CULTURE: 2026-05-25

by | May 25, 2026 | Culture | 0 comments

Culture Brief 2026-05-25

Ideas in Circulation

The hidden architecture of illegitimate money

The question of how financial opacity became structurally normal — not aberrant — is resurfacing with unusual force.

Lanchester’s essay — the anchor piece here — frames money laundering not as crime at the edges of capitalism but as something closer to its operating logic: the third-largest industry in the world, bigger than pensions, less discussed than either. The argument is that our collective ignorance isn’t incidental but maintained. The Public Domain Review’s archival 1911 cartoon offers an inadvertent counterpoint: the old radical diagram of who sits atop whom feels newly literal when you follow the financial flows Lanchester traces. What’s interesting is the framing shift: from “corruption as exception” to “opacity as infrastructure.”

Determinism, blame, and what punishment is actually for

Philosophy is circling back to free will, but the current iteration is less about metaphysics and more about the practical ethics of condemnation.

Nagel’s LRB essay argues directly: if people do not create themselves, retributive punishment is incoherent. Resentment toward a criminal is as misplaced as resentment toward a tiger. This is old territory philosophically, but the current political moment — where criminal justice, moral condemnation, and public shaming are all in flux — gives it fresh traction. Aeon’s essay on the power asymmetry between parent and child runs a related line: the trace that early powerlessness leaves on adult psychology complicates simple accounts of individual moral responsibility. Together they suggest a broader reconsideration of culpability thinking that may be moving from academic philosophy into wider circulation.

Queer history as political act

Two films at Cannes this week approach LGBTQ+ history not as identity narrative but as the recovery of deliberately erased lives, with distinct formal approaches.

Lukas Dhont’s WWI film and the Spanish triptych derived from Lorca are both, at root, arguments about what gets expunged from official history. Dhont uses drag performance behind the front lines as a frame for cowardice, survival, and secrecy; the Spanish film works across three eras to show how gay sexuality was not merely suppressed but actively disappeared from national record. That two films with this preoccupation appeared at the same festival in the same week is worth noting as a signal: the interest is less in visibility politics per se and more in the historiographical question of how erasure functions.

The disruption of the pastoral — land, belonging, and what “nature” is for

Several pieces this week, from different angles, challenge the idea of a stable natural world that humans either steward or ruin.

John Drake’s essay makes the specific and undervalued argument that the “breakdown” metaphor — so pervasive in environmental writing — is borrowed from engineering and medicine, and may be the wrong frame entirely for ecological systems that don’t have a designed function to fail from. James Dinneen’s piece pushes further, asking what the deep Earth’s timescale does to human categories of damage and recovery. The Hawaiian poet piece grounds this abstractly: indigenous land relationships encode a different ontology of belonging that the breakdown metaphor forecloses. These three pieces are arriving at the same problem from philosophy of science, geology, and poetics simultaneously.

AI infrastructure and the literature of displaced places

The cultural conversation about AI is shifting from capability arguments to the physical footprint — what gets built where, and what it overwrites.

Thomas John Weber’s Paris Review piece is anchored in James Wright’s poem “Lying in a Hammock at William Duffy’s Farm in Pine Island Minnesota” — a lyric about pastoral stillness — and uses it to measure what a trillion-dollar tech company is about to do to that specific piece of land. It is a minor masterpiece of juxtaposition. Carissa Véliz’s Aeon essay on devices having “jobs” — surveillance being the actual design function, comfort the cover — operates in the same territory from the philosophy of technology angle. Together they suggest the cultural conversation about AI is finally beginning to ask material and geographic questions, not just capability ones.

Books, Film, Music, Art Worth Attention

Hunger and Thirst by Claire Fuller — A novel about a sculptor and a true-crime documentary that fuses gothic unease with state-of-the-nation social realism, reviewed in the Guardian as Fuller’s most ambitious work yet.

The Black Ball — A Cannes triptych drawing on Lorca to excavate erased gay history across three eras of Spanish life; Bradshaw rates it as the festival’s clearest formal achievement.

Becca Rothfeld: Mourning the Houseplant — Rothfeld’s LRB essay on Marlen Haushofer, the mid-century Austrian novelist whose work is experiencing significant critical revival; the essay reads the wall motif across Haushofer’s fiction as both trap and liberation.

Wallace Shawn’s Moth Days — George Prochnik’s Paris Review essay on Shawn’s new work, which uses the therapeutic dyad as a structure for confronting complicity in political violence; the fruit-salad line in the abstract is the argument in miniature.

Twilight of the Velocipede: Typesetting Races before the Age of Linotype — Public Domain Review’s recovery of the world of competitive hand-typesetting — crowds in the thousands, cash prizes, women “Swifts” fighting for workplace equity — that vanished when Linotype arrived; worth attention as a model for thinking about what AI may be about to do to another set of skilled trades.

Essays Worth the Read

Building an AI Data Center in Pine Island, Minnesota

Weber sets James Wright’s canonical American pastoral poem against the news that a tech company is fighting to transform Pine Island into data-center infrastructure. The essay argues by proximity rather than argument, and the proximity is devastating: what the poem heard as silence, the company hears as available land. A model for how literary criticism can do what straight journalism can’t.

Can ecosystems malfunction?

John Drake’s challenge to the dominant vocabulary of environmental crisis deserves careful reading: the breakdown and malfunction metaphors borrowed from engineering presuppose a designed system with a correct operating state, which forests and wetlands are not. The alternative he proposes is genuinely harder to communicate politically but may be more accurate, and the tension between those two facts is the essay’s real subject.

Barthelme, the Houstonian

Susan Choi’s piece on Donald Barthelme as a product of Houston rather than Manhattan is a quiet corrective to the way literary geography gets narrated — the will delivered to a Kinko’s, the city’s refusal to aestheticize itself, the specific kind of absurdism that an un-beautiful place produces. Short, but it reframes the work.

One Thing Worth Reading Deeply

John Lanchester: Squillions

Lanchester’s essay is the most consequential piece in this week’s intake. The argument — that money laundering operates at the scale of a major global industry, that this is widely known in specialist circles and almost unknown in public culture, and that the architecture enabling it is not criminal deviation but legal infrastructure — reorients how to think about financial crime, political corruption, and the relationship between wealth and legitimacy. Lanchester writes economics the way very few people can: with novelistic texture and without condescension. Read it before the conversation it belongs to arrives in full.