MAY 4, 2026: Rebuilding American Culture
A Golden Age of American Letters; Trump’s Golden Age of Culture; and Deadlocks in Contemporary Culture
A GOLDEN AGE OF AMERICAN LETTERS
From the New Yorker, Joan Lowell and the birth of the modern literary fraud: A century ago, an aspiring actress published a remarkable autobiography—she made up most of it; and Stephanie Gorton on the little magazine that defied American censorship: Margaret Anderson’s Little Review fought to bring the great works of Modernist literature to the United States. The editor who helped build a golden age of American letters: Malcolm Cowley championed Jack Kerouac and Ken Kesey—and elevated the status of American writing. Guilherme Giovaneli why literary criticism needs philosophy. The book Optimism, Literature, and Culture in American Capitalism and Chinese Socialism (Oxford) by Wendy Larson is now out. Rachel Donald interviews Heather Milligan on how fiction makes sense of the crisis.
TRUMP’S GOLDEN AGE OF CULTURE
Umut Mert Gurses (Ohio State): The Afterlives of Capitalist Realism. We need another Surrealist Revolution: Ana Haaland on resisting authoritarianism and the flaws in contemporary realism. Zach Mortice reviews Antifascist Architecture by Andrew Santa Lucia and Daniel Jonas Roche. Donald Trump’s triumphal arch and the architecture of autocracy: When asked by a reporter whom the arch would be for, Trump said, “Me.” Trump’s golden age of culture seems pretty sad so far: The president’s party has total control of government—but not what Americans care about. Jennifer Schuessler is tracking Trump’s efforts to reshape cultural institutions. Josef Palermo spent 10 months working at the Kennedy Center because he thought he could help protect it; what he observed there is far worse than the public knows. Can art defend democracy? Raoul Peck discusses his urgent new film, Orwell: 2+2=5. Where’s the countercultural outrage to Trump?
DEADLOCKS IN CONTEMPORARY CULTURE
Thought and its vicissitudes: Reflections on some deadlocks in contemporary culture. How bad is plagiarism, really? Anthony Lane reviews Strikingly Similar: The Art of Intellectual Theft by Roger Kreuz. Daisy Fancourt on why the mad artistic genius trope doesn’t stand up to scientific scrutiny. The culture dividend: Elena Raevskikh on why measurement matters for culture as infrastructure. When did literature get less dirty? A puritan strain is manifesting in realist novels as a marked absence of straight sex. The Seinfeld theory of fiction: Annoying characters let us admit that we might be annoying too. The last time everyone watched the same thing: No one knew it at the time, but 2014—more precisely, Ellen DeGeneres’ star-studded selfie moment—marked the peak of a monoculture that no longer exists; the numbers show a long decay ever since.
REBUILDING AMERICAN CULTURE
How should we remember the hippies? They’ve often been a punch line, but by fusing their political convictions to a broader cultural identity they seemed to find something that we’ve lost. The book Rolling Stone and the Rise of Hip Capitalism: How a Magazine Born in the 1960s Changed America (UNC) by Charles L. Ponce de Leon (CSU-Long Beach) is now out. 25 years later, Nickel and Dimed is as relevant as ever. From the Baffler, a symposium on The Profession That Does Not Exist: Writing won’t make you a living. Does writing have to be hard? American writing instruction has always involved some level of torture—what happens when technology makes it easy? Is “literary fiction” just another genre now? There is no real middlebrow any more. The middleware manifesto: Douglas McLennan a proposal for rebuilding American culture.