A roundup of the most engaging recent pieces on the web read by the Pittsburgh Review of Books this week.
“Capitalism’s Long Revolution” from The Nation
“If capital was viewed as a thing and capitalists as people, capitalism was something else.”
“The Serpent in the Garden” from Commonweal Magazine
“Such rightwing conspiracy theories and just-so stories, full of heat and devoid of light, have long cried out for a systematic exploration. Fortunately, we now have A.J.A. Woods’s illuminating new book The Cultural Marxism Conspiracy to connect all the dots.”
“Molière Ex Machina: AI used to create ‘new work’ by beloved French playwright” from The Guardian
“The two-hour play tells the story of a wealthy bourgeois Parisian who, under the instruction of a charlatan astrologer called Pseudoramus, insists his daughter Lucile marry a debt-ridden and elderly wigmaker. While the theme could well have been dreamed up by Molière, the dialogue, music, costumes and scenery were all created with the help of a French AI tool called Le Chat (The Cat).”
“Our Straussian Techocracy” from Liberties
“It’s easy to forget just how far the core values of certain Silicon Valley elites stray from those held by ordinary Americans. Would anyone hire a babysitter who believed she could live forever by uploading her brain to the cloud? “
“The Trouble With Narrative History” from the MIT Review
“Ultimately, the trouble with narrative history — which presents history as a chronologically coherent arc of characters, motives, turning points, and consequences — is that it simply can’t resolve these questions either way. There are too many forces operating on the trajectory of human affairs even to be enumerated. As a result, weighing them against one another is a fool’s errand.”
“Cherry Kearton: The eccentric influence on a young Sir David Attenborough” from BBC Future
“There is, in effect, only one degree of separation between a boy fascinated with the wildlife he saw on a Yorkshire farm in the 1880s, and the natural history documentaries we enjoy watching today: Bevis believes the brothers would have greatly appreciated the effect their films had.”
“How Occultists Remade the World” from Compact
“The supernatural, it would appear, is on the move, and popes and priests aren’t the only ones who have noticed.”
“I’ve Got the Post-Duchamp Blues” from Hyperallergic
“A century later, we’ve kissed our attention spans goodbye, welcomed microplastics into our bloodstreams, and surrendered authorship over almost everything to AI — from cake recipes to war target lists.”
“Chanda Prescod-Weinstein on Cosmic Wonder as Resistance to Despair” from truthout
“Her research spans theoretical physics and Black feminist science studies, and in this book, she takes readers on a cosmic journey that connects neutron stars to poetry, quantum theory to pop culture, and our place in the universe to our struggles here on Earth.”
