A roundup of the most engaging recent pieces on the web read by the Pittsburgh Review of Books this week.
“The Harvard Law Student Who Sparked Boston’s Underground Rock Revolution” from The MIT Press Reader
“Part of Ray Riepen’s genius when he started WBCN is that he didn’t hire professional radio people. He found kids, like me, who loved the music and had a bit of radio experience.”
Chosen by Jamari Bass
“The Nonfiction Book Market is Collapsing” from Dear Head of Mine
“The collapse of nonfiction is less a “male reading crisis” than a massive breakdown in the social fabric of trusting education, expertise, or any authority other than follower count and force of personality.”
Chosen by Allison Blair
“What Happened in Lancaster?” in Columbia Journalism Review
“One evening in March, LNP staff hosted a listening session at a Mennonite church in Landisville, Pennsylvania, fielding requests such as that of a bespectacled man in a flannel shirt who said he was tired of reading op-eds by ‘retired guys.’”
Chosen by Riona Duncan
“Kelela wants her songs to feel as complex as real life” from Fader
“There’s a rhetoric around like, “Black people invented so much. Black people invented everything.” But what does that actually mean? What does that look like? What did White people do in response to that? That’s a very important part of the conversation, and you will be lost when you’re looking at the current context if you don’t know that origin story.”
Chosen by Alexander Johnson
“Eugenics and the Nihilism of Law-and-Order Politics” from the Los Angeles Review of Books
“Each of us needs to be made to open our eyes to what happens behind closed doors when marginalized people, already living in the absence of a social safety net, encounter institutions skilled
at justifying the deaths of racial minorities, the “unfit,” and the unhealthy—people that were “going to die anyway.”
Chosen by Saty Mukherjee
“We Can’t Let AI Writing Take Over the Internet” from Derek Thompson
“The Great AI Flood is inundating even the more respectable corners of the landscape of letters.”
Chosen by Eliot Polikowski
“The Annihilating Now: An Interview with Gerry Feehily” from 3A.M. Magazine
“Death destroys us biologically. Fashion destroys us in another way: by continually making the new old. Our clothes, tastes, identities, desires — everything falls into obsolescence.”
Chosen by Isabel Weaver
“Gloria Steinem’s Life Between Art and Activism” from the New Republic
“Steinem was smooth, not spiky; there is a reason she became the figurehead of women’s liberation and not, say, Kate Millett.”
Chosen by Hailey Price
