A roundup of the most engaging recent pieces on the web read by the Pittsburgh Review of Books this week.
“Your Reflection is Not You” from John Paul Bremmer
“Mirrors invite a fascination with the self. To hate yourself or to love yourself is nonetheless to be fascinated.”
Chosen by Jamari Bass
“America’s College Dream Is Dying. Why Is the Campus Novel More Tempting Than Ever?” from Cultured
“At some point in college, I made a vow that I wanted to treat those four years the way an 18th-century white man would have: as a time to ponder, smoke cigars, and bat around ideas, instead of seeing it as a pre-professional training program.”
Chosen by Allison Blair
“Should We Kill One Kind of Owl to Save Another?” from Mother Jones
“Greenwald argues that the barred owl is an invasive species, even if it made its way west due to vast ecosystem shifts wrought by people—’and invasive species are the second leading
cause of extinction.’ But should we punish the barred owl for adapting to a human-created environment while the northern spotted owl has failed to do so?”
Chosen by Riona Duncan
“Fun, Feminine, and Fundamental: In Defense of Frivolity” from Literary Hub
“The frivolous is a splendid excuse. It allows us to partake in stead in the fun of gossip, to enjoy the delights of fashion and fragrance, to devour sugary cookies until our gluttony is sated, the soul fat as a full belly.”
Chosen by Saty Mukherjee
“Imagine an Organism” from Inference
“The advent of various large language models and their successes may make the claims about linguistics and cognition seem plausible, but given their boldness, some skepticism is warranted.”
Chosen by Elliot Polikowski
“How the ‘backwoods Barbie’ Dolly Parton turned self‑aware artifice into authentic artistry” from The Conversation
“But the fact it is her true name pushes us into the performative savviness with which Dolly herself played. Her blondeness became a trademark, as did her pride and tongue-in-cheek
irreverence for her ‘plastic’ image.”
Chosen by Hailey Price
“The University’s Deportable Workers” from Spectre
“Since the earliest inception of colleges in what became the United States, institutions repeatedly sought out students whose political exclusion from the governing polity was precisely what made their education useful: universities could educate them as
missionaries, intermediaries, diplomats, and workers who would extend institutional and state power beyond the boundaries of political membership.”
Chosen by Violet Shields
“Arabic has four words for sadness. Philosophy explains why” from Psyche
“…choosing one word over another involves being precise with their description: ‘This is the exact form of what I’m holding.’ And when that level of precision is reduced to a facile label, it
represents a significant loss of clinical understanding.”
Chosen by Isabel Weaver
“On the Liberal Imagination” from The Point Magazine
“If it makes some rough sense for elected officials in a liberal society to refrain from making prejudicial statements of judgment and value, this is no argument against intellectuals or artists
advancing their own ‘positive doctrines’; in fact, it makes it all the more necessary that they do so.”
Chosen by Stephen Malkin
“How to Talk about Murder” from The Yale Review
“When we are perverse, we turn not only against our better judgment but also against what are apparently our desires.”
Chosen by Morgan Tarr
“Trump Administration Dismantles Beloved Kennedy Center Sculpture” from Artforum
“Wednesday, September 2, 2026 will forever be known as the day
the United States government tore down a piece of public art at the behest of a petulant crybaby. But it won’t be the last.”
Chosen by Casandra Skebeck
“How L’Rain tried to smash the cycle of time” from Paste
“She remains a singularity, perhaps, but I see… an insular world of her own making rendered external, re-shaping what each listener’s world can sound and look and feel and smell and taste like in the process. In transforming herself, there is the very real possibility that it will mold a small piece of someone else, even if it has to move around a steadfast core identity.”
Chosen by Alexander Johnson
