Culture Brief 2026-06-10
Ideas in Circulation
The past as monster: horror-comedy as the genre for historical reckoning
Television and criticism are converging on a question the body politic can’t stop asking — is the past something to be preserved, weaponized, or escaped?
- In ‘Widow’s Bay,’ History Is Hard to Kill (NYT)
- ‘Absolutely wonderful’: why everyone should be watching Widow’s Bay (Guardian)
The coincidence of both the NYT’s chief TV critic and the Guardian landing on Widow’s Bay as a show worth arguing about — and framing it identically, as a meditation on historical haunting — signals something beyond a good premiere. The horror-comedy hybrid has become the preferred vessel for this moment’s anxieties about collective memory: neither the earnest historical drama nor straight satire can hold the contradiction of wanting to honor the past while being unable to stop it from consuming the present. That the show is generating genuine watercooler heat on Apple TV, a platform that routinely buries its prestige work, makes the cultural signal stronger.
AI and language: who owns the em dash?
The question of what distinguishes human writing from generated text is moving from think-piece speculation to close linguistic analysis.
- Humans vs. Bots — Who Does the Em Dash Better? (NYT)
- Building an AI Data Center in Pine Island, Minnesota (Paris Review)
The NYT piece, by novelist Vauhini Vara, argues that chatbots have appropriated the rhetorical tics of literary prose — the em dash in particular — but that the appropriation reveals something hollow: the gesture without the hesitation that generated it. The Paris Review piece approaches the same territory obliquely, a poem that plants AI infrastructure into a James Wright landscape, asking what gets displaced when the data center moves in. Taken together, they mark a shift in the AI-and-culture conversation away from existential alarm toward something more granular: the specific textures of voice that machines can and cannot replicate.
Russian ideology: not a manifesto, a succession of conflicts
The LRB’s Greg Afinogenov offers the clearest current articulation of a thesis gaining ground in intellectual circles — that Putin’s ideological framework isn’t coherent doctrine but a series of reactive layers.
Afinogenov’s argument is that contemporary Russian ideology resists the 20th-century template of manifesto-based movements (communism, fascism) because it has been formed through successive smaller conflicts: ordoliberal statism giving way to conservative geopolitics, then to the more eschatological militarism of the present. This matters for how the West interprets and responds to Moscow — it means looking for a unifying text or doctrine is the wrong move. The ideology is the history of its own contradictions, which makes it both more durable and more unpredictable than it appears.
The Enlightenment under simultaneous attack from left and right
Aeon is running a serious piece on whether the Enlightenment can be defended without being co-opted.
- Flickering Enlightenment (Aeon)
Eliane Glaser’s essay argues that the Enlightenment’s best critics — on the postcolonial left and the communitarian right — have identified real failures in its universalist claims, but that the response cannot be abandonment. The only coherent defense is to deploy the Enlightenment’s own tool: permanent self-critique. The argument is not novel, but the timing is pointed. As various political actors invoke Enlightenment values as cover for exclusionary nationalism, the need to distinguish the baby from the bathwater becomes more acute. Glaser’s framing — the Enlightenment can only be saved by being turned against itself — deserves more circulation than it’s getting.
Britain’s universities: the structural argument nobody is making
Stefan Collini’s LRB essay cuts through the loan-system debate to argue the crisis is systemic.
Collini has been making this argument for over a decade, but the current piece crystallizes it: the British political conversation about universities remains trapped in a consumer-choice framework (is the loan system fair to students?) that forecloses examination of what the marketization of higher education has done to institutions, disciplines, and the idea of knowledge itself. The argument applies well beyond Britain. Any country that has allowed tuition and league tables to reshape universities will recognize the syndrome. The piece is worth reading alongside discussions of academic freedom and DEI debates in the US — these are different symptoms of the same underlying restructuring.
—
Books, Film, Music, Art Worth Attention
Disclosure Day — Spielberg’s alien-conspiracy thriller with Josh O’Connor and Emily Blunt, reviewed by both the Guardian and covered seriously in a NYT Magazine profile; the critical argument isn’t whether it’s good but what it says about Spielberg’s continued insistence that collective catharsis is what cinema is for.
Glenn Branca’s Symphony No. 13 (Hallucination City) for 100 Guitars at Lincoln Center — Reg Bloor conducting Branca’s mass-guitar work for the first time, a live event with genuine stakes for how downtown New York’s noise-music legacy is transmitted across generations.
Karl Ove Knausgaard: Idiots: On Munch and von Trier — Knausgaard at the Paris Review, working through what Munch and von Trier share: a commitment to access-without-mediation that produces work that looks idiotic to the aesthetically trained eye, and why that’s the point.
Musical Bodies at the Met — Exhibition spanning 4,000 years of the relationship between human bodies and instruments; worth attention for how it historicizes the very idea of music as something produced through physical intimacy with an object.
The Guardian’s Best Albums of 2026 So Far — A substantive mid-year audit that surfaces Shabaka Hutchings, Kacey Musgraves, and Dry Cleaning alongside Thundercat; useful as a calibration of where serious music criticism is placing its attention this year.
Frida Kahlo at the restored Dolores Olmedo Museum, Mexico City — The largest single Kahlo collection, long kept from public view by a patron who regarded her as a rival, now fully accessible after restoration; the political and personal story behind the collection is as interesting as the work itself.
—
Essays Worth the Read
David Runciman: Trivial Pursuits
Runciman argues that scoring systems are not simply tools of measurement but dialectical structures: the same rule-bound quality that makes a game liberating also makes it susceptible to capture by those who game the metrics. The essay moves from board games to institutional power without strain, and the central insight — that exposing value capture requires using the system’s own logic against itself — connects to everything from university rankings to ESG scoring.
Tere Dávila and translator Rebecca Hanssens-Reed write from inside a translation project, using the medieval practice of inserting commentary directly into text as a formal model. The essay is about Puerto Rico, violence, memory, and the ethics of rendering one consciousness into another language — it enacts its argument in real time, making translation visible rather than transparent.
Rahmane Idrissa: AK-47 and Guitar
On the Sahara as a geopolitical dumping ground, where distant powers deposit their unsolved problems. Idrissa reads the region’s interlocking crises — jihadism, mineral extraction, the collapse of post-independence state projects — through the paired images of the title. The cultural dimension (guitar, meaning the Tuareg musical tradition that runs through the region’s political movements) lifts this above standard security analysis into something that illuminates how identity and armed conflict have become inseparable.
—
One Thing Worth Reading Deeply
Stefan Collini: Squadrons of Pigs
Collini’s argument is that the structural transformation of British universities — and by extension universities in any country that adopted the market model — cannot be addressed by tweaking the loan system, because the loan system is a symptom of a prior ideological commitment: that higher education is a private investment rather than a public good. What makes this piece worth reading in full is the precision with which Collini identifies how even critics of the current system remain captured by its premises, accepting the framework of student-as-consumer while disputing its terms. The essay names what is happening at a level of abstraction that makes it applicable far beyond Britain, and it does so without nostalgia — Collini is not arguing for a return to elite exclusion but for a genuinely different account of what knowledge institutions are for.