The bohemian lie: In a recent essay by Adam Lehrer, readers are launched into the bohémien world of Montparnasse in the late nineteenth century. But instead of the rosy retrospection lent by painter Marc Chagall’s assertion that the Paris neighborhood was a “revolution of the eye,” we get the disappointed frustration of writer and artist Wyndham Lewis. Lewis, stifled by his New England upbringing, moved to Paris looking for a celebration of individuality and artistic freedom. Instead, he found that most bohemians were conformist mediocrities riding the coattails of family money and convincing themselves they were distinguished by their newfound proximity to genius. Read about the results of Lewis’s disenchantment, including the seminal modernist novel Tarr and his flirtation with fascism, in Compact.
Money shot: If sex work is work, what kind of work is it? For UnHerd, Sarah Ditum dives into the industry, uncovering exploitation at every level, hidden under the shiny veneer of “empowerment.” Though a lucky few Pornhub models may afford to buy their homes with the money they make from adult videos, Ditum traces how this same company encourages increasing degradation for clicks, burns out moderators who watch hundreds of bestiality videos a day, and still ran ads on videos of trafficked children. This raises questions about consent as a preeminent sexual ethic, power under threat of poverty, and the limits of free expression. Finally, Ditum asks, if we’re willing to tolerate—even promote—this sort of abasement in growing and hypervisible industries, where will the moral compromises end?
At the limits of forgiveness: Atlantic writer and Pulitzer Prize finalist Elizabeth Bruenig will deliver a public lecture at the University of Chicago on Monday, March 27th, on forgiveness in American life. Bruenig, who previously worked as an opinion writer for The New York Times, studied Christian theology, especially the work of St. Augustine of Hippo, in university and eventually converted to Catholicism. Conservative writer Rod Dreher has described Bruenig as being a member of the “Catholic Left.” Her writing often touches on themes of mercy, justice, and the reclamation of forgiveness as a social virtue, all of which she will explore in her upcoming talk. Bruenig’s lecture will be the inaugural address in the Public Thinking Lecture Series at the University of Chicago, hosted by The Point Program for Public Thinking, the Parrhesia Program for Public Discourse, and the Neubauer Collegium for Culture and Society.
Red scared: Who are the victims of global communism? Billie Anania, writing for The Baffler, takes a trip to Washington, D.C.’s new Victims of Communism Museum to find out. According to Anania, the museum is “part fascist propaganda, part Epcot ride.” Among the so-called victims of communism: all Nazis killed by the Red Army and all the world’s COVID-19 deaths. And the insanity doesn’t stop there. The Victims of Communism Foundation counts Nazi sympathizers among its early donors, and traces its origins back to a propaganda booklet that describes the “double genocide” of the twentieth century: one carried out by fascists, the other carried out by “Judeo-Bolshevik Communists.” (The Judeo-Bolshevik canard, of course, was coined by the Russian aristocracy and picked up by Hitler.)