Thet’s Brief – 2026-05-17 – CULTURE

by | May 18, 2026 | Culture | 0 comments


Culture Brief 2026-05-17

Ideas in Circulation

Moral responsibility under determinism

Thomas Nagel’s new LRB essay reopens the case against retributive punishment, arguing that because no one authors their own character, resentment toward criminals is as incoherent as resentment toward a tiger.

The Nagel piece is the philosophical anchor, but the Aeon essay on 19th-century French mal du siècle runs alongside it as a complement: both are asking what it means to inherit a world you didn’t make and whether suffering that world constitutes moral failure or simply fate. The juxtaposition is useful. Nagel’s argument — that punishment as retribution is conceptually bankrupt — is not new to philosophy but remains almost entirely unabsorbed by public discourse. The generational malaise essay suggests why: cultures that cannot absorb determinism need guilt as a social technology. Together they signal a slow but building pressure on the liberal consensus about desert and blame, one that sits well to the left of current policy debate but increasingly finds expression in literary and therapeutic culture.

Cannes as geopolitical theater

Multiple sources are tracking how the festival is negotiating political speech, Israeli participation, and the question of whether a film festival can or should hold a position on a live war.

The debate is not merely procedural. Farhadi’s press conference appearance — condemning civilian deaths in Iran and in Gaza in the same breath, from the Cannes stage — is itself a cultural event, distinct from whatever his film achieves. The festival’s leaders have been drawn into live commentary on a war while simultaneously programming a main slate that multiple critics describe as making few waves. The gap between the urgency outside the screening rooms and the relative quietness inside them is itself a signal worth reading.

Literary gatekeeping and the agent’s power

The Paris Review’s interview with Laura McGrath on her book about literary agents, and the LRB’s Adam Mars-Jones review of George Saunders’s new novel, are converging on a common anxiety: who controls what gets written, published, and read — and by what criteria.

McGrath’s argument — that good taste is irrelevant without the ability to sell — is blunt in a way the literary world rarely allows itself to be. Mars-Jones’s review of Saunders’s novel reads as a case study in what happens when commercial reputation decouples from literary judgment; he finds the book a failure of structure and tone that the publishing apparatus has allowed through on the strength of a name. Read together, they make a pointed argument about the feedback loops now governing literary production, one that will become more urgent as AI-generated content begins filling the same channels that agents currently filter.

Eurovision’s politics have outrun its pop

Both NYT and the Guardian are giving substantial space not to the songs but to the structural politics: Israel’s participation, the five-country boycott, soft-power investigations, and the contest’s history of geopolitical flashpoints.

The Guardian’s historical survey is the more useful piece: it traces how the contest has never been merely a song contest, from 1969 onward, and asks what it means that political stakes now reliably exceed musical ones. Bulgaria’s win — with what both outlets describe as a memorably strange entry — is almost beside the point. The contest’s soft-power function, as a mechanism for European identity performance, is under more visible strain than at any point in its 70-year history.

The financial architecture of the hidden economy

John Lanchester’s LRB essay on money laundering makes the case that one of the world’s largest industries operates almost entirely outside public awareness, and that this ignorance is not accidental.

Lanchester is characteristically good at making financial complexity both legible and alarming. The Aeon essay by tax law scholar Attiya Waris runs parallel: she argues that human rights are unfunded not because of political will but because of deliberate architectural choices in global finance. The conjunction suggests an emerging framework — gaining traction in legal, economic, and literary circles — that treats financial opacity not as a side effect of capitalism but as one of its primary products.

Books, Film, Music, Art Worth Attention

Is God Is — Aleshea Harris’s revenge thriller, adapted from her own acclaimed stage play, reviewed seriously by both the NYT and the Guardian as a film debut of genuine force, not merely a competent translation from one form to another.

The Wonderful World That Almost Was: A Life of Peter Hujar and Paul Thek — Andrew Durbin’s dual biography of two artists who were central to the downtown New York scene of the 1960s–80s but remained outside its canonical accounts; the NYT review treats the book as a genuine recovery project.

All of a Sudden — Ryusuke Hamaguchi’s new film at Cannes, reviewed by the Guardian as beautiful but uneven, which is itself interesting given his status after Drive My Car; the comparison between his quieter and more self-consciously solemn registers is a real critical question.

Marisa Anderson: The Anthology of UnAmerican Folk Music — A guitarist reinterprets Harry Smith’s archival folk collection, deliberately reorienting it toward music from nations touched by US military conflict; the Guardian review situates this as a pointed political act as well as a musical one.

Backrooms — A 20-year-old director turns a years-old internet meme into a theatrical horror film with Chiwetel Ejiofor and Renate Reinsve; the Guardian feature is worth reading as much for what it says about the pipeline from internet folklore to prestige cinema as for the film itself.

Essays Worth the Read

In “Mutual Analysis” with Wallace Shawn’s Moth Days — George Prochnik’s Paris Review essay on Shawn’s new book uses the concept of “mutual analysis” — Ferenczi’s radical experiment in reciprocal psychoanalysis — as a lens for reading Shawn’s lifelong preoccupation with guilt, complicity, and the ethics of pleasure. The fruit salad line in the abstract is doing real philosophical work, and Prochnik takes it seriously rather than treating Shawn as a charming eccentric.

Twilight of the Velocipede: Typesetting Races before the Age of Linotype — Alex Wright’s Public Domain Review essay recovers a genuinely forgotten world: competitive typesetting as mass spectacle, with prize money, crowds of thousands, and women compositors using the races to argue for workplace equity. The piece is pleasurable as history but also quietly relevant to present debates about what happens to skilled labor when a technology shift renders it obsolete overnight.

One Thing Worth Reading Deeply

Thomas Nagel: I’m not sorry — Nagel’s LRB essay on moral luck, desert, and punishment is short by LRB standards and precise in a way that most philosophical writing avoids in popular venues. The argument — that retributive punishment is philosophically incoherent because no one creates themselves, and that the appropriate response to this is not nihilism but a shift toward deterrence and forward-looking justice — is not fashionable in political culture but is gaining quiet traction in criminology, therapeutic culture, and certain strands of literary fiction. Reading it now gives you the underlying framework for a set of conversations that will become louder over the next two years.