the next two decades 2012: chided Obama for resisting Netanyahu’s war-pressure campaign and preemptively pledged the US would fight a war Israel started — no such defense treaty exists Made common cause with the MEK, a US-designated terrorist group lobbying for regime change, cosponsoring its delisting Fought the JCPOA with a “zero enrichment” poison pill; Trump’s 2018 withdrawal sent Iran’s enriched-uranium stockpiles spiking back up Now the war is in its sixth month. Rogers calls it “a win-win-win,” tells voters “we got plenty of oil,” and stays wary of the diplomatic off-ramp while Michigan eats the costs: over $2 billion in economic impact, $15–20 a week more on gas in West Michigan, up to $22,000 more per season for farmers. ...