Bartolomeo Sala is an Italian writer based in London. His writing has appeared in the Gagosian Quarterly, the Brooklyn Rail, and the Dial.
In The Life, Old Age, and Death of a Working-Class Woman, French writer Didier Eribon sees his mother’s passing as symbolic of the disappearance of the mass culture and politics that once gave workers of her generation identity and social standing.
The hyperelitist world of prerevolutionary France fostered resentment among writers excluded from salons and high society. This bitterness proved a fertile breeding ground for revolution led by writers who targeted their anger at the old order.
Today’s far right manages to combine the call for economic freedom with pseudoscience about natural hierarchies of race and IQ. Historian Quinn Slobodian explains how these ideas can be fitted together.
In premodern England, peasants organized football games over enclosed land. Today, fans have gotten together to buy teams from corrupt owners. The beautiful game has always shaped the culture of the popular classes, despite moneyed influences.