A roundup of what the Pittsburgh Review of Book’s class is reading the fifth week of January 2026:
“The Rough Joy” from Van Magazine
“The laissez-faire attitude that purges any sense of immediacy from Congolese life can feel incongruous against the world of classical music, which operates on principles of exactitude and diligence. As a Congolese friend explained to me, ‘You Europeans have the watches; we Congolese have the time.’”
Chosen by Ursula Sturgeon
“Half the Battle” from The Baffler
“The key question may not be whether a computer can be as ‘intelligent’ as a doctoral student, or even as smart as a fifth grader, but rather: What image of the world are these tech firms trying to create?”
Chosen by Kathryn Anne Langley
“Woke Obsessions” from The Ideas Letter
“Desire and Fate is probably better understood as the lament of a writer and thinker who feels exasperated by the state of the culture in which his mother, her many legendary acquaintances, and he himself once flourished.”
Chosen by Asia Thompson
“The People vs. ICE” from New York Magazine’s Intelligencer
“The impulse to drive hostile invaders from your home lives in your body in a place too deep to name. I finally bought a gas mask. You should get one too.”
Chosen by Suzy Liss
“The Peculiar Magic of a Winter Snowstorm” from The New York Times
“In a short essay about the cold from 2011, the poet Charles Simic writes, “If only Plato and Socrates had to scrape the ice off their windshields. …” How different might things be if, instead
of lazing under a plane tree with Phaedrus at high noon in the Grecian summer, Socrates and the beautiful boy had trudged through knee-deep snow. Would they have talked, as they did,
about love, language and memory, about the myth of the Muses who were so moved by humans singing that they turned them into cicadas? I doubt it, but we’ll never know.”
Chosen by Elias Fox
“The Narrative Genius of Heated Rivalry” from The New Republic
“Its physicality, its brutality, the virtuosity of its skaters, the precise and perilous movements of the sticks, the operatic anger, the balletic movement—these are all things that are visible only if
you are in the audience, face pressed up against the glass.”
Chosen by Paul Beer
“Letter from Minnesota: We are Going to Win” from Literary Hub
“We all know that the only thing that separates us from Renee Good and Alex Pretti is that we have not yet found ourselves on
the wrong side of guns held by men coward enough to pull the trigger.”
Chosen by Sofia Johnson
“A Piece of Work” from The Baffler
“The vanity photos continued but were joined by pseudo-Art Deco, AI-generated illustrations of white workers with slogans like ‘Blue Collar Boom’ and ‘Build America’s Future.’”
Chosen by Sabikun Mazumder
“The AI-Powered Web is Eating Itself” from Noema
“Think of it like making a photocopy of a photocopy, again and again. Each generation keeps the bold strokes and loses the faint details. Both trends, in turn, weaken our ability to verify information independently. In the long run, this will leave people relying on systems that amplify errors, bias and informational blind spots, especially in niche domains and low-visibility communities.
Chosen by Maggie Hua
“Dreams of the far Right” from Aeon
“Yet, the diversity of problems that tend to be associated with the (presumed) lack or weakness of community should give us pause and make us ask not only if it is ‘the community’ that is seemingly universally needed and desired, but what kind of community, and also – what is meant by ‘community’?”
Chosen by Jennie Tian
“The Marathon Moby-Dick Reading is a Radical Act” from The Atlantic
“Coming and going as I am, nevertheless, in my blue-whale heart, I remain attached to the collective, to the shared journey, the shared imagining, all of us with our copies of the book, all
of us enmeshed in the great and groaning text.”
Chosen by Riona Duncan
“Jimmy Carter and the Problem of Celebrity Painting” from Artforum
“How close are we now to lucrative evangelical expressionism, to painting as showbiz more craven than Bill Clinton’s saxophone? Painting—which some of us love the most—can also play as the worst.”
Chosen by Rahaf AlMubarak
“Sinophobic Sinophilia” from N+1
“In Wang’s picture, the US and China appear as mirror images. One builds too much, too fast; the other too little, too slowly. The rhetorical pattern of this odd-couple comparison has a seductive symmetry: for every function, an equal and opposite dysfunction. Nor, as apples-to-oranges maneuvers go, is the contrast unrevealing.”
Chosen by Jinze Mao
