Arts & Culture
At Money on the Left, we insist that money is a cultural phenomenon. In this sense, all our work has a cultural dimension. However, the contributions to our project that most directly address culture and the arts are collected on this page.
Weird Epistemologies of Money and Trust in Fitzgerald, Ford, and Larsen; or, Isn’t Money Weird?
By Rob Hawkes What follows is a slightly expanded version of a talk I gave at the ‘Weird Modernisms’ conference at Loughborough University, UK (1-4 July 2026), a collaboration between the UK-based British Association for Modernist Studies (BAMS) and the US-based Modernist Studies Association (MSA). ‘Weird Modernisms’ brought over 400 delegates together in the midst…
(It’s Not) All About Olivia: A Study in Citations, Retroactive & Otherwise
by Jonathan Haynes A different girl now, but there’s nothing new — Olivia Rodrigo, “déjà vu” (written by Olivia Rodrigo, Daniel Nigro, Taylor Swift, Jack Antonoff & St. Vincent, and everybody’s team) The Taylor Swift–Olivia Rodrigo “feud” is bullshit. It makes me angry — and, I’ll admit, it breaks my heart — to watch the Livies…
Invisible Republic (With Apologies to Greil Marcus)
By Jonathan Haynes Given the miserable state of American life generally, here’s a thing that astonishes me. Two of the best homegrown popular artworks I can think of came out recently, within months of each other, are enormously popular, and are political (I beg you to please stay with me here): Olivia Rodrigo’s You Seem Pretty…
I Think You’re What’s Wrong With Me: On Influence, Absorption, and Olivia Rodrigo’s ‘You Seem Pretty Sad for a Girl So in Love’
By Jonathan Haynes Watch what happens when the reviews of Olivia Rodrigo’s third album — a concept record that tracks a single romance from first date to bitter aftermath — go looking for its value. Almost without exception they find it somewhere other than in Rodrigo: in the older male band she references, in the…
A Dvar Torah on the Subject of Democratic Public Finance
By Anna Minsky The following speech was read on March 28th at a progressive New York City synagogue, a guest sermon by one of the congregants. In the Jewish tradition, each week we read one part (a “parsha”) of the Torah (the first five books of the bible) aloud in Hebrew. Then someone, often a…
Animal Spirits and Public Promises: Phantom Beavers and the Politics of Monetary Design
By Rob Hawkes There is a spectre haunting Nigel Farage. The spectre of a beaver. On 11 March 2026, the Bank of England announced that, following a public consultation, its next series of banknotes will feature images of the UK’s wildlife in place of historical figures, which have adorned our currency since the 1970s. Mr.…
The Ontology of the Monetary Image: Référance and Reconstruction
By Will Beaman Money is often introduced in critical theory as a problem. It appears as the medium that makes unlike things commensurable by reducing them to sameness, the abstraction that removes social life from the conditions that give it substance, or the sign that circulates by displacing the relations on which it depends. In…
Fiscal Chronotopes: #ZcavengerHunt, the Zetro Card, and the New Finance Franchise
By Will Beaman This essay is lightly adapted from a talk delivered at the 2026 American Comparative Literature Association conference. It contributes to a growing body of endogenous money theorization that we at Money on the Left call Democratic Public Finance (DPF). DPF begins from the distributed and publicly mediated character of political-economic life, approaching…
The Challenge of Reporting on Trump (Parody)
By Gideon Fairchild Editor’s note: The author is a fictional composite of several real guys with real New York publishing jobs. I have been told—gently, as one tells a sleepwalker not to step off the roof—that I should “just write about Trump.” As if it were that simple. As if Trump were an object you…
Touch Grass, Touchscreens, and Public Design
By Will Beaman A small design story from May 2025 has been making the rounds on my newsfeed, about how car manufacturers are re-embracing physical buttons after years of migrating controls onto touchscreens. The given reason is practical, not nostalgic: glass-only interfaces increase cognitive load and reduce safety, and safety-rating criteria are beginning to incentivize…
One Battle After Another
In this episode of the Superstructure podcast, Scott Ferguson is joined by independent film scholar Jonathan Haynes to discuss Paul Thomas Anderson’s acclaimed new film, One Battle After Another. The conversation centers on the film’s contribution to popular political cinema under the authoritarian violence of the second Trump administration. Scott and Jonathan affirm One Battle’s…
The Activist Humanist with Caroline Levine
We speak with Caroline Levine, Ryan Professor of the Humanities in the Department of Literatures in English at Cornell University, about her important book The Activist Humanist: Form and Method in the Climate Crisis (Princeton University Press, 2023). Building on the theory developed in her award-winning book, Forms: Whole, Rhythm, Hierarchy, Network, Levine’s The Activist…
Why Credit’s Due: Reclaiming Pride in Boro
By Rob Hawkes and Robyn Ollett The summer of 2025, like the summer of 2024 before it, has been one of heightened tensions surrounding the issues of race and immigration in the UK. This year, Union Flags and St George’s Crosses have adorned innumerable lamp posts, motorway bridges, roundabouts, and zebra crossings – ostensibly as…
Jim Crow to Trump: Reconsidering the Psychological Wage
by Will Beaman W.E.B. Du Bois’s “psychological wage” has long been treated as a metaphor. In Black Reconstruction, he describes how white workers, denied meaningful economic uplift, found compensation in racial status. Many have read this as a bribe, or as a symbolic reward for class betrayal—something less real than money, but no less effective…
A Forgotten Letter to W.E.B. Du Bois: Monetary Populism and the Scapegoating of Black Political Life
by Will Beaman In July 1934, W.E.B. Du Bois received a letter from an Atlanta resident named Gus Reich. We are excited to share both Reich’s letter and Du Bois’s short reply below. A lay theologian and self-styled monetary reformer, Reich in his letter proposes a spiritual plan for economic renewal. He urges Du Bois…
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