CULTURE: 2026-06-03

by | Jun 3, 2026 | Culture | 0 comments

Culture Brief 2026-06-03

Ideas in Circulation

The university funding crisis and the market logic that caused it

Higher education is being squeezed from two directions simultaneously: new US federal guidelines threatening half of graduate arts programs by measuring them against earnings thresholds, and a deeper British structural critique of how loan-market logic has hollowed out the purpose of universities altogether.

The American story is alarming on its own terms—musicians, filmmakers, and visual artists earn below what the Education Department’s proposed guidelines deem acceptable, meaning federal aid could be yanked from the programs that train them. But Collini’s LRB essay supplies the intellectual framework the news story lacks: the problem isn’t just austerity, it’s that the loan-market system has transformed universities into credential factories optimized for income metrics rather than intellectual formation. Taken together, these two pieces describe the same crisis from opposite sides of the Atlantic, and suggest the damage is already structural rather than merely political.

The scoring and gaming of institutional systems

David Runciman’s LRB essay on games and scoring takes up a deceptively broad question—what happens when a scoring system gets captured by those it was designed to evaluate?—that maps directly onto debates in education, platform economics, and political metrics.

Runciman’s argument is that scoring is dialectical rather than binary: the same rule-bound structure that liberates also stifles, and any metric exposes value capture precisely because it makes the inside visible. This is a useful analytical lens for the university earnings debate, but also for Venice Biennale award controversies, streaming recommendation algorithms, and antitrust findings against Live Nation—each of which involves a system whose scoring logic has been gamed or contested.

Gen Z filmmakers and the legitimacy of platform-native authorship

The box office performance of Backrooms—$82 million opening weekend, from a 20-year-old YouTube creator, on an A24 release—has the industry rethinking where directorial credibility originates, and both the NYT and Guardian are running substantial pieces on what it signals.

The argument worth tracking here isn’t about Kane Parsons specifically—the NYT review is lukewarm on the film itself—but about what the numbers reveal: a generation of filmmakers whose creative apprenticeship happened entirely in public, on platforms with immediate audience feedback, producing work that is structurally different from festival-circuit cinema. The Guardian situates Parsons alongside the Philippou brothers as evidence of a pattern rather than an anomaly. Within twelve to eighteen months this will likely force a reckoning with how film schools, critics, and distributors define emerging talent.

The Obama Presidential Center as a monument to contradictions

Both the NYT and Guardian published substantial architectural criticism of the Chicago center this week, and their conclusions partially converge: a building that uses the language of civic aspiration to produce something fortress-like and alienating.

Kimmelman and Wainwright approach the building differently—Kimmelman focuses on the tension between the park and the tower, Wainwright is more pointedly critical of the tower’s windowless mass—but both identify something troubling about an $850 million structure in a historically underserved neighborhood that looks more like a monument to power than an invitation to a community. The architectural criticism is functioning here as political criticism once removed.

The Enlightenment under siege from all sides

Aeon’s essay by Eliane Glaser argues that both progressive and conservative critics of the Enlightenment are attacking a caricature, and that the tradition’s actual content—permanent self-critique—is precisely what’s needed to evaluate it honestly.

This is a single-source entry, but the essay earns its place because the argument is structurally sharp and genuinely countercurrent: Glaser isn’t defending Enlightenment values sentimentally but claiming that the critique of those values is only possible using the critical tools the Enlightenment itself produced. The implication—that abandoning the framework destroys the means of evaluating whether to abandon it—has consequences well beyond the history of ideas and connects to ongoing arguments about reason, liberalism, and institutional legitimacy.

Books, Film, Music, Art Worth Attention

Land by Maggie O’Farrell — A multigenerational novel set in post-Famine Ireland, reviewed positively in both the NYT and Guardian; O’Farrell folding myth, cartography, and the long shadow of colonial disruption into family saga form.

The Traveler: Andrea Wulf on George Forster — Biography of the teenage naturalist who sailed with Captain Cook, reviewed by Jennifer Szalai; Wulf, whose Humboldt biography reset the standards for intellectual biography, applies the same method to a figure who deserves to be much better known.

Hal Foster: At MoMA — Foster on the current Duchamp retrospective, arguing that a large dose of the original is the best cure for fifty years of Duchamp epigones; worth reading against his Paris Review piece on Burri’s burlap paintings as a study in two radically different ways of thinking about the readymade.

Half Man (Netflix) — Richard Gadd’s follow-up to Baby Reindeer, reviewed in the Guardian as punishing to the point of self-indulgence; the critical controversy around whether sustained suffering onscreen constitutes drama or something else is the real subject worth watching.

Forastera — A debut feature set on Mallorca in which a teenager channels her dead grandmother, reviewed warmly by the NYT; genuinely strange, quietly executed, the kind of first film that surfaces once a year from a non-English-language context and disappears without enough attention.

Essays Worth the Read

Love in a Fallen City: Shanghai’s Marriage Market — Becky Zhang’s dispatch from the People’s Square marriage market in Shanghai, where parents negotiate matches for adult children using handwritten index cards and whispered statistics. The essay’s real subject is how the architecture of Chinese family obligation intersects with a generation whose material circumstances and affective expectations have been entirely reconfigured; it’s social reportage that earns its literary register.

Animal, Vegetable, Lamb: The Zoophyte from Tartary — Thom Sliwowski traces the medieval European myth of the Vegetable Lamb—a creature believed to be simultaneously plant and animal—through its various explanations: fern rhizome, fetal lamb skin, misapprehended cotton. The essay works because it refuses to settle on a single debunking explanation, staying instead with what the persistence of the myth reveals about how the medieval imagination processed taxonomic instability and contact with the unknown.

Artist of sympathy and cruelty — Dorian Bandy’s Aeon essay argues that Mozart’s operatic genius lies specifically in his ability to create moral predicaments so charged that they implicate the audience rather than merely the characters. The claim goes beyond the familiar “Mozart understood human nature” observation: Bandy is saying the operas are designed as ethical stress tests, and that their power depends on the audience’s discomfort with its own sympathies.

One Thing Worth Reading Deeply

Stefan Collini: Squadrons of Pigs

Collini has been writing about British universities for decades and this essay crystallizes the argument: the damage done by the student loan system isn’t primarily financial but conceptual—it has restructured how universities understand their own purpose, converting them into service providers selling outcomes rather than institutions transmitting and creating knowledge. The piece goes well beyond UK policy and describes a transformation of higher education’s self-conception that has parallels across every Anglophone system, and increasingly beyond. Read it alongside the NYT piece on US graduate arts programs and the argument becomes even more uncomfortable: we are watching the institutional infrastructure for serious cultural production being dismantled through metrics that were designed without any theory of what universities are actually for.