Culture

Kenneth Clark called Paolo Veronese “the greatest dog lover of the Renaissance” — a claim with no biographical evidence behind it and a great deal of painted evidence in front of it. Thomas W. Laqueur’s essay, excerpted from his new book The Dog’s Gaze, reads the dogs in half a dozen Veronese paintings as something more than decoration. Luther said of his dog Tölpel: “Oh, if I could only pray the way this dog watches the meat.” For Laqueur, that is what a dog in art is usually about — attentiveness. Veronese’s dogs watch the sacred event the way we are meant to. ...

Luis Feliz Leon reviews Who Moves America, Yael Bridge’s new documentary on the Teamsters’ 2023 contract campaign at UPS. It covers the largest private-sector union contract in North America — 340,000 workers — and it deliberately spends its time below the leadership, on the slow work of building a strike-ready membership. The scale is the point. UPS Teamsters move twenty-five million parcels a day, roughly 6 percent of US GDP. Their conditions are punishing enough that two drivers had died of heat in the year before the campaign. ...

Arron Reza Merat reads Ansar Allah’s September offensive on Yemen’s Red Sea coast as the product of a frozen civil war and a collapsed political process — not the “sudden seizure” much of the wire coverage described. On September 9 the group moved from the highlands down to the Tihamah plain, took the port of Mokha within a day, and held Perim Island in the Bab al-Mandeb by September 11. ...

The Public Domain Review has posted James Graham’s 1790 tract on “EARTH-BATHING” — the practice of burying yourself naked in fresh-dug earth or sea-shore sand, up to the chin or over the head, for three, six, or twelve hours at a time. Graham (1745–94) sold it as a cure for spasms, convulsions, nervous afflictions, leprosies, rheumatisms, consumptions, and a condition he calls “rigidity of the full body.” His evidence was, mostly, himself. ...

Lolly Willowes; or, the Loving Huntsman (1926) is Sylvia Townsend Warner’s debut — a novel that spends two hundred pages being a quiet English domestic story about a spinster aunt, and then hands its heroine a contract with Satan. The setup is deliberately unremarkable. When Laura Willowes’s father dies, she is twenty-eight and under pressure to find a husband. She moves into her older brother’s London house, where she has no patience for tea parties and balls — there is never “an opportunity of mentioning anything that she had learnt from Locke on the Understanding or Glanvil on Witches” — and keeps scaring off suitors with odd dinner-table remarks, like asking Mr. Arbuthnot whether he might be a were-wolf, since February is the month when one is most likely to go out on a dark windy night and worry sheep. So she becomes “Aunt Lolly”: ...

Sushovan Dhar marks the ninth anniversary of the 2017 Rohingya genocide with an argument against the comfortable version of the story. The genocide was structural before it was violent — and the forces now tearing down the Myanmar state may simply inherit the order that produced it. The essay opens on the August 2024 killings on the Naf River in Maungdaw, where drones and mortars hit Rohingya families waiting to cross into Bangladesh. Roughly two hundred died. The twist: the killers were attributed not to the Tatmadaw, the army that drove three-quarters of a million Rohingya into exile in 2017, but to the Arakan Army — the ethnic Rakhine force that has spent two years dismantling that same military’s grip on the state. ...

The best photograph in this collection shows a dandyish hare with his arm around a hedgehog carrying a bottle of brandy. Joseph Albert (1825–1886) shot them at the 1862 Carnival masquerade ball of the Jung-München artists’ association, where Munich’s art scene and the Bavarian Court costumed themselves in folklore. The figures look timeless. They were nearly brand new. The fable “Der Hase und der Igel” entered Grimm’s Fairy Tales in the 1843 fifth edition — less than twenty years before the ball It was first transcribed in the Hannoversche Volksblatt after being told to editor Wilhelm Schröder near Bexhövede in Lower Saxony around 1840 Ludwig Bechstein adapted it in his 1853 Deutsches Märchenbuch Costume roles are documented: the hare and hedgehog worn by the sculptor Hermann Oehlmann and an unknown person, Puss in Boots by Heinrich Lang, a further group by Heinrich, Eduard and Clara Lang Guests included the Bavarian Court and the future “fairy tale king” Ludwig II The ball’s festival newspaper lists a golden goose beside Puss in Boots — implying at least one more animal photograph, apparently lost The tale itself is a knowing inversion of Aesop’s tortoise and hare, some two millennia older. Aesop rewarded perseverance; this version rewards the con. The hedgehog, mocked for his stubby crooked legs, challenges the hare to a race through turnip and cabbage fields and stations his identical wife at the far end. She pops up to claim victory. When the suspicious hare insists on racing back, the husband pops up instead. The hare runs himself to death. The Low German catchphrase is “Ick bün all hier!” — “I’m already here!” ...

Daron Acemoglu — 2024 Nobel laureate, among the world’s most-cited economists — has a new book, What Happened to Liberal Democracy?, arguing that liberal democracy lost the working class and can get it back. Most of the left would rather not engage. Gerard Di Trolio argues in Jacobin that this is a mistake, and then does the engaging. The book’s spine is the framework Acemoglu is known for: Inclusive institutions constrain power, protect rights and broaden opportunity Extractive institutions concentrate wealth and authority, and undermine long-run prosperity even when they deliver short-term growth Technological innovation does not automatically produce shared prosperity — who benefits depends on who controls the technology and how institutions distribute its gains “Pro-worker AI” would help workers do existing tasks better and take on new ones, rather than automating them out; Acemoglu thinks AI firms have no incentive to build it On speech: regulate the algorithms, not the speech — feeds should show accounts you follow instead of shepherding users toward outrage None of that troubles a Jacobin reader much. Di Trolio points out the left was theorizing institutions long before Acemoglu — Poulantzas on the state as the “material condensation” of class forces, the Analytical Marxists, Maher and Aquanno’s Institutional Marxism, Chibber on industrial policy design. ...

Aubrey Beardsley (1872–1898) personified fin-de-siècle Britain and died of consumption at twenty-five. Oscar Wilde’s line was that he passed “at the age of a flower.” Largely self-taught, he built an idiosyncratic language out of solid black ink against white paper — lines “knit together with fantastic, nervous lines, almost or quite unrelated to nature,” as his colleague Gleeson White described them. Contemporaries were already calling their own moment the “Beardsley Period.” ...

Daniel Denvir interviews Molly Crabapple about her book Here Where We Live Is Our Country: The Story of the Jewish Bund. The Bund was founded in a Vilna safe house in 1897 and within a decade was the largest revolutionary party in the tsarist empire — 30,000 members, printing presses, smuggling routes, and funding sent back from New York sweatshops. Its core analysis was that Jewish workers were oppressed both as workers and as Jews, “as a race and as a class,” and that this demanded organizing autonomously as Jews while fighting alongside everyone else. ...

“A Cat-astrophe” is a 1919 Columbia Orchestra record that does one thing: it interrupts cheerful instrumental passages with cat yowls, credited to Columbia in-house musicians Howard Kopp and William Daniel. The shrieks were almost certainly not made by a real cat, but as the PDR’s Mathilde Montpetit notes, they are recognisable to anyone who has stepped on a tail. Orchestral and slapstick at once, it plays like a Looney Tunes short avant la lettre. ...

Princeton political scientist Atul Kohli reads Trump’s foreign policy against the long history of American empire rather than as a break from it. The United States has rarely built formal colonies; it built an informal empire in which governments in the Global South keep nominal sovereignty and open their economies. Across that history, Kohli argues, imperialism has come in three varieties: Hard militarism — the Philippines in the early 1900s, Vietnam, Iraq, and now Iran Covert regime change — Mossadegh, Árbenz, Lumumba, Allende, and the 2026 capture of Venezuela’s Nicolás Maduro Multilateral coercion — the Open Door Notes, the IMF and World Bank, the Washington Consensus What changes under Trump is not the repertoire but the candor. Where earlier interventions wrapped resource grabs in talk of saving countries from communism or spreading democracy, Trump said plainly that the Venezuela operation was about access to oil for American companies. ...

In 1899, Charles Godfrey Leland published Aradia, or, The Gospel of the Witches — a scripture he claimed to have collected in Italy, proving that paganism had survived there undetected since the Middle Ages. A. D. Manns’s PDR essay asks the question nobody has answered: who actually wrote it? What was in the book was unlike anything else in the record. The goddess Diana sends her daughter Aradia to free the poor and disenfranchised Aradia teaches them sorcery — not just to escape the rich, but to destroy hierarchies of oppression altogether Christianity is named as a religion of diabolists: “your God, the Father, and Maria are three devils” The promise: freedom “until the last of your oppressors shall be dead” Historians have never found evidence of an organized pagan witch-cult in nineteenth-century Italy. Ronald Hutton points out that the reactionary Catholic regimes running central Italy until 1859 would hardly have missed whole villages rejecting Christianity. The manuscript is lost. Its supposed author, the Tuscan fortune-teller Maddalena, was on Leland’s payroll. ...

Benjamin Y. Fong’s Jacobin piece works from documents Amazon never meant to publish: internal “Employee Relations” trainings and union-threat spreadsheets disclosed in a British Columbia labour case, produced in open hearings and handed to him by Unifor. The brass knuckles of the Ford era are gone. What replaced them, he argues, is more effective — empathetic listening and fine-grained surveillance, run systematically. The architecture is simple. Amazon collects worker sentiment constantly, then uses it against the workers who supply it. ...

In 1967 the appliance manufacturer Philco-Ford made a short promotional film, 1999 A.D., directed by Lee Madden, showing how an American family would live at the turn of the millennium. A mother and her small son build a sandcastle replica of their house on a Southern California beach and write “1999 AD” next to it. The house is a modular “honeycomb structure” with a school center, a pool room, two bedrooms, one bathroom — and “the room where the computer lives.” The boy asks what everyone would go on asking: how does the computer know everything? ...

China’s micro-dramas — serials shot in vertical frame for a phone, each episode under two minutes — are watched by more than 700 million people a month, two hours a day on average. The reflex response, in China and outside it, is to call them brain rot. Mao Jian’s essay in New Left Review 160 argues the opposite: that the form, and the decades of literary acceleration that led to it, register something real about how people live now. ...

The Metropolitan Museum of Art announced a spring Costume Institute exhibition honouring John Galliano in late July. It killed the show on August 31st, one month to the day later. Tyler Foggatt’s Critic’s Notebook piece in The New Yorker asks what that month actually settled — and finds that the fight was never about whether Galliano deserves forgiveness. Her correction is blunt: “Galliano wasn’t cancelled; he was convicted.” A French court found him guilty of a hate crime in September 2011, after three antisemitic incidents at the same Paris café. He was fired from Dior after roughly fifteen years. ...

In 1617 Frans Francken the Younger painted a collector’s cabinet: shells, coins, shark’s teeth jutting off the table toward you, desiccated sea creatures pinned between landscapes. Then, through a doorway on the right, he painted a second collection lying in ruins — a globe, a lute, a broken statue — while donkey-headed figures raise clubs over it. Thea Applebaum Licht’s essay for The Public Domain Review is about the genre that grew from images like this one, and about what the ass-headed iconoclasts were arguing. ...

In Boeuf écorché (Carcass of Beef, 1925), an ox hangs by the ankles in a blue studio, its blood a deep red stain. Chaïm Soutine painted several carcasses, and this one is an Expressionist answer to Rembrandt’s own Boeuf écorché of 1655, now in the Louvre. The French term for still life, nature morte, literally means “dead nature” — which is the whole collection in a phrase. The PDR’s selection of roughly two dozen Soutine still lifes makes the case that his bridge between the Masters and the Moderns was deliberate, not instinctive. ...

Before 1803 the clouds had no names — only the shapes poets saw in them. Luke Howard (1772–1864), an industrial chemist by trade and an amateur meteorologist by calling, changed that. Drawing on weather journals he had kept since the age of ten, his Essay on the Modification of Clouds made the case that the sky has stable, distinguishable forms. The Latin names he coined are still the ones we use: ...