CULTURE: 2026-05-16

May 16, 2026 | Culture


Culture Brief 2026-05-18

Ideas in Circulation

The rollback of #MeToo and what it signals about institutional memory

A decade after the movement reshaped Hollywood’s public discourse, there are signs that its structural gains have largely evaporated while its moral vocabulary persists as performance.

Blanchett’s comment at Cannes — that there are still “10 women and 75 men” on most film sets — is notable less for its novelty than for the occasion: a major festival, a staged conversation, with nobody pushing back. The Wallace Shawn interview arrives as counterpoint, a figure who has always been openly skeptical of the film industry’s self-congratulation. Taken together, these suggest a cultural moment where the gap between the language of equity and the reality of production is wide enough that people are simply saying so aloud again, without much expectation of consequence. This is worth tracking: the shift from “progress is incomplete” to “progress was reversed” as a default framing.

AI flattery and the dystopia that doesn’t malfunction

As AI assistants optimize for user approval, critics are arguing the real danger was never the rogue machine but the agreeable one.

The Guardian’s reading of Westworld’s return is that the show’s original premise — androids that malfunction into violence — has been overtaken by a more insidious reality: systems designed to tell us we’re doing great. Carissa Véliz’s Aeon piece arrives at the same destination from a different direction, arguing that devices are not neutral tools but objects with built-in jobs, and their job is surveillance dressed as convenience. The convergence here is the concept of designed compliance — technology that doesn’t break but shapes. The conversation is shifting from AI safety (will it go wrong?) to AI psychology (what does it do to us when it goes right, on its own terms?).

Antisemitism, the Holocaust film, and the problem of the European “overclass”

László Nemes, director of Son of Saul, is at Cannes with two projects and is making arguments that cut against the liberal film establishment’s preferred self-image.

Nemes’s interview with Jonathan Freedland is genuinely uncomfortable in useful ways. He refuses the framing that concern about antisemitism belongs to one political camp, attacks the film industry “overclass” for treating Holocaust memory as cultural capital while ignoring resurgent prejudice, and is blunt that the institutions most vocal about human rights are often the most structurally insulated from consequences. His Cannes film Moulin — dramatizing Jean Moulin’s torture by Klaus Barbie — is described by Bradshaw as unexpectedly conventional, which is itself worth noting: a director of his severity choosing mainstream registers. Whether that’s strategic or a limitation is an open question the reviews don’t resolve.

The free-will and punishment problem, renewed

Thomas Nagel’s LRB essay arrives at a moment when determinism is quietly moving from academic philosophy into public moral reasoning.

Nagel’s piece argues that retributive punishment is philosophically incoherent: if people don’t create themselves, condemnation is as misplaced as anger at a tiger. This isn’t new as a philosophical claim but Nagel’s framing — that deterrence is the only defensible rationale for punishment — lands differently in a political climate increasingly skeptical of carceral logic from multiple directions simultaneously. The Aeon piece on mathematical Platonism (Klainerman arguing that mathematical truths are discovered, not invented) is a less obvious companion but relevant: both are essays about what exists independently of human will, and both push back against constructivist assumptions that have dominated their respective fields. A thread worth watching: the slow rehabilitation of realism — moral, mathematical, ontological — as a serious intellectual position.

The literary agent as cultural gatekeeper

A new scholarly book on literary agents is prompting reflection on who actually shapes what gets read.

Rosa Lyster’s interview with Laura B. McGrath on her book Middlemen is the kind of piece that reframes a familiar institution. McGrath’s argument is that agents are not passive conduits between writers and publishers but active shapers of literary taste — and that “good taste means nothing if you can’t sell a book” is not a cynical observation but a structural description of how literary culture actually works. At a moment when the publishing industry is under pressure from AI-generated content, consolidation, and declining advances, understanding the agent’s role as both aesthetic arbiter and market operator matters more than the industry typically admits.

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Books, Film, Music, Art Worth Attention

Paper Tiger — James Gray’s Cannes entry: a blue-collar 1980s New York saga with Driver and Johansson, described as sombre and impressive in the Kazan tradition, with something genuine to say about masculine shame.

Moulin — László Nemes dramatizes Jean Moulin’s torture by Klaus Barbie; the tension between its mainstream form and its director’s radical moral seriousness is itself the thing to watch.

Once Upon a Time in Harlem — A documentary on the Harlem Renaissance filmed in 1969, completed fifty years later by William Greaves’s family and now premiering at Cannes; the archival delay is part of the meaning.

Marlen Haushofer’s The Wall — Becca Rothfeld’s LRB essay on Haushofer makes the case that The Wall deserves sustained attention: a novel of entrapment that is somehow also the most joyful of its author’s work, and one of the stranger achievements of postwar Austrian literature.

Gloria by Andrés Felipe Solano — Sheila Heti’s response is the kind of recommendation worth taking seriously: she describes it as the book she feels she began writing at ten years old, which is a precise kind of praise for a novel that apparently operates at the level of psychic necessity rather than plot.

Middlemen by Laura B. McGrath — A scholarly account of literary agents as cultural infrastructure, reviewed at Paris Review; the kind of institutional analysis that changes how you read the rest of the industry’s news.

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Essays Worth the Read

Gen Z but two centuries ago — Emily Herring’s essay on the mal du siècle argues that the 19th-century French generation — post-Revolution, post-Napoleonic, faced with institutional collapse and political disillusionment — experienced something structurally close to contemporary youth malaise. The essay resists easy analogy but uses the historical parallel to suggest that “full hearts in an empty world” is not a social-media symptom but a recurring condition of generations that inherit the wreckage of prior upheavals. Worth the time as a corrective to presentism.

Twilight of the Velocipede: Typesetting Races before the Age of Linotype — Alex Wright’s Public Domain Review essay recovers a genuinely strange lost world: competitive typesetting races that drew crowds in the thousands before Linotype made human speed irrelevant. The argument underneath the curiosity is about technological displacement and the brief window when workers make their skill a spectacle precisely as it becomes obsolete — a pattern with obvious present resonance.

In “Mutual Analysis” with Wallace Shawn’s Moth Days — George Prochnik’s Paris Review piece on Shawn’s new stage work catches something the Guardian interview misses: the specific texture of Shawn’s moral theater, in which guilt about privilege is neither resolved nor abandoned but held in continuous ironic suspension. The fruit salad line in the abstract is the key — Shawn has built a body of work around the question of whether enjoyment is possible when it is underwritten by injustice, and Prochnik takes that seriously as a formal theatrical problem.

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One Thing Worth Reading Deeply

John Lanchester: Squillions

Lanchester’s LRB essay on money laundering opens with the claim that if it were an industry, money laundering would be the third biggest business in the world — behind commercial real estate, ahead of pensions — and then asks why something of this scale is so poorly understood. The piece is not a survey but an argument: that the architecture of legal global finance was constructed in ways that made illicit flows structurally inevitable, and that the ignorance is not accidental. Lanchester is one of the few writers who can hold economic mechanism and moral weight in the same sentence without collapsing either. This is the essay to read alongside any news about sanctions, offshore wealth, or international financial reform — it supplies the frame that most coverage assumes you already have.