A roundup of the most engaging recent pieces on the web read by the Pittsburgh Review of Books this week.
“Gordon S. Wood, eminent scholar of the American Revolution, dies at 92 after being hit by a car” from the AP.
” Many peers regarded the white-haired, mild-looking Wood as the embodiment of the learned, traditional historian, guided by facts rather than ideology.”
“There Is Already a Word for the Deep Moral Failures of AI” from The Atlantic
“Perhaps I shouldn’t be surprised, then, that the critics, living and dead, who capture my unease about the AI revolution—who discuss it with appropriate moral gravity—are or were Christians.”
“What the hit ‘Hedwig and the Angry Inch’ says about Pittsburgh theater attendance” from 90.5 WESA
“As embodied by Pittsburgh-based stage star Treasure Treasure, deliver she does. On a set that’s giving ‘American junkyard’ — truck grill, trash can, toppled McDonald’s sign — Hedwig is by turns venomous, hilarious, venomously hilarious and unsparingly insightful as she tells her story, roasts Tommy and narrates her life-long search for her “other half,” who might be either a he or a she.”
“Anti-Woke, or Just Wounded? A Typology of Two Types of Anti-Woke Intellectuals” from Skeptic
“I see two very different people wearing the same coat. One wants to make the world more reasonable. The other is settling a score.”
“In Defense of Difficult Reading” from the American Scholar
“The winning jolt of the book, in fact, is the way it positions a Great Books defense as natural and important for readers on the political and cultural left, where Kanakia locates herself.”
“What Was AI?” from the Yale Review
“Our folio, then, is a partial, though we hope meaningful, snapshot of what it felt like to watch AI enter our lives: a time capsule of the thinking that literary writers and critics were doing during this strange interval.”
“Reforming Capitalism Is Not Enough” from Jacobin
“I mention it not to flatter you but because that slogan — eight, eight, and eight — is still relevant today. It wasn’t a basic reformist demand; it was a revolutionary claim about what a human life is for. And I want to argue that the whole socialist project is, in the end, a fight over that question.”
“The Singular Power of Persepolis” from the New Republic
“The first thing to say about both Persepolis the 2003 graphic novel and Persepolis the 2007 film is that they are perfect.”
