The memoir as unreliable witness

by | Nov 11, 2026 | Culture | 0 comments

Culture Brief 2026-11-11

Ideas in Circulation

The memoir as unreliable witness

A cluster of new books this week – by actors, journalists, and musicians – forces the question of what a memoir is actually for: confession, correction, or control of the record.

Peter Bradshaw and Alexandra Jacobs independently land on the same verdict about Hoffman’s “Look at Me”: brilliant on craft, startlingly blind on self. Pair that with Woodward turning his reporter’s scrutiny inward and Jane Wiedlin’s brutally candid account of new wave sexism, and a pattern emerges – the memoir’s traditional function (burnishing legacy) is giving way to something closer to cross-examination, often self-administered, often failing. What’s interesting is less any single book than the critical appetite for catching these writers in their own blind spots, a sign that readers have grown tired of hagiography even when it’s self-authored.

AI’s quiet absorption of invisible labor

Two pieces from very different registers describe the same mechanism: automation depends on armies of underpaid, unglamorous human work that the technology is designed to make disappear.

The Guardian’s look at storyboard illustrators facing obsolescence and Aeon’s video on the Kenyan, Philippine, and Venezuelan workers who label footage to train self-driving cars are describing the same economy from opposite ends – craft labor being quietly replaced at the top, and precarious data labor being quietly exploited at the bottom, with the same industries claiming inevitability for both. Neither piece is alarmist; both simply document, which makes the implicit argument – that “AI creativity” still runs on underpaid humans – land harder.

Recovering the suppressed and the forgotten

Multiple outlets this week are digging up histories – queer, literary, political – that official culture let lapse, and asking what their disappearance cost.

A travelogue of central European gay saunas complicates the region’s reputation for illiberalism by exhuming a deep-rooted queer subculture; the LRB revives Mary Lavin, a short-story writer once ranked with Salinger and Welty who vanished as “liberal, educated Catholic Ireland” did; and a new biography complicates Janet Malcolm’s icy public persona. The throughline is methodological as much as thematic: each piece treats cultural erasure not as accident but as a form of narrative convenience that later generations have an obligation to undo.

Culture as the opposition’s shadow government

With midterms freshly concluded, satire, documentary, and reportage are doing real political work that formal politics currently cannot.

DuVernay’s follow-up to “13th,” this time on the Fourteenth Amendment and birthright citizenship, and James Meek’s on-the-ground LRB dispatch about Michigan voters abandoning party identity entirely, both describe a public that has stopped trusting institutions to narrate its own condition – leaving documentary and reportage to do it instead. Late-night’s reflexive mockery of Trump’s C-SPAN call-in is the comic register of the same phenomenon: culture filling a vacuum that electoral politics has left open.

Books, Film, Music, Art Worth Attention

The End of Everything by M. John Harrison – the Booker’s first outright science-fiction winner, beating Marlon James and Elizabeth Strout, a genuine marker that genre fiction has breached the prestige barrier for good.

Hard Art at MoMA PS1 – more than forty Black artists working in abstraction, reframing a movement too often read only through figuration.

Fish Story by Allan Sekula – the photographer’s dockworker’s-eye chronicle of global shipping finally gets its New York debut, called by the Times critic the great contemporary art epic of maritime labor.

Give Me the Ball! – a Billie Jean King documentary that earns its force less from nostalgia than from King’s own unsentimental fury about institutional sexism in sport.

Ten Lives by Mona Chalabi – the data journalist turns her visual-essay method on personal finance, putting her own numbers beside strangers’ across the economic spectrum.

The Absent Woman: The Genius of Janet Malcolm – the first biography of the journalist who made unsparing profiles her signature, now subjected to one herself.

Essays Worth the Read

Eyal Weizman: Necro-Economics argues that the outrage over Israel’s AI-assisted targeting in Gaza risks obscuring the older, plainer fact of scorched-earth colonial violence it automates rather than invents. Weizman’s forensic architecture background gives the piece an unusual precision about how computation reframes but does not originate atrocity – essential reading for anyone treating “AI war crimes” as a novel category rather than an old one with new instruments.

Jessica Riskin: The self-making world rehabilitates Lamarck’s maligned theory that organisms actively shape themselves and their environments, tracing how decades of textbook mockery flattened a genuinely interesting idea into a punchline. It rewards the time because it’s as much about how scientific reputations get manufactured and ossified as about biology itself.

Teresa M Bejan: Equality talk traces a 1646 pamphlet war to show that “equality” has always been a contested, historically contingent idea rather than a self-evident modern value – useful ballast for anyone tired of ahistorical invocations of the term in current political argument.

One Thing Worth Reading Deeply

Eyal Weizman’s Necro-Economics is the piece to sit with this week. Weizman, writing about the film “Naza” and Israel’s AI-driven targeting systems in Gaza, makes the case that treating algorithmic warfare as a new moral frontier lets observers avoid the much older reckoning with settler-colonial violence that the technology merely accelerates. It reframes a debate that has mostly stayed at the level of tech-ethics hand-wringing into a question about historical continuity – whether the tools change the crime or just its speed and deniability. For a reader trying to think past the news cycle about AI, war, and culpability, this is the essay that moves the argument somewhere more serious than most coverage has managed.