Culture

Before the biennale crowds and gondola rides, Venice’s waterways were the stage for something far more violent: the guerre dei pugni (“wars of the fist”), ritualized street battles between the city’s two great working-class factions. A Public Domain Review collection gathers the paintings and engravings that documented the brawls, alongside historian Robert C. Davis’ account of why ordinary workers fought so hard over “seemingly ordinary neighborhood bridges.” Two factions: the Castellani (“red shrimps”) — shipbuilders from Venice’s east — against the Nicolotti (“shadows”) — fishermen from the west — marked by red and black clothing and fighting caps The battagliole sui ponti (“little battles on the bridges”) ranged from boxing matches to “enormous, prearranged wars” fought for hours before tens of thousands of spectators Fists and cudgels were the primary weapons; knives and stones were banned by authorities trying to keep the disorder “orderly enough” — a safety valve letting artisans pummel their grievances out without tearing the city apart Fights crowned popular champions, spawned new slights, and fueled the next canal-side brawl; men and boys were often injured, sometimes killed Even Venice’s origin myth was partisan: the archipelago supposedly founded by the land-based genta da terra and sea-based gente da mar, with stick battles reported as early as around 800 AD By the seventeenth century the pugni were a hallmark Venetian amusement and a Grand Tour staple; the last great battaglia was staged in 1705 — interest faded, Castellani shipbuilders were lost to the Turkish wars, and passions found new outlets in regatta rowing The artists: Joseph Heintz the Younger’s Ponte dei Pugni scenes (1670s), Giacomo Franco’s engraving (ca. 1610), Domenico Rossetti, Domenico Lovisa (1717), and Alessandro Piazza’s Battaglia dei Pugni on the Bridge of San Barnaba The images are all of a type: sturdy bodies swarming a bridge’s arch, crowds leaning from windows and filling gondolas, combatants toppling into the canal still swinging. The festival attitude is universal — it spills over the railing-less bridges and into the water below. ...

The Cerîde-i Adliye (Journal of Justice) began in the late Ottoman Empire as the Journal of the Courts, serving judges of the new state-run Nizamiye court system. Its 1924–26 covers — intricate data-diagrams of legal caseloads — are nearly illegible at first glance: a tuft of numbered grass rising from a sectioned pile, ledgers of tightly packed headers beneath an etching of a government building. Mathilde Montpetit reads them as artifacts of a legal revolution. ...

Victorian Britain had its own proto-Wikipedia: Notes and Queries, the weekly founded in 1849 by William Thoms, a clerk in the House of Lords, as a platform for “enthusiastic amateur scholars” to share antiquarian finds (“notes”) and raise questions (“queries”) — then argue about them across following issues. George Eliot’s Casaubon, the pedantic researcher in Middlemarch who never wrote his “Key to All Mythologies,” would have found his natural home there. ...

Ashok Kumbamu — a sociologist who grew up under a dominant-caste landlord in a Telangana village — argues that India’s Gen Z street protests are breaking the “culture of fear” that shields Narendra Modi’s Hindutva government. He names the shift the “post-fear phenomenon”: fear that remains, but loses its power to organize silence, self-policing, and deference. People are still afraid; they act anyway. The movement began with the NEET medical-entrance paper leak and a chief justice calling unemployed youth “lazy cockroaches” — an insult Gen Z reclaimed with pride. ...

Colin Kidd’s new history, “Twilight of the Dons: British Intellectuals from World War II to Thatcherism” (Princeton University Press), argues that the Oxbridge professoriate enjoyed a golden age running from 1945 to Margaret Thatcher’s ascent in 1979. Reviewing it in the WSJ, Tunku Varadarajan sketches an era when dons were a national institution rather than a besieged one. The golden age was built on what Kidd calls “soft power”: Kidd spent 21 years as an All Souls College fellow before moving to St Andrews — “the sort of place that might send a shudder down the fellowship at his former abode” Dons were TV personalities, royal tutors, and voices with the ear of cabinet ministers and press barons; they sat on royal commissions that shaped national policy Cambridge archaeologist Glyn Daniel was TV personality of the year in 1955; among his pupils was Prince Charles, who stayed a lifelong confidant and patron Time magazine in 1961 called All Souls a sanctum sanctorum “where the best brains of Oxford are preserved — in alcohol” Kidd’s own verdict on the era, quoted in the review, is anything but sentimental: “A complacent lowercase conservatism coincided with greater access to the press, the radio and television, creating a new kind of complacency, one with a megaphone at its disposal.” Influence without accountability — the mandarinate’s soft power was real but never democratic. ...

When the Oberlin Review needed a football story last October, senior Ava Harvey wrote a provocation instead — “Put Your Mouth Where Your Money Is: Back Oberlin Football” — arguing that the school’s students were at best indifferent, at worst hostile, to a winless team whose Midwest athletes never felt at home in the school’s “homogenized coastal culture.” The column lit up the dining halls, drew two formal rebuttals, and gave Jesse Dougherty a lens on the small liberal-arts school’s oldest argument about itself. ...

Trump keeps reaching for North Korea: four throwback photos of himself with Kim Jong-un on Truth Social in nine days, a scaled-down annual US–South Korea military exercise, and reported overtures for a new summit — seven years after Hanoi ended with nothing signed. Kap Seol’s Jacobin essay reads the courtship as a distraction exercise, timed to pull attention from the failing Iran war, and explains why Kim will make Trump pay a high price this time. ...

This month the Bayeux Tapestry goes on view at the British Museum, laid flat in a custom-made case — the first time the object has ever left France. Curators expect at least seven hundred thousand visitors over ten months, and the digital queue for tickets ran nine hours. John Phipps’s Weekend Essay follows the journey itself: a 220-foot embroidery (never actually woven on a loom, so “tapestry” is a misnomer) narrating the Norman conquest of 1066, likely made in England by and for people who lived through it, held in Bayeux for centuries. ...

Gloria Steinem died on September 2 at age 92, and the mainstream press responded with wall-to-wall hagiography — the New York Times called her the personification of the women’s movement. Jenny Brown’s Jacobin essay reads against that grain: the woman canonized as the movement’s face spent her early career running a CIA conduit, launched Ms. magazine on a market the radicals had already created, and steered feminism toward individual self-improvement and corporate accommodation rather than class struggle. ...

Doreen St. Félix’s weekend Critic’s Notebook opens with a man who buys a Minnie Evans drawing and returns it — he can’t get in. The show he walked away from, “The Lost World: The Art of Minnie Evans” at the Whitney (up through January), gathers nearly a hundred paintings and drawings by the self-taught visionary: dense, rainbow-bright botanical realms peopled by floating, expressionless, many-eyelashed heads. What the piece lays out: ...

In August 1982, a parcel bomb sent by South Africa’s Special Branch killed Ruth First at the Center for African Studies at Eduardo Mondlane University in Maputo, Mozambique. She was fifty-seven — a lifelong South African Communist Party member, journalist, and scholar who had already survived 117 days of solitary confinement. Christopher J. Lee’s Jacobin essay traces her life as an argument about who gets remembered from the liberation struggle, and why her Marxism still reads as urgent. ...

In an interview by John-Baptiste Oduor, Francis Fukuyama reflects on the distance between his earlier defense of liberal democratic capitalism and his current description of himself as a classical social democrat. The conversation covers the American right’s turn toward Trump, the attack on professional bureaucracy, executive power, and the Democratic Party’s relationship with working-class voters. The right and Trump Fukuyama argues that parts of the Straussian right have abandoned its earlier intellectual commitments and attached themselves to Trump. He describes Trumpism less as a coherent doctrine than as a political project built around Trump’s personal resentments, while Oduor presses him on the longer-running economic and organizational changes behind the Republican Party’s transformation. ...

The psychologist Peter Gray opens his new book, Restoring Childhood, with a thought experiment: imagine a loving person who makes you wear a GPS tracker, escorts you everywhere, and coordinates with a boss who controls you the way a teacher controls a schoolchild. Adults would call that a nightmare. Gray calls it modern childhood. The case, via Joshua Rothman’s review essay: The trend lines: in 1971, 86 percent of English elementary schoolers walked home from school alone; by 2010, just 25 percent. Today 38 percent of US children will be the subject of a CPS investigation at some point — “supervisory neglect” is now a parental offense How the leash tightened: TV from the fifties, adults replacing sandlot play with Little League, car-first housing without sidewalks, eighties “stranger danger” panic, and a school year that grew five weeks between 1950 and 2015 while recess and lunch shrank The phone question: a 2025 panel of 120 experts split the difference on Haidt’s Anxious Generation — the mental-health decline is real, phones cause sleep problems, but effects depend heavily on the kid. Ban studies show modest gains: Norway’s best-evidence ban was worth about as much as cutting class size by one student Gray’s contrarian claim: phones aren’t fundamentally different from the pre-phone internet; the real loss is the unsupervised time with friends that phones partly replaced. Show kindergarteners pictures of play and they pick the frames with no adult in them Rothman’s synthesis is the useful part: Gray and Haidt share more than their feud suggests — both sat on the board of the childhood-independence group Let Grow — and their accounts work best read together. Social phenomena are multicausal, and no one can undo sixty years of accumulated change at once, so the practical move is to pick a lever and pull it. Disagreement, he writes, gives us more levers. ...

Ratko Mladić, the Bosnian Serb general convicted of genocide, died on August 27 in a prison hospital in The Hague. In Belgrade the news landed mid-election-campaign — and days later residents of one city-center block woke to a new, several-meter mural of the man who commanded the Srebrenica massacre. Lela Vujanić’s essay is about that mural and everything underneath it. What the piece lays out: Mladić’s arc: JNA officer from 1965, commander of the Army of Republika Srpska’s Main Staff from 1992 — the siege of Sarajevo, the Srebrenica genocide, war crimes across Bosnia — indicted after Dayton, living openly in Belgrade under Milošević’s protection, captured in 2011 The state’s ambivalence: the justice minister announced a burial “with military and state honors”; only Vučić’s retreat to “family wishes” averted it The survivors’ verdict, from Srebrenica and across Bosnia: his death changes nothing — it does not bring back the dead or erase the mass graves The mythology: Mladić recast as defender of the Serbs against a new genocide, an arc from WWII slaughter through the Yugoslav wars with an anti-NATO sheen — “The only genocide in the Balkans was against the Serbs” runs as graffiti on Belgrade’s main avenue Vujanić is clear about who benefits. The myth is a “technology of staying in power”: it turns a class war lost to privatization and dispossession into an endless ethnic drama, and it rigs the two questions every Serbian contender must answer — Was there a genocide in Srebrenica? Is Kosovo Serbia? — so that myth-busters lose the parts that matter. ...

California’s Proposition 40, on November’s ballot, would levy a one-time 5 percent tax on the net assets of the state’s roughly 200 billionaires — raising about $100 billion, most of it to keep Medi-Cal afloat after federal Medicaid cuts. It qualified with 1.6 million signatures and has labor’s endorsement. Ben Case’s essay tracks what the other side built in response: the world’s first lobby whose only client is the billionaire class. ...

Eric Blanc, interviewed by David Griscom on The Jacobin Show, takes on the oldest smear in American socialist history. “Sewer socialist” was coined by rival leftists as an insult for municipal do-gooders — but Milwaukee’s Socialists ran the city for most years between 1910 and 1960 and were, Blanc argues, the most important socialist organization the US has ever produced. Mayor Zohran Mamdani cites them as an inspiration; Blanc thinks their method is the best model for the Left right now. ...

Mitchell Abidor’s new biography, “Victor Serge: Unruly Revolutionary,” argues that Serge’s final years in Mexican exile hardened him into an anti-communist — an early stop on the familiar ex-leftist road to the Cold War. Three writers from different traditions, Claudio Albertani, Suzi Weissman, and Christian Dubucq, answer in Jacobin that this turns a life defined by resistance into “a trial by innuendo.” Who Serge was: Lived 1890–1947; born Victor Kibalchich in Belgium to Russian anarcho-populist exiles, died in exile in Mexico City Took part in three revolutions, spent a decade in prisons, was politically active in seven countries, published more than thirty books Anarchist, then Bolshevik, then Left Oppositionist — argued with Trotsky from inside the anti-Stalinist left, and opposed both fascism and the emerging Cold War Four of his books were confiscated by Soviet censorship (Glavlit); airbrushed from Soviet history, he became a forgotten figure “who belongs to our future” The dispute with Abidor: ...

Lauren Michele Jackson covered Daisy Chain Fields, Olivia Rodrigo’s free, daylong festival in Irvine — fourteen woman-fronted acts plus guests, benefitting charities for women and girls. The obvious ancestor is Lilith Fair: Rodrigo is the first talking head in the 2025 documentary Lilith Fair: Building a Mystery, stunned she only recently learned the festival existed. Rodrigo is after something more catalytic than a reboot: $10 million was already raised before gates opened; by night’s end it doubled via a matching gift from Melinda French Gates. Ten nonprofit partners: Planned Parenthood, the Center for Reproductive Rights, Black Mamas Matter Alliance, the National Domestic Workers Alliance, the National Women’s Law Center, and more. Rodrigo’s politics are woven in, not pasted on: her last tour raised money for abortion funds (a Missouri politician said she should be “ashamed”), she has expressed empathy for Palestinians, condemned ICE, and wore a dress by the Palestinian label Nöl Collective at the press conference. Die Spitz signed off with “Free Palestine! Fuck ICE!”; the crowd mixed kaffiyehs, “FUCK ICE” caps, and mother-daughter pairs who’d been to the original Lilith Fair. The corporate contradiction was inescapable — Taco Bell activations, sponsor blankets, C3 Presents/Live Nation running the show. One DSA member and union activist’s verdict: “This is definitely a capitalist event… But you have to balance things, I guess, at this point in time.” ...

ARTnews critic Jackson Arn accepted an assignment to binge nothing but art-theft stories, and ended up interrogating an American paradox: how does a country famous for philistinism spend billions on beautiful objects — and billions more on entertainment about stealing them? His framing line: “It’s as though a nation of teetotalers chooses, year after year, to hang out in bars.” The essay runs from How to Steal a Million (1966) to Ocean’s Twelve to Kelly Reichardt’s The Mastermind, and the pattern in the loot is telling: ...

Logan McMillen’s Jacobin piece dissects Trump’s Truth Social announcement of “the biggest oil deal in world history” — US partial control of ~65 billion barrels of Venezuelan oil, negotiated by Marco Rubio with interim president Delcy Rodríguez. The essay’s spine is historical: it dismantles the Washington myth that Venezuelan resource nationalism was a Chávez invention. The deal’s mechanics are as alarming as its scale: Pentagon’s Office of Strategic Capital takes a 35% ownership stake in the new extraction entity plus rights to 20% of output at cost — unprecedented in US history Reported 100-year lease across 17 fields (Orinoco Belt, Lake Maracaibo); Rodríguez’s address said 25 years — and no written documents existed at all Oil revenues deposit in a US Treasury account; US officials decide what gets disbursed back to Caracas PDVSA stripped of its operating role under opaque “productive participation contracts”; Venezuelan oligarch Alejandro Betancourt reportedly runs operations Venezuelan Right and Left — rarely united — both call the country sold out McMillen’s key move is the deep history: ...