Quillette

Art & Culture When critics start issuing dictates, they end up excluding broad swathes of art and culture as well as whole areas of human experience. Pauline Kael, whose provocative, uncompromising criticism helped shape American film culture for more than three decades. Editorial illustration by Zoe Sankey using an archival photograph. The film critic Pauline Kael once said that a friendship cannot survive too many disagreements about movies.

Claire Lehmann sits down with Parnell Palme McGuinness—columnist for the Sydney Morning Herald and The Age, and senior research fellow at the Centre for Independent Studies—to unpack her landmark report, Generation Trapped, on the collapsing life satisfaction of Australians aged 18–34.

A review of Love and Terror: The Helter-Skelter History of the Manson Murders by Claudia Verhoeven; 384 pages; Verso (May 2026) Although the True Crime genre of publishing and documentary television is replete with accounts of murderous spouses, serial killers, Mafia wars, and financial scams, rarely do the subjects transcend the headline immediacy of police procedurals to deliver the long-term import of critical analysis.

Every four years the world gathers to remind Americans that soccer is boring. The World Cup arrives, a billion people weep with joy, and everyone who wasn't indoctrinated before the age of six sits there waiting for something…anything to happen. Then suddenly it almost does. Then just as quickly it doesn't.Then it almost does again. This is the rhythm of the world's most boring game.

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In the spring of 1945, weeks after liberation, a Jewish editor named Yehuda Eismann sat in a Bucharest office and compiled a small pamphlet of songs composed in the Nazi camps and ghettos of occupied Poland. He printed five hundred copies, but almost all were lost. One survived in a Sydney cupboard for decades, undisturbed, until it was rediscovered in 2013.

Science does not often advance in sudden epiphanies that yield “Eureka” moments. More typical are years of failed experiments, dogged hypothesis-testing, and incremental discoveries that are, at best, inconclusive. And then, sometimes, eventually, the accumulated knowledge results in a breakthrough. Two recent examples are stunning advances in cancer medicine—one for pancreatic cancer, the other for melanoma—that are rewriting what doctors can promise their patients.

I brought a 510-million-year-old trilobite I’d split out of Cambrian shale four hours north of Las Vegas to show a class of eighth graders. I passed it around the room and explained what it was: an ancient arthropod called Bristolia, from the same branch of the tree of life as every insect and crab alive today, that lived in a warm shallow sea that used to cover Nevada. It predated the dinosaurs by 250 million years. It was older than plants on land.

The questions were put to me without malice: Are you Jewish? And is that why you have written about antisemitism and antizionism from so far outside the immediate theatre of war? I understand these questions. They were asked in good faith, and I will answer them seriously in return. Antisemitism is unequivocally a Jewish wound, a Jewish danger, and a Jewish historical burden. Jews are its direct targets, and nothing in this essay seeks to diminish that fact.

Although I was not sure why until quite recently, I spent over thirty years struggling with something I was never going to be good at anyway. Not the work itself. The performance required to fit in at the office. The overlooked social cues. The off-putting intensity. The frequent mistranslation of the way my brain processes a problem into language that sounds like everyone else’s understanding.