A roundup of the most engaging recent pieces on the web read by the Pittsburgh Review of Books this week.
“Why Were So Many Rappers Betting on the Midterms?” from Pitchfork
“More than 35 years since Chuck D rapped ‘Our freedom of speech is freedom of death,’ since the spit-in-the-face-of-a-cop rage of Efil4zaggin, it feels like rappers getting paid to
blow their paychecks on an app that is completely gamifying society is the new normal. Obviously, nobody ever expected 42 Dugg and YG to be shining examples of virtuosity, and it’s not like members of Public Enemy and N.W.A. haven’t shown their whole ass over the last few decades, but still, it seems particularly bleak.”
Chosen by Jamari Bass
“Am I One of the Last Shakespeareans?” from The Chronicle of Higher Education
“The dearth of positions for Shakespeareans led me to ask Microsoft Copilot, the large language model my university subscribes to, if I was part of the last generation of Shakespeareans. It responded, ‘Probably not, but it feels that way to many people in the humanities.’ How did the chatbot know what Shakespeareans feel?”
Chosen by Allison Blair
“How Édouard Manet’s Black Cat Became a Symbol of Modernity” from Hyperallergic
“The black cat became a fitting mascot for modernity, with its appetite for provocation and its refusal to be domesticated.”
Chosen by Alexander Johnson
“Beauty Is Everywhere. But What Is It For?” from The MIT Press Reader
“Looking at the beauty of the stars, a sunset, or a mountain range — you’d really have to stretch the argument to say humans benefit from living in the presence of things like that. There’s too much beauty to be accounted for by simple utility.”
Chosen by Saty Mukherjee
“Trumpism Is Running Out of Gas” from Jacobin
“To reiterate something that cannot be repeated enough: Trump has never been particularly popular. So it was wrongheaded for shocked liberal commentators to throw up their hands and declare the country lost, both in 2016 and 2024. In order to consolidate its hold on the countryʼs politics, the Trump project ultimately needed to mobilize a larger popular coalition — something it has consistently proven unable to do.”
Chosen by Elliot Polikowski
“What Does Hollywood’s Recent Obsession With Monster Sex Say About Our Desires?” from Cultured
“In a time when the manosphere proliferates, the monster romance provides a safe alternative to a relationship with a real human. He’s a protector, chiefly from other men, in both the fantasy and the real world. The fact that the monster paramour has made it all the way from guarded fanfiction sites to the multi-billion-dollar film industry shows just how atomized and detached we are as a society.”
Chosen by Hailey Price
“This Halloween, amateur astronomers may be in for a dwarf planet treat” from Science News
“It’s really big. It’s damn huge,” Deen says. “No matter what you call it, it’s still the biggest thing we’ve found in the entire solar system in 19 years.”
Chosen by Violet Shields
“Blame It on Bibi” from Equator
“Historical amnesia is pervasive in Israeli political debate, particularly in the way the Zionist centre and centre-left recount their own history.”
Chosen by Morgan Tarr
