A roundup of the most engaging recent pieces on the web read by the Pittsburgh Review of Books this week.
“The Arch is Atrocious” from The Atlantic
“If President Trump’s ambition is realized, a triumphal arch will thrust its way into this murmuring conversation like a boastful bore crashing into a huddle of friends swapping stories about a loved one at a wake.”
“Ozymandias” from Slate
“The statue is perhaps the most brazen expression of Trump’s one-of-a-kind hubris, and if you consider the record, that’s really saying something.”
“Why did the press ignore a gathering of the world’s leading fascists?” from the Redoubt
“It would be easier to dismiss this Hitlerian greeting as an awkward gesture — as some did when X’s owner, Elon Musk, gave it at Trump’s 2025 inauguration — were it not selected and shared by a man on his way to a racial-purity conference.”
“Our tech overlords are planning for conscious AI to conquer the cosmos. What could go wrong?” from the Guardian
“It would be a mistake to understand these weird worldviews as an ultimately harmless take by techies who grew up on a diet of dystopian science fiction.”
“Superhuman Fantasies” from The Point
“Rather than solving the problem of suffering and revealing eternal truths, Nietzsche foresaw science uncovering the limits of human knowledge. Science would lead not to an understanding of the fundamental truths of nature, but rather to the realization that humanity is wandering through an endless hall of mirrors.”
“Pleasure, parody and propaganda: rethinking the art of illustration in a new history of the genre” from The Art Newspaper
“Illustrations are important not for what they are, but for what they refer to: a passage in a book, an event, a cultural or a natural fact. We do not admire them the way we would a painting in a museum. Instead, we read them, claims D.B. Dowd, a professor of design and American culture studies at Washington University in St Louis.”
“Gad Saad Is Very Mad That His Books Are Bad and Sad” from Jacobin
“A year into Donald Trump’s second administration, many have hypothesized that intellectual conservatism may now be on life support. Saad’s book constitutes the moment the plug was pulled and the patient can officially be declared brain-dead. There is nothing even remaining for the Left to argue against.”
“Hidden History: This nonbinary minister was a hero of the American Revolution” from the Advocate
“Over the course of the American Revolution, Universal Friend gathered followers for a sect called the Society of Universal Friends. The young minister seemed to embody the possibilities offered by the revolution, especially the right to total self-determination.”
