A roundup of the most engaging recent pieces on the web read by the Pittsburgh Review of Books this week.
“Nonfiction Publishing, Under Threat, Is More Important Than Ever” from The Nation
“These developments suggest a rough future for a certain kind of writing: nonfiction that’s based on reportage more than on personal experience or celebrity—a.k.a. long fact, literary nonfiction, or narrative nonfiction. The form is as essential as it is hard to define. Nonfiction books of this kind are the basis for much of our understanding of the world we live in, and their impact extends far beyond bookstores, book review sections, libraries, and universities.”
“Geist in the Machine” from Aeon
“The conflict between these extremes is taking a new form as glimmers of a soul appear in the latest wave of artificial intelligence – large language models (LLMs) like ChatGPT, Claude and Gemini.”
“Critique of ‘Agentic’ Reason” from Compact’s Substack
“For decades, the idea that you could make things in the world while also looking inward was common enough in Silicon Valley, whose early culture drew heavily from Northern California’s post-’60s spiritualism. But evidently, this notion has fallen out of fashion.”
“I Love the Em Dash—Too Bad If AI Does Too” from The Walrus
“I love em dashes. Even on a superficial level, the sleek, suave em dash feels superior to the homogenous barrage of dots and commas that otherwise constitute the punctuation department of the English language.”
“The Elusive Poet of Desire” from The Yale Review
“But familiarity is not intimacy, and the ease with which we can call up Cavafy’s elegant handwriting on our laptops is deceptive.”
“The New Chicago Renaissance: Nathan Hill on Halle Butler’s ‘The New Me’” from The Chicago Review of Books
“It explains why, for example, there’s very little Chicago in this Chicago novel.”
“Doomers in Love” from The Point
“’Heteropessimism,’ coined in 2019 by the critic Asa Seresin, has become a shorthand and sometimes a rallying cry for many who are uneasily straight.”
“The Renaissance of the Trans Magazine” from Electric Literature
“A trans magazine can create a magnetic field, drawing people together into community.”
“Defeat as Method” from Cabinet Magazine
“In a letter, Shariati outlined this vision to Fanon. Fanon’s reply expressed a familiar hesitation, the same reservation he had voiced toward the Négritude movement. He regarded the pursuit of ‘one’s roots,’ whether in religion, ethnicity, or race, as a misguided path to liberation. His orientation was forward-looking.”
