Singularity of cubic hypersurfaces and hyperplane sections of projectivized tangent bundle of projective space

We show that the normal points of a cubic hypersurface in projective space have canonical singularities unless the hypersurface is an iterated cone over an elliptic curve. As an application, we give a simple linear algebraic description of all the hyperplane sections of projectivized tangent bundle of projective space, hence describing hyperplane sections of a rational homogeneous manifold of Picard rank <inline-formula content-type="math/mathml"> <mml:math xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" alttext="2"> <mml:semantics> <mml:mn>2</mml:mn> <mml:annotation encoding="application/x-tex">2</mml:annotation> </mml:semantics> </mml:math> </inline-formula> . This also simplifies and extends recent results of Mazouni-Nagaraj in higher dimensions. We also compute the Chow ring of these hyperplane sections.