Anna Gát: What to Read This Weekend #58
Our April 13 festival! We're HIRING! Also: movies, grief, wokes, babies, chess, IQ, anti-ambition, Boomers, self-care, Frans de Waal, Oliver Sacks, Raymond Aron, Paul Tillich, Dr Seuss, Dr Freud...
Hello friends! I am so pleased to invite you to Interintellect’s inaugural The Future of Publishing festival in New York City, where - on April 13 - we will gather to discuss how the ideas of tomorrow will find their readers, be it through traditional printed books, online media creators, or internet communities. Our partners in this event is OSV’s new Infinite Books.
Our friends Coleman Hughes, Kyla Scanlon, Renee DiResta, Dan Shipper, Tara Isabella Burton, Sahil Lavingia, Tamara Winter, Shadi Hamid, Tina He, Eugene Wei, Susannah Black Roberts, Jon Baskin - and many more - will join us. I hope to see you there! (If you’re press and want a pass, just respond to this email.)
On April 10, I’ll be at Yale doing an offline Interintellect conversation with the great duo of Agnes Callard and Elizabeth Bruenig. The discussion will revolve around the mysteries of forgiveness, and will be hosted by the excellent Jennifer Banks. You can grab a ticket here.
On April 6, in New York City, we’re partnering with Plough and Wayfare Magazine for an offline conversation on faith and progress. An ecumenical discussion to kick off the season of rebirth. Tickets here.
Online, Cass Sunstein on sense-making, Rachel Nuwer on psychedelics, Carlos Eire on the paranormal, and the formidable duo of Anil Seth and Erik Hoel on the nature of consciousness await you.
Last weekend’s Digest was a bit different, but now we’re back to our old traditions... Scroll down for my selection of superb readings for you! x Anna
(PS: I’m hiring.)
What Is the Nature of Time?
It seems in a way philosophically unsatisfactory because it divides the description of the world into two pieces.
Frank Wilczek interviewed by Steven Strogatz; Quanta
How Wittgenstein Watched Movies
Wittgenstein seemed to enjoy films primarily for their immersive “cleansing” properties, for their ability to force one to focus entirely on the screen – and not ruminate on philosophical issues. Perhaps for this reason, he was a fan of films that had basic good vs. evil narratives and settings far removed from contemporary Europe – especially American Westerns.
K. S. Kazimir
The Tyranny of English
Lurking beneath the jokes, though, a deeper inquiry is at play, one concerning the tyranny of the English language in this age of porous borders and digital interconnectivity.
Rhian Sasseen; The Atlantic
Sheila Heti’s book of life
“Let the novelists write the novels,” this voice says. “Let this be the impulse under which you write it: sentence follows sentence, truth follows truth. Let time do its job.”
Anna Leszkiewicz; New Statesman
How We Built the Internet
“The Internet is no longer tracking the population of humans and the level of human use. The growth of the Internet is no longer bounded by human population growth, nor the number of hours in the day when humans are awake,” writes Geoff Huston.
Anna-Sofia Lesiv; Every
The Reddits
I met the Reddits before we even started Y Combinator. In fact they were one of the reasons we started it.
Paul Graham, Y Combinator
Why we still need Dr Freud
Our suffering has a story, and it makes sense.
Matt Rowland Hill; UnHerd
The Cowardice of Guernica
Blowups at literary journals are not the most pressing news of the day, but the incident at Guernica reveals the extent to which elite American literary outlets may now be beholden to the narrowest polemical and moralistic approaches to literature.
Phil Klay; The Atlantic
Campus confidential: Inside the secret Cambridge societies hiding their unfashionable views
Within weeks of committing to this experiment, I had been thrown out of every student theatre society in Cambridge for refusing to state my pronouns. “Your presence in the room makes people feel unsafe,” was the judgement handed down to me.
Charlie Bentley-Astor; The Critic
Paul Tillich was a religious socialist and a profoundly subtle theologian who placed doubt at the centre of his thought
Defying the traditional notion of a theologian, Tillich worked across the fields of philosophy, theology and culture, focusing on the personal search for answers to ultimate questions. He examined the human quest for meaning, but without theorising about the nature of God. God, he thought, could be discussed only symbolically and never literally.
Ted Farris — This essay was born out of an offline Interintellect salon with Larissa MacFarquar where the editor, Nigel Warburton, met Ted during Q&A (they both asked excellent questions)
Why do we do things that are bad for us? The ancient philosophers had an answer
Aristotle had a name for what happens when you change your mind about what’s good for you in the face of temptation or desire: weak akratic action… Both Aristotle and Socrates ascribed akratic behaviors to a lapse in reason or knowledge.
Shayla Love; The Guardian
Yes, Sydney Sweeney's Boobs Are Anti-Woke
How much one “sexualizes” women is among the most important cultural differences based on class and ideology that exist within American society. Think of blue collar men putting up pictures of scantily clad women in their workspaces. Law school was the first time in my life I was exposed to upper-class American culture, and I remember a guy once being shocked when I started graphically talking about a woman’s body. Where I grew up, that’s how men bonded! Appreciating women’s bodies too openly is coded as lower class and more conservative, and this is reflected in things like how people dress, what kinds of cultural products they consume, and which politicians they identify with.
Richard Hanania
Judith Butler and the fear of gender
Nobody [in the mid-1990s], and certainly not, I imagine, Judith Butler, could have imagined today’s gender wars. In our joyless, ungenerous, unironic times, gender theory has become an ideological and at times literal battlefield.
Lyndsey Stonebridge; New Statesman
Image Without Metaphor
The truly huge films of the last two or three years have had even less space for self-reflection or individual analysis. There seems to be an allergy to ambiguity, a desire for orderly storytelling and image making that leaves little to the imagination or debate…
This kind of audience-condescending premise-forward literalism is not just in the narrative and scripting, it's in the acting. The actors of Dune 2 almost all speak in that tedious whisper-growl that stands in for profundity, a vocal-style also popularized by Nolan, in Christian Bale's portrayal of the caped crusader in 2005's Batman Begins. I believe that if a movie features a bunch of good actors and all the performances are flat and dull, as is the case in Dune Part Two, where even Florence Pugh, Lea Seydoux and Josh Brolin lack all charisma, it is ultimately a reflection on the director (and the script), not the actors…
Despite all the attempts of the literalists, the movies still contain resonances and ideas beyond their control. The pleasure (or, in the case of ideological production, danger) of creating culture is that it maintains meaning well outside and beyond the intentions of the artist, writer or producer. But I do think the current trend of literalism is of a piece with a liberal deadening of the moment, an attempt to deradicalize and defang society, social critique, and the population, through an anti-intellectualism that dresses itself up in elaborate aesthetic gestures and epic fantastical narratives. Do not abandon the messy, conflictual and difficult space of desire, poetry and metaphor. The clarity on offer is the clarity of a one-way mirror in a police interrogation room.
Vicky Osterweil (via Tyler Cowen)
Hurkle-Durkle Is the New Way to Self-Care Ourselves to Death
Self-care is like self-help, but with no goals or striving. The $11 billion industry is mostly geared toward women, and while hurkle-durkle might not be associated with a particular product, it smuggles in the same insidious message: anything you do for yourself is inherently good and you should never feel guilty about it.
Suzy Weiss; The Free Press
Raymond Aron’s search for liberal foundations
Aron wanted to understand how the different liberties associated with liberalism fit together – and sometimes didn’t. For there was, he believed, an inherent instability to liberalism.
Samuel Gregg; Engelsberg Ideas
Frans de Waal, Who Found the Origins of Morality in Apes, Dies at 75
“Uniquely human emotions don’t exist,” he argued in a 2019 New York Times guest essay. “Like organs, the emotions evolved over millions of years to serve essential functions.”
Alex Traub; The New York Times
My inheritance is being drunk through a straw in a coconut in the Caribbean! Am I selfish for resenting my boomer parents for burning through money that should be mine?
As an impecunious 34-year-old millennial in an impossibly expensive property market, I am relying on, at some stage, a handout from them. But all I can see is my money receding into the distance on a long-haul trip to Bali. With many of my friends in a similar position, and the cost of living crisis still at full throttle, the question troubling us over the generational divide is this. Who is being selfish? Us for wanting them to save their money so we can one day have it? Or them, for splurging it all so freely on themselves?
Anonymous; Daily Mail
Culture over Policy: The birth rate decline
I don’t want to suggest policies & targeted social interventions never work; just that their force pales in the face of the mighty power of Culture and Biology & that they’re hopeless when they go against them. Why might that be? I think it’s pretty clear why Biology is a powerful force and if you do not agree with this simple statement, you might as well stop reading this essay here.
Ruxandra Teslo
Kate Middleton reveals cancer diagnosis in moving statement
The Princess of Wales has been diagnosed with cancer and revealed her illness to the world in a personal and deeply moving video message. Kate Middleton disclosed that the cancer was discovered while she underwent major abdominal surgery at The London Clinic at the start of the year. The 42-year-old princess said she needed to recover from surgery before she could start “preventative chemotherapy”, as advised by her medical team.
Alex Ross; The Independent
Why Do Men Dominate Chess?
Other, equally informed, female players argue that it really does just come down to sexism. Their ranks include Hungary’s Judit Polgár, the highest-ranking women’s chess player in history (by far), who’s declared that “it’s just as possible for a woman to become the best as any guy. But there are so many difficulties and social boundaries for women generally in society. That is what blocks it.”
Carole Hooven; Quillette
Cat People - What Dr. Seuss really taught us
In the back of “Why Johnny Can’t Read,” Flesch had printed seventy-two word lists, which parents who bought the book could use to teach their children at home. Spaulding asked Geisel to write a story that used only a limited number of similar words, words recognizable by a first grader.
Louis Menand; The New Yorker
Finally getting somewhere: Memories of Oliver Sacks’s shy, eccentric brilliance
It seems that Oliver always wanted to combine medicine, science and literature and he found a way when he wrote Awakenings (1973), his next book. It was unusual in many ways. It is a selection of twenty case histories but in the first and last chapters Oliver outlined a then revolutionary view of medicine: that it is not enough to repair the parts of the body that go wrong. Illness, he proposed, changes us, whatever the outcome. We are different afterwards, and therefore the whole person must be understood and treated. He was in the vanguard of what became known as holistic medicine, but Awakenings, which Auden proclaimed a masterpiece, was not well received by the medical profession. Maybe it was because, almost uniquely, Oliver was writing about how his idea and his treatment ultimately failed. That wasn’t done. It took real humility. Doctors wrote about their successes.
Jonathan Lynn; Times Literary Supplement
Significantly Enhancing Adult Intelligence With Gene Editing May Be Possible
Most traits, like personality, diabetes risk, and intelligence are controlled by hundreds to tens of thousands of genes, each of which exerts a tiny influence. If you want to significantly affect someone’s risk of developing lung cancer, you probably need to make hundreds of edits.
GeneSmith and kman; LessWrong
All about the money
It is also weird that having lots of money is not seen as an obvious and enormous benefit. Money is liquid economic influence. One can do many amazing things with money, and the more creative and higher-agency one is, the more one can do with it. More money means more ambitious projects. Money can fuel companies, political advocacy, art, and research. Money can be spent to perfect the furniture of one’s life in widening circles. Why wouldn’t a builder want lots of money?
Gena Gorlin
R.I.P. The Scottish Enlightenment 1697-2024
The Scottish Enlightenment will die on April 1st 2024, exactly 327 years, eight months and 24 days after the incident that provoked it. For on April 1st the Hate Crime and Public Order Act (Scotland) 2021 comes into force, an Act which will criminalise speech and opinion deemed ‘hateful’ even if spoken in the privacy of your own home.
C.J. Strachan; The Daily Sceptic
George Scialabba’s Prejudice for Progress
Rorty isn’t alone: Christopher Hitchens, Norman Rush, James Wood, and Vivian Gornick have all, at various times, proclaimed their membership in the informal Association of Scialabbians. Scialabba, it has been said, is a “critic’s critic,” which, like being called a “songwriter’s songwriter” or a “comic’s comic,” is a way for more successful peers to laud his singular talent—as another admirer described it, “skeptical without being cynical, earnest without being sanctimonious, and truthful without being a scold”—while thanking him for remaining courteously unfamous. We love geniuses, Trilling says, but they are discouraging.
Sam Adler-Bell; Commonweal
Overnight neuronal plasticity and adaptation to emotional distress
The model generates testable hypotheses for how failed sleep-dependent adaptation to emotional distress is key to mental disorders, notably disorders of anxiety, depression and post-traumatic stress with the common aetiology of insomnia.
Yesenia Cabrera, Karin J. Koymans, Gina R. Poe, Helmut W. Kessels, Eus J. W. Van Someren and Rick Wassing; Nature
The Red Hand Files - ISSUE #6
I feel the presence of my son, all around, but he may not be there. I hear him talk to me, parent me, guide me, though he may not be there. He visits Susie in her sleep regularly, speaks to her, comforts her, but he may not be there. Dread grief trails bright phantoms in its wake."
Nick Cave
Is Anti-Ambition Actually Ambitious?
Ambition is a shitty word but we actually need more of it. If it requires using words like "aspiration" so be it I'm all for seeing if we can reclaim ambition. Ambition to find a life worth living, work worth doing, and pursuits worth following.
Paul Millerd
The seasonality of births
As the chart shows, births tend to rise between July and September, in the United States. These seasonal differences across the year aren’t small.
Saloni Dattani
Archaeologists Unearth New Building in Sicily’s Valley of the Temples
The team found the building beneath the soil using geophysical survey techniques across a 32,292 square-foot area that created a map of possible underground remains.
Francesca Aton; ARTnews
The last crimes of Caravaggio
The painter had a long-running animosity with a pimp called Ranuccio Tomassoni that seems to have come to a head with an argument about a woman, either Tomassoni’s wife or Fillide Melandroni, a courtesan and one of Caravaggio’s models: the two men decided to settle matters with a duel. They met at night on a tennis court and in the fight, Caravaggio pierced Tomassoni’s femoral artery. Caravaggio may have been aiming for his opponent’s genitals, to inflict a sexual wound in keeping with the honour culture of the time. Tomassoni bled to death.
Michael Prodger; New Statesman
Can we afford to buy marginal babies?
Robin Hanson has used the size of the US national debt plus scheduled outlays for programs like social security and Medicare to argue that we should be willing to pay up to at least 300k (750k if you use the high end debt and outlays estimates) “to induce the birth and raising-to-adulthood of a single child who would then pay average levels of future taxes to repay this debt.”
Regan Arntz-Gray
Don’t teach me
Architects don’t come much angrier than Ernö Goldfinger. Even among his own disillusioned generation, he seemed perpetually crosser than most. Towering, handsome, self-assured (‘Everyone always seems to have known me’), this Hungarian emigrant was quite unlike the pallid, fish-eyed Professor Otto Silenus, Evelyn Waugh’s caricature Modernist. Silenus had come to the Home Counties spouting aphorisms from the Bauhaus via Moscow, invited by Margot Beste-Chetwynde, who had fallen on his designs for a chewing-gum factory in a progressive Hungarian quarterly. Margot wanted ‘something clean and square’ to replace her irrelevant Tudor mansion.
Nigel Warburton; London Review of Books