Culture

Cesare Pavese was at the center of Italian literary life — an editor at Einaudi, his country’s chief translator and interpreter of American literature, and a relentlessly productive novelist — when he checked into Turin’s Hotel Roma in late August 1950 and killed himself with sleeping pills, two weeks short of forty-two. He had won the Strega Prize that year. In his diary he had written: “I am king. In the course of ten years, I have done it all.” Beside the bed, sixteen empty tranquilizer packets and a note: “I forgive everyone and ask forgiveness of everyone. Okay? Not too much gossip, please.” ...

“NAZA” is a documentary by the Israeli journalist Yuval Abraham and the filmmaker Rachel Szor, built almost entirely from twenty-four anonymous interviews with people who served in Israeli military or intelligence roles during the Gaza war. The title is shorthand for the Hebrew nezek agavi — “collateral damage,” the phrase used inside Israeli military circles. The reporting behind it first appeared in +972 and Local Call in late 2023 and April 2024, drawing limited attention. As a film it has become a front-page conflict of its own: ...

Margaret Talbot reviews Anna Louie Sussman’s Inconceivable: The Impossibility of Family in an Age of Uncertainty — a reported social critique, not a policy book — and frames the fertility debate as two competing stories about what people actually want. The first story belongs to the right: J. D. Vance deriding “childless cat ladies,” the Heritage Foundation blaming second-wave feminism, Elon Musk calling population collapse a bigger risk than global warming. In that telling, falling birth rates are a cultural failure — people no longer want children enough. The second story starts from the opposite premise: people still want children, often more than they end up having. What changed are the conditions for building a family. ...

Cedric Robinson’s Black Marxism (1983) was ignored for over a decade, then became orthodoxy after its 2000 reissue with an introduction by Robin D. G. Kelley. August Nimtz reviewed it in 1984 — the first detailed appraisal it got — and has now collected four decades of criticism into Black Marxism: A Marxist Critique. He talks to Constantin Berlin about why the argument mattered then and matters more now. Robinson’s core claim is that Du Bois, C. L. R. James, and Richard Wright had to break with Marxism to find something more liberatory, a “black radical tradition.” Nimtz says the record contradicts it: ...

Vivek Chibber’s argument on the Confronting Capitalism podcast, in conversation with Melissa Naschek, starts from a conceptual error that both the right and much of the left make: treating markets and capitalism as the same thing. Mainstream economics sees capitalism as a quantitative expansion of the market. A lot of the left mirrors it — “whenever they see a market, it has to be a capitalist market” — which is where objections to market socialism come from. ...

In 1825, Lieutenant Colonel James Skinner (1778–1841) compiled a Persian manuscript on the customs, culture, and castes of India, illustrated with 120 paintings. The Public Domain Review’s collection presents it as one of the strangest artefacts of the early British Raj — and as a case study in how empire recruited the very people it racialised. Skinner’s position was contradictory at every joint: Son of a Scottish East India Company officer and (he claimed) a kidnapped Bhojpuri noblewoman. Initially excluded from Company service on account of his race; brought back in after his irregular cavalry — Skinner’s Horse — distinguished itself in the service of the Mughal Empire. Later decorated by the Mughal emperor Akbar Shah II as Nasir al-dawlah, Kirnil Jams Iskinar, Bahadur, Ghalib Jang. Spoke Persian better than he spoke English, and participated enthusiastically in late Mughal intellectual and artistic culture. The only English text in the book is a pencil gift inscription: “History of the origin and distinguishing marks of the different Castes of India, compiled by Lt. Col. J. Skinner, CB, whose gift it is to the present possessor, JW.” ...

Kate Atkinson once described her own debut novel this way: “The book is a repository for the past. The book is, in its own way, my own museum.” Jill Lepore takes that as the organizing idea for a short appreciation in The New Yorker’s What We’re Reading newsletter — tracing how completely Atkinson’s fiction is built out of objects, and how much history rides along inside them. The evidence is mostly in the inventories: ...

Sharon Horgan’s new HBO comedy, Youth, follows Alex — a fiftysomething London literary agent whose son comes home after his first week at college. In an interview with Inkoo Kang, Horgan (creator of Pulling, Catastrophe, Bad Sisters) talks about the sandwich generation, menopause, midlife romance, and the working method she only recently learned a word for: autofiction. What she describes is essentially a serialized autobiography, one show per life stage: ...

Zach Cregger — director of Barbarian and Weapons, with a blank check for any horror movie he wants — made the eighth Resident Evil film. He has never seen the other seven. Asked whether it is a sequel, prequel, or “universe-expanding retro-reboot,” he shrugged: “I couldn’t really say. I’ve never seen one.” Jacobin’s Eileen Jones thinks that is exactly the right attitude, and reviews the result as a stand-alone picture rather than an adaptation. ...

Annie Dillard died in September 2026, and Grace Glass wrote her an appreciation in n+1 that refuses the usual eulogy flattery. Dillard published Pilgrim at Tinker Creek at 28, won the Pulitzer, and became the mold for half a century of American personal essays — including, Glass admits, her own. Glass uses Dillard’s own famous weasel — the animal a naturalist had to walk half a mile to water to soak off his hand — as the figure for that influence: “her weasel teeth still scar my writing flexors.” ...

Naaman Zhou went to a stadium show in Philadelphia and came back with a study of what neutrality costs in pop music now. Ahead of the gig, Ed Sheeran had allowed Macklemore to be removed from the tour for saying “Free Palestine” onstage. Then Sheeran walked out alone and apologized for a week he called the worst of his life. The chain of events: Macklemore had performed “Hind’s Hall” at two New Jersey shows — named for the Columbia building protesters renamed for Hind Rajab, the five-year-old Palestinian girl killed by Israeli soldiers Sheeran’s remaining support acts (Lukas Graham, Aaron Rowe, Finneas) and his backing band, the Irish folk troupe Beoga, all withdrew in solidarity Reportedly Robert Kraft, who owns the Boston stadium on the tour, asked for Macklemore’s removal; Sheeran says the promoter decided Roughly a hundred protesters gathered at a nearby train station, asking it be known as a show of support for Gaza “and not the ‘Ed Sheeran rally’” One man noted the tank shells used in the attack that killed Hind Rajab were made by Day & Zimmermann, a Philadelphia weapons company The show itself was the argument: ...

When Godard died in 2022, the obituaries called it the end of politically committed filmmaking. William Andrews argues the era never closed. In Japan, Masao Adachi is still working — at eighty-seven, with two new features in four years and a new short screening at NYFF this autumn. The life is the intersection of art and politics taken literally: Japanese New Wave; wrote and directed for Wakamatsu Kōji — Schoolgirl Guerrillas (1969), Ecstasy of the Angels (1972) Relocated to Lebanon in the 1970s to keep making revolutionary cinema alongside the Palestinian resistance, and became a member of the Japanese Red Army Has always maintained he was never involved in any attack on civilians, despite the group’s 1972 Lod Airport attack Arrested in Lebanon in 1997 on passport violations, jailed three years, extradited home — effectively barred from leaving Japan since Fusako Shigenobu, the Red Army leader released in 2022 after more than twenty years inside, became a close friend during his years with the group The films are stranger than their agitprop reputation: ...

George Wightwick’s The Palace of Architecture: A Romance of Art and History (1840) is a world history of architecture staged as a garden tour. The reader is addressed in the second person as a guest of the “Prince Architect,” handed a map where India, China, Burma, and Egypt flank a central palace and Greek and Roman structures curl toward Gothic, Soanean, Greco-Roman, and both Christian and “Mahomedan” pointed styles. Matthew Mullane’s essay is about who that second person was meant to be, and what happened when the profession noticed. ...

Chris Saltmarsh reviews Russell Warfield’s The Green Socialist: Zack Polanski and the Battle for Britain’s Future — a book by a left-Green campaign volunteer about the man who has pulled the party from ~66,000 members to over 230,000 in a year. It reads most usefully as a map of how Polanski’s own supporters understand the project, and then names the contradictions they would rather not. What has actually happened: Membership of the Green Party of England and Wales quadrupled after Polanski’s September 2025 leadership win The Greens took Gorton and Denton in a by-election, beating both Labour and Reform UK, and posted their best-ever local results in May Polanski’s own path is short and sharp: Lib Dem in 2015 (during the austerity coalition), Greens in 2017 after failing Lib Dem selection, opposition to Corbyn from the right, then a leftward shift that won him the leadership He is now running in Holborn and St Pancras, aiming to make the Greens the permanent left opposition to Labour Saltmarsh separates three electoral purposes that live inside the same party and do not agree with each other: supplant Labour, stop Reform UK, or represent a progressive social bloc. He argues only the third is viable. Labour is still the strongest national bulwark against Reform because it can draw from both Green and Reform voters, while Greens and Reform appeal to distinct bases and cap each other’s ceiling. A principled left pole on migrants’ rights, climate justice, and Palestine solidarity is a real position; winning outright is not. ...

Louis Menand’s review of two new writing books — Florence Hazrat’s On the Mark and Sarah L. Kaufman’s Verb Your Enthusiasm — is mostly about a quieter claim: changes in the technology of writing always track changes in who gets to read. Punctuation exists to make writing easier to read; easier reading means more readers; the audience widens and the old monopoly on literacy breaks. His best evidence is textual. The famous commas in the opening of Pride and Prejudice do no grammatical work at all — no non-restrictive clause, no series, no natural pause. And Austen probably didn’t write them. ...

For more than two thousand years, the learned geography of Europe and the Islamic world agreed on one thing: somewhere past the edge of the known world lived people with no heads. Their eyes, nose, and mouth were all in their chests — where the brain was supposed to be. The Public Domain Review gathers half a millennium of the illustrations, from a thirteenth-century English psalter to eighteenth-century natural histories. ...

Three pieces captured here tonight were written independently, by different people, for different audiences. Read together they make one argument about how the American press is being bought — and about why none of it requires anyone to say “censor this.” Each does a distinct job: a model, a mechanism, an architecture. The three, in reading order: The American Media Polycrisis: Cascading Layers of Capture — Victor Pickard, LPE Project, 17 February. The model. CBS News Is Convulsing as Larry Ellison Tries to Please Trump — Margaret Sullivan, The Guardian, 21 February. The mechanism, in one newsroom. The Ellisons’ Empire: Media Consolidation, Narrative Control, and the Threat to Democracy — Coty Poynter, Nonprofit Quarterly, 17 March. The architecture. 1. The model. Pickard separates three stacked layers of media capture: ...

On 13 March 2026, Pete Hegseth held a press conference about CNN’s coverage of the administration’s war on Iran and said the quiet part out loud: “The sooner David Ellison takes over that network, the better.” He was angry about a CNN report finding that the Pentagon and National Security Council had significantly underestimated Iran’s willingness to close the Strait of Hormuz. CNN’s spokesperson told The Hill the network stands by its reporting. NPQ’s Coty Poynter asks what that assertion is worth once you consider who is about to own it. ...

Margaret Sullivan’s February column connects a handful of incidents at CBS that read, separately, as normal churn — and together as something else. Anderson Cooper walked away from 60 Minutes. Stephen Colbert took his interview with a rising Democratic Texas lawmaker to YouTube instead of his own late-night show. The CBS Evening News anchor presented a misleading version of the network’s own exclusive reporting on ICE arrests. And a news producer, Alicia Hastey, left with a farewell note to colleagues blaming the loss of editorial independence. ...

Victor Pickard, who co-directs Penn Annenberg’s Media, Inequality & Change Center, wrote this in February as a way to make sense of a breakdown that resists synthesis: the gutting of the Washington Post, the rightward lurch of CBS, journalists arrested, regulatory agencies turned into political weapons, ownership consolidating into a few billionaires. His claim is that this isn’t one collapse but cascading layers of media capture — and each layer needs a different intervention. ...