A roundup of the most engaging recent pieces on the web read by the Pittsburgh Review of Books this week.
“What Makes American Architecture American?” from The Nation
“What separates the history of architecture in the United States from that of Europe is essentially a matter of scale, speed, and spectacle.”
“The Huckster Shaman Who Founded a Cult” from The New York Times
“Does anyone under 50 know who Carlos Castaneda was?”
“Why We Need More Woman-Centric Retellings of The Odyssey“ from LitHub
“The Odyssey hasn’t survived because of what it tells us about the ancient world or about the long shadow of Western patriarchy, but because of what it continues to tell us about ourselves, today, here.”
“A Homerist Reacts to Christopher Nolan’s ‘The Odyssey'” from Hyperallergic
“This is not Homer’s Odyssey. Let’s get that out of the way.”
“‘The Odyssey’ Rocks the Boat of History” from PopMatters
“Almost unbelievably, Christopher Nolan mostly succeeds in this insane endeavor, which is far more complex than simply visualizing Odysseus’ epic mishaps on his 10-year journey home to Ithaca.”
“The Secret Lives of Objects” from Electric Literature
“In that sense, Artifacts is a form of archaeology by other means. It excavates memory as much as ruins, illusions as much as evidence.”
“‘Ravelstein’ Revisited” from The Bulwark
“A quarter century later, we can take this final novel of a fine novelist less personally.”
“What Do We Actually Mean When We Talk About Class?” from Jacobin
“Some of this just reflects the usual bad faith and motivated reasoning that infects any sort of political discourse. But some of it also just reflects the slipperiness of the term.”
