A roundup of the most engaging recent pieces on the web read by the Pittsburgh Review of Books this week.
“True Confessions” from The Baffler
“But in the American writer Meghan O’Gieblyn’s latest book, the memoir Will and Attention, the soul, and the vast human consciousness and humanistic intellectual tradition for which this word functions as a shorthand, is not something so easily dismissed.”
“Why Our Obsession With Extending Lifespans Is a Distraction” from Jacobin
“There is something deeply perverse about a society that can investigate whether the wealthy might live beyond the ordinary limits of aging yet tolerates conditions that leave millions debilitated long before old age.”
“Let’s Keep it for Ourselves” from the Los Angeles Review of Books
“If poetry provided OX’s primary content, eros was its motivating method.”
“Reading is Not Dying” from The New Republic
“Nothing about mass literacy should be taken for granted. It is deeply strange, to begin with, that we have written language at all.”
“All the Write Stuff” from the Literary Review
“Build a life around the novel and you can’t help but feel the ground swell and pitch under your feet.”
“What is Literary Substack?” from Paroxysms
“Here, in miniature form, we have the posting economy of literary Substack laid out for us. The amateurs are facing off against the professionals, the latest in a long chain of binary schisms that have riven the literary world—ancients versus moderns, scholars versus gentlemen, autodidacts versus university-based Literature academics.”
“The Vanity of Kings” from The Atlantic
“No people on Earth have done monuments more ambitiously and lastingly than the ancient Egyptians.”
