A roundup of the most engaging recent pieces on the web read by the Pittsburgh Review of Books this week.
“Anna Holmes on Saying No and Yes” from Columbia Journalism Review
“But I also just don’t care as much anymore, because the older I get, the less I give a shit as to whether someone deems me difficult. My problem is not that I’m being asked for things that I have to say no to in any major way. It’s that I keep saying yes.”
Chosen by Jamari Bass
“Jonathan Franzen: ‘It’s still mysterious to me that I was angry for so long’” from The Guardian
“In the age of social media, AI and the endless scroll, TV has started to look like a “friend.”
Chosen by Allison Blair
“The End of Upward Mobility” from NOEMA
“Applied to our moment, his question — Who controls the instruments of production, and what class does that control create? — is discomfiting. If artificial intelligence becomes the decisive instrument of modern production, then those who control it become the new ruling class.”
Chosen by Riona Duncan
“A Humanism of Bad News” from the Los Angeles Review of Books
“ Far from being purveyors of gloom, irresolution, or misguided do-goodism, both Chekhov and Kouchner—these physicians turned philosophers—aspired to ameliorate the worst conditions of modern life without aspiring for utopian perfection, which always seemed to backslide into catastrophe.”
Chosen by Saty Mukherjee
“AI will not make mathematicians obsolete” from Inference Magazine
“For mathematicians, especially those just beginning their careers, such announcements raise an unsettling question: will there still be a place for us? Answering it requires a closer look at what the machine has accomplished and what remains to be understood.”
Chosen by Elliot Polikowski
“For the Love of Money” from The Baffler
“The Main Street Millionaires are every bit as greedy and as cunning as the so-called fat cats we’re accustomed to reviling. We just haven’t paid them as much attention.”
Chosen by Hailey Price
“We Need to Talk About the Apocalypse” from The New Republic
“That’s what gives you this kind of chaotic, amorphous style that is obsessed with the end times, but can never quite pin down what they mean by the end times.”
Chosen by Violet Shields
“The Dystopia We Live In: Sarah Anderson’s ‘Fallow’” from The Chicago Review of Books
“The book is not speculative fiction. Everything that does happen could be happening right now. And yet, there is a sense that Natalie lives in a dark dystopia, only here we can recognize it as the world we live in.”
Chosen by Cassandra Skebeck
“He was probably right” from Aeon
“You would think a man whose private and public worlds are collapsing so dramatically would hardly have the focus to write philosophy.”
Chosen by Morgan Tarr
“Borrowed Tongues: Writing From Another Country” from Full Stop
“If one has not been directly affected by the people wielding that tongue, its edges don’t feel as sharp. The language, if not its history, becomes a tool among others to effectively communicate one’s realities or the realities of another people one is attempting to represent who are themselves, too, removed from that language’s direct incision. If the language of a particular form of colonial contact is its dagger, then shifting to another tongue is a way to shift the blade from making contact with the most vulnerable parts of oneself.”
Chosen by Isabel Weaver
“Moby-Dick and the Indefinite Sublime” from The Yale Review
“In less religious terms, Burke the empiricist seems to have lent Melville his materialism. ‘Methinks,’ Ishmael cautions, ‘that in looking at things spiritual, we are too much like oysters observing the sun through the water, and thinking that thick water the thinnest of air.’”
Chosen by Stephen Makin
