Culture Brief 2026-05-18
Ideas in Circulation
Cannes as a geopolitical theater rather than a film festival
The question of whether a film festival can or should be politically neutral is now unavoidable, with five countries boycotting Eurovision over Israel’s participation and Cannes fielding the same tension in its main competition.
- Cannes 2026: How Political Should a Film Festival Be?
- ‘An orgy of antisemitism is overtaking the west’: Son of Saul’s László Nemes on Hollywood hypocrisy
- Cate Blanchett says #MeToo ‘got killed very quickly’ in Hollywood
The argument circulating at Cannes this year is not new but has sharpened: cultural institutions can no longer claim the festival frame as a depoliticized space. Blanchett’s observation that #MeToo “got killed very quickly” lands alongside László Nemes’s unsparing critique of an industry “overclass” that performatively condemns antisemitism while maintaining its own hypocrisies. What makes this moment distinctive is that the dissent is coming from filmmakers with full festival credentials, not outside protestors—the insiders are the ones challenging the institution’s claim to neutrality.
Historical pessimism about money and opacity
John Lanchester’s LRB essay and Aeon’s essay on human rights financing are circling the same structural argument from different angles: the architecture of global wealth is designed to be illegible, and that illegibility is not incidental but load-bearing.
Lanchester’s framing—that money laundering is the third-largest industry in the world but almost no one thinks seriously about it—is the kind of claim that reorients a reader’s sense of what politics actually is. The Aeon companion piece, by tax law scholar Attiya Waris, argues that rights discourse is entirely hollow until it confronts sovereign wealth, capital flight, and the tax convention framework. Together they make the case that moral and political language operates as a distraction from the financial infrastructure that actually distributes outcomes.
AI flattery as the real civilizational risk
The Guardian’s piece on the return of Westworld and Aeon’s “The prophet in your pocket” by Carissa Véliz are both pushing back against the frame that AI danger means malfunction or takeover—arguing instead that the danger is a system designed to agree with you.
- The return of Westworld is perfect timing for the flattery-oriented age of AI
- The prophet in your pocket
Véliz’s contribution here is the more useful frame: objects have jobs, and the job of the device in your pocket is not to assist you but to model you for extraction. The Westworld piece, looser but culturally resonant, notes that the original show’s nightmare scenario—robots going rogue—has been eclipsed by the quieter reality of robots that validate. The conversation that’s forming is about sycophancy as infrastructure.
Generational malaise as recurring form
Aeon’s essay drawing a direct line between 19th-century French Romantic despair and contemporary Gen Z affect is getting at something that several other sources are circling obliquely: the current mood of stalled futures and ambient hopelessness has deep historical precedents that complicate the idea that this generation is uniquely afflicted.
Emily Herring’s essay on the mal du siècle—the post-Napoleonic generation of young French people who felt they had arrived too late for heroism and too early for anything else—is worth reading slowly. The parallel isn’t just atmospheric: it involves a specific relationship to political defeat, cultural oversaturation, and a sense of being acted upon rather than acting. The Paris Review piece on literary agents adds a material dimension, tracing how taste-making in publishing is inseparable from market-making, which creates its own version of the generational squeeze.
Broadway’s documentary impulse
Multiple sources are noticing a genre crystallizing on the New York stage: plays that use real people and documented events but invent the dialogue, producing a hybrid that sits between verbatim theater, historical drama, and fiction.
Jesse Green’s T Magazine piece names this as a distinct and growing genre—plays where the characters are factual but the words are fabricated—and asks what it means for audiences to receive invented dialogue as if it carries documentary authority. Liberation and Giant are the tent-pole examples this season; the Pulitzer going to Liberation suggests the form has institutional validation now. The question is whether this is a productive formal innovation or a permission structure for laundering speculation as history.
Books, Film, Music, Art Worth Attention
Paper Tiger — James Gray’s 1980s New York fraternal tragedy with Driver and Johansson, described as a serious and muscular Cannes competition entry in the Kazan vein, a genuine counterweight to the festival’s lighter fare.
Is God Is — Aleshea Harris’s film debut, a revenge thriller adapted from her own play, reviewed by multiple NYT critics as a significant arrival in American cinema: formally bold, emotionally uncompromising, and cinematic in ways that exceed its theatrical origins.
The Wonderful World That Almost Was — Andrew Durbin’s dual biography of Peter Hujar and Paul Thek, artists who operated in Sontag’s orbit but whose work remains underexamined; a serious book about art-making, friendship, and the downtown New York world that almost was.
Moulin — László Nemes dramatizes the torture of French Resistance leader Jean Moulin by Klaus Barbie; the Guardian review finds it surprisingly conventional for the Son of Saul director but still chilling, and the film arrives alongside a substantive profile in which Nemes speaks frankly about European antisemitism and the film industry’s moral abdictions.
Twilight of the Velocipede: Typesetting Races before the Age of Linotype — Public Domain Review’s recovery of competitive typesetting races in the pre-Linotype era, including their role in women workers’ labor equity campaigns; a genuinely odd and well-researched piece of media history.
Once Upon a Time in Harlem — William Greaves’s long-unfinished Harlem Renaissance documentary, completed by his family and now receiving its global premiere at Cannes; an archival event with real historical weight.
Essays Worth the Read
In “Mutual Analysis” with Wallace Shawn’s Moth Days
George Prochnik’s Paris Review essay on Wallace Shawn’s new stage work treats it as an occasion for thinking about guilt, complicity, and the moral phenomenology of daily comfort—the fruit salad problem. Shawn’s theatre has always worked in this register, but Prochnik’s reading is sharp enough to stand alone as an intellectual event; the Guardian profile of Shawn published the same week confirms that the work itself is pressing these questions hard.
Nagel, at this point in his career, writing in the LRB on moral luck, free will, and the incoherence of retributive punishment: the argument is that condemnation and resentment toward a criminal are as logically misplaced as they would be toward a tiger, and that the criminal justice system’s emotional foundation is philosophically untenable. The piece is compact and uncompromising in the way only someone who no longer needs to build consensus will allow themselves to be.
Wolfgang Koeppen’s Structural Musicality
Joshua Cohen on the three post-war German novels of Wolfgang Koeppen—written in rapid succession, then silence for decades—as a body of work that registers the Federal Republic’s moral psyche with a precision that no better-known author achieved. If you’ve never read Koeppen, this essay functions as an argument for why that’s a gap worth closing; if you have, Cohen’s framing of the trilogy’s relationship to Thomas Mann and to the Nazi inheritance is genuinely new.
One Thing Worth Reading Deeply
Lanchester’s essay opens with a claim designed to stop you: if money laundering were an industry, it would be the third-largest business in the world. From there it builds an account of how financial opacity functions not as a bug in the global system but as its primary product—the deliberate engineering of illegibility across real estate, shell companies, correspondent banking, and enforcement jurisdictions. What makes this more than a summary of familiar concerns is the rhetorical question Lanchester sustains throughout: how did a system this vast become this invisible to ordinary political consciousness? The answer he develops has implications for how we think about corruption, sovereignty, and the limits of liberal governance—and by the end, the phrase “third biggest business in the world” has become genuinely difficult to move past.