A roundup of the most engaging recent pieces on the web read by the Pittsburgh Review of Books this week.
“They Wanted Me for My Blackness. Then the Calls Stopped.” from The New Republic
“For a season, Black was not merely a race or an identity (…) Black was insight, credibility, perspective, access, urgency, and, in certain rooms, capital. Then it wasn’t.”
Chosen by Jamari Bass
“Kiss The Ring: Richard Wagner’s Opera Festival in the Age of AI” from The Paris Review
“Bayreuth is locked into a sadomasochistic relationship with its attendees: reinterpreting Wagner is both the central imperative of any new Bayreuth production and certain to disappoint the festival audience, which craves nothing more than the now-impossible traditional staging.”
Chosen by Allison Blair
“‘I Like My Big Rat Wife’: Meet the People Using Chatbots to Write Custom Fiction” from Wired
“A possible end state might be a tiered publishing system, where a large quantity of AI-generated books and self-generated fiction gratifies the median reader, and a smaller rung of human-authored fiction feeds a niche appetite for experimentation in form or narrative ambiguity.”
Chosen by Riona Duncan
“Tom Cole on Autofiction, Shame-Based Writing, and Being an Unreliable Narrator” from LitHub
“And when I feel the kind of heat that tends to accompany my shame or embarrassment, I know I am onto something that should be included, even if it makes me uncomfortable. These are the sections I find audiences connect to in a more profound way.”
Chosen by Saty Mukherjee
“The Falling Man” from Esquire
“The photographer is no stranger to history; he knows it is something that happens later. In the actual moment history is made, it is usually made in terror and confusion, and so it is
up to people like him—paid witnesses—to have the presence of mind to attend to its manufacture.”
Chosen by Elliot Polikowski
“9/11’s Unlearned Lessons” from The Boston Review
“Part of the domestic War on Terror’s power stemmed from the fact that people across the political spectrum decried such associations, allowing racialized fear to take hold in their
absence.”
Chosen by Hailey Price
“Math Can’t Go On Like This” from The Atlantic
“OpenAI said its swarm of 10,000 AI agents solved the problem in
less than four days.”
Chosen by Cassandra Skebeck
“Radical Ideas for Fixing the Nonfiction Book Market” from Dear Head of Mine
“A notion that is at the very crux of the cultural pressure that book publishing is battling.”
Chosen by Morgan Tarr
“Think of the parable of a frog in boiling water. That’s us dithering as the ‘unprecedented‘ weather becomes more extreme” from The Guardian
“ One place to start is with the words we use to describe what is happening. ‘Awesome’ became ordinary because we kept using it for ordinary things – such as warm bread and marmalade. Climate extremes are different: the events themselves haven’t become ordinary, even if our experience of them is becoming
more familiar.“
Chosen by Isabelle Weaver
“‘Deciding That Things Are Too Hard for Students Is a Self-Fulfilling Prophecy” from The Chronicle of Higher Education
“I really don’t like that term, ‘public writing,’ because it implies that there is some distinction to be made between one’s ‘real’ work and the other stuff, the so-called public-facing stuff. I’ve never wanted there to be that distinction.”
Chosen by Alexander Johnson
“Shots in Zion” from The Baffler
“[I]n addition to the sweet potatoes, radishes, and cherry tomatoes already grown in a region that cultivates a great deal of Israel’s produce, entrepreneurs have also planted barley for whisky and grapes for wine. As Avi Leitner, the American entrepreneur behind the venture brags, ‘This is the first time anyone is trying to make sexy alcohol like this.”’
Chosen by Stephen Makin
