Welcome to the Indie Scholar Review for Saturday, May 30, 2026.
In today's issue:
Stefan Collini on the UK university system as a near-accomplished ruin
James Marriott's The New Dark Ages and whether literary studies invented its own crisis
Geoff Shullenberger on Lukács and Silicon Valley's faith in the Singularity
A book on AI corrupting truth turns out to be corrupted by AI
A lost Leonora Carrington painting found with her psychiatrist's heirs after 80 years
Modern Intellectual History's most-read list and the field's non-Western turn
All right, without further ado…
Top Stories
Shullenberger applies Lukácsian reification to Singularity belief. Managing editor of Compact and former professor at NYU (and Indie Scholars alumnus!), Geoff Shullenberger argues that tech executives, not the general public, are the primary believers in the AI Singularity mythology, and that this belief constitutes the latest form of commodity fetishism as theorized by György Lukács, primarily in his essay 1923 essay "Reification and the Consciousness of the Proletariat." Lukács sees reification as a structuring principle of life under capitalism, which transforms all human relations, activities, and consciousness into fixed, thing-like forms.
Katie Thornton traces Esperanto's political suppression in Harper's. The June 2026 longform essay follows L. L. Zamenhof's creation of Esperanto in the 1880s through its near-adoption by the League of Nations in 1920. French pressure blocked this adoption. The essay also covers the systematic suppression of Esperanto under Stalin, Franco, and Hitler. It frames the language as a political project with internationalism that made it a target of 20th-century authoritarian states.
Wyatt Williams on weather modification as modern myth-making. The essay opens with a radar tower in northeast Oklahoma City on the night of July 6, 2025. A flash flood killed campers at a Texas riverside camp that same night. Williams's Harper's June 2026 essay argues that cloud seeding, geoengineering, and Doppler systems alter weather and rewrite the foundational narrative of humanity's relationship to nature.
Modern Intellectual History's May most-read list signals a non-Western turn. Daniel Steinmetz-Jenkins shares the Modern Intellectual History most-read list. Top articles cover Thoreau's labor-as-poiesis, Shabbir Ahmad Usmani's Islamic-democratic vision for Pakistan, Yugoslav socialist intellectuals, José Carlos Mariátegui's Peruvian Marxism, and a methodological critique of post-structuralism.
Charlotte Klein reveals nonfiction publishers lack structural defense against AI-fabricated quotes. New York magazine's May 28 report covers the discovery regarding Steven Rosenbaum's The Future of Truth (Simon & Schuster). This book warns about AI's distortion of truth and contained more than half a dozen misattributed or fabricated quotes apparently generated by AI. Klein's broader point is that nonfiction publishers bear no contractual obligation to fact-check manuscripts. This leaves the industry structurally exposed.
Leonora Carrington, Figuras fantásticas a caballo (2011)
Stefan Collini on the University Crisis as Accomplished Fact
In "Squadrons of Pigs," Stefan Collini's essay in the London Review of Books (June 4), the longtime critic of university policy steps back from warning and into inventory. Collini documents a system in structural collapse. The Office for Students projects 45% of UK higher education providers will face deficits in 2025–26. Twenty-eight modern languages programs have closed since 2014. Only around 10 universities still offer the full range of modern language teaching. The bulk of undergraduate teaching in many departments now falls to staff on poorly paid short-term contracts with no career progression. His earlier writing framed these issues as warnings. The current essay treats them as a "near-accomplished fact."
The analytic shift carries a counter-intuitive observation. Oxford and Cambridge have best preserved internal academic governance because of their peculiar collegiate structures. These structures proved resistant to the top-down managerialism that transformed the post-1992 sector. The essay's central target is the destruction of democratic self-governance within institutions. Collini argues this process has no political coalition willing to reverse it. He is blunt on the probability of meaningful reform. "We'll see squadrons of pigs in the sky before that happens."
Odds and Ends
Leonora Carrington's lost Villa Pilar (1940) surfaces after 80 years with her psychiatrist's heirs. The Surrealist painted the Santander sanatorium where Dr. Luis Morales treated her. She populated it with breasted human-animal hybrids including lions, leopards, peacocks, and Cape Buffalo. She gave the painting to him upon leaving. It goes on display at London's Freud Museum on July 1, 2026. Morales stated late in life that she "was not mad."
@neoagrarian predicts an AI-enabled "house of cards" academy after Boomers retire. The anonymous account argues that once the senior cohort exits, AI will allow underqualified scholars to produce the appearance of scholarship at scale, removing the institutional quality floor that currently keeps the structure upright.
Jon Day reviews Benjamin Myers's novel Jesus Christ Kinski in the LRB. The novel centers on the German actor Klaus Kinski performing a notorious one-man show about Christ in 1971 Berlin, framed through an autofictional narrator. Day's review uses it to probe the line between charisma, madness, and genuine artistic possession.
Leonora Carrington, Villa Pilar (1940)
"Canon Fire," published in The Monthly (Australia, May 2026), discusses the growing debate around James Marriott's forthcoming book The New Dark Ages. This book grew out of his viral Substack essay "The Dawn of the Post-Literate Society." Marriott claims that smartphones have destroyed the capacity for sustained reading at scale. This leaves a civilization nominally literate yet functionally unable to engage complex prose. The essay cites an OECD report that found literacy "declining or stagnating" in many developed countries. One study found a significant proportion of college students unable to parse the opening page of Bleak House. The New Yorker declared the "end of the English major" in 2023. This book is the latest proof that the institutions are increasingly reliant on the independent outside for generating ideas worth publishing.
Literary studies have been uncertain about their own purpose since their initial institutional formation. This piece suggests the current crisis is partly specific to the discipline.
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