Culture Brief 2026-07-13
Ideas in Circulation
The Odyssey as culture-war object
Christopher Nolan’s upcoming adaptation has become a proxy battle over classical canon, casting, and who gets to claim antiquity.
- The Guardian view on Homer: The Odyssey is more modern than we might like to think
- Christopher Nolan says people ‘disdain’ AI and the idea it will replace humans is ‘nonsense’
- We’ll Help You Find Your Next Great Book. (Spoiler: It’s the ‘Odyssey.’)
Before the film has opened, Nolan’s Odyssey has drawn rightwing objections to Lupita Nyong’o as Helen of Troy — objections the Guardian editorial board uses to argue that Homer’s text has always been adaptive, polyglot, and contested. Nolan’s own public comments are pointed: he dismisses the backlash as “irrelevant” and frames AI anxieties in the same register — things people perform distaste for without engaging seriously. Three sources circling the same work from different angles suggests this film will function as a cultural Rorschach before anyone has sat through it.
Foucault at 100 and the AI-power convergence
The centennial of Foucault’s birth is prompting reassessment of whether his analytics of power anticipated the current digital moment better than any living theorist.
The NYT Books essay argues that Foucault’s account of surveillance, normalization, and knowledge-power loops maps with uncanny precision onto algorithmic governance and the AI stack. Aeon’s companion piece — on why the long-term gains of transformative technologies remain unreadable at the moment of their emergence — frames the same problem from a philosophy-of-technology angle. Together they suggest a revival of Continental critique as the vocabulary for AI skepticism, displacing the utilitarian and rights-based frameworks that have dominated the policy conversation.
The Israel-Gaza fracture inside cultural institutions
Literary and arts organizations continue to splinter over how to adjudicate speech about the war, with no stable position holding.
- PEN America President Resigns After Article About Israel and Cultural Boycotts
- Melbourne Symphony Wins Discrimination Case Over Gaza Comments
Dinaw Mengestu’s resignation from PEN America, seven months into his presidency, came after the organization published a piece he read as selectively defending free expression — protecting some speech rights while deprioritizing others. In Australia, the Melbourne Symphony lost a discrimination case brought by pianist Jayson Gillham, whom they deplatformed after he spoke about Gaza from the stage. Two separate institutional failures in two weeks, in two different countries, in two different art forms: the pattern is the story.
Skill nostalgia and the meaning of making
A quieter thread, but one that multiple signals suggest is building toward a broader argument about labor, automation, and human identity.
Aeon’s essay by Joshua Habgood-Coote argues that the current wave of interest in craft — baking, beekeeping, leatherwork — isn’t mere lifestyle aesthetics but a groping toward a pre-algorithmic relationship with competence and time. Read alongside Valerie Trouet’s essay on dendrochronology (tree rings as historical archive), there’s a coherent undertow: a renewed interest in knowledge that is slow, embodied, and non-scalable, as a counter-move to AI acceleration. This is the intellectual seedbed for arguments that will become louder over the next year.
The academic integrity crisis in historical scholarship
The case of Kerri K. Greenidge — who apparently lost her Tufts professorship after peer scrutiny of her 2022 book on the Grimké family — raises uncomfortable questions about how errors in politically resonant history get adjudicated.
This is a single-source story, but it meets the bar because of what it implies: the intersection of diversity-focused historiography, peer accountability, and institutional self-protection in the humanities. The book has been quietly removed from its publisher’s website. The field’s mechanisms for reckoning with this — who calls it out, how, and what happens to the author — are playing out in real time and have no settled precedent.
Books, Film, Music, Art Worth Attention
It Will Come Back to You: Collected Stories — Sigrid Nunez’s first short fiction collection, reviewed by Dwight Garner as disciplined, erudite, and unshowy.
Suddenly Last Summer (opera) — Composer Courtney Bryan’s adaptation of the Tennessee Williams one-act at Bard SummerScape; a genuine compositional risk, not a prestige adaptation.
Baby Rose: Yearnalism — Third album from the US soul singer, described by the Guardian as impressively rangy, from vintage R&B to balladry in the register of Nina Simone; worth attention as an artist building genuine arc rather than press-cycle presence.
Kelela: new album — The Guardian profiles Kelela on her return with a record blending soul, sex, and shoegaze while engaging publicly with Gaza; an artist whose genre-boundary work consistently anticipates where R&B moves eighteen months later.
Hélène Bessette and the Novel as Arc Lamp — Kathryn Scanlan’s Paris Review essay introduces (or reintroduces) the mid-century French writer Bessette, newly in English from New Directions, whose work reads as Stein crossed with Chandler; a genuine discovery for readers who missed the translation.
Zurbaran: Clearly Fake — Jackson Arn on the current National Gallery show, arguing that Zurbarán’s spectacular clumsiness alongside his sublime realism is precisely the point; the essay connects 17th-century Counter-Reformation image-making to contemporary debates about deepfakes and authentic representation.
Essays Worth the Read
César Aira’s Art of Not Editing
Jeff and Ann VanderMeer’s piece on the Argentine novelist whose method — write forward every day from a café, never revise, incorporate whatever enters the room — turns out to be not a gimmick but a fully developed theory of novelistic time. If you’ve wondered why Aira’s reputation keeps growing despite the unevenness of any individual book, this essay provides the frame.
“Worthless Idiot, Donkey Head”: Parodies of Pedantry on the Renaissance Stage
Arnoud Visser’s Public Domain Review essay on the Italian Renaissance stock character of the pedant — pompous, sexually suspect, socially transgressive — is funnier and sharper than its scholarly framing suggests. The argument that humanist erudition was already being satirized by humanists, that the production of learning and the parody of it were coeval, has real implications for how we think about expertise and its social reception now.
David Robson’s Aeon essay on what happens to autobiographical memory when the relationship that anchored it — a parent who co-authored your self-narrative — becomes severed or estranged. The psychological mechanism is real (memory is relational and maintained through rehearsal with others), but Robson uses it to examine something harder: how identity becomes illegible when its primary witness withdraws. More rigorous than the personal-essay form usually allows.
One Thing Worth Reading Deeply
Julie Reshe’s essay, based on interviews with Ukrainian war widows, makes a philosophical claim that the testimony earns: that grief for a spouse killed in war produces a specific form of consciousness she calls “dying while alive” — not depression, not mourning in the clinical sense, but an ontological fracture in which the self continues to function while its relational ground has been destroyed. Reshe writes from within Ukrainian philosophy and against Western therapeutic frameworks, which she finds inadequate to the experience. The essay shifts the frame not only on grief but on what love actually is — not a feeling, but a co-constitutive structure whose destruction takes the self down with it. One of the more important pieces from Aeon in some time.