Culture Corner: April 2026

Reading, Watching, Listening, Playing, Doing.

This is a bimonthly feature where I discuss what I’ve been reading, watching, listening to, and doing, and encourage readers to share the same. Here are my picks from March and April.

Reading

Books

Wuthering Heights (Emily Brontë, 1847)

Partly in anticipation of the film – which I’ve not actually watched yet – I read Wuthering Heights. I knew of its reputation as a tragedy and anti-romance. I didn’t know that revenge drove so much of the plot. The themes, settings, and characters are all justly famous (Heathcliff truly is one of the great jerks in the history of literature), but I was most impressed by the power and vivacity of Brontë’s writing. Her depictions of carnal obsession – the desire to completely subordinate the self and absorb another – feel prurient and provocative today. Reading them in 1847 must have felt like a shock on par with hearing a Chuck Berry riff for the first time or seeing Dorothy step into Technicolor. I can’t help but like the world is poorer for Brontë dying so young. Wuthering Heights was the only book she ever wrote.

Hyperpolitics (Anton Jäger, 2026)

If, like me, you’ve been searching for an understanding of why it feels like we’re constantly careening from crisis to crisis without actually creating durable political or social movements, then you might appreciate this book by Belgian political theorist, Anton Jäger. According to Jager, the West has passed through four distinct political ages. The first was mass politics, where mediating social institutions – churches, unions, parties, social clubs – grounded political identity. The end of the Cold War and triumph of liberalism gave rise to what Jäger calls postpolitics, “a world both depoliticized and desocialized, in which citizens retreat[ed] from collective life into the private sphere”. After the rupture of the Global Financial Crisis came antipolitics, “a type of moral indignation and rebellion on the part of a growing number of fringe groups who seek to free themselves from the old politics”.

Jäger’s hypothesis is that we now live in an era of hyperpolitics, a state of affairs characterised by extreme politicisation (everyone is furious about everything, seemingly all the time), high atomisation (people’s social circles are shrinking), low-cost (why join a movement when you can sign an email petition?), and low-commitment (our employers and situationships don’t commit, so why should we?). Jäger does talk about causes – the declining influence of those stabilising institutions like unions and the church, the economic precarity created by financialisation and neoliberalism, social media – but he’s more interested in discussing the effects: volatility without progress.

Hyperpolitics is a short book, impressionistic in places, dense but not overwhelming, and clarifying. I highlighted lots of passages – here’s one of my favourites.

In September 1957, a shipwreck southwest of the Azores kept the German reading public in suspense for days. On August 11, the Pamir—a four-masted barque usually deployed as a trainee ship—set sail from Buenos Aires with almost 4,000 tons of barley on board, bound for Hamburg. On the morning of September 21, the ship sent out its SOS calls, but contact was lost around midday. No trace of its eighty-six crew members could be found, including several young cadets. Two days later, as part of an international search operation, an American steamer retrieved a damaged lifeboat with five survivors; within forty-eight hours, another sailor was rescued alive. Investigations revealed that a severe hurricane had crossed the Atlantic at the time of the disaster—a ship with the Pamir’s design should have been able to withstand such a storm, yet a fatal mistake had been made when loading the vessel due to time pressure: instead of stowing the barley in sacks in the barque’s hull as usual, the grain had been poured in without prior packaging. As barley has a particularly high flow velocity, the cargo shifted uncontrollably from side to side when the Pamir was caught in the storm in front of the Azores. Incapable of reequilibrating, the ship capsized and eventually sank. No other survivors were located.

Returning to Sloterdijk’s nautical metaphors, it is the Pamir, rather than the superferry, that offers a fitting emblem for the hyperpolitical present. In earlier times, individuals were embedded in dense social networks and participated in a wide array of intermediate associations. Today’s societies are composed of increasingly atomized and isolated individuals. As long as history moves along smoothly and predictably, this need not necessarily be a problem. But when societies enter choppier waters, atomization amplifies their volatility—and the collective incapacity to respond to today’s political and ecological crises.

The essay which introduced me to Jäger’s book is also well worth reading.

Blogs/articles/essays

What will be scarce? (Ghosts of Electricity, April 2026)

Probably the most thoughtful essay I’ve read to date about AI’s possible effects on work. Alex Imas, a rising star in economics, argues that AI-driven automation is less likely to eliminate work as it is to relocate it to areas which AI diffusion makes more valuable. His central insight is that, as the production of commodities becomes automated, an increasing share of employment and expenditure in developed economies will shift towards what he calls the “relational sector”: care, education, hospitality, craft, therapy – any domain where the human element is intrinsic to the product’s value. Drawing from French theorist Rene Girard’s concept of mimetic desire (the unquenchable thirst for things other people want and we can’t have), Imas argues that as material abundance increases as a result of AI, the goods which denote status will become more desirable.

The argument strikes me as largely true and empirically valid. You only need to look at the widespread revulsion at any product which has the slightest whiff of AI to know that many people will pay a premium for goods and services which can’t be “faked” (and/or those where the creator is outspokenly anti-AI). Imas opens the essay with the example of Starbucks. Starbucks tried automation, found that it undermined the product, and reversed course. This won’t happen in every economy, or every part or every economy, but it’s an intelligent middle ground between glib techno-utopianism and hyperbolic AI doomerism.

Infinite Midwit (Experimental History, April 2026)

I could easily recommend most things I read from Adam Mastroianni’s Substack. His writing tickles my brain in a particular way. He’s clever, he asks provocative questions, and teases out interesting conclusions. In this essay, he tries to articulate what AI will be good at and what he suspects it will never master. The fundamental distinction, Mastroianni says, lies in the difference between objective and subjective intelligence. LLMs score highly on the former, and terribly on the latter.

There are two characters you can find in most academic departments. One of them we can call Madame Stats: she knows everything about crunching numbers. The other we can call Mr. Encyclopedia: he’s read every paper and he can recite them to you from memory. Right now, AI feels like having unlimited access to very friendly versions of Madame Stats and Mr. Encyclopedia. LLMs are pretty good at finding papers; they are very good at writing code. So shouldn’t they make research projects go way faster?

Well, once you get access to an infinite Madame Stats and Mr. Encyclopedia, you realize they can’t get you very far. For one thing, you can’t rely on Madame Stats and Mr. Encyclopedia entirely, because if you can’t do any stats and you never read any papers, you’re probably not going to have many interesting ideas yourself.5 Plus, while the Stats/Encyclopedia duo can tell you whether your experiment has been done before and whether you’ve run the numbers correctly, they can’t give you the single most important piece of feedback: they can’t tell you whether your idea is boring.

There are parts of the essay I disagree with. Without claiming an expertise in cognition that I don’t possess, it seems to me that although the question “how do I live a good life?” is ultimately a question of values, it’s also one that can be made more intelligible by breaking it down into smaller chunks and reasoning from there. As a lively, intelligent writer, I suppose Mastroianni would say that AI writing can never have that extra, hard-to-define juju (although I happen to agree with him). But whether he’s “right” or “wrong” seems secondary to me. The point is that he’s posing interesting questions and reasoning through his beliefs and experiences in a way that’s both interesting and – not coincidentally – completely human.

Is Mike Wazowski Jewish or Polish? (Sproutstack, November 2025)

Finally, this important subject gets the serious consideration it deserves. My only quibble is that, having weighed up all the evidence, I think it renders the wrong verdict. Read it and make up your own mind.

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Watching

The Studio (Apple TV, 2025)

The Studio wears its influences on its sleeve. It’s a workplace comedy, like The Office or Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip. Much like Curb Your Enthusiasm, it’s lightly scripted and uses mutual misunderstanding as a plot engine. And it draws from a rich tradition of shows that send up the business of Hollywood while wholeheartedly believing in its capacity to create magic. Yet despite risking pastiche, The Studio feels fresh. Seth Rogen, who directs, writes, and stars, is Matt Remick, the newly appointed head of the film production company Continental Studios. He has to deal with capricious stars, unreliable colleagues, and the challenge of wanting to make real art while needing to make the studio commercially viable.

The Studio is affectionately satirical, not bitingly critical. That might disappoint some. But given the people involved, it was probably unlikely to be anything else. It’s beautifully-made light entertainment, with enough formal innovation – it makes extensive use of single-take shots – to keep it interesting. And I have a real weakness for films and TV shows where the cast is clearly having a ball.

Oh, and I’d like to thank Sal Saperstein!

Listening

Emily Remler

The jazz guitar tradition has usually rewarded the ostentatious. There’s something about the instrument – this is by no means an issue confined to just jazz! – which seems to invite a certain kind of peacocking: speed, volume, gratuitous body movements and facial contortions. Emily Remler refused all of it. What she offered instead was economy: the right note in the right spot. Her restraint was a kind of mastery in itself. Remler always had the discipline to leave space where a more insecure player would have filled it with something.

That security was even more remarkable given how much of an anomaly she was. Jazz in the 1980s was overwhelmingly male-dominated, the guitar especially so. Larry Coryell, a jazz guitarist whose work I’m not familiar with (but who seems very highly regarded) wrote in his memoir that Remler was “creative, smart, swung like crazy and had a time feel that was just about the best I had ever heard from any guitarist, male or female.” That feels right.

Unfortunately, like so many jazz musicians, Remler struggled immensely with substance use. Her last-ever concert was in Adelaide, in May 1990. The full show is on YouTube. Before she began playing, she spoke about spending part of her day at the Cleland Wildlife Sanctuary, the same place I had a cherished childhood memory of hand-feeding kangaroos just a few years later. Remler passed away from heart failure, widely believed to be related to opioid use, just a few hours later. She was only 32.

This essay about her life and music is well worth the read.

Angine de Poitrine – Live on KEXP (February, 2026)

Now that I’m too old to read Pitchfork (which apparently has a paywall now???) I rely a lot on the concerts uploaded to the YouTube channel of KEXP, a Seattle-based indie station, for my new music recommendations. It was how I learnt about Mdou Moctar. And it was how I learnt about Angine de Poitrine. Maybe I haven’t listened to enough King Gizz or math rock. But these French Canadians blew my socks off. Part of what makes them so arresting is the visuals: in this performance, both members – as a long-time White Stripes superfan, I’m partial to two-piece bands – are decked out in monochrome polka dots and wear masks with proboscis-style noses. But there’s clearly an astonishing level of creativity and originality on show here. Angine de Poitrine make extensive use of “microtonality”, which Google tells me utilises “tuning systems and intervals smaller than the standard 12-note semitone system used in Western music” and “allows for pitches between conventional keys, enabling unique harmonies and melodies.” That’s a neat trick – but it’s the fact that they use that as a starting point to create mesmeric grooves that makes it work. You can hear traces of krautrock, desert blues, and new wave in their music. The Swedish group Goat try for a similar brand of weirdness. But Angine de Poitrine sound new. As one of the best comments on the video puts it: “I can’t believe I was alive to witness the release of Music 2.”

This video, which is already the 12th-most popular video on KEXP’s YouTube channel, helped create considerable buzz around the band. They released an EP a few weeks ago. It’s very good, but without the visual element, doesn’t quite have the impact of this extraordinary performance.

Playing

Slay the Spire 2 (2026)

Regular readers won’t be surprised to see this; I mentioned Slay the Spire 2 in the lead of my polemic about the AFL’s meddling with the rules. I described it in general terms there, but I’ll happily go into more detail here. I had faith that Mega Crit, the developers, would deliver an excellent sequel because the original game was brilliant in a specific way which suggested a sophisticated understanding of the mechanics that make these types of games work. The challenge was to do more of it – more characters, more cards, more strategies – while maintaining balance and that addictive feeling that almost any game is winnable if you make the right choices

It’s an almost-total triumph. I love both the new characters. The Necrobinder employs a skeletal sidekick called Osty which can fight on its behalf. The Regent, meanwhile, draws from an entirely parallel energy source to play its cards. They’re interesting and they’re different. The existing characters have been refurbished with new cards and new “build” archetypes. There is more of everything: enemies, events, relics, lore. It still feels recognisably like Slay the Spire. And there’s so much more to go. The sequel has only been in early access for a few weeks. There will be new playable characters and new biomes. Balance is being tweaked so there are many different ways to play because the developers – unlike the AFL – understand that it’s infinitely more satisfying to choose your own path than be led to it.

On a related subject, I highly recommend this essay on shopping like you’re playing Slay the Spire. It explores the concept, frequently used by one of the game’s most prominent streamers, of “archetypes and jobs”:

Over time, most people gravitate toward particular archetypes or builds. For instance, you might seek to design a deck around dealing poison damage. The problem with the archetype approach is that it requires betting you will find particular cards or other resources later. Maybe the game won’t give you the best poison cards in a given run. By waiting for them, you pass up good opportunities to deal damage and block enemy attacks in different ways. In the worst-case scenario, you might even take an ability that empowers poison and never come across the base poison-inflicting cards you need for it to work. Similarly, in real life, people often acquire objects—craft and hobby tools being the worst offenders—that are of no use without other objects, or without the most precious resource of all, an uninterrupted block of time.

A better strategy is to divide the game into a series of fine-grained jobs that your cards need to accomplish at different stages of the game: blocking a 45-damage attack, taking down a boss that inflicts status effects, helping you draw the specific card you want, and so on. You also know that later-game challenges will be more difficult, and you need solutions that scale—ways to deal or block increasing amounts of damage with the same cards. When you have a list of top-priority jobs in your head, it becomes much easier to evaluate any given opportunity. Does a card solve an immediate or upcoming problem for you, while also having enough scaling potential to meet later challenges? If so, grab it. If not, let it go.

The piece is nominally about shopping, but I think you can apply it to a whole bunch of different activities.

Doing

Joining YIMBY Melbourne

I’m officially a paid-up member of YIMBY Melbourne – a group dedicated to research-based advocacy for reforms that alleviate Australia’s profound housing crisis. YIMBY is a play on words of “NIMBY” (not in my backyard), the pejorative acronym for people who oppose new development near them. YIMBY Melbourne believes (as I do) that the only way to durably make housing more affordable in Australia is to build more – much more – of it, and that the best way to enable that is by arguing for broader reforms to a moribund planning system that systematically privileges incumbency and heritage over growth and progress. I admire their work and support their mission.

Turning internet friends into real-life friends

One of the loveliest things that’s happened as a result of starting this newsletter is joining a community of friendly, like-minded footy nerds – people I can chat to about even the most niche fascinations and preoccupations. It’s nice to log into Twitter or Substack and see a familiar cast of digital faces. Over the last couple of months, I’ve been lucky enough to be able to move a couple of those digital friendships into the physical realm. This is hardly a novel insight, but making new friendships in one’s thirties isn’t easy. People tend to already have well-defined life paths by that age – partners, careers, children, existing friendship groups. Breaking into that, and breaking out of the complacency that can creep in when you have enough of those things to fill your day, is worth the investment. It’s really cool to go to the footy with people you met online; I encourage everyone to do the same.

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In addition to restarting paid subscriptions, I’ve also created a “Buy Me a Coffee” page. Here’s the link.