This week the interwebs have been abuzz with exciting new work from The Brooklyn Quarterly’s contributors!

Our very own Meredith Turits pops a Xanax, schedules her next therapy appointment, and discovers the “cause and the solution” to all writerly problems. This is one that you can’t afford to miss. Check it out in The New Republic.

Is it time to consign the dollar to the scrap heap of history? TBQ’s article by Jillian Steinhauer, reposted on Salon.com this weekend, explores the possible future of non-traditional and local currencies. Time to empty your pockets and trade in those tired bills for thirty grams of Italian artist Piero Manzoni’s shit, which is apparently worth its weight in gold. Luckily there are plenty of alternatives.

I published a blog piece in the Huffington Post as part of the TED Weekends series that offers a behind the scenes look into how social class plays into the art world, even in our largest museums. Take a look before you make your next “suggested donation,” and don’t forget to thank TED sponsor Goldman Sachs for the privilege.

From elsewhere on the Internet: forget the Pope-mobile, this one is a notch better. According to the New York Times reporting this week, when President Obama travels abroad, he often chooses to camp out in a tent—one that is fully decked out with security features and surveillance equipment. Here’s to the nomadic lifestyle.

Gubernatorial races went off with a bang this week. Zerlina Maxwell, a contributor to the feminist website Feministing, published a wonderful piece in The Nation on how we should thank not only the “gender gap” (women who would rather not lose their right to reproductive health under Ken Cuccinelli), but also black voters for Terry McAuliffe’s victory in Virginia, which at moments was nail-bitingly close.

On Salon.com, Sean McElwee and Jenny Kutner found that Rand Paul’s plagiarism was not a one-time incident (he recited the Wikipedia post on the 1997 Jude Law movie Gattaca word for word in a speech—and it wasn’t even a filibuster). Rather, plagiarism seems to be the Kentucky senator’s M.O. Paul repeated the exact text of reports from The Gatestone Institute, a conservative think-tank, in a speech on how Muslims are persecuting Christians. The speeches have been taken off his website.

We thought that the infamous black-market trading site, the Silk Road, had been shut down by the FBI. They stormed into a public library in San Francisco to arrest the supposed man behind the operation, which was the Etsy of drugs and AK-47’s, 29-year-old Ross Ulbricht who coded under the pseudonym Dread Pirate Roberts. But the black market has refused to be thwarted, and this week, Silk Road 2.0 went live on the Deep Web. (TBQ also launched our new website this week with Issue #1: Garages and Grassroots. We promise it’s just a coincidence.)

Next week, send us your favorite stories and we may include them in our round up!