A roundup of the most engaging recent pieces on the web read by the Pittsburgh Review of Books this week.
“Think Nothing of It” from The Baffler
“There’s an implicit assumption behind this techno-optimistic historical narrative, and it’s now being drilled harder than ever: This is the unavoidable next stage in technological evolution, so you may as well just accept it.”
“A New Jersey Teen Finds Treasure, and More, in Abandoned Storage Units” from the New York Times
“While some teenagers hang out after school, playing Fortnite or shooting hoops, Michael has taken up a more enterprising hobby.”
“Flowing Against Fascism” from Religion Dispatches
“I am in no way suggesting that theory can fix the dissolution of American democracy we are watching happen in real time. If that were true, I’d spend all my time writing in my 5th floor office instead of dodging pepper spray on main roads.”
“The Manosphere Is Too Online for Louis Theroux” from The New Republic
“Although grimmer in subject matter, these films operated on the same basic principle of Weird Weekends: that Theroux was an eminently trustworthy, gregarious fellow who would give his subjects a fair shake. One imagines many of them were not always thrilled with the results.”
“The Number You Have Dialed” from Poetry Magazine
“This poem I’ve been trying to write—the lake, the pills, the last time I saw my brother alive—is maybe the same poem I’m always trying to write. I’m sure others have experienced this: how everything, after a particular type of loss, is imbued with elegy.”
“Antisemitism’s Afterlives” from the Boston Review
“Antisemitism is thus a particular kind of movement—an organized intervention into particular political crises—that seeks to rid the modern state of its internal other, exemplified by the figure of the unassimilable Jew who threatens the organic unity of the new polity.”
“In Praise of Difficult Poetry” from The Los Angeles Review of Books
But over the course of reading and teaching quite a lot of poetry over the years, an alarming pattern has endured: white-guy poets are often still permitted, if not encouraged, to write challenging, even esoteric, verse, with the expectation that it is edifying and a sign of artistic depth, but marginalized writers are often discouraged from doing the same.
“There’s No Substitute For Reading: A Roundtable With Four Literary Magazine Editors” from Alia Hanna Habib’s Substack
Below is a roundtable interview with Kiara Barrow, co-found and co-editor of The Drift, Meghan O’Rourke, executive editor of The Yale Review, Lisa Borst, co-editor of n+1 and Anastasia Berg, editor of The Point.
“Wittgenstein’s Apocalypse” from Commonweal Magazine
“When Wittgenstein referred to the ‘beginning of the end of humanity,’ he was not envisioning sci-fi cataclysms on the order of The Matrix or The Terminator or even Dr. Strangelove. He was referring to the end of humanity not primarily in terms of its biological survival, but in terms of what he called the ‘form of life’ we inhabit.”
“International, Global, Universal Poetry Month: Seven Poetry Books to Read This April” from LitHub
“A whole month dedicated to poetry is a nice idea, I’ll admit. But doesn’t poetry deserve more than that? Why limit ourselves to the National—why not think bigger, with an International Poetry Month, a Global Poetry Month, a Universal Poetry Month? Or why not concentrate on poetry that too often escapes notice, with a Local Poetry Month, an Independent-Press Poetry Month, a Poetry in Translation Month, an Uncollected Poetry Month? (If we brainstorm only a few more months, we could have a whole Poetry Year going.)”
