Quillette

People are outraged that a Black actress is playing Helen of Troy in Nolan's Odyssey. But Homer's myths have been radically rewritten for 2,500 years. This is nothing new, writes @CathyYoung63 🧵

@Kleisthenes2 @zoecabina More here: quillette.com/2026/05/08/doe…

If Joseph Henrich and others are right that many of the distinctive features of the West ultimately emerged from Christianity, then can those features survive after Christianity itself declines? - @Kleisthenes2 in conversation with @zoecabina

The Cambridge spies—three of whom were members of the Apostles society at Cambridge University—are the best-known and most written-about group of Western agents of Josef Stalin from the 1930s and ’40s. ✍️ @RonRadosh quillette.com/2026/05/26/tre…

@DrewPavlou One Nation's rise is a textbook protest vote: mainstream parties keep promising to cut immigration, keep failing to deliver, and voters keep moving further right until someone actually does it. quillette.com/2026/02/26/the…

Australian voter: I’m voting Pauline Hanson because I want less migration. Kos Samaras: So you’re a left behind rust belt worker fed up with neoliberalism. Australian voter: I’m just voting to lower migration. Kos Samaras: So you want to tax big business and the top 1%. Australian voter: I’m right wing, I’m voting for Pauline Hanson because I’m right wing and want less immigration. Kos Samaras: So you’re interested in voting for the Teals? Australian voter: I want less foreigners in my country. Kos Samaras: So you want to reopen the car factories?

@feelsdesperate This dynamic plays out just as brutally in arts and literature. The "sort-of-high-status/mediocre-salary" trap is basically the entire publishing industry — credentialed, socially prestigious, and financially precarious. quillette.com/2025/08/19/the…

This is a good example of what radicalizes Mamdani’s base: Ostensibly the type of person who takes this job is going to be sort of smart and well educated (credentialed) but they’re only going to be comfortable financially and lifestyle-wise in NYC if they have a trust fund or it’s a second-income vanity career. You can get off a plane from wherever and barely speak English and make this much driving an Uber. Nurses in NYC can easily make $150k a year. The dynamics of our economy that funnel people into these sort-of-high-status/ mediocre-salary jobs make them insane and then they become Leftists who want to burn everything down.

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This piece is definitive and superb.

"It may take hardball litigation and calculating cynicism to continue the whitewash of Jackson's reputation, but his entourage of sycophants has no shortage of either." - @AndrewHammel1. More here: quillette.com/2026/05/25/nev…

A law enforcement source told journalist Diane Dimond that forensic analysis of Jackson's finances concluded he had paid out roughly $200 million in gifts and hush money to young boys and their families in the years before his 2005 trial.

A Michael Jackson biopic that whitewashes decades of child sexual abuse is set to make $1 billion. A sequel is already in development. @AndrewHammel1 on the story it refuses to tell. 🧵

This the most compelling narrative of Michael Jackson's crimes and the campaign to whitewash his reputation ever written. By @AndrewHammel1 for @quillette quillette.com/2026/05/25/nev…

"Defenders of 'the West' who want the Homeric epics, or other ancient Greek works, treated with the reverence of sacred texts are missing an essential aspect of Western civilisation: its infinite variety, its dynamic creativity and rule-breaking, and its capacity for self-transformation, including the never-ending reinvention of its own stories and myths." - @CathyYoung63 quillette.com/2026/05/25/hom…

In 1950, Orson Welles cast Eartha Kitt — a Black woman — as Helen of Troy on a Paris stage. Nobody called it an erasure of Western civilisation.

In ancient Athens — the so-called Golden Age of Western culture — playwrights turned Odysseus, Homer's clever hero, into a scheming villain. Sophocles made him a cynical opportunist. Euripides made him cruel. Virgil called him the "inventor of wickedness." Dante put Odysseus in Hell and denied him his homecoming entirely.