Culture

David Broder’s read of Sunday’s Berlin state election is that Die Linke’s 26 percent — more than double its 2023 result, and better than every poll — is what happens when a left party stops treating multiethnic solidarity and the cost of living as separate projects. The campaign was about rent. Berliners voted in 2021 to renationalise the housing stock; the city government, a “red-red-green” coalition under a centrist SPD mayor, never honoured it. Die Linke said it would. ...

Helen Haiman Joseph wrote the first comprehensive history of marionettes in English, published by B. W. Huebsch in 1920 — but she opens it not with a thesis, sewing costumes late at night in Cleveland for a cast drawn from Lord Dunsany’s The Golden Doom, and being treated as rudely by her own stringed characters as Pinocchio treated Geppetto. Then she lets them recite their ancestry, and the book’s real subject falls out of their mouths: the Ramayana, Japanese jōruri drama, the medieval Passion plays, the pugilistic line of Pulcinella, Punch, Kasperle and Karagöz, and on into Shakespeare, Voltaire, Goethe, Shaw and Maeterlinck. ...

Kreuzigung (Crucifixion) premiered in 1920 after at least a hundred rehearsals, and was performed only a handful of times. Its author, the German expressionist dramaturg Lothar Schreyer, thought performances were transient and “unrepeatable” — sources of “newly creative forces for the transformation of humanity.” The book is what survives: the only one of his works ever captured in print, and the sole example of his workshop’s notation system. Thea Applebaum Licht writes it up for the Public Domain Review. ...

Susan Neiman spent decades writing about evil — Evil in Modern Thought, Learning from the Germans, Left Is Not Woke — and she opened the Einstein Forum in Potsdam from 2000 until earlier this year. Her new book, Call It Evil: Understanding the Trump Era, argues that the Left’s long reluctance to use moral language has left it disarmed. Kristen R. Ghodsee interviews her for Jacobin. Why the reluctance, and why it’s a mistake: ...

In the 1980s, archivists cataloguing the estate of Bolette Berg (1872–1944) and Marie Høeg (1866–1949) opened a suitcase labelled “private” in a barn behind the couple’s house near Oslo. Inside were hundreds of images made after the working day at their commercial photography studio had ended: a private archive of experiments in how gender could be worn. The collection, presented by The Public Domain Review out of the Preus Museum, is a set of deliberate inversions: ...

In April 1853, the Manchester instrument maker John Benjamin Dancer photographed a memorial plaque to the inventor William Sturgeon, then used a microscope lens to reduce the four-by-five-inch plate to one-sixteenth of an inch — about a millimetre and a half, roughly the point of a sharpened pencil. The plaque’s nineteen lines, 680 letters in all, were still legible under magnification. Anika Burgess’s essay for The Public Domain Review traces what happened to that trick over the next half-century. ...

When Princess Elisabeth von Hessen-Kassel (1596–1625) was christened in 1596, the festivities ran four days: fireworks, pageantry, and knightly tournaments the Public Domain Review describes as among the last ever held in Europe. Two years later the engineer-engraver Wilhelm Dilich (1571–1650) turned the event into a lavishly illustrated manuscript, Historische Beschreibung der Kindtauf des Fräuleins Elisabeth zu Hessen. The plates are a record of what the court wore: Hannibal, Impudence, Alexander the Great, Jason, Perseus, Fortune, and Julius Caesar, all as costumes Pageant knights dressed as allegories of the Sun and Moon Dilich’s own hand-coloring in the copy (Bavarian State Library, Cod.icon. 27) presented to Landgrave Moritz, the princess’s father Dilich’s preface is a bow to power in the classical register: he likens himself to Diogenes, watching the statesmen of Athens build and govern from his barrel, and offers the book as an “eternal memorial” rather than a rival to the events it depicts. ...

“The Heat Wave: A Strange Story of Ancient Rome and Modern New York,” by Marion Ryan and Robert Ord, ran in the April 1929 issue of Munsey’s Magazine — months before a real ten-day heat wave blistered New York that September. The story opens in a city dripping with sweat: relief agencies dole out ice, congregations pray for rain, the grass in Central Park turns black, paint bubbles off the walls. ...

At BAM Fisher, nine chairs form a faint semicircle. Four actors in business casual put in earbud headphones, and for sixty-five minutes Lee Sunday Evans and Elizabeth Marvel’s “The Ford/Hill Project” plays the Senate back at us: the 1991 Clarence Thomas hearings and the 2018 Brett Kavanaugh hearings spliced into a single verbatim re-enactment. Doreen St. Félix’s Critic’s Notebook is less review than argument about what the staging exposes: Marvel plays Christine Blasey Ford, Gabby Beans plays Anita Hill, Josh Hamilton plays Kavanaugh, Teagle F. Bougere plays Thomas — and all four toggle into senator roles, circling one another in what she calls “a gravitational choreography.” The testimony arrives through the earpieces, “including the stammers, the halts, the trip-ups that even the official transcript does not record.” Stripped of the bureaucratic veneer of the system, the state reads as “an invisible force, everywhere and nowhere.” One senator’s voice recurs across both hearings twenty-seven years apart (she thinks it was Patrick Leahy’s), turning government into “a frieze of unchanging agents, power entrenched.” Both men finish by putting on court robes and taking their seats while Hill and Ford look on, back to “their work of undoing.” The play is framed by Tiresias’ warning to Creon in Antigone: “All men make mistakes, but a good man yields when he knows his course is wrong, and repairs the evil. The only crime is pride.” The years 1991 and 2018 are made to rhyme, and the argument runs against “certain soothing myths about the inevitability of progress.” Procedure is played as fatuous — senators calling dibs on introductions, bickering over seat placements — while the two women who testified are reduced to evidence. St. Félix notes that the play is a product of the present as much as a capture of the past: “activist theatre presented in a moment when the idea of civic urgency is losing purchase,” with an air of mechanization that mirrors the numbness of being governed by a cabal. ...

In 1989, editors at the British paranormal magazine Fortean Times went looking for a historical precedent for the crop-circle craze and found one: a five-page pamphlet dated August 22, 1678, The Mowing-Devil: Or, Strange News out of Hartford-shire. Its woodcut frontispiece appears to be the oldest known depiction of a crop circle — and in the story, the circle is cut by the devil, hired in a wage dispute. The plot is a labour dispute before it is anything supernatural: ...

In November 1881, as Bartholdi’s Statue of Liberty was being assembled in France, San Francisco’s illustrated weekly The Wasp offered its own harbour monument: a Chinese man with an opium pipe, light beams reading “FILTH, IMMORALITY, DISEASES, RUIN TO WHITE LABOR” behind him, and a braid unfurling high above his shoulder. Sarah Gold McBride’s essay traces how that braid — the queue — became an index of who counted as a political subject in America. ...

In 2000, Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri’s Empire sold out printing after printing on the promise that national imperialism had been replaced by a single borderless sovereign — a hybrid of states, multinationals, NGOs, and media with no “outside” left to break away from. David Broder’s essay in Jacobin’s Fall 2026 issue (“The New Empire”) argues the book was an artifact of the Left’s defeats after 1989, not a description of the century that followed. ...

In 1903, a man sits down to a meal, slices bread, cuts a block of cheese, and raises his magnifying glass to the newspaper. Then he lowers it to his stilton — and does a five-second double take. The screen fills with a teeming sea of cheese mites, filmed through a tabletop microscope in backlit monochrome. Thea Applebaum Licht’s essay for The Public Domain Review reconstructs the film and the media history it sits inside. ...

In the summer of 1976 — Britain’s hottest in 350 years — the West Indies cricket team spent the whole season touring England. They were tired of being called “calypso cricketers”: entertaining, but not serious. Meagan Day’s essay in Jacobin reads the tour as a political event as much as a sporting one. The fuse was lit by England captain Tony Greig, who was raised in apartheid South Africa: Greig told the press the West Indies were overrated — if they were down, “they grovel, and I intend … to make them grovel.” Clive Lloyd’s reaction: “Here was this guy, apartheid still going strong, and he’s gonna make these black guys grovel.” Viv Richards remembers Lloyd telling the team they didn’t need to say much: “Our man on the television just said it all for us.” What made the word land: ...

The first Siamese cat in the United States arrived in 1878 in a Wells Fargo crate, after two months of travel by land and sea, to live with the family of President Rutherford B. Hayes. It was named, unimaginatively, Siam. A veterinarian prescribed beef tea and milk every three hours. It did not survive long in Washington. The manuscript The Public Domain Review has assembled is older than the cat and considerably more optimistic about feline fortune — a nineteenth-century Thai Tamra Maew, or “treatise on cats,” held by the Library of Congress. ...

Dan Rockmore teaches mathematics and computer science at Dartmouth. His Weekend Essay asks why we treat physical training and intellectual training as if they obeyed different laws — as though the mind might get strong without being made to struggle. The gym supplies the comparison: Nobody in a spin class would dream of outsourcing the pedaling, even though a car or e-bike covers the same distance more easily Forty-five minutes of deliberate discomfort is accepted because it builds a future self — the exercise is the point The classroom runs on proxies too: problem sets, close readings, research papers were never the skill itself, they were the bench press What changed is that machines can now do the reps. An early-2026 AI tool called Einstein claimed to plug into Canvas, ingest homework, complete and submit it on a student’s behalf — the product vanished almost as fast as it appeared, but the outrage it provoked was misplaced. The question was never “how dare a machine do the homework.” It was “why was the homework mechanical enough for a machine to do it?” ...

In April 1924 a group of São Paulo artists and writers — the poet Oswald de Andrade, the painter Tarsila do Amaral, the novelist Mário de Andrade, their coffee-baron patrons, and the French poet Blaise Cendrars — took a comfortable excursion into the Brazilian interior and came back with sketches, specimens, and a Tupi vocabulary. Four years later that trip produced a manifesto that opened: “Cannibalism alone unites us. Socially. Economically. Philosophically.” ...

In 2023, fresh off its Big Three strike, the UAW under Shawn Fain called on American unions to line up their contract expirations for May Day 2028 — so that instead of one union striking at a time, a coordinated season of action could create a crisis for the billionaire class. Jacobin’s Luis Feliz Leon checks the ledger a year and a half out. The aligned dates are real, but partial: Labor Notes counts 830,000 workers whose contracts are planned or expected to expire between March and July 2028. ...

The camera obscura — Latin for “dark chamber” — started life as a room. Shut the windows, leave a single aperture, cover the opposite wall with white cloth, and the world outside streams in: inverted both ways, colors deeper, movement exaggerated, closer to a dream than a picture. Julie Park’s essay traces how scientists, poets, and artists spent three centuries using it to see what the naked eye could not. ...

In 1381, more than a hundred thousand poor English people rose up demanding an end to serfdom, killed a coterie of hated royal officials, and were then massacred by the fourteen-year-old Richard II. Paul Greengrass’s new film The Uprising dramatizes that revolt with Andrew Garfield as a farmer turned rebel, and both men sold it as a story for the oligarch era: “I hope that if any billionaires watch it,” Garfield told an audience, that “they’re scared shitless.” Jacobin’s Jeremy Gong went in as a socialist and a fan of medieval period pieces. He came out arguing that billionaires have nothing to fear from this film. ...