Extreme amounts of good things to read this weekend — and before we dive in, just a little update for you:

🎟️ Cool new things to sing up for on Interintellect:

• Toronto social (Dec 12 | members)

• Austin social (Dec 15 | members)

• DC social with me (Dec 4 | public)

• Surviving the Apocalypse, online salon with Athena Aktipis (Nov 22 | public)

• NYC in-person salon with Jerome Copulsky — ‘American Heretics’ (Dec 1 | members)

• Online salon with Greg Epstein — ‘Tech Agnostic’ (Dec 4 | public)

• Online salon on family and selfcompassion (Nov 26 | public)

• George Saunders online book club (continues in Dec | public)

For a big seasonal discount on Interintellect memberships, use the code ‘AutumnLeaves’ at the checkout. (Works for gifting too!)

🎙️ The Hope Axis (episode 12) just DROPPED: The brilliant anonymous blogger joined me to explore dating and attraction, marriage and work, raising children and being in the media - and cleared up a lot of misunderstandings around seduction, trads, fame, monogamy, domination, and disappointments.

Episode 13 will be with the great ! We recorded it just yesterday, and talked about spiritual technology, designing the world based on values, spiritual suffering and healing — and Sam Altman, Peter Thiel, Tamara Winter, Marc Andreessen, Interintellect… And writing, embodiment, McLuhan, Steve Jobs, the Constitution, Adam Curtis, Silicon Valley as a noreligion, and the “God-shaped hole” in society. Coming soon!

Earlier this week, I attended ’s lovely Interintellect social in Manhattan ❤️ Thanks for bringing us together — such a great convo!

And now, let’s read ……

Science is neither red nor blue

Long before the 5 November US presidential election, I had become ever more concerned that science has fallen victim to the same political divisiveness tearing at the seams of American society. This is a tragedy because science is the best—arguably the only—approach humankind has developed to peer into the future, to project the outcomes of various possible decisions using the known laws of the natural world. Since the founding of the National Academy of Sciences (NAS) during the Civil War, the most divisive period in US history, science and the NAS (of which I am the current president) have consistently served the nation, regardless of the political party in power. As the scientific community continues to do so now, it must take a critical look at what responsibility it bears in science becoming politically contentious, and how scientists can rebuild public trust.

• Marcia McNutt; Science

Golden Age of Building

Government software - Public safety technology - Manufacture in the USA - Stablecoins 2.0 - LLMs for chip design - Fintech 2.0 - New space companies - AI aided engineering tools - One million jobs 2.0

• Y Combinator

How Professors Killed Literature

Three solutions were attempted in an earlier phase of this crisis, all guided by the assumption that students abhor the strange, the ancient, the remote, and like the familiar, the modern, and the close. The first was to replace or supplement books with newer media—film, TV, popular music, computer games, visual art—to which it was assumed that, since our students were native to them (“their capacities are different,” as Claybaugh put it), they would feel more attracted. The second was to reduce the amount of space in the curriculum previously held by the old novelists and poets (from the remote 19th century, for example) in favor of texts produced in very recent times. The third was to use cultural products of other periods and places as a way to discuss moral and political problems of our time. 

• Reinaldo Laddaga; COMPACT

Seeing Things as They Are

So these are people who literally hate democracy—and if they can get away with it, they’ll extinguish it. They’re influential people, in politics and business and the military bureaucracy, and they’re going to be empowered and emboldened if Trump wins office. It’s disturbing to hear people like that just openly discuss the things they want to do: summary tribunals for Democrats, that sort of thing. I hate Democrats, but I’m sorry, I don’t want to see that sort of thing for people just because you disagree with their politics, you know?

• Ken Silverstein and John Michael Colón; The Point

How to Have Grandchildren

If you live far away, your kids will not visit you frequently when they have little ones. I know it seems unfair, but expect it to be unfair, because traveling with a baby (or worse, a toddler) is pretty difficult (yes, I know I said life doesn’t end when you have kids, but travel is temporarily tricky when they’re very little.) Anyway, if you are able, you should visit them. Of course, all of this is stuff you can only do in practice when you already have grandkids, but I’m mostly talking about setting the expectation.

Pedro Almodóvar’s conflict of interests

There has been a greater emphasis – allied to his increased engagement with the devices of melodrama and his growing interest in more reflective, less impulsive modes of behaviour – on the written and spoken word: keyboards, typewriters, letters, notes, manuscripts, speeches, confessions, song lyrics, voiceover and inter-titles. His films have retained a taste for the macabre, the lust for red, but it would be hard to imagine a character in one of his 1980s films ending, as Talk to Her does, with characters promising to “talk one day”. Back then a heart-to-heart was a less likely prospect than a double suicide or a spot of sado-masochism.

• Leo Robson; The New Statesman

What President Trump Should Do

It’s also impossible to hire new, better civil servants. Our systems for sourcing are shattered. Take Jack Cable, 17, who won the Department of Defense’s “Hack the Air Force” contest against 600 other contestants by identifying weaknesses in Pentagon software. But when Cable applied for a DoD role, his résumé was graded “not minimally qualified” because the hiring manager didn’t know anything about the coding languages he listed himself proficient in.

Neutrality

It’s time to start thinking again about neutrality. Neutral institutions, neutral information sources. Things that both seem and are impartial, balanced, incorruptible, universal, legitimate, trustworthy, canonical, foundational.

The IDF’s New Recruits — As small but growing numbers of Haredi men enlist in the Israeli military, attitudes in their strictly observant communities start to shift

Anti-draft demonstrations continue to be held in Haredi areas. And last week, Haredi members of Knesset were threatening to withhold their votes for a national budget if a draft-exemption bill isn’t passed.

• Hillel Kuttler; Tablet

How the Ivy League Broke America

We want a society run by people who are smart, yes, but who are also wise, perceptive, curious, caring, resilient, and committed to the common good. If we can figure out how to select for people’s motivation to grow and learn across their whole lifespan, then we are sorting people by a quality that is more democratically distributed, a quality that people can control and develop, and we will end up with a fairer and more mobile society.

• David Brooks; The Atlantic

Are Ideas Getting Harder to Find Because of the Burden of Knowledge?

Assume invention is the application of knowledge to solve problems (whether in science or technology). As more problems are solved, we require additional knowledge to solve the ones that remain, or to improve on our existing solutions. This wouldn’t be a problem, except for the fact that people die and take their knowledge with them. Meanwhile, babies are (inconveniently) born without any knowledge. So each generation needs to acquire knowledge anew, slowly and arduously, over decades of schooling. But since the knowledge necessary to push the frontier keeps growing, the amount of knowledge each generation must learn gets larger. The lengthening retraining cycle slows down innovation. A variety of suggestive evidence is consistent with this story.

People want competence, seemingly over everything else

People prefer “competent” government over any other adjective, whether it’s “bureaucratic” or “rigid” or “big” or sometimes even “democratic”. Politicians think having the right policy is the answer to most questions. Ban this, regulate that, add a rule here. Whether it’s climate change or tax or entrepreneurship or energy shortage or geopolitical jockeying for status. But policies don’t mean much to anyone without it being implemented. In Berkeley apparently it’s illegal to whistle for a lost canary before 7 am, though I doubt this is being policed rigorously. What people in power hear are policies, what people on the ground see are its implementations.

On The Issues I.-Abortion

Allowing women to better time their pregnancies can lead to the birth of children in whom their parents, particulary their mother, invest more. Hence, one benefit of more liberal abortion laws that it can lead to higher overall investment in the human capital of children.

In the fray: How to teach contemporary literature

Worldwide, more than 100,000 novels are published in English each year. Even the prize-winners run into scores. So the first challenge is which authors to teach – the celebrities, those who sold most? – and the second what to say about them. “Here, if we could recognize it”, wrote Virginia Woolf. contemplating new titles in a bookshop, “lies some poem, or novel, or history which will stand up and speak with other ages about our age when we lie prone and silent…”. But it was “oddly difficult”, she continued, to say “which are the real books and what it is that they are telling us, and which are the stuffed books which will come to pieces when they have lain about for a year or two”.

• Tim Parks; The Times Literary Supplement

There’s a Better Way to Talk About Fluoride, Vaccines and Raw Milk

Measles vaccines have decades of safety data and save lives every day. Concern about a possible link to autism has been conclusively debunked in large and reliable data sets. Measles is extremely contagious, and without widespread vaccination, many people — including babies — will be vulnerable to infection, and some will die. The case of raw milk is more complex.

• ; The New York Times

We must love one another and die: Auden's enduring legacy in times of turmoil

As scholarship tries to determine why a culture has gone mad, why a new generation of psychopathic gods is being worshipped, I turn to poetry. To art. To the knowledge, that of course this is happening, because, yes, those to whom evil is done, do evil in return. 

Gwern Branwen - How an Anonymous Researcher Predicted AI's Trajectory

“The most underrated benefit of anonymity is that people don't project onto you as much. They can't slot you into any particular niche or identity and write you off in advance. They have to at least read you a little bit to even begin to dismiss you.”

The US Is a Civic Desert. To Survive, the Democratic Party Needs to Transform Itself.

The Democratic Party was swept up in this civic transition. Today, the party focuses almost exclusively on election campaign sprints optimized … for short-term mobilizing (squeezing donations and volunteer hours out of current members) rather than for long-term organizing (fostering the stewardship, growth, and leadership development of the party’s membership). Instead of funding itself primarily through membership dues, the party offers fancy events for the wealthy and ceaseless, disrespectful texts for the rest of us. Parasocial relationships with celebrities and famous politicians are emphasized over real relationships with fellow neighbors and local chapter leaders.

• Pete Davis; The Nation

The Biggest Bias in Higher Education is Not Political or Ideological Per Se

In order to understand biases and exclusion in academe, it’s best to consider who comprises it. Professors, for instance, are overwhelmingly relatively affluent, urban and suburban whites who graduated with terminal degrees from the top programs in their fields. These kinds of folks don’t just dominate academia. They are the primary producers and consumers of most content produced in the “symbolic professions.”

Yes, inflation made the median voter poorer

People do not feel wages, they feel total income. And median growth in total income — post taxes and transfers — was not just historically low: it collapsed and was deeply negative from 2021 onwards. Much of this decline is due to timing of pandemic stimulus and even less the “fault of Biden” than other things.

What Does It Mean That Donald Trump Is a Fascist?

A liberal has to tell a hundred stories, or a thousand. A communist has one story, which might not turn out to be true. A fascist just has to be a storyteller. Because words do not attach to meanings, the stories don’t need to be consistent. They don’t need to accord with external reality. A fascist storyteller just has to find a pulse and hold it. This can proceed through rehearsal, as with Hitler, or by way of trial and error, as with Trump.

• Timothy Snyder; The New Yorker

Frank Auerbach, Painter Who Redefined Portraiture, Dies at 93

His paintings from the 1950s and ’60s were so bombarded with paint as to be sculptural, forcing one of his early gallerists to exhibit them flat under the assumption that his materials might slip off the canvas when hung upright.

• Alex Greenberger; ARTnews

The Death and Life of Prediction Markets at Google

Even in cases where managers wanted explicit probabilistic forecasts, a prediction market turned out to be a tough sell.

• Dan Schwarz; Asterisk

'The Magic Mountain' Saved My Life

I fell under the spell of Hans Castorp’s quest story, as the Everyman hero is transformed by his explorations of time, illness, sciences and séances, politics and religion and music. The climactic chapter, “Snow,” felt as though it were addressed to me. Hans Castorp, lost in a snowstorm, falls asleep and then awakens from a mesmerizing and monstrous dream with an insight toward which the entire story has led him: “For the sake of goodness and love, man shall grant death no dominion over his thoughts.”

• George Packer; The Atlantic

AI progress has plateaued at GPT-4 level

The second hypothesis behind the stall is one people discuss all the time: deep learning is limited by the amount of high-quality data (of which human civilization has been thoroughly mined of by the big companies). This creates an “S-curve” that, at best, approximates human intelligence on tasks with lots of data … Of course, there’s still the question of whether or not synthetic data can get around this.

Ridley Scott: Paul Thomas Anderson Re-Wrote 'Napoleon'

Amidst Academy Award-winner Joaquin Phoenix‘s much-publicized exit from Todd Haynes’ NC-17 gay romance, the actor’s history of getting cold feet came under newfound scrutiny. Back in August, The Hollywood Reporter wrote that Phoenix almost left Ridley Scott‘s epic biopic “Napoleon,” but was convinced to stay after Paul Thomas Anderson stepped in to make some rewrites.

• Harrison Richlin; IndieWire

Ozempic For Sleep

My lab mate Yuki is also a short sleeper. She is constantly on her feet. She's one of the happiest and highest-energy people I know. She's also one of the few people who are always in the lab. And she's a professional violinist, and she has time to surround herself with wholesome people, and she walks 10 miles a day, and she plays so much badminton to obliterate me in a match. She says: “It feels like I have a cheat code in life.”

• Isaak Freeman

Between Mandala and Machine

Kamala Harris was described as a machine politician, as were Clinton and Obama before her. Almost all US politics since the Civil War has been machine politics. The Democratic flavor of city-based machine politics being the kind usually implied, but the underlying mechanistic logic is equally descriptive of how the Republican Party operated until the rise of the Tea Party, and later, Trump…

What will the new societal machine look like? What will its constituent smaller machines — including new political machines look like? Once today’s emerging mandalas — Trumpish trad mandalas as well as communitarian mutualist ones — mature and things start to stagnate, the need for a new machine will start to get acute. A source of impersonal and uncaring stability and individual space. Something that will check the creeping demands for ceaseless public performance of anxious mandala mythologies.

On becoming less left-wing (Part 1)

The point is rather that we should be highly suspicious of people and movements that depict themselves as escaping human nature's self-serving and competitive instincts or propose societal transformations that rely on our collective ability to escape them. And more generally, we should be sceptical of any narrative endorsed by those on the left or right that depicts a political movement’s motivations as rooted in a purely altruistic concern with justice or virtue.

What Does Love Do to Us?

What happens when you fall in love for the first time is the activation of various areas of the limbic system and the neocortex. But we also see deactivations. These deactivations occur mainly in the brain area linked to “mentalizing.” Mentalizing is the ability to tell someone’s intentions, and you need to be good at mentalizing to spot a liar or a cheat. To be able to tell if somebody is lying, you need to be good at understanding what their motivation is. But what happens when you fall in love for the first time is that bit shuts down. 

• Brian Gallagher; Nautilus

Auden’s Island — The poet in the postwar era

He returns and immerses himself in the intellectual and social life of that island. He writes poems, of course; he teaches for a time, in Scotland and England; in “horrible London,” he becomes a private tutor and, later, gets involved in an endeavor called the Group Theater; he writes verse to accompany documentary films. He seeks collaborative artistic endeavors whenever it’s possible for him to do so, but he grows increasingly discouraged. Writing in a journal in 1939, he commented that just a few years earlier “a part of me at least has been wanting to die.” …

Auden thereafter liked to make jokes about his famous father-in-law, but the jokes had a tendency to mask something more serious: Auden increasingly suspected that, like Thomas Mann, he would have to become an exile from his native country.

• Alan Jacobs; The Hedgehog Review

Here’s Why I Decided To Buy ‘InfoWars’

Today we celebrate a new addition to the Global Tetrahedron LLC family of brands. And let me say, I really do see it as a family. Much like family members, our brands are abstract nodes of wealth, interchangeable assets for their patriarch to absorb and discard according to the opaque whims of the market. And just like family members, our brands regard one another with mutual suspicion and malice…

Through it all, InfoWars has shown an unswerving commitment to manufacturing anger and radicalizing the most vulnerable members of society—values that resonate deeply with all of us at Global Tetrahedron…

As for the vitamins and supplements, we are halting their sale immediately. Utilitarian logic dictates that if we can extend even one CEO’s life by 10 minutes, diluting these miracle elixirs for public consumption is an unethical waste. Instead, we plan to collect the entire stock of the InfoWars warehouses into a large vat and boil the contents down into a single candy bar–sized omnivitamin that one executive (I will not name names) may eat in order to increase his power and perhaps become immortal.

• The Onion buys InfoWars and then writes a characteristic piece about it!

At the Blackboard - Kurt Vonnegut diagrams the shapes of stories

But there’s a reason we recognize Hamlet as a masterpiece: it’s that Shakespeare told us the truth, and people so rarely tell us the truth in this rise and fall here [indicates blackboard]. The truth is, we know so little about life, we don’t really know what the good news is and what the bad news is.

• Kurt Vonnegut; Lapham’s Quarterly - a classic!

The EA case for Trump 2024

While JD Vance has expressed heterodox opinions on a handful of domestic policy issues, from antitrust to labor law, his net effect as VP is likely to be pro-technology. On antitrust, Vance admires Lina Khan but favors an approach based on breaking Big Tech’s network effect through open source and crypto, rather than targeting particular companies with flimsy test cases.

The Beauty of ‘My Brilliant Friend’ Was in the Little Things

Elena is gradually revealed to be spoiled and narcissistic, continually hurting herself and those around her(**) through her fixation on the philandering Nino — which is fueled at least as much by her jealousy of Lila as it is by physical attraction and a stubborn belief that she would be the woman who could change him. Yet My Brilliant Friend keeps finding ways to believe in her.

• Alan Sepinwall; Rolling Stone

Stop assuming so much

Cold emailing is another case where assuming too much has costs. Lots has been written about why and how to cold email and getting over the reluctance to do it. Those experienced in a field, empirically, tend to enjoy talking about their work and helping newcomers. They don’t like feeling exploited. The desire to avoid bothering someone with an email is at the core of this, but rather than assume that a thoughtful, well crafted email bothers someone, check it: If you got the email you are about to send, would it bother you? Ask others that get cold emails, do they like to help others? The compiled knowledge of cold-emailers is that cold emailing works and that thoughtful cold emailing is well received, so stop assuming the contrary!

• José Ricón

How China’s United Front extends its influence in Hungary

For example, a day before the election, they posted a video made by the ruling Fidesz party that they translated to Chinese. In the video, Viktor Orbán, prime minister of Hungary, talks about how the country will drift into war if his party does not win.

According to experts, the Chinese Communist Party has been actively involved in the creation of several Chinese associations operating in Hungary.

• Kamilla Marton; VSquare 

Meditations on Machinic Desire

What happened in the story above is that our desires got incrementally virtualized.

Math Is Still Catching Up to the Mysterious Genius of Srinivasa Ramanujan

It became apparent to Hardy and his colleagues that Ramanujan could sense mathematical truths — could access entire worlds — that others simply could not. (Hardy, a mathematical giant in his own right, is said to have quipped that his greatest contribution to mathematics was the discovery of Ramanujan.)

• Jordana Cepelewicz; Quanta Magazine

Meaning in Mystery: Why Noir Speaks in a Morally Ambiguous World

Noir was post-Great War, the Progressive Era, the Cold War in smoke and neon. 

• Adam Hill;

UN to conduct new study of the broad impacts of nuclear war. Not all countries want to know

The new UN study will examine “the physical effects and societal consequences of a nuclear war on a local, regional and planetary scale, including, inter alia, the climatic, environmental and radiological effects, and their impacts on public health, global socioeconomic systems, agriculture and ecosystems, in the days, weeks and decades following a nuclear war.” For Alan Robock, a climatologist at Rutgers University and a leading scientist in the study of the impacts of nuclear war who helped develop the science of nuclear winter since the 1980s, “this will be the most comprehensive study ever on this subject.”

• François Diaz-Maurin; Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists

I see some silver linings in this election result

Trump’s win means that this will be his last presidency, which means he’s effectively a lame duck. His shadow won’t loom over his party or the country any more. It’s better to know when the Trump era will end than to have it extend indefinitely into the future…

• Tiago Forte

Virginia Woolf’s Mother Haunts Much of Her Writing

It was not until 1909 that Woolf felt able to make her first attempt to free Julia Stephen from the textual mausoleum Leslie Stephen had constructed, and only with the publication of To the Lighthouse could Woolf finally lay her mother’s ghost.

• Gillian Gill; Literary Hub

Down, not Done

Cutting myself off, shutting others out—that is what Trump and Vance are counting on. It is also how they win, at least for now. That their victory was so decisive represents a serious challenge for me and the many millions of Americans who see things as I do. For many, and especially for the most vulnerable, things will likely get much worse before they start getting better. But isn’t that the point of faith, and the virtue of hope? Community, justice, fairness, decency—none of these things is impossible. Give us something hard to do. 

• Griffin Oleynick; Commonweal

Thank you for reading!

Email me at anna@interintellect.com.

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Big week behind us, and a big week ahead. This is the start of the end-of-year rush, the finale of 2024, the time of the renewal of promises.

On Interintellect, some gems coming up for you. If reasonable conversations, friendly openness, and ideological diversity remain your thing, come say hi:

• The Value of Freedom - a rare public IRL in Washington DC with political philosopher Rebecca Lowe

• The Illness of Inequality – With David Lay Williams - online public salon

• A lovely IRL meetup in Austin focusing on science and art - members only

• Unseen Genius - With Sumana Roy - online public salon

• One Day In The Life Of Ivan Denisovichh - online public reading group

• Surviving the Apocalypse – With Athena Aktipis - online public salon

• Bi-annual hangout for our SuperSupporters - online, hosted by me!

• American Heretics: A History of Religious Resistance with Jerome Copulsky - members only, in Manhattan

And for our members, this weekend….

• TODAY: I will be hosting a Discord writing session from 11 am ET / 4 pm GMT

• TOMORROW: ACLU’s Jessica Apgar — military veteran and writer — will host a Discord fireside to continue our conversation about the elections and the future of politics in America, from 3 pm ET / 8 pm GMT

The great anonymous was just on my podcast The Hope Axis 🎭 The Hope Axis is now on both Spotify and Apple if you’d like to listen. Videos here. RSS feed here. Episode coming soon!

And now, let’s read….

The Left Must Start From Zero

By the same token, we must reject the notion that Harris lost because she is a nonwhite woman. No, Harris lost because Trump stood for politics and political contestation, while she stood for nonpolitics or antipolitics. 

• Slavoj Žižek; COMPACT

How to never be single

I’m 32 and I’ve never really ever been single. I’ve never been on the apps, or navigated “situationships” and I lived alone for a grand total of ~6 months of my adult life. Occasionally, when talking to friends who are single, or who at least had long stretches of singledom in their 20s, I get the distinct feeling that they think they know something I never will, because I never had to figure out how to “hack life on my own”. That they “know themselves” in a way that I don’t…

• Regan Arntz-Gray

The magic of Thomas Mann

‘A man lives not only his personal life, as an individual’, Mann writes, ‘but also, consciously or unconsciously, the life of his epoch and his contemporaries.’

• Guy Stagg; Engelsberg Ideas

Francis Fukuyama: what Trump unleashed means for America

Prior to the election, critics including Kamala Harris accused Trump of being a fascist. This was misguided insofar as he was not about to implement a totalitarian regime in the US. Rather, there would be a gradual decay of liberal institutions, much as occurred in Hungary after Viktor Orbán’s return to power in 2010.

• Francis Fukuyama; Financial Times

On Quitting Academia

Then, two years ago, things took a turn. A viable application for a big research grant fell at the first hurdle. Two articles I’d spent months on were rejected, one quite quickly, the other after a long ordeal of consideration and resubmission. Some of the assessors, cloaked in anonymity, seemed affronted by what I was trying to say. It was crushing, but also an awakening. They had pecked so viciously because I was an injured hen in the brood. They sensed disingenuousness, ebbing engagement, slippage from relevance, and, behind it all, a loss of faith. 

• Malcolm Gaskill; London Review of Books

Revenge of the Silent Male Voter

If we take a macro perspective, we see that such young men have never known a culture in which males are not routinely described as “problematic,” “toxic,” or “oppressive”. Going to university, and working at modern companies, they live in a world of Diversity Equity and Inclusion policies—many of which promote an insidious and pervasive form of anti-male discrimination. Yet to talk about it in public invites social ostracism. To criticise DEI is to risk being called a Nazi.

• Claire Lehmann; Quillette - Twitter version here

Two Nobel Prize winners want to cancel their own CRISPR patents in Europe

­­The request to withdraw the pair of European patents, by lawyers for Nobelists Emmanuelle Charpentier and Jennifer Doudna, comes after a damaging August opinion from a European technical appeals board, which ruled that the duo’s earliest patent filing didn’t explain CRISPR well enough for other scientists to use it and doesn’t count as a proper invention.

• Antonio Regalado; MIT Tech Review

Updates on the Arc of the Moral Universe

The arc of the moral universe wants you to please wait. Your call is important to it.

• Amanda Lehr; McSweeney’s Internet Tendency

How America Embraced Gender War

In the twenty-tens, women gained control over culture, too. A slick, corporatized feminism—the mugs about male tears, the Ruth Bader Ginsburg bobbleheads—occupied the public sphere. Girls were brash and confident and eager to call out bad male behavior; it was no longer O.K. to kiss a girl if she didn’t want you to (even if she was slutty!). All of this made a certain cohort of men lose their grip.

• Jia Tolentino; The New Yorker

The Elite College Students Who Can't Read Books

Mike Szkolka, a teacher and an administrator who has spent almost two decades in Boston and New York schools, told me that excerpts have replaced books across grade levels. “There’s no testing skill that can be related to … Can you sit down and read Tolstoy? ” he said. And if a skill is not easily measured, instructors and district leaders have little incentive to teach it. Carol Jago, a literacy expert who crisscrosses the country helping teachers design curricula, says that educators tell her they’ve stopped teaching the novels they’ve long revered, such as My Ántonia and Great Expectations. The pandemic, which scrambled syllabi and moved coursework online, accelerated the shift away from teaching complete works.

• Rose Horowitch; The Atlantic

A tale of two machines

The fact is, we have two different pitiless machines operating in tandem. One, the machine Ezra was talking about, was relentlessly focused on the threat of Donald Trump and the need to defeat him. But the other pitiless machine was relentlessly focused on shrinking the ideological tent, making it clear that troublemakers were at risk of being purged.

• Matt Yglesias

A language family of one, a land beyond conquest: What a Basque genetic plot twist tells us about prehistoric Europe

Today we know that the Basque language is in fact the only indigenous non-Indo-European language to still survive from antiquity (also-rans Paleo-Sardinian and Etruscan endured until around 500 AD and 100 AD respectively). Its handful of fellow non-Indo-European languages spoken across Europe today are all comparatively recent arrivals: Finnish and Estonian arrived 2,500 years ago, Hungarian 1,000 years ago and Turkish 500 years ago. The Romans encountered the Basques’ ancestors when their legions arrived in northern Spain in the 1st century BC, and it is clear from Basque-like given names that those people spoke a language ancestral to Euskara.

• Razib Khan

Last Night’s Pogrom in Amsterdam

In video of other attacks last night, a victim is struck and lays injured on the ground, seemingly unconscious. A father can be seen fleeing with his son. A man jumps into one of Amsterdam’s canals to escape his assailants. In the recording, where he is forced to say “Free Palestine,” his assailants laugh and jeer that he is a “cancer Jew”—a classic slur in Dutch, where both diseases and the Jewish ethnicity are deployed as put-downs.

• David de Bruijn; The Free Press

Don’t Worry, Have Babies - The Progressive Ambivalence about Motherhood

Into this debate steps Anastasia Berg and Rachel Wiseman’s What Are Children For?, a well-timed attempt to make just such a case. Berg, an assistant professor of philosophy at the University of California, Irvine, and Wiseman, a writer and managing editor at The Point, sagely counsel at the outset that, although natalism has largely become a preoccupation of the right, “whether or not to have a family is too important to allow it to be a casualty of the culture war.” 

• Rita Koganzon; The Hedgehog Review

Americans hate inflation more than they hate unemployment

The first reason we should think inflation mattered is that people pretty consistently said it mattered. On Gallup’s long-running “most important problem” survey, inflation consistently ranked as the most important specific economic problem that people mentioned, right behind “economy in general”.

• Noah Smith

What if A.I. Is Actually Good for Hollywood?

A.I. software, though, changes all the accounting. By using every available frame of Hanks’s movie career to capture his facial movements and the look of his skin under countless lighting conditions, physical environments, camera angles and lenses, Metaphysic’s artists can generate a digital Tom Hanks mask with the click of a few keystrokes. And what we see onscreen is just one factor in A.I.’s ascendancy. “It’s the quality, and it’s the speed, and it’s the cost,” Ulbrich said. No six-month production lag, no fortune spent.

• Devin Gordon; The New York Times

A History of Book Publishing: How Profits Flow, Why Publishers are Slow to Innovate, and How Authors Get Rich

This is why I chose to self-publish. The closer you get to the means of production, the higher your leverage as an author. But the takeaway from publishing is that [retailers] and distributors always win (for now).

• Paul Millerd

Don’t idolise Roger Scruton

Scruton was a liberal in the sense Burke was a liberal: suspicious of unbridled state power, realistic about human nature, idealistic about the value of nature, art and education irrespective of their “social utility”.

• Sebastian Milbank; The Critic

This is a repost of my original thread about Trump's election, which has since disappeared…

My test is the following: if stranded in an unknown city, would a Dem elite (typically a professional or bureaucrat from a coastal city, with postgraduate education) prefer to spend the next four hours talking to an American worker with a high school degree from the Midwest? Or would he or she prefer to spend it with a professional with postgraduate education from Mexico, China or Indonesia? Or name your country? I asked this question to colleagues and friends, they all think is the latter --- as do I. Most Dem elites are now alienated from American workers…

What is tragic is that Biden’s agenda had started paying off for workers already (and also proving that it was possible to adopt policies that would help workers and disproving the claim that globalization and inequality were acts of nature that could not be influenced). What is even more tragic is that the Trump-Vance policies are likely going to be for the plutocrats and not for the American workers.

• Daron Acemoglu

The sound of blood rushing — Exploring the experimental science of isolation

The sensations that were accidentally produced in these laboratory hide-outs belonged to a family of psychological effects that flourish in social and sensory isolation. From the Desert Fathers to prison inmates, polar explorers to shipwrecked mariners, the phantasmagoria of forlorn imaginings that acted as a proxy for human sustenance were well known. So too the listless confusion into which unending monotony would lead. In 1900, Maurice Small, a fellow at Clark University, went as far as planting a danger sign in the great outdoors: “In the presence of a desert, a prairie, a sea, or the sky; in an absolutely dark cavern, or on the summit of a mountain, a feeling of disproportionateness between the man and what he sees overwhelms consciousness. Paralysis of association results. Retrogression to a half-vegetative state like that of infancy follows”.

• Antonio Melechi; The Times Literary Supplement

HPV vaccination: How the world can eliminate cervical cancer

They estimate that 80% to 100% vaccination rates for both boys and girls, with catch-up vaccinations for adults, could prevent nearly 50 million cervical cancer cases by 2100.

• Saloni Dattani and Veronika Samborska; Our World in Data

Bridging the Great Stagnation: Why Taking an Extra Decade to Master the Fundamentals Matters

I may be biased, but I firmly believe that a key reason behind the so-called “great stagnation” is that too few people dedicate an extra decade to understand the foundational knowledge of the world in all its complexity. 

• Dr. Christine Corbett Moran

Schoenberg’s Second String Quartet: a guide to the best recordings

Many listeners will have first encountered this music via the LaSalle Quartet, whose Second Quartet was for long the benchmark in terms of lucidity and unforced pursuit of an emotional equilibrium over all four movements. With hindsight it now feels just a little pale in response…

• Richard Whitehouse (no relation); Gramophone UK

David Zaslav says Trump will fuel big media mergers

Warner Bros. Discovery CEO David Zaslav thinks putting Donald Trump back in the White House could offer a friendlier environment for major media mergers. “We have an upcoming new administration,” Zaslav said during an earnings call on Thursday. “It’s too early to tell, but it may offer a pace of change and an opportunity for consolidation that may be quite different.”

• Emma Roth; The Verge

Twenty-five facts about The Winter's Tale

#15: Winter’s Tale was written sometime around 1609-1611, when the Blackfriars theatre was newly opened. This theatre relied on candlelight, unlike the Globe, so far more stage effects were possible, such as Hermione’s reawakening, and could be done with suspense.

• Dear Henry Oliver

What I learned from 130 hours in a Waymo

Waymos can’t yet recognize their passengers, so I’ll often see my ride drive right past me even though I’ve stationed myself in a great spot for it to pull over.  Sometimes it will stop in front of me, but will decide for some invisible reason that it isn’t a safe spot to pull over anymore, and it will take off again, leaving me chasing it down and feeling like a chump.  This changes the experience from “I’m living in a magical future with robots doing my bidding” to “Hey loser, your ‘shiny’ new tech hates you”. 

• Matt Bell

The Art World Reacts to a Second Trump Presidency

Carrie Mae Weems lent imagery from her seminal “Kitchen Table” series for a short film titled Kamala’s Table. Artist Brian Andrew Whiteley even got his viral “Trump Tombstone” sculpture out of retirement.

• Tessa Solomon; ARTnews

The ultra-selfish gene

We already interfere with nature to protect humans and wildlife. In 1997 Zanzibar successfully eliminated tsetse flies, which transmit trypanosomiasis (sleeping sickness) to people and animals. Alberta, Canada, has been rat free since the 1950s due to a rigorous ongoing control program. Malaria, as mentioned previously, was eradicated from much of the Western world using the environmentally damaging DDT, which negatively affected wildlife from birds to fish.

Since gene drives allow us to target only the mosquitoes carrying malaria, it is both more effective and more environmentally friendly than other vector control methods like DDT. By eradicating the few species of mosquito known to spread most of malaria, we can rid the world of a horrible disease that kills more than half a million children every single year.

• Mathias Kirk Bonde; Works in Progress  

On Contempt: I Want to Be Liked

Look, I’m probably uncharitable. I’m probably a bad person. I probably have a dysfunctional relationship with my own art. But I hate poetry because I love it so much—and because maybe I feel like I’m not doing enough, or others aren’t taking things seriously enough.

• Randall Mann; Poetry Foundation

Voyager 1 Breaks Its Silence With NASA via a Radio Transmitter Not Used Since 1981

“The S-band signal is too weak to use long term,” Waggoner tells CNN. “So far, the team has not been able to use it to get telemetry (information about the health and status of the spacecraft), let alone science data. But it allows us to at least send commands and make sure the spacecraft is still pointed at Earth.”

• Margherita Bassi; Smithsonian Magazine

Thank you for reading!

Email me at anna@interintellect.com.

Attend our public online salons here. Join our community and find more great stuff to read and thoughtful people to discuss it with here.

Join Interintellect

I’ve just got back from Hereticon, which was so much fun! It’s a great place for reconnecting with friends, stretch one’s Overton window, and learn new things.

Some cool upcoming events for you on Interintellect:

• Unseen Genius - With Sumana Roy (online and public)

• Reading Group: One Day In The Life Of Ivan Denisovich (online and public)

• Living in Wonder: A Conversation with Rod Dreher (online and public - in partnership with )

• The Illness of Inequality – With David Lay Williams (online and public)

• And for our members I will be hosting a Discord hangout on Tuesday from 10:30 pm ET to talk election results and the future

Last night I finally got to meet the courageous and clever in New York City:

And now, my friends, let’s read…

America Votes, and the World Waits

[As an exception I’m including a live feed because I believe it will have good coverage and analysis.]

• Foreign Policy team

Foundational Divides: The essential dimensions of a worldview

Since some values and beliefs are downstream of other, more fundamental, ones and since some determine only a few, relatively unimportant positions, while others determine many, relatively important ones, it’s intuitive that some will do more work than others in terms of explaining salient differences in worldviews. It’s also intuitive that many relevant spectrums will be correlated, to various degrees, with one another, even if they also bring independent information relevant to defining a worldview. 

Anna Karenina in the making: An ‘unparalleled’ account of the novel’s composition

Prominent as well in the manuscripts was the homoeroticism that informs Vronsky’s storyline. Vladimir Nabokov claimed that one early scene in the novel, in which Vronsky is disgusted by an effete pair of officers, contains “the first homosexuals in modern literature”…

• Erik Naiman - The Times Literary Supplement

Why is Fertility Collapsing, Globally?

Men and women who are shy, introverted, boring, aggressive, violent, manipulative, deceitful, unfaithful, or ideologically polarised may ultimately call it quits. The sources of friction are wide-ranging - from personality mismatches to ideological divides. And after perennial disappointments, some may opt out. Without a loving partner, they may hesitate to procreate alone.

If this is an 'existential' election, why aren't people acting liking it?

We shouldn’t imbue politics with a meaning and weight it cannot carry.

• Thank you,

Dining with the Dead

I have very happy memories of families going to the graveyard with their flowers and their food in rural towns in Mexico. Not everyone in Mexico celebrates the Day of the Dead however. Although the custom is becoming more popular year by year, there are many groups at different social levels who do not.

• Rachel Laudan - via

The indignity of being born a woman

It was decided that the boys would be lions and the girls would be fairies. I stepped my foot and demanded to be handed a tail and claws. When I saw the dresses and wings and wands, I was jealous. But, not for the last time in this life, I kneeled on all fours and crawled. Just to prove a point.

Astral Codex Ten Endorses Harris, Oliver, Or Stein

I think the strongest argument against Trump is the argument from authoritarianism. But what is authoritarianism in this context? As I argued years ago, Trump isn’t Hitler, isn’t going to put people in death camps, and probably his approval rating among minorities won’t even dip below the 30s. So what am I worried about?

One worry is that Trump tries to pack election boards with his supporters and give them a mandate to fiddle with election law in ways that make him more likely to win… Another is that Trump might threaten opponents with jail time (or simply loss of government contracts) unless they support him. I don’t know whether Jeff Bezos’ decision to shift Washington Post away from endorsing Harris was motivated by fear, but it’s a good model for the type of situation I worry about.

This is far from Hitler or even Stalin. The model I worry about most is Hugo Chavez, who had no concentration camps and barely even managed a secret police.

Iain McGilchrist’s Naturalized Metaphysics

Why is it then that we have two distinct hemispheres? Not only us humans, but all mammals, as well as fish, birds, and reptiles. And what are we to make of the fact that the division of brain hemispheres has became more accentuated over the course of evolution, not less?

• Rogério Severo; Philosophy Now

Writes and Write-Nots

AI has blown this world open. Almost all pressure to write has dissipated. You can have AI do it for you, both in school and at work.

The result will be a world divided into writes and write-nots. There will still be some people who can write. Some of us like it. But the middle ground between those who are good at writing and those who can't write at all will disappear. Instead of good writers, ok writers, and people who can't write, there will just be good writers and people who can't write.

• Paul Graham

Against brute forcing

To believe that joy and meaning are achievable for you means that you would have to go out there and look for it. Which is hard in a different way than throwing yourself at a concrete problem that can eventually be broken down by brute force. From the outside, it can seem insane to let go of certainty for something as intangible, as indefensible, as meaning and connection. But for many people I think that’s the most important decision they can make.

School is Not Enough

Do children today have useful childhoods?

Fantastic Builders and Where to Find Them

A need to “prove oneself” to internalized authority figures leads to things like climbing conventional status ladders, or staying in an unhappy marriage, or piling up as much money as possible to preserve the appearance of having “made it”.

• with

‘Love Triumphs over Violence—Eventually’

“It’s important that Girard points a way out. Imitating something greater than yourself, beyond the circles of rivalry. Otherwise, you are pulled back into the world of imitating your neighbor, wanting what your neighbor wants—or is.”

• with

A Vast Wave of Drugs and Violence Is Catching Germany Off Guard

A case file that mentions "narcotics in not small quantities,” which could be the understatement of the century for drug investigators. The intercepted phone calls and surveillance photos paint a picture of the largest known amount of cocaine ever smuggled into Germany. One gang, 10 deliveries, 35.5 tons of cocaine, street value: 2.6 billion euros. A mountain of blow of a size never before seen in Europe – though likely only the tip of the iceberg. Investigators are certain that they haven’t come close to intercepting all of it.

• Matthias Bartsch, Jürgen Dahlkamp, Jörg Diehl, Tobias Großekemper, Roman Lehberger, Claas Meyer-Heuer und Ansgar Siemens; Spiegel International

Is Monogamy Right-Wing Coded Now?

Nobody is out there saying that it’s impossible to be a liberal and be married, or to be a liberal who cares about marriage. I think the extent of my pro-marriage values reads conservative, especially the fact that I generally think young marriage is a good thing (within reason; statistically you’re better off getting married after 25) and the fact that I’m pretty no-nonsense about how normal and healthy it is to want a partner, and to do things to try and attract a partner. Personally, I don’t think that’s political in either direction, but I can see why someone would make that mistake.

Recovering from Heroin and Fiction

We are free in some ways, but in others we are painfully constrained. I can’t flap my arms and fly, for example. The same applies to moral and spiritual reality. There are things that thou shalt not, and things that thou shalt. The path is narrow.

• Jordan Castro; Plough

New report on nuclear risk

“Respondents thought that a nuclear conflict between Russia and NATO/USA was the adversarial domain most likely to be the cause of a nuclear catastrophe of this scale…”

• Via Tyler Cowen

Meditation And Mindfulness Have a Dark Side We Don't Talk About

A 2022 study, using a sample of 953 people in the US who meditated regularly, showed that over 10 percent of participants experienced adverse effects which had a significant negative impact on their everyday life and lasted for at least one month.

• Miguel Farias; ScienceAlert

Agreeing to Disagree

Since neither one knows on what observations the other’s posterior is based, he may be inclined to give more weight to his own observations.

• Robert J. Aumann

Markets in Dating: To succeed in dating markets, you have to think like a trader.

Dating is a market because the dating each of us wants is different: different traits in our partners, different types of relationships, different things we offer in return. The challenge of this wild bazaar is finding your partner through the chaos.

Synodality—and ‘controversial’ issues—are here to stay: Takeaways from the Synod’s final document

“There is no reason or impediment that should prevent women from carrying out leadership roles in the Church: what comes from the Holy Spirit cannot be stopped. Additionally, the question of women's access to diaconal ministry remains open. This discernment needs to continue”

• James Martin, S.J.; America Magazine

Nobel Laureate Bob Dylan accidentally visited the world’s largest publishing trade fair

Very charming to imagine a titan and Nobel winner wandering a book fair by himself. 

• James Folta; Literary Hub

My Hereticon Talk - Spiritual Technology

What's at stake is the current existential crisis of technology - who will build the AI god (lower case g) first.

Ribbonfarm is Retiring

I do think that the end really is here for the blogosphere though. This time it really is different… I don’t think there is any single heir to the blog, or to the public social media landscape it dominated, anymore than there was a single heir to the Roman empire when it collapsed.

Another Change Election

One of the unintended and regrettable effects of the new focus on single issues was that it reshaped how civics was taught in American schools. The old approach was to teach the founding principles of the US Constitution and how our institutions were meant to function within the rule of law. Today, if schoolchildren get any civics education at all, it tends to focus on getting them to choose a single cause, learn what they can about it, and become active “agents of change.” Activism is important in a democracy, but to be effective it has to be grounded in a solid sense of how the system works and why.

• Mark Lilla; The New York Review

Agreeing to Agree

Unfortunately Aumann’s proof is quite static and formal, building on a possible-world semantics formalism so powerful that Aumann apologizes: "We publish this note with some diffidence, since once one has the appropriate framework, it is mathematically trivial." It’s ironic that a result so counter-intuitive and controversial can be described in such terms. This combination of elegance and parsimony of proof combined with the totally unexpected nature of the result is part of what makes this area so fascinating to me.

• Hal Finney

It Might Be Possible to Detect Gravitons After All

A new experimental proposal suggests detecting a particle of gravity is far easier than anyone imagined. Now physicists are debating what it would really prove.

• Charlie Wood; Quanta

Settling accounts: Before he was famous, Jean-Jacques Rousseau was Louise Dupin’s scribe. It’s her ideas on inequality that fill his writings

Rousseau unburdened himself to Madame Dupin in a letter, which she returned with a frostiness that nipped his festering passion in the bud. He nevertheless managed to recover his dignity and prove his merit by filling in briefly as governor to the Dupins’ ungovernable teenage son, Jacques-Armand Dupin de Chenonceaux. In 1745, Madame Dupin hired Rousseau ‘as a kind of secretary’. In this capacity, he spent most of his waking hours at the Hôtel de Vins or other properties owned by the Dupins, getting – in Rousseau’s own words – ‘fat as a monk’.

• Rebecca Wilkin; Aeon

How Kraftwerk’s Autobahn remade pop

They were turning the modern world around them into music, moving away from their country’s recent past, accelerating into the future.

• Jude Rogers; New Statesman

What a Russian Smile Means

Even dealing with a simple “How are you?” felt complicated. People in Russia didn’t engage in this kind of social script, and to her it seemed unnecessary. Did they really want to know how she was? No.

• Camille Baker; Nautilus

“Not Everyone Needs To Agree”: Conclave Director Responds To Audiences’ Reaction & Potential Controversy To Shocking Ending

“Not everyone needs to agree with the movie. I love when people disagree, and we can have an argument about it, a real lively discussion.”

• Bella Garcia; Screen Rant

Faced With Trump, Libertarianism Shrugged

By and large, libertarians have shown little enthusiasm for holding Trump accountable for fomenting the election steal lie, or his role in instigating the January 6th attack, or his calls for violence.

• ;

The great British cheese heist: Who stole $390,000 of cheddar?

The incident has caused alarm and upset among high-end foodies in the United Kingdom. The celebrity chef Jamie Oliver told his 10.5 million Instagram followers: “There has been a great cheese robbery. Some of the best cheddar cheese in the world has been stolen.”

• Dwayne Oxford; Al Jazeera

Identity Crisis

The global left has moved away from social class as an organizing identity, allowing the Right to peddle a working-class identity politics untethered from the socialist vision.

• David Broder; Jacobin

The New Chaos of Asian Dance Scenes

The history of pan-Asianism in Japan, however, is not innocent.

• James Gui; Pitchfork

Toward a Christian Postliberal Left

Liberalism is dying—again.

• Eugene McCarraher; Commonweal

Monkeys will never type Shakespeare, study finds

The results indicated that even if every chimp in the world was enlisted and able to type at a pace of one key per second until the end of the universe, they wouldn't even come close to typing out the Bard's works. There would be a 5% chance that a single chimp would successfully type the word "bananas" in its own lifetime.

• Hannah Ritchie; The BBC

Thank you for reading!

Email me at anna@interintellect.com.

Attend our public online salons here. Join our community and find more great stuff to read and thoughtful people to discuss it with here.

Join Interintellect

Lots to read this weekend, so you might not see the full email in your inbox — for the full reading digest open the list in your browser or Substack app.

On Interintellect, some nice new things have been listed. My quick recommendations for you:

• ONLINE The Illness of Inequality – A Super Salon with David Lay Williams: hosted by Bronwyn Williams

• ONLINE Unseen Genius: People and Plants on the Periphery – A Conversation with Sumana Roy

• ONLINE Finding a Second Chance with Shakespeare and Freud: Join Shakespeare professor Stephen Greenblatt and psychoanalyst and writer Adam Philips, alongside writer Henry Oliver, for a discussion about second chances

• ONLINE (Series) George Saunders Book Club: A Swim in a Pond in the Rain

• ONLINE What Does Spiritual Healing Mean For Our Emotions and Psychology? An Introduction to the Science Behind Ancient Wisdom Applied to Modern Society

• ONLINE (Series) Judaism Is Psychedelic – With Madison Margolin

• OFFLINE gatherings in Toronto and Austin (I’ll also probably be hosting one in NYC on November 6, with Claire Lehmann — more on this soon)

Earlier today, I hosted a wonderful salon with literary critic and Hollywood screenwriter Michael Sonnenschein on the problems with today’s storytelling in TV, cinema, and novels: we're talking about genre and Mamet, The Sopranos and Mad Men, character growth and Succession, number of seasons and technological change, studios and directing style, and much more. Video soon!

And episode 11 of my podcast The Hope Axis just dropped - WATCH HERE.

Last week the novelist and essayist joined me to talk about status and attraction, mimesis and uniformity, Girard and Austen, Batuman and Kierkegaard, Tolstoy and main character energy, Natasha's first novel and her new one in the making, the positive side of the imitation game, and how individuals can live freely from it all.

Alright, buckle up, and let’s read…!

Architect of his own downfall: The cold heart of Frank Lloyd Wright

Famously, or notoriously, Wright was a charismatic figure – for if a radically original architect is not a seducer of wealthy clients, how will his work be realized? Like many charismatic figures, Wright was drawn to exploiting his admirers, including women; he paid his employees and acolytes starvation wages, or none at all; at the time of the Spring Green slayings, Wright was in debt to a number of employees and local tradesmen, and breezily indifferent about paying what he owed; the pettiness recounted by his biographers is extraordinary. 

• Joyce Carol Oates; The Times Literary Supplement

‘The Onion’ Officially Endorses Joe Biden For President

Throughout its venerable 268-year reign, The Onion has always made it a top priority to endorse the correct presidential candidates. From George Washington to Richard Nixon to Donald Trump, this institution’s highly respected editorial board has had its finger on the pulse, and has accurately backed the winner of every single national election in this country’s long and storied history. Now, with our nation at a pivotal crossroads, The Onion‘s editorial board faces its most difficult decision yet. That’s why we have chosen to officially endorse Joseph R. Biden for president of the United States.

• Thank you The Onion! If only WaPo had the sense of humour…

Risers and Fallers: What happened to the intellectual giants of the 20th century?

An example of a Faller is John Kenneth Galbraith, who was known for claiming that the American economy had come to be dominated by large corporations. He described them as able to use advertising to ensure demand for their goods. He thought that the leaders of these giants cultivated a myth of entrepreneurship to hide their immense power and quasi-permanent status. In his prime, his books were bestsellers and many educated Americans were familiar with his line of thinking. Today, he is little read, and the business world has experienced considerable disruption. An example of a Riser is Rene Girard, who is known for claiming that we acquire our desires by copying other people. He seems to be better known today than he was in his twentieth-century “prime.” The case that interests me the most is Sigmund Freud…

• Arnold Kling — HT Marginal Revolution

The Charisma-vs.-Charm Election

“Charm is a defining feature of contemporary politics, not just in the United States but internationally,” [Julia] Sonnevend told me recently at an event in New York City hosted by the intellectual community Interintellect. “If you analyze politics without considering it, you are missing a core component,” she insisted. “There’s a stronger focus on personality than before. We have to understand how it operates.”

• Conor Friedersdorf; The Atlantic - This was a good event!

Consciousness as a Gödel sentence in the language of science

While I can’t claim certainty, science being fundamentally incomplete is at least conceivable to me. It would mean that there are scientific facts that at first look tantalizingly discoverable, but then their true answers remain closed to us for non-trivial reasons. (“Non-trivial” is important here—there are clearly many facts trivially closed for us, like counting every atom in the universe.) Non-trivial scientific incompleteness would be a different beast. It’d be more like some statements within science end in paradox, the scientific equivalent of “This sentence is a lie.”

Scientists usually shy away from meta-scientific questions like that of scientific incompleteness. I understand why! It seems too much like philosophy, which is dangerous (something I was told during my PhD repeatedly). Dark and deep waters. But of course, a very similar question was famously asked in mathematics, and it has a very famous answer in Gödel's theorems (essentially that yes, mathematics is necessarily incomplete). While the “genre” of incompleteness proofs doesn’t affect most working mathematicians, it also isn’t irrelevant—it crops up like an ominous weed.

“The Genius to Glue Them Together”: On René Girard and His Ideas

Deceit, Desire, and the Novel remains practical, lucid, and focused on the novels at hand and what they reveal about human nature. At the heart of the book is our endless imitation of each other. Imitation is inescapable — it’s how we learn, it’s why we don’t eat with our hands, it’s why we communicate beyond grunts. When it comes to metaphysical desire — which Girard describes as desires beyond simple needs and appetites — what we imitate is vital, and why, and can be a symptom of our ontological sickness. While he did not coin the word “mimesis” — Erich Auerbach predates him, along with Aristotle and even Plato — certainly much of its usage in our contemporary culture comes from René Girard.

The “Romantic lie” Girard attempts to dismantle is the myth of personal autonomy, the “authentic self” so dear to thinkers from Rousseau onward. The hero wants something, and it is really “he” who wants it — unaffected by others, as if he were not also a slave to public opinion and the approbation of friends and family. Girard saw an inevitable third in these transactions — the one who modeled the desire, who taught us to have it.

• Cynthia L. Haven; Los Angeles Review of Books

25-Year-Old Men Are Adults

I don’t mean to get all Bill Maher on your asses, but like…everyone needs to grow up a little… We are living in the first era in which society has extended men’s adolescence well into their twenties. People will wax poetic about a time in history when twenty-year-old virgin women were sold off to wealthy patriarchs in their forties, but this was never the norm. Throughout history, marriage has been between young women and young men a couple years older. Perhaps young men are a bit less mature than young women, but an age gap of 2-5 years seems to account for this, per the US census…

The curious history of imaginary libraries

Just as potent as the libraries that once existed are the libraries that never did. The imaginary library has never ceased to enthral poets, prelates, politicians and pranksters down the centuries. The Bible might be the very first imaginary library. 

• Josh Mcloughlin; Engelsberg Ideas

Metascience 101 - EP7: “Science and Political Legitimacy"

Journalist Dylan Matthews leads a conversation with Open Philanthropy CEO Alexander Berger, Professor Tyler Cowen, and IFP Co-CEO Caleb Watney. Together, they explore the relationship between effective, robust scientific institutions and notions of political legitimacy…

Tyler Cowen: I think there's a general problem in science funding, also arts funding, and it's the following. There is a lot of underproduced public goods out there. Basic science is one of them. At the margin, you can always do something with government. If it's small enough, it can be well-controlled and have positive impact. But as it gets larger, Congress or someone else wants to have a say. Then effectiveness is greatly diminished. Over time, bureaucratization sets in, labor costs rise, maybe the states and different senators want their share of the thing, whatever else. 

So you have this scarce resource. It's the ability to do things without attracting too much attention. You have to think very carefully how you allocate that. I think a lot of good science policy is knowing when you can do more in an area without attracting too much attention. That's always going to change over time. It won't be a fixed formula. Knowing that we could set up 27 different ARPA-like entities, but in fact, the total amount of money would be so high that Congress would really start interfering with them all, and then we've got to pull back from that. Even though the abstract arguments for doing that might be quite strong. It's a kind of art: figuring out the balance of what you can get away with and keeping enough autonomy so that it still works well.

Antigone’s Law: Who can make the world a better place?

It then falls to women to secure the future and keep human misery out of sight. 

• Jacqueline Rose; The New York Review

When Do We Have Free Choice?

When we better understand another person’s reasons for believing and acting as they do, we are less likely to think that they are free to change their minds. At least, they aren’t free unless we give them new reasons and information to help them change their mind. And if we realize that they are limited in this way, we are more likely to engage in conversation rather than judgment.

• Corey Cusimano; Nautilus

How real should fiction be?

Henry James put it like this: “as the picture is reality, so the novel is history.”

On reading Iris Murdoch's The Sea, The sea and why kids these days can't read

I realized, watching Robin Waldun's video, that I too have lost sight of why great literary novels are worth reading. I once knew it of course, and I read my Hardys and Austens with much pleasure. But over time, they had to make room for more pressing things. If you cannot afford mental space, a certain stretchiness in your day, then out of the window goes our capacity for wonder and discovery (so I argue in my book Wonderstruck). The problem is, you need to read to fully know it. Reading a lot gets you into a virtuous feedback loop where you want to read more. 

How Joe Rogan Remade Austin

The city attracts people with a distinct set of political positions that don’t exactly line up with either main party. They might be religious but are equally likely to be “spiritual.” They shoot guns but worry about seed oils. They are relaxed about gay people but often traditional about gender. They dabble with psychedelic drugs but worry about drinking caffeine first thing in the morning.

• Helen Lewis; The Atlantic

Notes From The Progress Studies Conference

It feels like the United States, after a fifty-year binge on over-regulation, has woken up, wiped the vomit off its chin, noticed it’s lost half its net worth, and started to consider doing something else. I am equally confused why it took so long and why it’s happening now.

• Scott Alexander

Gisèle Pelicot takes stand in French mass rape trial

She told the court in Avignon she wants women who have been raped to know that "it's not for us to have shame - it's for them".

"I want all women who have been raped to say: Madame Pelicot did it, I can too. I don't want them to be ashamed any longer," she said, referring to her request for an open trial and for the videos of the alleged rapes to be shown.

• Laura Gozzi; BBC News

The Bleak Genius of Michel Foucault

Not the grand things in history but the seemingly marginal in human affairs interested him most. He wasn’t so much preoccupied with the power differentials and conflicts embedded in the mode and relations of production, as with the production of power in the hidden and embarrassing little corners of ordinary life—in the interplay between, for example, the young boy or girl just discovering masturbation and the Victorian governess charged with interdicting such behavior. 

• ; COMPACT

Reading J.D. Vance

In Hillbilly Elegy, Vance is still trying to work it out – what was his mother’s fault? What was America’s? He started writing the memoir while he was a student at Yale Law School, where he studied with Amy Chua, author of Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother (2011), which explores the reason ‘Chinese parents raise such stereotypically successful kids’. His book, which Chua helped him to get published, is a kind of counterpart: why does the American white working class produce so many losers? Particularly dysfunctional, he argues, are his own people – the ‘Scots-Irish hillbillies’ who settled in Eastern Kentucky. He thinks that it wasn’t only his mother who ‘lacked even a modicum of temper control’, but nearly all the adults he grew up around – ‘seeing people insult, scream, and sometimes physically fight was just a part of our life.’

These days Vance refers to his hillbilly brethren as ‘very hardworking people, and they’re very good people’, and he blames Kamala Harris for shipping their jobs to China and Mexico, and illegal immigrants for seizing on what little is left (when not too busy fricasseeing their cats). But in his memoir he argues that perfectly decent jobs are in abundance, but ‘too many young men immune to hard work’ are making ‘good jobs impossible to fill for any length of time’. 

• Deborah Friedell; London Review of Books

What Does It Mean to Want Kids?

One of the key tensions of modern life is that the Internet concretizes our internal monologue and we get inured to being judged by our digital presences. Because we’re so used to living as this externalization of our inner voice, it can be surprising or even offensive to hit up against the limitations of what we physically are. In the future, everyone will see you exactly as you want to be seen for 15 minutes…

A while back, a friend of mine was reviewing What Are Children For? and asked me why I decided to have a child. I said that for me, it was instinct. When I say I “wanted” kids what I really meant was that I needed them. It felt as natural as being hungry. Like a phantom limb, I longed to hold my baby.

• — Watch Anastasia Berg and Rachel Weisman on Interintellect talking about What Are Children For? — Watch Katherine See on my podcast The Hope Axis

Why Do Some States Protect Women While Others Enable Abuse?

"Come see us after he’s killed you" remains a grimly accurate characterisation of official attitudes.

In 2017, Russian legislators actually decriminalised domestic battery. Half of all married women have been beaten by their husbands, yet many feel fatalistic presuming nothing can mitigate pervasive alcoholism and abuse.

Why human creativity matters in the age of AI

But the poem is also a record of the noble, melancholy soul of Matthew Arnold. It matters as a human artefact, and an appreciation of Arnold’s lines is inextricable from an appreciation of the human personality that created them. Even the reader’s thrill at the poem’s technical virtuosity is inextricable from the human intelligence that conceived it. You could give me a hundred years and I could not write the final lines.

• James Marriott; Engelsberg Ideas

Will the China Cycle Come for Airbus and Boeing?

One industry that hasn’t yet gone far through this cycle is large commercial aircraft (i.e: jetliners), which remains dominated by Boeing and Airbus, even within China. But this isn’t for lack of trying. China has been attempting to manufacture its own commercial aircraft since the 1970s, and has been following the China cycle playbook to try and get there. It’s not yet clear if it will succeed. So far China has spent decades and billions of dollars in its attempts to build a successful commercial aircraft. 

The Middle-Class Women Who Are Tripping Balls

But Rachel also has another hobby, one that makes her a bit different from the other moms in her Texas suburb—not that she talks about it with them. Once a month or so, after she and her husband put the kids to bed, Rachel texts her in-laws—who live just down the street—to make sure they’re home and available in the event of an emergency. And then, Rachel takes a generous dose of magic mushrooms, or sometimes MDMA, and—there’s really no other way to say this— spends the next several hours tripping balls.

• ; The Free Press

Doctors Agreed Her Baby Would Die 3 Months Before She Was Forced to Give Birth

Deborah Dorbert was five months pregnant in November 2022 when learned that her baby was not going to live. Late in the second trimester of her pregnancy, a scan revealed that his kidneys and lungs were failing to develop; a specialist diagnosed the baby with Potter syndrome, a condition that occurs when there is a lack of amniotic fluid in the uterus. He would not survive more than a few hours past birth, Deborah and her husband, Lee, were told.

Her doctor advised that the safest option for Deborah would be to induce, and end the pregnancy as soon as possible. But because of restrictions that had taken effect in Florida that summer, a week after the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade, that option was not available to her. Instead, Deborah was forced to carry her pregnancy to term: three and half more months, living with the knowledge that her child was going to die.

• Tessa Stuart; Rolling Stone

I'm Done Worrying about "Self-Plagiarism"

When I was getting started as a writer, I remember fantasizing about publication as a magical finish-line that would someday free me from the activity of (always, endlessly) writing and rewriting. How wonderful it would be, to officially finish a text and be free (obliged?) to move on to something else. But if publication marks the completion of a piece of writing, it also marks its birth—its entry into the world as an object with material reality. The text starts having its own adventures, and dictating your further fate and movements. In a way, that’s the beginning of the real story, not the end. What if there were formal conventions for how to tell that story—other than tacking on a “foreword to the Xth edition” every few years?

How American-style cheesecake was born in ancient Rome

The ancient Romans feasted on a delicious honey-crusted cheesecake called Savillum, which is believed to be the real ancestor of modern US-style cheesecake. Instead of Philadelphia soft cheese, there was fresh goat milk ricotta straight from the shepherds. It was adored by slaves, aristocrats and soldiers.

• Silvia Marchetti; CNN

Does academic writing have to be boring?

Academia and higher education have to be a public good. In order for that to happen, we need to be able to communicate in a way that people are going to hear what we’re saying and receive the message.

• Samantha Perfas; The Harvard Gazette

Very attractive and very unattractive men show the highest hostility towards women

Results showed that the strongest link was between right-wing authoritarianism and hostility towards women, both in the form of hostile sexism and misogyny. 

• Vladimir Hedrih; PsyPost

Can the Media Survive?

All of these media insiders have watched up close as the business that undergirds journalism changed dramatically in the past decade, and almost all of them would agree that it hasn’t, for the most part, been for the better. We wanted to understand not just what this new state of media looks like but what the future of getting reliable news out in the world might actually be…

Some unquestionably powerful figures declined to participate…

• Charlotte Klein, Paul Kooiker; New York Magazine

Popular History

Historians like Ramsay and Bancroft—who served in government as Secretary of the Navy under James Polk—have plenty to teach us about the potential conflicts between politics and scholarship. But they were essentially gentleman amateurs (even though Bancroft held a German Ph.D.) who lived in a world defined by very different academic and intellectual institutions. Our current model for serious popular history dates, instead, to the period after World War II, when the rapid expansion of higher education, and of the market for history, produced that golden age of books that we now hold up as paragons of the genre. Writing about this period in his recent book Popularizing the Past, the historian Nick Witham shows how the paperback revolution in publishing, the democratization of culture and the self-examination that accompanied America’s global power after World War II all fostered a cultural environment in which large numbers of Americans looked to serious historical scholarship to help them understand their world…

But Americans did not only feel a strategic imperative to understand other peoples; they also wanted to better understand themselves.

• Scott Spillman; The Point

Simple Yet Profound: On the Timelessness of Aesop’s Fables

So the fables—we know of over seven hundred—deliver inconsistent messages. They are a ragbag. From our childhoods, we’re most familiar with animal fables that have a moral attached. But in many fables animals don’t feature at all. We have talking inanimate objects such as walls and bushes, talking parts of the human body, talking humans and gods. And not all the fables are intended to deliver a moral. 

• Robin Waterfield; Literary Hub

The Essay as Realm

Engineering is a function, but architecture is aesthetic. You’re not just designing for function—you want people to feel a certain way. Churches have high ceilings because they make one feel exalted, smaller and in awe. A visible roof makes a house feel cozier—the roof is a sign of shelter… When I’m writing, I’m trying to be an architect. I’m trying to get the reader to feel the way I do; even when I don’t intend to convince them of something, and most of the time I don’t, writing is a subtly coercive act.

• Elisa Gabbert; Gorgia Review

What Do You Do With an Idea?

Almost any 1950s or 1960s idea that’s being brought back to life today benefits from dramatic cost and performance improvements compared to the technology available at the time. 

What Can You Learn from Photographing Your Life?

Taking pictures of the same things over and over can emphasize the rhythms of existence. Every evening, on the way home from work, I pass the same red-and-white fire hydrant, which is set into some reedy bushes on a little promontory overlooking a harbor. I often stop to take a picture of it: its red registers as warmer in summer and cooler in winter, and its white adopts the yellow of scorched grass in late summer and fall. People’s faces also change with the seasons…

• Joshua Rothman; The New Yorker

Thank you for reading!

Email me at anna@interintellect.com.

Attend our public online salons here. Join our community and find more great stuff to read and thoughtful people to discuss it with here.

Join Interintellect

A lot to read this weekend, so my intro will be brief.

Coming up on Interintellect for you:

• ONLINE Finding a Second Chance with Shakespeare and Freud: Join Shakespeare professor Stephen Greenblatt and psychoanalyst and writer Adam Philips, alongside writer Henry Oliver, for a discussion about second chances.

• OFFLINE (NYC) Why Foucault Matters – Reading Group with COMPACT’s Sohrab Ahmari and Geoff Shullenberger

• ONLINE What Does Spiritual Healing Mean For Our Emotions and Psychology? An Introduction to the Science Behind Ancient Wisdom Applied to Modern Society

• ONLINE (Members only) A Return to Self-Compassion because we all need it

• ONLINE (Series) Culture, Games, Society: Provocative Conversations with Robin Hanson

• ONLINE (Series) Weirdly Brilliant: The Outlier Series with Jason Shen

• ONLINE (Series) Judaism Is Psychedelic – With Madison Margolin

AutumLeaves: Grab your -20% discount to join the Interintellect community - enter it at the checkout or just click HERE! - and enjoy more than just our public online events: get access to our community forum, discounts, freebies, and perks, and our wonderful in-person events!

Before we dive into all the readings… A little tableau of Interintellect in the world, our gatherings on three continents — all the ideas, all the conversations, all the friendships.

What a journey! Thank you for reading, conversing, and travelling with us✨

And now: let’s read….

We Are All Fiddlers on the Roof

With tradition, Tevye says [in the book], “Every one of us knows who he is and what God expects him to do.” The musical, however, seems to test this bold proclamation, for it is often very unclear what God expects Tevye to do. When his daughter rejects the match that has been made for her, preferring the poor tailor to the wealthy widowed butcher, Tevye is faced with a decision: abandon tradition or make his daughter miserable. Which must he choose? Can tradition stretch to accommodate the happiness of his daughter?

• Joy Marie Clarkson; Plough

The Village Nobody Wants

To build a village, you have to make connections with other people. If your in-laws don’t live super close, you need to build connections with neighbors and friends. And people repeatedly reveal their preferences: they are “too busy” to meet neighbors and friends. They “don’t like people.” They complain about “having” to attend birthday parties for other kids in their child’s class, let alone actually chipping in to help another parent plan a gathering. Almost every time I’ve met up with another mom, it was my idea and I had to do most of the planning. Frequently, they cancel or reschedule at the last minute, often giving no reason other than “things are crazy over here.” To some extent, things are crazy, and part of that is because people are less likely to live near family members who can help them. But these people do have free time, even if they say they don’t. There’s plenty of negative stuff to say about the state of work, but we (and by “we” I mean the parents I know, I can’t speak for every parent in the world) work less, or the same amount, than parents did in decades past. Most of the parents I know work remotely or in a hybrid arrangement, and have full time childcare, whether a nanny or daycare. These people absolutely have the time to build community. It’s not a priority.

• Cartoons Hate Her 

Forgetting Taylor Swift

People have been forgetting Taylor Swift’s Eras Tour. You spend thousands of dollars on the most important night of your life, and as the days tick down you get more and more excited—only two months until I see Taylor Swift! Only fifty-nine days! Only fifty-eight!—until the magical day itself. You get dressed up in imitation of one of her outfits. You wear a friendship bracelet, because there’s a Taylor Swift song called “You’re On Your Own, Kid” where she mentions friendship bracelets. You write the number thirteen on your hand, because Taylor Swift sometimes writes the number thirteen on her hand. You’re so full of excitement it feels like your heart might burst. And then, suddenly, it’s night, and you’re streaming out of the venue with hundreds of thousands of other fans, and you have no memory of what just happened. You know, intellectually, that you were there for more than four hours as the world’s biggest pop star performed her entire back catalog for you, and you sang along to every song. But you don’t remember it. You can’t conjure the images, or the feelings. You don’t feel anything at all.

• Sam Kriss; The Lamp

The Inner Ring

Of all the passions, the passion for the Inner Ring is most skillful in making a man who is not yet a very bad man do very bad things. ... As long as you are governed by that desire you will never get what you want. You are trying to peel an onion: if you succeed there will be nothing left. Until you conquer the fear of being an outsider, an outsider you will remain…

The quest of the Inner Ring will break your hearts unless you break it. But if you break it, a surprising result will follow. If in your working hours you make the work your end, you will presently find yourself all unawares inside the only circle in your profession that really matters. You will be one of the sound craftsmen, and other sound craftsmen will know it. This group of craftsmen will by no means coincide with the Inner Ring or the Important People or the People in the Know

• C. S. Lewis

A Reductionist History of Humankind

Since Harari considers natural science to be the final word on reality and all cultures to be “imaginary orders,” it is no surprise that he considers morality, too, to be entirely a fictional invention.

• John Sexton; The New Atlantis — Harari is by far the most morally harmful author of our times. How someone’s personal depression (sad) turns into cultural poison (bad).

Can Space-Time Be Saved?

Most of today’s leading theoretical physicists have a shared perspective about what the next revolution in physics will look like. They think reconciling Albert Einstein’s general theory of relativity with quantum mechanics will require transcending the notion of space-time. Einstein’s theory attributes the force of gravity to curves in the space-time fabric, but beneath this fabric they hope to find a quantum theory of gravity expressed in terms of entirely different, more fundamental concepts.

• Charlie Wood; Quanta

In Defense of Motivated Belief

But language was not understood, or used, in a primarily literal way until relatively recently in human history. It is not that the literary dominated the literal, but that no practical distinction was made until the rise of the W.E.I.R.D. mind and its methodical, analytical approach that we recognize today as scientific rationality. When a Rudolph Carnap dismisses theology and metaphysics as “mere language games” – and even when more moderate antipositivists assert that statements do not have to be falsifiable to be meaningful – both of these are assertions about the function of language quite at odds with any premodern use of language, beyond particularly literate urbanites. Incanctations with no obvious physical referents, metaphysical shibboleths, are no abberations; they were for most of human history the primary function of language.

• Cameron Harwick — I’m pretty sure the first primary functions of language were “pass me the elk bone, Ubuh”, but an interesting read

Cheap ornament and status games

Something similar seems true of literature: tycoons and dukes are surely no more likely than standard middle-class people to read Joyce, and much less likely to do so than, say, university professors or highbrow journalists. In the case of painting and sculpture, the situation is a little more complex. Rich people certainly do buy modernist art today, and some of them did so even in its pioneer phase. But it is still doubtful that the development of modernist painting and sculpture was driven by rich patrons. The traditional story of the modernist artist suffering poverty and ostracism for his art is partly mythical, but not entirely so: most modernists would have been bemused, not to say outraged, by the suggestion that they were following the market. The intelligentsia embraced modernism first, and the rest of the bourgeoisie gradually fell into line over the next generation.

• Samuel Hughes; Works In Progress

A Nobel for the big big questions

What’s an “institution”? No one can quite agree on that point. Conceptually, they could include legal arrangements like property rights, political systems like democracy, bureaucratic organizations, etc. Different researchers tend to mean different things when they say “institutions”, though everyone seems to agree that 1) rule of law, and 2) property rights are important examples.

Acemoglu, Johnson and Robinson (whom most people call “AJR”) have a theory that economic development is caused by a country having the right kind of institutions.

• Noah Smith

The Death of Yahya Sinwar

If there is any justice, this killing will not be seen as an accomplishment of any kind. It’s yet another murder in a seemingly endless line. Whatever the extent of Sinwar’s crimes, his death does not justify the thousands that were killed to get to him. And who exactly gave him permission to martyr thousands of innocents on the way to his own martyrdom?

• John Ganz — Currently on Twitter break because of threats

‘And You a Catholic!’ — Faith beyond the culture wars

Here’s the story as I first heard it—as, perhaps, you’ve heard it as well. Evelyn Waugh, the great stylist, the great humorist, and the less-than-great human being, was appallingly rude at a party. “How can you behave so badly,” the hostess asked, “and you a Catholic!” To which Waugh, who would have been great on social media, shot back, “You have no idea how much nastier I would be if I was not a Catholic. Without supernatural aid I would hardly be a human being.”

• Phil Klay; Commonweal

I.B. Singer’s Language of Everyday Life

Singer’s own lifelong identity as a newspaperman informed his thinking about literature, especially his suspicion of the pretentious and the abstract. “No matter how deep a literary work may be, if it bores the reader, it is worthless,” he declared. The job of the novelist isn’t “to analyze or to probe,” but to report something new about the world—“some sort of revelation, a fresh approach, a different mood, a new form.” As he put it in the essay “Who Needs Literature?,” writers “are entertainers in the highest sense of the word. They can only touch those truths which evoke interest, amusement, tension…. In art, a truth which is boring is not true.”

• Adam Kirsch; The Nation

Cargo airships are happening

It’s happening. There will soon (soon in the grand scheme of things at least) be thousands of giant airships crossing our oceans, transforming global logistics and connecting economies. Cargo airships are going to be big.

• Eli Dourado — I’m a proud investor in Airship

Reevaluating Alcohol: Is Total Sobriety the Healthiest Way?

The study found that even 1-2 drinks per day is associated with lower gray matter and white matter volume in the brain, which indicates reduced cognitive abilities…

To keep stating the obvious, moderation is key, and they knew this then as well as now. But what has been partially forgotten is the acknowledgement of what benefits drinking brings, that it “moistens the soul,” that it brings us “to a more sportive mood” where we can speak and think openly. Wine was key to the philosophical insights produced in ancient Greece.

• Maia Adar; Cosimo

Rooms of all our own: On the history of ignoring early women writers

If all this lyrical emotion for kings and children seems conventional, and also problematically feminine, we can turn to Margaret Cavendish for poems that consider atoms, “like workmen, which among themselves agree”, or poems on the theory of a vacuum, or on optical instruments. An oak engages in a dialogue with the man cutting him down, and a castle in ruins discusses its fate with a knight.

• Diane Purkiss; The Times Literary Supplement

Five takeaways on the value of space activity 🚀

Attempts to quantify the monetary value of space activity run into immediate problems arising from contestation over what the widely-used term ‘the space economy’ refers to.

• Rebecca Lowe

Status (part 3)

And so we carefully paint over it… Despite the squirmy discomforts of our egoic motives, our instinct to deceptively obscure them, our counter-instinct to painstakingly exhume what we’ve obscured, the selfish quest for status is responsible for the best as well as the worst of human achievement.

• Natasha Joukovsky

Life in India is a series of bilateral negotiations

Living in a country built off of bilateral negotiations for everything is simultaneously the libertarian dream and an incredibly inefficient way to do most collective things. Ronald Coase told us this in 1960.

“if property rights are well-defined and transaction costs are low, private parties can negotiate solutions to externalities without the need for government intervention”

• Rohit Krishnan

An Interview with Joel Towers, The New School’s New President

‘Rebecca Solnit is another source of inspiration. In an essay called “False Hope and Easy Despair” she writes, “Despair demands less of us, it’s more predictable, and in a sad way safer.  Authentic hope requires clarity—seeing the troubles in this world—and imagination, seeing what might lie beyond these situations that are perhaps not inevitable and immutable.”’

• The New School

Exploring Immersive Entertainment

When I think about the World's Fair and its power to inspire millions, I envision building dozens of wonderful experiences like the "home of tomorrow" at the largest possible scale, creating an unforgettable experience. An experience that will remind every guest of what humanity is capable of and, more importantly, ignite the ambition of every kid who visits to become a scientist, technologist, or entrepreneur — to become a builder of the future.

• Cameron Wiese

Moral hazard or not, I now feel the climate situation is bad enough that we should begin scalability work for stratospheric aerosol injection (SAI) immediately.

This is not the same conclusion I would have had even two years ago, but the increase in ocean temperature and extreme climate events indicates a trend that will rapidly get worse unless we are able to take global-scale action within the next 1-5 years, and SAI is the only feasible one.

• Yishan Wong

The Gender Divide Is a Class Divide

Fundamentally, the Democratic Party is catering to women because it is catering to the highly educated.

• Batya Ungar-Sargon; COMPACT

The Weak Science Behind Psychedelics

The field also draws eccentric types who, rather than conducting research with clinical disinterest, tend to want psychedelics to be accepted by society. “There’s been really this cultlike utopian vision that’s been driving things,” Matthew W. Johnson, himself a prominent psychedelic researcher at Sheppard Pratt, a mental-health hospital in Baltimore, told me.

• Olga Khazan; The Atlantic

Britain’s food wars Is Waitrose a cure for the Westminster class?

British cuisine at its best is hearty, simple fare, showcasing the natural bounty of these islands, our waters rich with fish and seafood (much of it exported abroad to more appreciative consumers), our rain-soaked pastures the nursemaid of the free-range meat and rich dairy goods Britain has excelled in for millennia. At its best, British food displays the worth of good ingredients cooked well — and at its worst, of poor ingredients cooked badly.

• Aris Roussinos; UnHerd — No comment

The Real Rodney Alcala Story Was More Gruesome Than Woman of the Hour Lets On

As gruesome a portrait as Woman of the Hour might paint of Alcala, the film practically glosses over the most chilling aspect of his backstory: Even before appearing on the dating show, Alcala had already been arrested multiple times, including for murder, and had made the FBI’s Ten Most Wanted list.

• Laura Bradley; Vulture

‘Advanced’ construction technology found at 5000-year-old Stone Age site in Denmark

Starting nearly 6,000 years ago, the Funnel Beaker Culture led a switch to agriculture and domestication of animals in Scandinavia, moving away from a hunter-gatherer lifestyle.

• Vishwam Sankaran; The Independent

‘Second Act’ Review: Better Late Than Never

But [one of the ancient rabbis] is a bit ambiguous when it comes to one’s creative contributions and worldly success: At what point are those best accomplished? Early on in life? Or are they more likely the product of decades of preparation? In his wide-ranging book, “Second Act,” the writer Henry Oliver explores the potential of those later years for something more than reflective wisdom or the giving of hard-earned advice. It is a celebration of late bloomers, a type he defines simply as those who succeed “when no one expects them to.”

• Samuel Arbesman; The Wall Street Journal

From Elon Musk to cop car chases, how a software engineer launched a police AI startup

Earlier this year, Abel founder Daniel Francis was in a car going 135 miles per hour down a highway in Oakland, California. The driver, a police officer, had a gun in his lap.  Francis has made a habit of riding shotgun with policemen in the name of research for his company, which creates AI to fill out police reports. Usually, the rides are fairly uneventful. But that day, the officer had pulled over a man to search his car. The man freaked out and pressed the gas pedal, almost hitting someone. Francis and the officer took off chasing him. “I was so excited,” Francis recalled. “I was like, finally, it’s happening! Finally, not just a stolen car call where we go and fill out a report.” 

• Margaux MacColl; TechCrunch

Critical Creative Genius at the Intersection of Order, Disorder, and Chaos

Creativity doesn’t arise from comfort.

• Lane Watson 

Is TikTok different in China? Here's what to know

The version of Douyin used by Chinese adults resembles U.S.-based TikTok, except for some propaganda in favor of the Chinese Communist Party and a lack of alternative viewpoints on hot-button topics…

More noticeable differences between TikTok and Douyin arise when the respective apps are looked at through the lens of young users, some experts said. In the U.S., children experience the same version of TikTok as adults, while children in China see a modified version of Douyin that includes more educational content, they said.

•  Max Zahn, ABC News

Bullshit Is a Choice

There’s another important implication: if you’re looking for a decent cue of someone’s trustworthiness on a topic, try to assess how involuntary their belief seems to be. If they seem like they were dragged kicking and screaming toward the belief—blindsided by the sheer force of reality—then their belief is probably of the regular type, and it’s probably not bullshit. On the other hand, if their belief seems eagerly chosen or all-too-convenient for them, then it’s probably a credence, and it’s probably bullshit. 

• David Pinsof — A crudely phrased article, but I too tend to trust beliefs and opinions only when they feel examined and show signs of struggle. Your brain shouldn’t just surrender its scepticism for nothing!

500 years ago, China destroyed its world-dominating navy because its political elite was afraid of free trade

Few people in the West realise how economically and technologically advanced China was by the 1400s.

• Jim Edwards; The Independent

Red, Hot and Blue: A Defense of Agatha Christie's The Blue train

What a melancholy, autumnal tone there is to this novel, set in part in the sun-drenched Rivera! I cannot help thinking it reflects Christie’s views as she headed for Las Palmas in the Canary Islands with her young daughter at the beginning of 1927 to try and recuperate from what surely had been a 1926 nervous breakdown when she was thirty-six (her notorious disappearance) and get to work on another Poirot novel in the wake of her career triumph with The Murder of Roger Ackroyd.

• Curtis Evans; CrimeReads

Zen questioning

Zen questioning is a simple and direct method that helps you uncover your own buddha-nature. It was developed in China from the sixth century onwards, in reaction to the scholastic tradition of the time, which relied heavily on the scriptures. The Zen school wanted to get back to the Buddha’s original message of practicing meditation and realizing awakening in this life…

The practice is very simple. Whether you are walking, standing, sitting or lying down, ask repeatedly 'What is this?’ You are not looking for an intellectual answer so your question should not be an intellectual enquiry. In this moment, you are turning the spotlight onto yourself and your whole experience.

• DharmaNet

Thank you for reading!

Email me at anna@interintellect.com.

Attend our public online salons here. Join our community and find more great stuff to read and thoughtful people to discuss it with here.

Join Interintellect

I’m watching Megalopolis today - wish me luck, will report back!

I’ve just started reading the new Olga Tokarczuk, an homage to Thomas Mann’s The Magic Mountain, but a horror story! What can go wrong….?!

For private reflection, I’ve been thinking about work - especially the invisible, private, quiet actions we do every day, outside the limelight, the little things that take up our time, the tasks we take for granted.

Readings of…

• Kipling

To these from birth is Belief forbidden; from these till death is Relief afar.
They are concerned with matters hidden – under the earthline their altars are
The secret fountains to follow up, waters withdrawn to restore to the mouth,
And gather the floods as in a cup, and pour them again at a city’s drouth 🛠️

• Carly Simon (lyrics — song and video)

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Let all the dreamers wake the nation!…
We the great and small
Stand on a star
And blaze a trail of desire
Through the darkening dawn 🌇

• The Proverbs

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She considers a field and buys it; out of her earnings she plants a vineyard...
She sees that her trading is profitable 🍇

• Rilke (no good official translation in English exists - but I created one with Claude, without the rhyme pattern.)

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And if you ask her at midnight, she says 
With deep simplicity: I am Ruth, the maid 🕊️

On Sunday, we hosted our fourth seasonal Interintellect festival - this time the theme was “Ideas of Power” in an election year.

Julia Sonnevend, John Ganz, and Tara Isabella Burton discussed fame and populism. Musa al-Gharbi, Skye Cleary, and Scott Barry Kaufman the role of universities in educating the elites. Jennifer Frey, Shadi Hamid, and Rebecca Lowe talked about secular vs divine power. We closed with a roundtable with all the panels and attendees. Pure intellectual joy - difficult conversations in a spirit of friendship, in our signature Interintellect style! (Livestream - for now unedited - here)

Some cool newly listed Interintellect events for you:

• COMPACT magazine in-person reading group on Foucault’s intellectual legacy on October 23 in Manhattan, with and - members only - register here

• SuperSalon - public and online - hosted by on the great new book Second Chances: Shakespeare and Freud with the authors Stephen Greenblatt and Adam Phillips

• In-person casual social in Washington DC hosted by Vidhika Bansal and Gina Hafez — I’ll try to swing by! Book here

My new The Hope Axis podcast with is now up! Watch and comment:

Podcaster star Dwarkesh Patel on how his eponymous podcast started, how his niche interests empower him, what he learned about scene-building and getting one's "lucky break", and how he succeeded at landing Mark Zuckerberg, Tony Blair, or Tyler Cowen as interviewees.

(Audio version here.)

And now, let’s read!

Home Libraries Will Save Civilization

I have previously written about how overstuffed with books and bookcases my family’s home is. In the midst of the (il)literacy crisis unfolding around us, I would like to propose an old-fashioned response: Home libraries will save civilization. Why? Because a home overcrowded with books sets the tone for how its inhabitants spend their time at home. Bored? Read a book. Want something to do for fun? Read a book. Have friends over? Read a book together. Relaxed family night at home? Start a read-aloud.

• Nadya Williams; Front Porch Republic

An economic defense of the liberal arts

The intuition is simple: in a modern, highly uncertain world you often don’t know where and in what capacity you will be working in ten or twenty years, so it is crucial to accumulate a set of knowledge and skills that can be used to acquire further knowledge and skills in many different areas. How can a liberal arts education achieve that? First, it does that by introducing students to many different fields, so they do not rely entirely on knowledge related to one field. Second, when done right, it also does that through emphasizing critical thinking.

• FTW

South Korean author Han Kang wins the 2024 Nobel prize in literature

According to Korean news reports, some online bookstores were brought down by an influx of traffic following the announcement, and multiple government hearings were paused as officials cheered the news. In a statement, Korean President Yoon Suk Yeol congratulated Han: “You converted the painful wounds of our modern history into great literature,” he said. “I send my respects to you for elevating the value of Korean literature.”

• Ella Creamer; The Guardian

Writing advice is a lie

Here’s the thing. You should ignore this stuff. Almost all of it is wrong. Flat wrong. Plain wrong. Waste-of-time wrong… You won’t ever read the most important thing a writer can know, that grammar is logic.

• 🔥

Timothy Snyder’s liberty bell

Co-opted by political cynics and their rich friends, on the one hand, “freedom” has been squeezed of meaning, becoming a tatty banner in an apparently worldwide battle with no purpose other than to keep on generating fear, outrage and terror in pursuit of power. Yet precisely because of the horrors perpetuated under this banner, there is a new awareness of freedom, even if it is perceived simply, and for many starkly, as an empty seat. Just ask them in Kyiv, Snyder would say; and he does (one of the people he asks is Volodymyr Zelensky). 

• Lyndsey Stonebridge; The New Statesman

The Disappearance of an Internet Domain

The removal of an entire country or territory from the world map is incredibly rare, so one might ask why the process for deleting a domain is so clearly documented. So automatic. So…final. The answer is simple: history. 

• Gareth Edwards; Every

Rationality After Oct. 7

The future of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict will be determined by the larger human question of whether wounded people can think clearly. Everything depends upon the possibility of post-traumatic rationality. But can there be such a thing?

• Leon Wieseltier; COMPACT

The Texan Doctor and the Disappeared Saudi Princesses

Burdick, a lifelong peacenik with a neat white beard, had moved to Saudi Arabia from Texas in the mid-nineties. He had served for years on the King’s personal medical detail, but had never before encountered Princess Hala. The request to drug her alarmed him—forced sedation was a “violation of my professional ethics,” he said—but he was curious.

• Heidi Blake; The New Yorker — I am deeply shocked but apparently this is not an isolated case

Seizing the Means of Knowledge Production

The idea of utilizing administration, etc. for promoting social justice goes back to prominent student activist Rudi Dutschke, who advocated a “long march through the institutions” as the most plausible means for his fellow student activists to realize change: those committed to the cause should entrench themselves as integral parts of the socio-cultural machinery, become expert operators of said machinery (actually do the work, and well), then leverage these instruments in the service of alternative aims. Dutschke’s proposal was celebrated and wholeheartedly endorsed by Marcuse and many others on the ‘new left,’ leading to its popularization.

• ; Heterodox Academy

A well-lived life means wasting some time

You need to dawdle and dream. You need to leave enough empty space in your life to feel and experience, and simply let yourself be you. Hurrying from one thing to the next, in order to make sure your life is full enough is not going to satisfy you but merely craving for more.

• Helen de Cruz

Why do we get the wrong leaders?

This political quality is not to be found in the substance of any particular value or conviction or body of knowledge, but rather in an attitude towards how all of these things should be weighed up in the process of decision-making. We call this quality judgement. And once you know that this is what makes for a good politician, you see it, or more precisely you see its absence, everywhere.

• James Vitali; Engelsberg Ideas

Soulful Houellebecq

[We] find the reason for admiring Houellebecq’s fiction: For him, theories never do justice to the strangeness of human life. As he told his Paris Review interviewer, “belief in the soul . . . is strangely persistent in me, even though I never stop saying the opposite.”

• ; First Things

The Rise of the Barbarian Right

Given the emphasis on edgy jokes, the dissident right’s voice can blend with that of other groups of online shitposters, all contributing their share of noise to the social-media cacophony. 

Boomers Are Losing Narrative Control

Baby boomers have been in the catbird seat since they were teenagers, exerting enormous cultural and social power. As their grip weakens, they are not only losing control of the generations below them, but also of how we think about the time we live in, and about them. Maybe young generations feel off-balance because we are now defining the times but never learned how. Or maybe our unsettled feeling is downstream of boomer disorientation.

Survey Results: Sex, Divorce and Infidelity After Baby

This makes me wonder if arguments over parenting and household contributions are usually a symptom of a larger problem: if you’re in the type of marriage where infidelity and emotional abuse is happening, it stands to reason that this type of person might also be kind of a sucky parent and/or spouse in other ways. On the flip side, is a lack of interest in parenting or contributing to the household a sign that someone is more likely to be emotionally abusive or unfaithful?

Against steelmanning: It's usually not a good idea to try to make arguments look stronger than they really are

Steelmanning can easily turn into strawmanning.

It’s Time for Electronic Music to Turn Its Dreams Into Reality

You could look at all this viral creativity as just another meme. But I think the outpouring of enthusiasm for a made-up genre speaks to a curious nexus of frustration and desire in the air right now, at the midpoint of the 2020s. There’s a nagging feeling that electronic music, for all its former promise, is spinning its wheels. And there’s a yearning for something more—an unspoken wish that things could be more interesting, more daring, more audacious.

• Philip Sherburne; Pitchfork

For better, for worse — June brings fewer wedding bells, but Scheherazade offers post-nuptial inspiration

2020 even saw, for the first time, more people divorcing than tying knots. While partly explained by the postponement of many weddings, this was also the consequence of lockdown restrictions causing couples to feel imprisoned within their marriages. Does this imply that marriage is finally heading for extinction? Or could it suggest the opposite – that having always come in and out of fashion, marriage is on the verge of another comeback?

• Devorah Baum; Perspective Media

The Man Who Was Not There — What Einstein Is Really Doing in “Oppenheimer”

So what is Einstein doing there? Why did Nolan, screenwriter as well as director, write him into key moments in the story, including the film’s final scene?

• Ohad Reiss-Sorokin; The Hedgehog Review

A letter from Prague: the city in timeless harmony

I often wonder about composers: does knowing about their lives matter or impact the way we hear the music?

• Hattie Butterworth; Gramophone

When a writer belongs to society now!

Candor — the raw kind — is a luxury afforded to those who owe people nothing, but in actuality, none of us live in a vacuum.

The Economic Way of Thinking in a Pandemic

During the pandemic, economists often found themselves at odds with politicians, physicians, epidemiologists and others. Some politicians, for example, were worried that the pharma companies might engage in profiteering while economists worried that the pharma companies were not nearly profitable enough. Physicians focused on maximizing the health of patients while economists focused on maximizing the health of society–during the pandemic these were not the same and this led to disputes over testing, first doses first and human challenge trials. During the pandemic economists were often accused of not staying in their lane. But what is the economist’s lane?

• Alex Tabarrok

Conversations with Goethe by Johann Peter Eckermann

Unfortunately, the book, which was initially published in 1836 and only gradually became popular, concludes with a third part, a kind of long appendix, published in 1847. Here, Eckermann borrows from the diary of a French writer who also visited Goethe, and revisits his own earlier memories of their tête-à-têtes. This section doesn’t have the same force and grace as the first two parts, although Goethe still manages to deliver his fair share of maxims.

• David Starkey; California Review of Books

The Giving Tree: Bad Book or Worst Book?

Let's not mince words. Written by a Playboy mansion habitue and composer of "A Boy Named Sue," The Giving Tree is about a female tree that literally gives up every aspect of her existence to please a spoiled, uncaring boy. By the end of the volume, the tree is reduced to a stump where the boy, now an old man, can park his ass. Decades past the Sexual Revolution, it's damn nigh impossible to read The Giving Tree as anything other than sublimated male anxiety over the rising tide of unfettered feminine sexuality and freedom.

• Nick Gillespie; Reason

Why painting (still) matters

Writing about the masters is a safe and well-trodden career, but Gayford approaches it with an appealing scepticism. In a chapter entitled “What does a Rothko mean?”, he confronts the Russian-American artist’s insistence on the sublime, spiritual nature of his painting and how important it is that so many people burst into tears in front of his canvases.

• Andrew Marr. New Statesman

The Reality Ouroboros

Scientists tend to think about reality in one of two ways. The first perspective involves physically emergent hierarchies (ontologies). The second describes conceptually emergent hierarchies (epistemologies)...

• David Krakauer; Nautilus

Thank you for reading!

Email me at anna@interintellect.com.

Attend our public online salons here. Join our community and find more great stuff to read and thoughtful people to discuss it with here.

Join Interintellect

As always there is so much good stuff to read, but this week I’ll keep this short: tomorrow is a big day at Interintellect as we’re throwing our Ideas of Power festival in New York City.

If you’re a member, you will be able to watch the livestream and interact with the speakers online by visiting the “ideas of power” channel in our community Discord. (If unsure how to access Discord: log into our website as a member and click on Update Discord.)

During the past week, apart from the always fun online events hosted on the Interintellect platform by a myriad of fascinating hosts, there were in-person Interintellect socials in Washington DC, Austin…

I also, finally, updated my personal website! Background, Interintellect’s beginning, and other trivia.

I have just published, for my new podcast The Hope Axis, the video for episode #9 with death doula Emma Acker. A truly incredible person. (Audio coming soon.)

“Professional end-of-life doula Emma Acker joined me to discuss the mystery of dying -- and the forgotten art of being there with the dying. Her job is just this, and we talked about the various stages of departure, how the family might react, what administrative things one needs to take care of. But also about dying when young versus old, when in pain versus no pain, when religious versus atheist. There is no one like Emma!”

👉🏻 I also have just recorded an episode - episode 10 - with the one and only 🔥

This was a wide-ranging episode about his podcasting journey, the art of getting started, how to build a friend group, why is the GOAT, how Zuck agreed to come on the Dwarkesh Podcast, why AI should be on everyone’s mind — and our mutual obsession with the World War II (and why that’s as much of a worthwhile obsession as Ancient Rome). We talked about religion, honesty, working in public, the importance of reaching out. And tycoons, secrets, boredom and more. Video soon.

And now, let’s read… !

I should have been braver

The most direct piece of medical evidence there is in this case is two high readings of insulin observed in two babies after the prosecution’s experts went through various medical records of babies treated at the hospital. In 2019, they found 2 abnormally high readings of insulin dating from 2015, which they argued were proof that someone attempted the babies with insulin (the babies survived.) The only problem is that the assay that was used to measure insulin was not designed to show exogenous insulin administration, something that is actually written on the test itself.

• I for one think is very brave. This trial is a major fiasco and a moral stain on Britain.

Lucy Letby was not working on day Baby C was harmed, BBC investigation finds

Letby was found guilty of killing a boy known as Baby C by injecting air into his system at the Countess of Chester Hospital in June 2016… “Pivotal evidence for one of the Lucy Letby murder convictions is deeply flawed, as she appears to have never met the baby at the time it was obtained.She had never been on shift. This, quite obviously, calls into question whether the conviction it underpins is safe.”

• Sarah Knapton; The Telegraph — the stuff of nightmares.

Schooling Myself

My own homeschooling fused religious and institutional anxieties to produce a Christian-right unschooling. Before I was born, my mother had worked at a Christian school as a liaison with homeschooling families, and their children’s freedom to pursue their own interests had beguiled her. She didn’t want her own children to “get beaten down by school” like others she’d seen, she told me recently. Homeschooling, she believed, could keep us safe and set us free.

• Elisa Gonzalez; The Point

Against The Cultural Christianity Argument

The challenge of modernity has felled both Christian theocracies and the virtuous liberalisms of the past alike. If modern atheists want a society better than our current one (or rather, better than wherever modern culture is leading us) they'll have to invent some new cultural package that's never been seen before.

• Scott Alexander

The Unraveling of Space-Time

“To be clear, the potential emergence of space-time doesn’t make it any less real. Most of our world is emergent. Tables and chairs emerge from grids of jiggling molecules. You emerge from bursts of electricity between your neurons. The discovery of cells or atoms has in no way robbed us of our reality. On the contrary, emergent descriptions are in some sense more real than fundamental ones…”

• Various authors; Quanta - Excellent and interactive

Metascience 101 - EP4: "ARPAs, FROs, and Fast Grants, oh my!"

Stripe Press’s Tamara Winter talks through the broad range of scientific funding institutions with guests Professor Tyler Cowen, Arc Institute Co-Founder Professor Patrick Hsu, and Convergent Research CEO Adam Marblestone…

Tyler Cowen: “I like the idea that it may be temporary: you achieve the end and then the institution dissolves. But people aren't used to that. Many institutions prolong themselves, carrying overhead, keeping friends and associates in jobs. There's something pernicious about that, but it does, in some ways, make it easier to hire basic talent. If you're going to do it differently, you have to be more innovative. You need a strong soft network to bring people in, and you need to pay them pretty well. I think that's part of the problem: people aren't used to the model of potential temporariness.”

• Tim Hwang; Macroscience

No, Culture is Not Stuck

The Internet was supposed to democratize everything, do away with gatekeepers and in some cases, craft. We were prepared for that: the masses overtaking the institutions. But that’s not what happened. The gatekeepers and the craft both changed. And with it, so did ideas around authorship. It wasn’t a simple fight between independent creators and established ones. It was a complete reshuffling. 

• ;

She’s bloody clever — Agatha Christie’s Miss Marple approaches 100

Jane Marple made her first appearance in “The Tuesday Night Club”, published in the Royal Magazine in December 1927. From the beginning, Aldridge says, she was “a reassuring presence”, created at a turbulent time in Christie’s life. The year before had seen a bewildering mixture of professional success and personal crisis: publication of her brilliant, controversial novel, The Murder of Roger Ackroyd; a deep depression following the death of her mother; her husband’s adultery and the end of her marriage; and the scandal surrounding her highly publicized disappearance. Little wonder, then, that she should crave someone whose “entire raison d’être was to be a calm point in a stormy sea”.

• Nicola Upton; The Times Literary Supplement — no wonder I adore Miss Marple

The new media barons

As has been happening elsewhere (namely the United States, with the sale of Time magazine to the Salesforce co-founder Marc Benioff and Jeff Bezos’s purchase of the Washington Post), money made in other markets is buying into the press. Will the new media moguls save Britain’s oldest publications – or change them beyond recognition?

• Will Dunn; The New Statesman

Michel Houellebecq’s Outlook for an Ailing France: C’est Fini

The French writer Michel Houellebecq has the sort of notoriety, Karl Ove Knausgaard wrote, that makes it easy to talk about him as if you’ve read him — even if you’ve not.

• Dwight Garner; The New York Times

Can we scale cultures that support learning?

I also think that AI systems and zero knowledge proofs will provide us with interesting new design possibilities that could be useful when building better cultures.

Understanding Desire in the Age of Ozempic

GLP-1 drugs such as Ozempic, Wegovy, and Mounjaro mimic a hormone that not only stimulates insulin production but also interacts with the brain’s reward circuitry. Scientists are still working out exactly how people respond psychologically. Despite some anecdotal reports of depression and anxiety, a recent study didn’t find an uptick in neuropsychiatric issues with semaglutide, the active ingredient in Ozempic and Wegovy, compared with three other antidiabetic medications; another found that the drugs are not significantly associated with increased suicidal thoughts. The question of desire is more subtle. Davide Arillotta, a psychiatrist at the University of Florence, recently led a study that analyzed tens of thousands of English-language posts about GLP-1 drugs on YouTube, Reddit, and TikTok and found that, unsurprisingly, many express enthusiasm about weight loss. But other people “reported a lack of interest in activities they once enjoyed, as well as feelings of emotional dullness,” he told me.

• Shayla Love; The Atlantic — I often think about this

Great Works: An Experiment on a Bird in the Air Pump, 1768, by Joseph Wright of Derby\

Yes, just look at the fascinating range of responses, and see how they differ so dramatically from the youngest to the eldest. The youngest are fearful in the extreme – one of them cannot even bear to look at this poor, suffering bird – and the oldest (that seated man on the right of the table who leans on his cane) is the most steadily ruminative. And then, quite different again, there is the young couple who are standing to the left of the man who is the master of ceremonies. They are engaging in a bit of idle banter, aren't they? They are here because they are interested, but most of all they are pleased with each other, we feel.

• Michael Glover; The Independent

Why you shouldn't (and probably can't) support anyone '100 per cent’

You might have gleaned that I don’t like consequentialism from the title of this Substack. ‘The ends don’t justify the means’ is a classic criticism of the consequentialist family of moral theories, which most famously includes utilitarianism. And I’ll admit that I am planning to use this Substack, sometimes, to attempt to further my life goal of countering consequentialist reasoning.

• New Substack by Rebecca Lowe

Puccini’s battle of darkness and light

Puccini tests our tolerance for suffering to its limits.

• Alexandra Wilson; Engelsberg Ideas

The VP Debate Shows How Performance Shapes Our Democracy

And as Americans watched on, the debate gave a glimpse into how much American politics relies on the power of performance to shape the way we move forward as a democracy.

• Julia Sonnevend; Time

Politics in the ‘New Normal’ America

“On one level nothing happens, but it is nothing at the very center of the world you are part of,” the Newsweek correspondent Howard Fineman said to The New York Times by way of explaining the apparently intractable enthusiasm of American reporters for covering political conventions. “You are immersed to the eyeballs in the concentrated form of the culture you cover.”

• Joan Didion; The New York Review

Are all relationships transactional?

Transactional relationships aren’t necessarily bad. In fact, they’re mostly good, and some of them can even look similar to non-transactional relationships so long as incentive structures are well aligned.

Game Theory Challenged: Humans Cooperate Despite Betrayal

Humans tend to cooperate even after being betrayed, defying traditional game theory expectations. 

• Neuroscience News

How does Low Fertility Affect Economic Growth, Worldwide? — With Jesús Fernández-Villaverde

“You're saying that the size of the working age population matters because people are generators of ideas and that's a primary driver, a structural determinant of structural transformation and growth and productivity. And even if some AI can do some of those things, then the problem is how do you tax AI? How do you get the government revenue to build all those essential services? So let me have, if that's a fair summary, let me have two points. So one is, okay, so we need government services to pay for stuff. But could we make paying for stuff a bit cheaper? So for example, can you solve a bunch of old age issues by having robots, you know, when I'm decrepit and lying on the floor, can a robot pick me up or something like that? And the other question, I guess, is, you know, so what I was saying earlier, and perhaps I didn't phrase it well is, I worry that AI development is shaped by market demand. And at the moment you see a lot of that being directed into longevity. So AI is not necessarily improving productivity, it could be directed to making rich people have much longer lives. And the issue then is then you get a pensions problem. You're not solving the production of, you're not increasing output, you're just increasing that dependency ratio.”

• Alice Evans of course!

Why the U.S. Can’t Build Icebreaking Ships

Because polar bodies of water are often covered in ice, accessing these regions by ship requires specially designed ships which can break up the ice and create a path for other ships to follow. The need for icebreaking vessels will remain even as climate change reduces the extent of sea ice: paradoxically, as new polar routes become accessible and sea ice becomes more mobile, the demand for icebreakers is likely to increase. Russia has an aging fleet of more than 40 icebreakers, with several under construction. China has somewhere between 5 and 7 icebreakers (depending on exactly how you define “icebreaker”), with more under construction.

The U.S., on the other hand, has allowed its icebreaking capabilities to wither. The Coast Guard has handled all U.S. icebreaking since 1966, and estimates that it needs 8-9 polar icebreakers (4-5 heavy and 4-5 medium) to fulfill its needs. But it currently has only two: the heavy icebreaker Polar Star, and the medium icebreaker Healy. The U.S. hasn’t built a heavy icebreaker since 1976. 

• Brian Potter — guys!!

The Madly Captivating Urban Sprawl of Francis Ford Coppola’s “Megalopolis”

Coppola’s protagonist is a controversial architect and designer named Cesar Catilina (Adam Driver), who has the ability to pause time. “Time, stop!” he says, and everything freezes: people, cars, the clouds in the sky, even the crumbling of a public-housing development that was being demolished on Cesar’s own orders. But his supernatural powers are limited. Eventually, he must allow time to start up again, with a reluctant snap of his fingers.

• Justin Chang; The New Yorker — I’m watching it next weekend, wish me luck

College students used Meta’s smart glasses to dox people in real time

In the demo, you can see Nguyen and Caine Ardayfio, the other student behind the project, use the glasses to identify several classmates, their addresses, and names of relatives in real time. Perhaps more chilling, Nguyen and Ardayfio are also shown chatting up complete strangers on public transit, pretending as if they know them based on information gleaned from the tech.

• Victoria Song; The Verge - OK yeah, let’s do the future but not this one

Thank you for reading!

Email me at anna@interintellect.com.

Attend our public online salons here. Join our community and find more great stuff to read and thoughtful people to discuss it with here.

Join Interintellect

Busy days….! I hope you are well ❤️📚✨

Greetings from Washington DC! If you’re in town, see you TONIGHT.

If you’re in Chicago, there’s an in-person gathering for you tomorrow.

On October 3, in Austin. On October 6 in New York City (only public tickets remain!)

If you want a 20% discount on a yearly Interintellect membership (to get freebies and discounts on online events, and access to offline events + online forum) enter the code exploreNOW. You have 5 days to use it!

Online, you can come and hang with and discuss Turgenev and the death of liberalism.

and I will chat about the next American Millennium.

Julian Togelius is joining you over Zoom to talk Artificial General Intelligence.

We are starting an online salon series on Judaism’s psychedelic renaissance. The host is Madison Margolin.

continues his online series on the hidden forces shaping culture and society, and I’m hosting his next episode on the science of hidden motives.

The great Jason Shen is starting an online series on outliers - based on his new book Weirdly Brilliant!

Our friend Renée DiResta did a SuperSalon a few days ago on her new book Invisible Rulers — you can watch it here:

And the “death doula” Emma Acker came on my podcast The Hope Axis: we talked about the lost art of dying and being there, the power of touch and bearing witness, what the dying and their loved ones need at the end, pain, fear, denial, acceptance—and above all, always, hope.

My main takeaways were:

• We forgot how to be there when people die, mostly because it happens so late and rarely to most of us

• How death equalises yet so many division lines remain: young/old, pain/no pain, community/alone, religion/no religion

• And, most strikingly, that in our solution-centric world, death doulas alone show up after the moment when it was concluded there is no solution

Video soon!

***

And now, let’s read:

Books My Father Bought For Me

Here is part of that stack of books, from my Dad to me. You know them all… Your lists are probably better than mine but my list reminds me of Dad.

• Edward Rooster

The Intelligence Age

With these new abilities, we can have shared prosperity to a degree that seems unimaginable today; in the future, everyone’s lives can be better than anyone’s life is now. Prosperity alone doesn’t necessarily make people happy – there are plenty of miserable rich people – but it would meaningfully improve the lives of people around the world.

• Sam Altman

This Movie is Why I'm Alive - How Ratatouille showed me the beauty of the world that wished to kill me

Foreign goods being sanctioned off from Iran, there were shops selling repaired old appliances at the price of a new one. My grandfather, who recently went to Saudi Arabia, had smuggled a brand-new TV for us. I was excited to watch something on our new TV. “Perhaps I could borrow a CD from my cousin,” I thought. Then I saw a sign on a corner between shops: “Chef Rat cartoon arrived.”… “Mother…, I promise, I will eat less so you get the money back. It wouldn’t cost you anything if you don’t have to buy food for me.” She relented. The suspicious-looking dealer looked around and discreetly produced two unmarked CDs from his suitcase and wrote: Chef Rat.

• Pouya Nikmand

Notes on the collapse of complex societies

Maybe an even shorter summary is “diminishing marginal returns dominate everything around us.”  A large amount of the book is devoted to debunking other theories of societal collapse and going into case studies that support the marginal returns to complexity theory. These are fascinating — few sources draw parallels between the rise and fall of societies in North America and the Romans — but mainly served the purpose of convincing me that Tainter’s theory has legs.

• Ben Reinhardt’s response to Eli Dourado — watch Eli Dourado on Interintellect here (not on Youtube yet)

To the Woman Who Trashed Me on Twitter

“I used to work with this person,” it read. “She was not always like this, but this particular strain of contrarianism is like heroin—there are very few casual users.” The writer of this comment was Jane.

• Kat Rosenfield; The Free Press

How literature helps us find meaning and understand the world

When I spoke to a range of people in Silicon Valley recently, everyone gave the same answer. A few people here read old books. One or two of them even read Shakespeare and Tolstoy. But it’s rare. Instead, the intellectual landscape of Silicon Valley is political, with some philosophy. The majority of tech people have a modern, STEM-based view of the world; they are much less influenced, if at all, by any notion of the literary canon.

• Henry Oliver (watch my interview about exactly this, with Khe Hy, here)

How Israeli spies penetrated Hizbollah

Once a Hizbollah operative is identified, his daily patterns of movements are fed into a vast database of information, siphoned off from devices that could include his wife’s cell phone, his smart car’s odometer, or his location. These can be identified from sources as disparate as a drone flying overhead, from a hacked CCTV camera feed that he happens to pass by and even from his voice captured on the microphone of a modern TV’s remote control, according to several Israeli officials. Any break from that routine becomes an alert for an intelligence officer to sift through, a technique that allowed Israel to identify the mid-level commanders of the anti-tank squads of two or three fighters that have harassed IDF troops from across the border.

• Mehul Srivastava in London, James Shotter in Jerusalem and Charles Clover and Raya Jalabi in Beirut; Financial Times

How a Book About Gloves Inspired a Masterpiece by Philip Roth

Among the many astonishing things about “American Pastoral” is how quickly Roth seemed to have written it. 

• Sam Graham-Felsen; The New York Times

How tenure should be granted, circa 2024

Soon it won’t much matter whether humans read your data contribution, as long as the AIs do. So we’re all going to do this, right?  After all, “how much you really contribute to science” is obviously the standard we use, right?  Right?

• Tyler Cowen woke up and chose violence

Over 30 Years, 40% of Publishing Jobs Disappeared. What Happened?

Then there is the anecdotal evidence, which suggests that some of the “efficiency” realized by book publishers today has been achieved on the backs of staff: fewer full-time editors, designers, and production personnel, with more work shifted to the assistant level or outsourced to freelancers foreign and domestic—labor that would not be counted in the government’s statistics on publishing industry employment.

• Thad McIlroy and Jim Milliot; Publishers Weekly

Washington DC is Not a Popularity Contest

I do not think either of these characterizations is correct. Each is incomplete. My wife, who has lived in both Los Angeles and D.C., suggests that “who you know” matters more in the former city than the latter. In L.A. knowing people is the whole game.

• Tanner Greer

This is the story of how Edward Bernays with the help of his uncle Sigmund Freud changed your mind in ways that you may never discover.

In this 4 part series The Century of the Self you will begin to see how we live in the Bernays world.

• Brian Roemmele

How Powerful Is Political Charm?

When we spoke recently, [Charm author Julia Sonnevend - panelist at the upcoming Interintellect festival Ideas of Power] underlined the differences between charisma and charm. “Charisma is built on distance from audiences,” she said. “Think of the bombastic speeches of Churchill or de Gaulle. You are not like that person—that person is distinctly different from you.” When Ronald Reagan stood at the Brandenburg Gate and chanted, “Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall!,” he seemed (or sought to seem) like an embodiment of history itself. Charm, by contrast, is, or is meant to appear to be, humble. “It’s built on proximity,” Sonnevend said. A charming politician makes you “really feel like you’re in a common space with them.”

• Joshua Rothman; The New Yorker

Fraud, So Much Fraud

There's also a proposed Alzheimer's therapy called cerebrolysin, a peptide mixture derived from porcine brain tissue. An Austrian company (Ever) has run some small inconclusive trials on it in human patients and distributes it to Russia and other countries (it's not approved in the US or the EU). But the eight Masliah papers that make the case for its therapeutic effects are all full of doctored images, too. A third drug, minzasolmin, is supposed to prevent misfolding of alpha-synuclein and Masliah and co-workers published the original papers that make the case for its effects. Papers which have doctored images in them. Masliah co-founded a company (Neuropore) that has been developing the drug, and they have a partnership with Belgian drugmaker UCB. It has to be noted that this one has taken some fire already: a paper last year on its in vivo effects brought some pointed criticism that the drug's short half-life should have made it impossible for it to work under the conditions described. The authors responded that they had other evidence of the drug's mechanism, and I'm glad to hear it, because in addition to the original papers, their previous paper on the drug had images in it credited to Masliah that also seem to have been digitally modified. Minzasolmin is currently in Phase II trials. This is just a horrible situation in every direction. The NIH has stated that Masliah is no longer heading the Neuroscience division, but they haven't stated much else, honestly.

• Derek Lowe; Science

On Pilgrimage and Package Tours

Yet when I walked a portion of the Camino last year—not as a pilgrim proper, but as a pilgrimage-curious lecturer working on a group hiking tour for National Geographic—the vast majority of the people I met on the trail understood themselves to be, if not pilgrims in a technical sense, travelers on a spiritually significant journey of some kind.

• Tara Isabella Burton; The Hedgehog Review

Infinite Novel Theory: Jordan Castro and Tao Lin In Conversation

“When I was younger, I thought I was really smart. But now I feel like I was scared and prideful and hid behind a flippant dismissal of any worldview that would require me to focus on changing myself before I tried to change others. I’d come up against myself, and I’d try to exert my will, but it seemed like the harder I tried, the worse things became.”

• Jordan Castro, Tao Lin; The Paris Review

The Illustrated Hostage Diary of Amit Soussana

I wrote in the WhatsApp family group: “Fuck, they are outside my house, knocking on the security room wall. Ugh, let this be over already.” And then, symbolically at 10:07 a.m., the battery died. Suddenly, I heard a loud boom. Within a second, someone opened the closet and immediately pulled me out… Then four men grabbed me, and the fight began. I wasn’t scared. I really fought them. One of them wore a purplish-pink shirt, and he was the worst. He was about 25 or 26, looked me in the eyes, and beat me. He punched me in the eye, split my lip, just severely beat me up, lifted my shirt, touched my breast, and choked me constantly. And I didn’t care. I kept going, dropping the blanket, falling to the ground on purpose, really fighting them. The whole thing took about an hour, the fight of my life… Understand this: All this time, I didn’t cry, nothing, no tears. I always knew I was physically strong, but I did want to die. I wanted to die because the last image I had in my head was a video I saw on my phone while hiding in the closet, of a vehicle entering Gaza with a soldier’s body being thrown from it. That’s what I thought they were going to do to me.

• Rachel Shalev; Tablet

Emotional intelligence: not much more than g and personality

Based on these results, we question the uniqueness of EI as a construct and conclude that its potential for advancing our understanding of human performance may be limited. Implications and suggestions for future studies are discussed.

• Melanie J Schulte, Malcolm James Ree, Thomas R Carretta

Commit Lit

Amid this cacophony of culture-talk—heard from a remove, like music from a distant room—I began to discern a theme. I listened, equally interested and perplexed. It concerned the state of American higher education: plummeting enrollment in English, philosophy, history and other bookish, scholarly disciplines leading to the annulment of programs and the shuttering of departments; skyrocketing tuition and ballooning student debt; a pervasive sense of panic and despair. From graduate students in particular, one could sense an almost inexhaustible font of disappointment and bitterness. In light of the collapsing job market, deteriorating working conditions, the venomous pettiness of colleagues, the apathy of students and a general sense of purposelessness—against a backdrop of general educational austerity and the meteoric rise of digital media and technological capital—the life of the academic no longer seemed worth it. “Quit lit,” as it came to be known, grew out of dozens of public letters of academic resignation and quickly concretized into a genre of recognizably confessional literature with its own signature tropes…

• Joseph M. Keegin; The Point 

The fraught history of Christianity and sex

When Coldingham Abbey, a mixed religious community, was destroyed by fire in 683, the Venerable Bede considered it a just punishment by God for their “feasting, drinking, gossip, and other delights”. Bede also denounced thanes who built monasteries where they put their wives…

• AN Wilson; The New Statesman

Why do obesity drugs seem to treat so many other ailments?

It could take years to prove in which cases the drugs are useful. Understanding how they work could be even harder. In some instances, such as for people with cardiovascular disease, the reason seems straightforward: weight loss is almost certainly providing much of the benefit. But the effects observed in conditions such as addiction and Parkinson’s disease involve other mechanisms that are far from being unravelled.

• Mariana Lenharo; Nature

I Want My Mutually Assured Destruction

This was all pretty heavy stuff for a channel that used hair gel and lip gloss by the truckload. In retrospect, the amount of political literacy the directors and bands sometimes assumed on the part of MTV’s viewers is astonishing. Consider the video [late-1984 video] “Two Tribes,” by Frankie Goes to Hollywood… Look-alikes of Ronald Reagan and Konstantin Chernenko (a sick old man who ruled the Soviet Union for about 20 minutes in between Yuri Andropov and Mikhail Gorbachev) walk into a ring, and then proceed to beat the daylights out of each other. Middle fingers turn into punches, crotch kicks, bloody ear bites, a game of Roman knuckles, and strangulation. As the fight erupts into a riot, “Reagan” and “Chernenko” pause with looks of fear on their faces, and the camera zooms out to show us that we are actually at the United Nations in New York. Then, in case anyone is still trying to grasp the point, the whole world itself explodes.

• Tom Nichols; The Atlantic

Talking Nick Cave Blues

He’s always been a model of understanding and openness in some ways. If I were him, I’d be pretty annoyed with people thinking that now is the time I’ve discovered religion. I mean, this is someone who wrote a novel titled And the Ass Saw the Angel in 1989. And “Mutiny in Heaven,” on The Birthday Party’s 1983 EP … that’s Milton’s Paradise Lost referencing the Old Testament, right?

• David Cohen interviews “Caveologist” Tanya Dalziell; Quillette

The Ozempic craze and the limitations of liberal feminism

Since then, a shift has occurred in which Ozempic use has become more accepted. Today, we increasingly hear about the drug in more sympathetic terms. It has been framed as a feminist choice, giving women a simpler method to subvert patriarchal pressures to be thin.

• Sarah Manavis; The New Statesman

Beach reading

Quality Trash frequently uses trope and stereotype — but only to build in unexpected ways on top of what appears to be thoroughly preworked ground. This apparently paradoxical combination of familiarity with novelty is one of its great attractions. Quality Trash may seem boringly conventional but isn’t.

• Vaughn Tan

Occult? Try upstairs! Inside the world’s weirdest library, now open to the public

The institute was founded in Hamburg at the turn of the 20th century by pioneering German art historian Aby Warburg, whose work focused on tracing the roots of the Renaissance in ancient civilisations, mapping out how images are transmitted across time and space. Long before the algorithms of today’s digital world, he drew unlikely connections between different epochs, regions and media, putting his findings into a sprawling visual diagram of European art.

• Oliver Wainwright; The Guardian (Warburg was one of my favourites to read during my postgrad years. Look up his “pathos formulae”; so helpful for navigating media imagery!)

A Beginner’s Guide to Dying by Simon Boas review – an extraordinary book

This book, he tells us, was almost called Muscadet and Morphine, because they were the things that got him through those painful final months. Bob was surprised at the response to his columns – and that surprise energises this short, remarkable book on how to die well.

• Alex Preston; The Guardian

Her lively and sweet countenance — Did European people in the early 1800s perceive the human face differently from us?

[When] we read books that were written in that period, our way of aesthetically and even morally evaluating people is different from them, in a way that perhaps makes it difficult to understand them.

• Helen de Cruz

Unconfined creativity — Art Brut and its lessons for all of us

Walking through the dark gallery I was drawn to the work of Anna Zemánková, a Moravian dental technician and mother of two children who began creating after a midlife depression. Usually working between four and seven in the morning, she painted imaginary flowers in pen and ink or pastels, which she sometimes embellished by embossing them or embroidering the paper. In one of her paintings a long stringed flower like a mountain dulcimer leaps out from a tuft of purple-green leaves, flanked by arcs in one direction and an orange and yellow net in the other. It reminded me of the freeform shapes I make when I’m doodling, but given full colour and texture.

• Irina Dumitrescu; The Times Literary Supplement

Why So Few Matt Levines?

So, that’s why there are so few Matt Levines, and explains where the other Matt Levines are: they don’t, and usually can’t, exist.

• Gwern Branwen 

The Miracle of Van Morrison’s “Astral Weeks”

This flourishing of countercultural activity was not accidental. Its foundations were laid a decade earlier. 

• Jon Michaud; The New Yorker

Philosopher Fredric Jameson, author of Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism, dies at 90

Jameson continued to publish books and articles well into his late-80s. Inventions of a Present: The Novel in its Crisis of Globalization was published in May. The Years of Theory: Lectures on Modern French Thought was one of his last book projects, and is set for release this October.

• Daniel Jonas Roche; The Architect’s Newspaper

Thank you for reading!

Email me at anna@interintellect.com.

Attend our public online salons here. Join our community and find more great stuff to read and thoughtful people to discuss it with here.

Join Interintellect

Lot of fun things coming up on Interintellect! Packy McCormick and I will discuss the next American Millennium.

British literary critic Henry Oliver and Hollywood screenwriter Michael Sonnenschein join to lead a salon on whatever happened to good storytelling.

In New York, offline, Jennifer Frey, Musa al-Gharbi, Scott Barry Kaufman, Julia Sonnevend, Shadi Hamid, Tara Isabella Burton, John Ganz, and I will talk about the true nature of power in 2024: religion, education, fame.

I’m also doing a conversation on 90s cinema, an exceptional decade — we’ll explore why.

And videos from

• Nadya Williams on cultural Christianity and the early Church

• Agnes Callard and Irina Dumitrescu on academia, women, mentors, and whether Eros is an intellectual monster

• And my excellent conversation with Musa al-Gharbi on his new book We Have Never Been Woke on my new podcast The Hope Axis

And now, let’s read!

Silicon Valley is an aristocratic culture

[Tanner Greer] emphasizes how broader culture and individual values reinforce each other in DC and Silicon Valley book habits. Tanner argues, rightly as far as I can, see that books “[stake] out the norms, conventions, and ideals that govern the community as a whole” for Silicon Valley, in a way that they do not for Washington DC.” But that doesn’t necessarily mean that Silicon Valley people care more about reading and ideas than their DC counterparts, as he also claims. It sometimes means that they care more about seeming to be well-read, which is a different thing altogether.

The actual difference, as I see it, is not one between the philistines of the Beltway and the bibliophiles of the Valley. It is between a technocratic culture in which the public display of a sound general education is irrelevant and an aristocratic one where it can be a valuable asset.

• Henry Farrell — A very important conversation on intellectual osmosis

How to choose what to work on

So you want to advance human progress. And you’re wondering, what should you, personally, do? Say you have talent, ambition, and drive—how do you choose a project or career?

• Jason Crawford — I used a similar model for choosing Interintellect (and in general “culture peace”) to work on as the convergence point of my passions, skills, where technology is going, and what the world needs

Ghosting the Patriarchy: Female Empowerment and the Crisis of Masculinity

Young women are increasingly joining progressive universities, earning on par with male peers, and feeling free to pursue hedonistic pleasure. Singledom is no longer shamed or stigmatised. So why tolerate guys who shirk the washing up, send tedious texts, or otherwise fail to please..?

The age of female acquiescence is waning, supplanted by an era of female freedoms… Obviously, a lack of matches has major implications for fertility.

• Alice Evans — I remains habitually bewildered by how good and clear and prolific Alice is

Hilary Mantel was my mentor. Here are seven things she taught me about writing – and life

A lot of ink has been spilled over whether creative writers should plan or “pants” their stories. Planners make meticulous notes before attempting a first draft. By contrast, improvisers who write “by the seat of their pants” jump straight in. Both approaches have their problems: overplanning is the equivalent to overthinking and the result is likely to be less organic; whereas “pantsing” can read as disorganised. Both methods can also create opportunities for excellence, through either a cohesive plot or serendipity.

A good third way is to know your ending. Hilary wrote the end of the final Thomas Cromwell instalment, The Mirror and the Light, “well ahead of time”. This is a simple method that creative writers can apply to their own work. Knowing how your story ends will serve as a compass, while leaving you with enough latitude to explore your imaginary world. And a crafted, impactful ending is ultimately more satisfying for the reader, too.

• Katie Ward; The Guardian — The dream

Was Marx Woke?

The publication in 1976 of the last major English translation of Capital, by Ben Fowkes, was motivated by the crisis of postwar capitalism and the radical politics of the late 1960s and early  ’70s. But by the time it appeared, the Trotskyist economist Ernest Mandel’s declaration in the introduction that “capitalism’s heyday is over” already seemed dated and would seem even more so a few years later, when Thatcher and Reagan were swept into power. The impetus for the latest edition similarly came from the resurgent left of the 2010s, but now that left is scattered and defeated. Nowhere is that clearer than in the many ideological reversals of Kamala Harris, who in 2020 went to remarkable lengths to seek the support of left activists; today, she is going to similar lengths to distance herself from them. 

• Geoff Shullenberger; Compact — Marx retranslated so now maybe more people will actually read him and not just pretend to have done so

Foundations: Why Britain has stagnated

We explain that it is blocking investments the private sector would like to do – in buildings, railways, roads, and more – that explains decline. Thankfully, that means fixing it, and returning to French and German levels of productivity, or, as in history, higher ones, is quite straightforward. We just need to build.

• Ben Southwood, Sam Bowman, and Samuel Hughes — A landmark study: no, it’s not just the vibes

The ultra-selfish gene

We now have the power to genetically modify entire species by inserting certain genes into them with brute force. Doing this to malaria-carrying mosquitoes could allow us to wipe out humanity’s most deadly killer.

• Mathias Kirk Bonde; Works in Progress — Exciting!

The Curse of ChatGPT

In the AI space, it’s the core models doing the disrupting, not the startups. Each new release leapfrogs forward, threatening to obsolete entire application layers. AI startups must not only keep pace with competitors but also adapt to an environment where foundational breakthroughs constantly redefine product strategies.

• Jeremiah Lowin — Slightly misleading title but a good read

The Impact of PhD Studies on Mental Health—A Longitudinal Population Study

Recent self-reported and cross-sectional survey evidence documents high levels of mental health problems among PhD students… After the fifth year, which represents the average duration of PhD studies in our sample, we observe a notable decrease in the utilization of psychiatric medication.

• Sanna Bergvall, Clara Fernström, Eva Ranehill and Anna Sandberg — I wonder what made these 3 women research this in particular

Frontiers

Creating new industries and society-shifting technology paradigms can be dual-purpose, creating abundance on Earth and permissionless frontiers in space. But to subvert the tradeoff between inward improvement and outward striving, we need to reinvent the culture and aesthetics of space and technology more generally. The outlines of it are already visible: something that embraces both abundance and grungy rebellion.

• Ben Reinhardt

College Students Not Reading Is an Issue, So Teachers Are Adjusting How Classes Look

Jennifer Frey, a philosophy professor and the dean of the Honors College at the University of Tulsa, says she sees such moves by colleagues as a “tyranny of low expectations.” “It is actually incredibly important that students just read a massive amount,” she tells Teen Vogue. “Reading widely and deeply is incredibly important… in terms of building the skills that are necessary, no matter what you’re going to go on to do.”

• Marie-Rose Sheinerman; Teen Vogue — YES!

The Mr. Beast Memo is a Guide to the Gen Z Workforce

There is a lot to learn there. We are already seeing some moves to de-bureaucraticize companies, like Amazon and their bureaucracy inbox.

• Kyla Scanlon

Microsoft buying Three Mile Island reactor to power AI

Under the terms of the deal, Microsoft would own 100% of the nuclear energy output for 20 years. Apparently, this is the only way to power CoPilot and other AI tools for millions of individuals while not burning fossil fuels. I'm assuming, since much of Microsoft's AI stack is built on ChatGPT, that OpenAI might be another beneficiary of the deal.

• AnandTech

Dead Internet Souls

In the 1800s, before serfdom was abolished in the Russian empire, landowners paid taxes based on how many serfs they had. A census was conducted every few years by government employees traveling across the empire and doing counts; a manual map-reduce of epic proportions. If a person was dead, it would often be years before the government cleared the cache, so to speak, and landowners continued to pay taxes on these dead souls.

Alexandr Pushkin, the greatest living Russian-language author at the time, heard a story about how landowners took advantage of this by buying up dead souls from landowners, and passed this story onto fellow writer, Nikolai Gogol as an idea for a book or play, which resulted in Gogol’s seminal satirical work, “Dead Souls.” Gogol meant dead souls on two levels: both the serfs, and the banality and falsity of Russian landowning society at the time.

The internet today is filled with dead souls.

• Vicki Boykis - Beautiful

Intermezzo by Sally Rooney review — her characters just aren’t normal people

For all her dazzling virtues as a psychologist and an observer of emotional life, Rooney’s artistic curiosity is unavoidably limited… Ivan, 22, is a “chess genius” with a degree in theoretical physics. His brother Peter, 32, is a human rights lawyer. (Readers disturbed by a Rooney hero profaning himself with even this virtuous branch of the law will be reassured to know that he “could have been a very fine academic”.) The brothers are dealing with the death of their father, their own difficult relationship and other, more obscure sources of suffering — in Rooney’s novels unhappiness is a mark of personal distinction, like good A-level results.

• James Marriott; The Times — Savage and well-deserved review. Visa Veerasamy once explained to me why Murakami is so popular (I didn’t get it): people like “sad horny”. Sally Rooney (to me unreadably pretentious) seems to fit into that category too

The cost of cynicism

“I think it’s important to separate ancient cynicism from modern cynicism. So when I talk about cynicism, I’m not talking about the philosophical school led by Antisthenes and Diogenes but rather about a general theory that people have about humanity. The idea that overall and at our core people are selfish, greedy, and dishonest.”

• Sean Illing interviews Jamil Zaki; Vox

Inside the court of Adolf Hitler

[Richard J Evans] starts his brilliant hundred-page biography of Hitler with the sentence: “For the first thirty years of his life, Adolf Hitler was a nobody.” Here lies the utterly compelling paradox.

• William Boyd; The New Statesman

The Lost Art of Waiting

As life gets faster, we have become more impatient about everything, including the interactions of daily life.

• Christine Rosen; The Free Press

Why Does Editing Work?

Sure, for thousands of years, we’ve been able to close our eyes and imagine different perspectives. A British soldier fighting in the Somme in the early days of film editing could close his eyes as Mauser bullets rattled over his head and imagine he was sitting by his Newcastle fireplace, enjoying a glass of ale. But as soon as he opened his eyes, he would still see the same blood-soaked battlefield stretched before him.

Likewise, someone watching the first performance of Shakespeare’s The Tempest in 1611 could have been so entranced that they momentarily believed they were with Prospero on the enchanted island. But again, what they saw with their eyes would have remained stubbornly, persistently continuous (says Murch: “stage machinery can only move so fast, after all”).

Until film editing arrived at the turn of the 20th century, thousands of years of evolution had kept our visual perception time-bound and earth-bound.

• Ed William

How “enlightened selfishness” can lead to a more fulfilling marriage

“I think that love involves something known as sacrifice. It involves unpleasantness. It’s a package deal and part of the package is suffering. It’s true of just about every attachment that you have to another human being — it comes with suffering. But, I guess the reason to stick with it and to continue is the good things that are to be gotten for you. I want to be with someone where they’re getting incredible value out of this relationship.”

• Sean Illing interviews Agnes Callard; Vox

The Silent Tension Between Moms and Nannies

Because my personal experience with the mom/nanny dynamic has never been negative, I didn’t see the cover as critical or negative. But one thing I’m learning, per the Internet, is that often these relationships carry all sorts of awkward undertones, sometimes but not always because of race and class.

• Cartoons Hate Her — An excellent recent discovery of mine!

Finding the Courage to be Disliked

It’s clear that many of Adler’s ideas are centered around focusing on forward-focused goals, rather than looking deep into the past to find meaning. This belief runs in direct contradiction to the Freudian school of thought, which looks to an individual’s past to define their personality.

• Salman Ansari — I know Salman from the Interintellect community and as a public salon host on our platform; do check him out!

Answers to 12 Bad Anti-Free Speech Arguments

The concept of freedom of speech is a bigger, older and more expansive idea than its particular application in the First Amendment, even if we are talking about the US context alone. A belief in the importance of freedom of speech is what inspired the First Amendment; it’s what gave the First Amendment meaning, and what sustains it in the law. But a strong cultural commitment to freedom of speech is what maintains its practice in our institutions—from higher education, to reality TV, to pluralistic democracy itself. Freedom of speech includes small-l liberal values that were once expressed in common American idioms like “to each his own, everyone’s entitled to their opinion” and “it’s a free country.”

• Greg Lukianoff; Quillette

Dialectical Matter: Aristotle, Politics, and Utopia

Is Aristotelian philosophy a natural ally of conservatism? Aristotle’s thought was indeed put to work by Thomas Aquinas and came, via the Catholic Church, to undergird the rigid social and political hierarchies that characterized much of medieval Europe and beyond. But was this alliance inevitable? Are cherished conservative principles—like essential social differentiation, natural function and a fixed cosmic order—incontrovertibly supported by Aristotle’s thought? Not according to Marxist theorist Ernst Bloch, who, in the early 20th century, rerouted Aristotle’s reception through medieval Islamic and heretical Christian philosophy, discovering there dynamic and utopian strains of interpretation—or, a “Left” Aristotelianism.

• Robbie Howton; The Brooklyn Institute — Looks like a cool course

Everything led to women — Olga Tokarczuk’s subversive homage to The Magic Mountain

The Empusium’s protagonist is a mildly tubercular young Polish man called Mieczysław Wojnicz. The year is 1913; Europe is on the eve of war, as in The Magic Mountain. Professor Sokołowski – one of several real historical figures in this novel – has sent Wojnicz to Görbersdorf for treatment. Like Hans Castorp, Wojnicz is an engineer in training, intellectually out of his depth among the cultured residents of the resort. The reader swiftly feels affection and sympathy for the whimsical young Wojnicz…

• Claire Lowdon; The Times Literary Supplement - I feel like Tokarczuk wrote a book specifically for me!

Twin Peaks and the Divine

But as the series goes on, one comes to suspect the sentimentality is not just stylistic. David Lynch is up to something else.

• Damir Marusic; Wisdom of Crowds

Born Sleeping

I was at home when I got the call, and rushed to the hospital. But there was nothing to be done except hold each other, and weep, and prepare for the worst day of our lives. Our baby had died, but Katrina was still pregnant, and she would still have to deliver him.

• Brian Potter — An absolutely heart-breaking read

My Childhood Toy Poodles

In middle school, when no one was home, I would lay facing Binky as he lay flat on his side on the carpet. “I love you,” I would say, looking into his black eyes while carefully petting him in a limited, measured way. I never said this to anyone else during my childhood.

• Tao Lin; The Paris Review

Authority, by Richard Sennett

Sennett turns initially to Hegel. “For all Hegel’s special philosophic concerns and convoluted language”—by which he means to indicate that he is not going to try to understand Hegel—“the nature of the journey he describes suggests . . . how the experience of authority might become less humiliating, more free in everyday life.”

• Commentary — I shared this one before but always good to revisit, as is the book itself

Missing Hitch

You are not doing your part. You don’t speak or write clearly enough. You are wrong and do not know it—and it matters. There has been so much to say, and no one to say it in your place.

• Sam Harris — Another one revisited (but shared for the first time); a good mantra

Saving the Idea of the University

Even though the students themselves typically have a wider range of views than their teachers, they tend to feel pressured to censor any contrary opinion.

• Sian Leah Beilock; The Atlantic

Why Negative Emotions Aren't Any Worse Than Positive Ones

Once we stop thinking about the most extreme examples and we realize that negative emotions have been with us forever, their bad reputation looks overblown. And we might also realize that positive emotions aren’t exactly innocent.

• Krista K Thomason; Psychology Today

France: Europe’s crème de la crème

France, despite its position on Europe's furthest Atlantic edge, serves as a cultural and historical bridge between the southern Latin Mediterranean and northern Germanic domains… This central role predates history.

• Razib Khan 

Seven fun things I did with "Good Work" (and I finally got the book)

With The Pathless Path, I was shocked you can just say “Published by Paul Millerd.” One line item and boom — I’m a publisher. I decided to lean into it a little more and rename it Pathless Publishing. Do I have any plans to publish other people’s book? No plans but you never know.

• My friend Paul Millerd has a new book!

The Legacy of Robert Evans, a Vexing Hollywood Legend

“My wife was fucking another guy, and I had no idea,” he told Biskind. “She was looking at me and thinking of Steve McQueen’s cock.” Such perfectly neat deadpanning, but with a trace of humility, too: sometimes even a cocksman realizes that he is also just a schmuck.

• Naomi Fry; The New Yorker — I find this article too lenient for someone with Evans’s reputation. Joe Eszterhas writes in Hollywood Animal (a zero filter book mentioned in the above article) about how Sharon Stone was traumatised by Evans after he’d held a girlfriend of hers captive in a cage in his house. Just one of the many stories

"These 'kids online safety' bills need to die"

I had top researcher danah boyd on Power User a couple months ago to talk about kids’ mental health and social media use (turns out the two aren’t as correlated as the media would have you believe!). I’ll also be dropping part two of my YouTube series about the moral panic around kids and technology in the coming weeks.

• Taylor Lorenz

Will A.I. Kill Meaningless Jobs?

[David Graeber] developed it into a book that delved deeper on the subject. He suggested that the economist John Maynard Keynes’s dream of a 15-hour workweek had never come to pass because humans have invented millions of jobs so useless that even the people doing them can’t justify their existence. A quarter of the work force in rich countries sees their jobs as potentially pointless, according to a study by the Dutch economists Robert Dur and Max van Lent. If workers find the labor dispiriting, and the work adds nothing to society, what’s the argument for keeping these jobs?

• Emma Goldberg; The New York Times

Thank you for reading!

Email me at anna@interintellect.com.

Attend our public online salons here. Join our community and find more great stuff to read and thoughtful people to discuss it with here.

Join Interintellect

It’s HERE! Finally! Ideas of Power — Celebrity, Authority, and Faith in an Election Year 🔥

This is me being bugged to find out what the true nature of POWER is in 2024 - and also Interintellect’s next mini-fest in New York City, on the afternoon of October 6. Come, come along….

We’ll do 3 panels:

• On authoritarian charm, fame, and tricks, with Julia Sonevend, John Ganz, led by Tara Isabella Burton

• On educating the powerful, with Wesleyan University president Michael Roth and Musa al-Gharbi, led by Skye Cleary

• On God, secular vs divine power, with Jennifer Frey and Shadi Hamid, led by me

Then we’ll do a roundtable, and involve the audience to discuss the nature and aspects of power in 2024!

BOOK YOUR SPOT HERE!

Meanwhile, in other news….

I was also on a friend’s podcast — just published. Khe Hy and I recorded this conversation in the middle of a heatwave, and it couldn’t have been more fun! We discussed the essential importance of reading fiction. For your soul, for your relationships, for your self-knowledge, for your career, and most importantly for living a good life. Watch here:

BONUS! You might want to join Agnes Callard, Irina Dumitrescu, and me for an online discussion about Eros, the intellectual monster... 🎟️ BOOK HERE!

Alright, after so much excitement now let’s read…! This week’s harvest is once again quite strong and promising an intellectually eventful weekend for you:

Philosophy of the people

The Platonists of Illinois were centred around Hiram Kinnaird Jones of Jacksonville. The Hegelians of the St Louis Philosophical Society, meanwhile, were led by Heinrich Conrad (‘Henry Clay’) Brokmeyer and William Torrey Harris. These were movements of amateurs in the fullest and best sense: their ranks were composed of non-professional students of philosophy – lawyers, doctors, schoolteachers, factory workers and housewives – motivated by personal edification and the earnest pursuit of truth rather than professional achievement or status-acquisition. They conducted their activity against the backdrop of a country reeling from a bloody civil war, tenuously unified and engaged in an energetic campaign of westward expansion and industrialisation. The very intelligibility of their world had been thrown into question, and these readers and thinkers on the prairie found help in the great minds of the past. ‘The time,’ writes Denton J Snider, a member of the St Louiscircle, ‘was calling loudly for First Principles’ – and, for their readers, Plato and Hegel offered paths toward them.

• Joseph Keegin; Aeon

How to write love — Tom Stoppard’s exploration of intimacy, over forty years on

“I have to choose who to hurt, and I choose you because you’re mine”.

• Maria Margaronis; Times Literary Supplement

Robert Caro Reflects on ‘The Power Broker’ and Its Legacy at 50

Now, in an astonishing turn for a 50-year-old book and its 88-year-old author, “The Power Broker” seems more popular and relevant than ever. Caro’s iconic portrait of Moses — a megalomaniacal city planner who reshaped New York City with his bridges and expressways, often destroying communities that stood in his way — has inspired video and board games, a Broadway play and a “Repeal Robert Moses” movement, led by an organization that aims to reclaim the city from cars.

• Alexandra Alter; The New York Times

The underground railroad for Russian deserters

Launched in 2022, the group has helped thousands of like-minded Russians escape their country’s war, even as its vast network of volunteers has helped thousands more avoid military service through legal and logistical support. Clearly, that’s a boon to Russians unwilling to kill and die for their country.

• Ruchi Kumar; UnHerd

On Not Losing Our Minds to Technology

Have you ever wondered: why are babies so fragile? Why are they so helpless—and so vocal in their outrage over this helplessness? Maybe this is the wrong question to ask, though. The longer we interact with real people of all ages, the more clearly we see the truth that while most adults do not look obviously fragile the way babies do, we all retain in us these traces of helplessness with which we were born. We are vulnerable and finite; it’s a feature, not a bug…

• Nadya Williams; Front Porch Republic

The Men Who Sabotage Women's Fertility

Was the idea that I had to give him time to decide? Decide on what, me? I should tolerate that the man I 100% knew I wanted to marry wasn’t 100% sure he wanted to marry me? I knew we were young, but marriage wasn’t about needing a wedding, a ring, or “half his stuff.” It was about having some kind of definitive promise that he had chosen me. And if I was simply his live-in girlfriend indefinitely, I wasn’t being chosen. I was being tried out.

• Cartoons Hate Her

Durably reducing conspiracy beliefs through dialogues with AI

Human participants described a conspiracy theory that they subscribed to, and the AI then engaged in persuasive arguments with them that refuted their beliefs with evidence. The AI chatbot’s ability to sustain tailored counterarguments and personalized in-depth conversations reduced their beliefs in conspiracies for months, challenging research suggesting that such beliefs are impervious to change. This intervention illustrates how deploying AI may mitigate conflicts and serve society.

• Thomas H. Costello, Gordon Pennycook, David G. Rand; Science

The Bookmaker - Nate Silver and the addiction to prediction

In the field of Bayesian statistics, betting has served as a metaphor for the probabilistic calculations that we make naturally—a background, subconscious reasoning that informs every decision we make. But in moving Bayesianism out of textbooks and into the wild, Silver takes the metaphor literally, and in doing so turns a descriptive framework into a prescription for practical success. If everyday reasoning looks like betting, then in order to come out on top, you need to spend your life at the casino—and remake the rest of the world in its image.

• Leif Weatherby and Ben Recht; The Point

Who are Britain’s new aristocrats?

Friedman and Reeves boast that their work is “underpinned by the most comprehensive dataset of the British elite that has ever been produced”. By this they mean Who’s Who, the biographical reference book that has served as the atlas of our high society since the Victorian period. Its volumes are compiled semi-secretively. While some of its current crop of 33,000 individuals are entered automatically (MPs, King’s Counsels, FTSE100 CEOs), the rest are elected by a mysterious “board”, whose operations and criteria are fiercely guarded.

• Nicholas Harris; The New Statesman

Pro-progress needs to avoid Trumpian aesthetics

Whatever happens in this election, I hope that the next president will pursue a pro-abundance agenda and will enact policies aimed at fostering as opposed to inhibiting scientific and technological progress. For those of us thinking about progress more broadly, I think it’s worth taking a moment and reflecting on how the aesthetics of the movement should look like.

• Ruxandra Teslo

‘The Return’ Review: Ralph Fiennes & Juliette Binoche Lead Deeply Satisfying Retelling of Homer’s The Odyssey

Ralph Fiennes is magnificent in a role he’s wanted to play for many years. He brings forth the decades of weariness inherent in the part, the dormant warrior lurking beneath, as well as the craftiness Odysseus is known for. Close-ups of his sculpted face, lit by firelight, as he recounts tales of war have appreciable gravity.

•  Ankit Jhunjhunwala; The Playlist

Under Siege — A beloved Soviet writer’s path to dissent (2006)

Grossman went on to write “Life and Fate” and “Forever Flowing,” novels that in their warmth of feeling and their historical sweep stand alongside “The Gulag Archipelago” as the most anti-Soviet books of all time. Yet here is this letter, which the American scholars John and Carol Garrard dug up and published in their 1996 biography of Grossman. Was it pro-Soviet? 

• Keith Gessen; The New Yorker

17 Novels You Need to Read This Fall

Olga Tokarczuk pastiche of Thomas Mann’s The Magic Mountain is a dark, feminist novel—atmospheric, creepy, and absolutely perfect. In 1913, Mieczysław Wojnicz goes to a sanatorium in the Silesian mountains to recover from tuberculosis. In the evening, the other men at the guesthouse gather, drink hallucinogenic local liqueur, and have vague, philosophical discussions—“Does man have a soul? Monarchy or democracy? Can one tell whether a text was written by a man or a woman? Are women responsible enough to be allowed voting rights?”—which are (surprise!) actually paraphrased misogynistic utterances from real famous men. Meanwhile, disturbing things are happening in the guesthouse and the surrounding hills: gathering spirits, dead bodies, femicide.

• Emily Temple; Literary Hub

My video contribution to the new Strawberry release

Spinoza (the dog) steals the show. As I said to the OpenAI film crew, “Spinoza may not be AGI, but if you leave any foodstuffs near the couch, he will beat anything you people come up with.”  That said, when it comes to mathematical, economic, or many other kinds of reasoning, OpenAI o1, the new model, is in the clear lead.

• Tyler Cowen; Marginal Revolution

Letby’s conviction is unsafe, says Boris Johnson’s former science adviser

Letby is serving 15 whole-life orders, making her the fourth woman in UK history to be told she will never be released from prison. Mr Phillips said he had followed the Letby trial and his “instinctive reaction” was to wonder whether the cluster of deaths on the ward could be a statistical coincidence.

… [After] reading a lengthy New Yorker article in April outlining the flaws in the prosecution’s argument, he flagged his concerns to Sir David Davis, who is now intending to bring the matter before Parliament this autumn. The Oxford-educated, multi-prize-winning neuroscientist said that the case seemed to be a “cognitive optical illusion” where each piece of evidence had been used to shore up another, rather than there being any single damning smoking gun.

• Sarah Knapton, The Telegraph

Feminism is not about fairness

But feminism is not like Catholicism. There’s no pope, there’s no Catechism. No one has the authority to baptize you and no one has the power to excommunicate you. There are lots of things feminists disagree on and there have always been lots of things feminists disagree on. It’s not at all uncommon for a feminist to call other feminists anti-feminist if they promote a view she disagrees with. But the thing that makes it a disagreement between feminists is that the disagreement is around whether a particular course of action, or a change in norms, laws etc. would lead to greater gender equality. 

• Regan Arntz-Gray

How to Read Greek Tragedy in a Netflix World

Greek tragedies are like the last episode of The Sopranos.

• Ted Gioia

Our attention dilemma is age-old

Mindfulness has deep roots in the quietist tradition of western thought, best exhibited by Stoic philosophy as it was transmitted from Greek culture by Roman authors such as Seneca, Nero’s philosophical tutor. He urges his friend Lucilius to ‘hold every hour in your grasp. Lay hold of to-day’s task, and you will not need to depend so much upon tomorrow. While we are postponing, life speeds by.’ And yet, its commercialisation in western Europe and America, its dissemination in gamified apps, in faux-profound language of the advertising world and across the legacy media, has led the expansion of a perfectly useful set of simple meditation techniques, and a component of virtually all philosophical and religious traditions, into a pseudo-philosophy of life.

• Alastair Benn; Engelsberg Ideas

Charting change in a life’s journey through skills

But perhaps most interesting to me, is that Edison reportedly wanted his lab to have “a stock of almost every conceivable material,” which an 1887 newspaper article reported as: “eight thousand kinds of chemicals, every kind of screw made, every size of needle, every kind of cord or wire, hair of humans, horses, hogs, cows, rabbits, goats, minx, camels … silk in every texture, cocoons, various kinds of hoofs, shark’s teeth, deer horns, tortoise shell … cork, resin, varnish and oil, ostrich feathers, a peacock’s tail, jet, amber, rubber, all ores …” and so on. If Edison’s research and development lab in my hometown of Edison, New Jersey is a model and inspiration for general invention and innovation, I aspire for Skills for Scholars to be a model for the research and development of invention and innovation of ideas across the academic world.

• Matt Rohal; Princeton University Press

Human embryo models are getting more realistic — raising ethical questions

Some have proposed revising regulations concerning real embryos to cover some types of embryo model. In the Netherlands, says Nienke, a scientific advisory body proposed a ban on growing the models beyond the equivalent of 28 days in real-embryo terms. France is considering the same limit. Researchers in the United Kingdom did something a little different in July: they published voluntary guidelines for embryo models that do not set fixed limits on how long they can be cultured. The guidelines could eventually lead to the passing of binding legislation — as happened with similar voluntary UK guidelines around embryo research several decades ago.

• Smriti Mallapaty; Nature

Station Eleven, 10 Years Later

“I really love what they did in the show, that plot point toward the beginning where Kirsten goes home with Jeevan. I think that’s really smart. That speaks to the power of the television writers room, where you just have all of these people collaborating to build a world, whereas when I’m writing the book, it’s just me alone in my office. And if I were writing it now, I would pay more attention to that uneasy in-between state of just entering or just leaving a pandemic.”

• Rebecca Onion; Slate

The Falling Man (2021)

There is something almost rebellious in the man's posture, as though once faced with the inevitability of death, he decided to get on with it; as though he were a missile, a spear, bent on attaining his own end.

• Tom Junod; Esquire

Lydia Pettit Channels Female Rage Into Surreal, Haunting Self-Portraiture

Black blood spurts from the blueish body of an unreal woman—an effigy, a dummy with a waxy pallor. Straddling the dummy, and stabbing it furiously with a knife, is a real woman, naked, with shortly cut blond hair. Her pale flesh, her breasts, move with the momentum of her plunging thrusts. Each lunge sends bursts of black blood into the air. The woman pauses at moments, exhausted from the exertion of violence, her breath heavy, only to resume her attack in bursts. And here’s the most distressing detail: the woman and the effigy are mirror images.

• Katie White; Artnet

The Great Data Integration Schlep

Obtaining the data is a hard human problem.

That is, people don’t want to give it to you.

…

Why?

• Sarah Constantin

We’re the Only Plane in the Sky’ — Where was the president in the eight hours after the Sept. 11 attacks? The strange, harrowing journey of Air Force One, as told by the people who were on board (2016)

This oral history, based on more than 40 hours of original interviews with more than two dozen of the passengers, crew and press aboard—including many who have never spoken publicly about what they witnessed that day—traces the story of how an untested president, a sidearm-carrying general, top aides, the Secret Service and the Cipro-wielding White House physician, as well as five reporters, four radio operators, three pilots, two congressmen and a stenographer responded to 9/11.

• Garrett M. Graff; Politico

The Best Classical Music Albums of 2024 (So Far)

A superb contribution to Bruckner’s bicentenary year from Gerd Schaller, a performance of the composer’s Symphony No 4 that is full of poetry and a powerful sense of journey.

• Gramophone

Two mini-reviews: Seeing Like a State; the Unabomber manifesto

James C. Scott says that “tragic episodes” of social engineering have four elements: the administrative ordering of society (“legibility”), “high-modernist” ideology, an authoritarian state, and a society that lacks the capacity to resist. This is a bit like saying that the worst wildfires have four elements: an overgrowth of brush and trees, a prolonged dry season, a committed arsonist, and strong prevailing winds. One of these things is not like the others!

• Jason Crawford

How a viral AI image catapulted a Mexican startup to a major Adidas contract — Someone Somewhere proved AI can create jobs for artisans, not replace them

ll told, the marketing post reached more than 50 million people, and was covered on national TV and over 100 media outlets, according to Nuño. On June 21, the companies announced the new collection of Mexican National Team jerseys, hand-embroidered by women artisans from the Sierra Norte of Puebla, Mexico. Each shirt represented more than 11 hours of hand-embroidery work, symbolically representing the 11 players who proudly represented Mexico in the Copa América.

• Mary Ann Azevedo; TechCrunch

Thank you for reading!

Email me at anna@interintellect.com.

Attend our public online salons here. Join our community and find more great stuff to read and thoughtful people to discuss it with here.

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This was a busy weekend in New York City. We have a lot of fun things prepared for you…

First of all, if you’re in New York City: SAVE THE DATE! October 6… Tickets coming soon ✨

Some more events: online/offline, series or one off, public or members only…

• on the American Millennium - TICKETS

• on Jane Austen’s Emma - TICKETS

• Our friends from the Georgetown University Latin America Leadership Program will lead a fireside on Mario Vargas Llosa’s political thought - TICKETS

• Kinderintellect in New York City — a “bring your own baby/child” picnic for the parents in Interintellect - RSVP

• An online host training about offline hosting, with me - RSVP

• Friend-Finding & Self-Discovery Mingle - TICKETS

• My online salon on 90s movies, and what makes them so special - TICKETS

• Renée DiResta on her new book Invisible Rulers: The People Who Turn Lies into Reality. - TICKETS

NEW! Hope Axis episode: just uploaded (haven’t had time to do the timestamps yet, but that and the audio version are both incoming!) —

And now, let’s read…

Max Richter on the Music That Made Him

He tends to describe his music as hopeful, though it is the kind of hope that follows crisis—hope for emotional relief, political reconciliation, ecological repair.

• Jazz Monroe; Pitchfork

Entrepreneurship changed the way I think

Voting with your feet to ditch the well-worn path and try something bold and risky, something that can only succeed through persistence and luck, creates an internal tension that can only be resolved through the adoption of optimism, at least over the long term. Short term paranoia and pessimism is still warranted – plenty of things are trying to kill your company. The unity of building a thing you believe in appeals strongly to me.

• Casey Handmer

The First Nuclear Clock Will Test if Fundamental Constants Change

The thorium nuclear state’s energy is far more sensitive to variations in the fundamental constants than that of any atomic state. But scientists will need to improve the precision of their measurements even further to notice changes more subtle than those already ruled out by conventional atomic clocks… Eventually, though, some old Cold War byproducts could yield the first evidence for deeper, still undiscovered physics that underlies the universe we see. “We call them constants, but why?” Hudson asked. “Nothing is ever that simple when you zoom in and look at it.”

• Joseph Howlett; Quanta

How motherhood was weaponised

I recognise this weaponisation, something that mothers often willingly partake in, forming cages “for ourselves and each other out of obligation and expectation, which we call duty or love”.

• Megan Gibson; The New Statesman

It is Forbidden to Forbid — Why People Are Going to Make Art With and Without AI

[Beyond] this paragraph I don’t want to concern myself with a text that forbids artists to work in a specific way. The same text has been written by the same people when electric guitars, mobile phone cameras, video games, books, and any other new medium came along. There will always be a gatekeeper. I will instead focus on pushing back against one single line of argumentation in the article: the need for decision making to make art. The need for control. I think this, too, is a far too simplistic and entitled understanding of art. And I can’t have that particular gate kept. I want both, art born out of control and art out of control.

• Martin Pichlmair 

‘Weird’ Is the New Normal

The most influential social movements of recent decades are symbolic crusades that seek not so much to change the material basis of people’s lives, but to change the way we feel, think, and behave. 

• Ashley Frawley; Compact

Libraries of matter

Libraries contain books, yes. But they also contain latex rubber, carbon fiber fabrics, and graphene aerogel. And in some materials libraries you can cut, cast, drill, sand, scrape, and sculpt too.

• Virginia Postrel; Works In Progress

How networks really work

Social scientists Nicholas Christakis and James H. Fowler have found that while networks do have six degrees of separation, they have only three degrees of influence. Friends influence friends. They also influence friends of friends. And they can influence friends of friends of friends.

• Henry Oliver

‘It’s a very tough time in Hollywood’: inside the shrinking world of the TV writers’ room

A screenwriter, who has worked on several high-profile shows and wishes to remain anonymous, tells the Guardian that some of his former co-workers are no longer getting hired. “These are people who are not breaking in – they worked on the same shows that I did right before,” he says in a phone interview. “Now they’re saying, ‘We’re not getting any work. Our agents and managers are saying staffing is tricky out there.’

• David Smith; The Guardian

Why Does Horrific Abuse Persist in the Most Gender Equal Countries?

For over nine years, Gisèle Pélicot’s husband invited online strangers to rape her while drugged. Hundreds of men saw these advertisements yet stayed silent and allowed the continued torture.

• Alice Evans

The Unfreedom of Liberty

Today the word ‘freedom’ is pronounced with confidence, even nonchalance, as something that requires no definition or characterization. The times where philosophers were inquiring about the true meaning of freedom and trying to seize its elusive nature are long forgotten. Modern Western man has few certainties in his life; yet one of them is that he knows what it means to be a free man. Yet when the average modern man talks about freedom, he’s actually usually talking about liberty.

• Arianna Marchetti; Philosophy Now

The Contingency Contingent

“Months of reading and populating spreadsheets turned me spreadsheet-like myself.” … “Who managed the management consultants”?

• Leigh Claire La Berge; n + 1

The Constitution Gave Us This Mess

The problem, added Rana, is that the Constitution’s “countermajoritarian checks and constraints are far more extreme than comparable constitutional democracies in a way that inhibits that underlying value of one person, one vote, and makes it very hard for organized majorities to influence policy.” At the same time, continued Rana, the Constitution “limits or delays policy and mobilizes and facilitates rule by particular empowered minorities.”

• Luke Pickrell; Jacobin

Lover and hater — The complete works of Baudelaire, the first modern urban poet

In fact, long before he was anointed the modern Parisian poet, Baudelaire was himself all over the map, hardly limited to the Left Bank. Legends had him born in India – this wasn’t the case, but his family did ship him off in that direction around the time he turned twenty, partly to escape his mounting debts in Paris – and even living deep in the American woods. In a biographical note he claimed to have visited Mauritius, La Réunion and Sri Lanka. His travels no doubt contributed to the faraway dreaming with which he opens the prose version of his celebrated “L’Invitation au voyage”

• Seth Whidden; Times Literary Supplement

Twelve Months to Fall Back in Love with America

Bearded, greasy, and leaning against my filthy old rucksack out in the sand by the empty highway, I wasn’t the 25-year-old the high school guidance counselor might hold up as a portrait of success… But on that day in Nevada, something in me began to change.

• A.M. Hickman; The Free Press

Thank you for reading!

Email me at anna@interintellect.com.

Attend our public online salons here. Join our community and find more great stuff to read and thoughtful people to discuss it with here.

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• Julia Sonnevend, her book Charm, and authoritarian populism (tickets)

• , his book We Have Never Been Woke, and social justice (tickets)

• Agnes Callard, Irina Dumitrescu and myself on the philosophy of mentors and lovers (tickets)

• , Nadya Williams, on Cultural Christianity (tickets)

• and (one-off and the whole series)

• Online Single Mingle! (tickets)

• on utopian world-building (tickets)

• Austin offline social (tickets)

• Get your membership here ✨

In podcast news, the great , founding editor of Quillette and one of the most fair-minded thinkers on free thought and Classical Liberalism came on my new series, The Hope Axis. We talked about the importance of a balanced media, free and factual inquiry, cancel culture and public intellectuals, polemic and sincerity, how technology solves social problems, why... Listen to the audio on Spotify. Subscribe to my Youtube channel here. Watch the video below:

I also went on a podcast myself, namely ’s on Reason. We talked about and The Hope Axis, intellectual orphans and the politically hopeless, and why Millennials need to get out of the pessimism trap:

And now let’s read!

Will AI Change Art History Forever?

Some eight months after Brooke and Ugail’s announcement, a Swiss AI company called Art Recognition used its own model to determine, with 85 percent certainty, that the de Brécy Tondo was not made by the Renaissance master. In an op-ed, Art Recognition’s founder, Carina Popovici, defended her company’s findings, pointing to the many art historians on her staff and the sophistication of her model, which was  trained on images of real and forged Raphael paintings. Notably, she stopped short of discrediting Brooke and Ugail.

• Taylor Dafoe; ARTnews

Founder Mode

One theme I noticed both in Brian's talk and when talking to founders afterward was the idea of being gaslit. Founders feel like they're being gaslit from both sides — by the people telling them they have to run their companies like managers, and by the people working for them when they do. Usually when everyone around you disagrees with you, your default assumption should be that you're mistaken. But this is one of the rare exceptions. VCs who haven't been founders themselves don't know how founders should run companies, and C-level execs, as a class, include some of the most skillful liars in the world. Whatever founder mode consists of, it's pretty clear that it's going to break the principle that the CEO should engage with the company only via his or her direct reports. "Skip-level" meetings will become the norm instead of a practice so unusual that there's a name for it. And once you abandon that constraint there are a huge number of permutations to choose from.

• Paul Graham

The Asteroid-in-Spring Hypothesis: Two paleontologists have turned on each other, each claiming to have found new evidence about the worst day on Earth

After the asteroid, surviving birds would carry on the genetic legacy of giant reptiles and the continent would enter the strange age of mammals. There would be a superfast 12-foot-tall bear and a muscular, strong-jawed giant pig. There would be a dog-size horse and beavers six feet long. Camels would evolve right here on the plains, and American lions bigger than African ones. The species that took it upon itself to figure it all out, to make a story of the past, would largely overlook these creatures in favor of T. rex and triceratops. The species would construct elaborate rules that govern who may and may not tread on particular pieces of land. It would evolve a complex economy of prestige to accompany the discovery of truths about all that had come before — a shadowy interplay of gatekeeping, mentorship, and recognition. There would be reason for everyone, on every side of a small discovery of a single fact, to feel overlooked and underappreciated, awake to the vastness of time and vulnerable to the smallest slight.

• Kerry Howley; New York Magazine

Measuring the Black Death

Finally, the plague itself disrupted historical record-keeping, taxation, and burials, and caused demographic shifts, which affected records from the time. Given such limitations, how can we accurately estimate the Black Death’s toll?

• ;

PJ Harvey’s songs of England

Harvey’s is a very English shadowland, a place where a young girl wanders through “beech and aller, woak and birch” trees – beech, elder, oak and birch – on Maundy day, where we are instructed to worship nature above all: “Hail the hedge as it grows/Ask the hedge all it knows.” 

• Ellen Peirson-Hagger; New Statesman

Secular Stagnation

To view religion as primarily social—as something that comes alive when it is done in the company of others or that springs from the knowledge that one is doing the same thing that others are doing—allows a shift away from a preoccupation with the interiority of individual belief… It takes a leap of faith for people to believe in the unseen in a world that tells them that everything must be “rational.” To be Christian, one must presumably believe in Christ. To be Muslim, one must—again, presumably—believe in the divinity of the Koran and the prophethood of Muhammad.

• Shadi Hamid; Foreign Affairs

Israel recovers bodies of six Gaza hostages

The IDF named the hostages as Carmel Gat, Eden Yerushalmi, Hersh Goldberg-Polin, Alexander Lobanov, Almog Sarusi and Master Sgt Ori Danino. Spokesman Rear Adm Daniel Hagari said an initial assessment was they were "brutally murdered by Hamas terrorists shortly before we reached them".

• Jaroslav Lukiv & Adam Durbin; BBC

Perplexing the Web, One Probability Puzzle at a Time

[Daniel Litt’s] posts have prompted lively online discussions among research mathematicians, computer scientists and economists — as well as philosophers, financiers, sports analysts and anonymous fans. Some joked(opens a new tab) that the puzzles were distracting them from their real work — “actively slowing down economic research,” as one economist put it(opens a new tab). Others(opens a new tab) have(opens a new tab) posted(opens a new tab) papers(opens a new tab) exploring the puzzles’ mathematical ramifications.

• Erica Klarreich; Quanta

A summer defined by men killing women and girls. This can’t go on

When I read the Guardian’s report on the 50 women allegedly killed by men in the UK so far this year, I was struck not only by the devastation of lives cut short but by how few of them I had heard about before. These women met brutal ends, and most barely got a few paragraphs on their local paper’s website. In an age of breaking news banners, stories are more sensationalised yet we are more able to scroll by – a dead woman’s face next to the popup ads for online casinos.

• Frances Ryan; The Guardian

Why Open Source is So Hard to Defend

It's everywhere, an invisible bedrock beneath our entire digital ecosystem, underpinning all the applications we take for granted every day. It seems impossible that something that important would be under attack. But that's exactly what's happening right now.  Or rather, it's happening again.  It's not the first time.

Succumbing to Spectacle

Although it’s difficult to know what museumgoers are thinking, my impression when I visited the Guggenheim on a weekday afternoon was that they weren’t having it. People looked nonplussed as they wandered up and down the ramp, reading combinations of words ranging from the romantic or erotic (“I WAIT FOR YOU,” “I TICKLE YOU”) to the political (“PEOPLE WHO DON’T WORK WITH THEIR HANDS ARE PARASITES”). Aside from the verbiage, there’s nothing much to engage you. 

• Jed Pearl; The New York Review

Elbow Room

Americans have one of life’s finest luxuries in our protected and ample open spaces. Our cities are bustling economic hubs of opportunity, but unlike in many other countries American has an incredible heritage of publicly owned wilderness.

• Julie Fredrickson

Comic of “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” by T.S. Eliot

• Julian Peters (the artist); Poetry Foundation

What School Didn’t Teach Us: You Need to Lose Control

This fact may be held up as evidence that the species is evolving: Behold the Zoomers in their glorious sobriety, so much smarter, healthier, and more sensible than the sloppy, barfing generations that preceded them! But scratch the surface of Gen Z’s sobriety, and what you find isn’t wisdom so much as fear—of vulnerability, of failure, of being out of control. This is a generation that is both highly conflict-averse and virtually allergic to risk, particularly when it comes to markers of autonomous adulthood like driving, working, or sex.

• ; The Free Press

Taxing unrealized capital gains is a terrible idea

In a world with reasonable capital markets, the best way to protect the liquidity of the wealthy is to maintain or boost their net wealth.

• Tyler Cowen

‘My Brilliant Friend’ Trailer: The Fourth and Final Season of Elena Ferrante’s Saga Returns to Naples

The first episodes find Lenù and Lila reunited after years apart, and everyone once again telling Lenù that Nino, whom Lila also had an affair with years prior, is very bad news.

• Ryan Lattanzio; IndieWire

The Firebird's Nest (1997)

The combustibility of women is a source of resigned wonder to the men.

• Salman Rushdie (fiction); The New Yorker

Max Wolf Friedlich’s Tech-Bro Friendly ‘Theater for the Boys’

But [‘Job’ playwright Max Wolf Friedlich is] not, he insists, trying to moralize about big tech. “I really don’t think in the digital age that theater has the power to, like, change hearts and minds,” he says. “What’s more interesting to me is the base act of getting a bunch of people together.”

• Brock Colyar; Vulture

Alex Karp Has Money and Power. So What Does He Want?

“I think a lot of the issues come back to ‘Are we in a dangerous world where you have to invest in these things?’” Mr. Karp told me, as he moved around his living room in a tai chi rhythm, wearing his house shoes, jeans and a tight white T-shirt. “And I come down to yes. All these technologies are dangerous.” He adds: “The only solution to stop A.I. abuse is to use A.I.”

• Maureen Dowd; The New York Times

Thank you for reading!

Email me at anna@interintellect.com.

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Long time no read! I’ve been AWOL for several reasons: I’ve been busy building some cool things for my startup Interintellect, hosting and attending online and offline (NYC, Austin, Philly, SF) events on our platform, as well as working on my new Hope Axis project that is for now a video series / podcast celebrating the many aspects of active intellectual hope but there’s much more in the making.

Below, you’ll find some of my favourite reads from the past weeks, as per our tradition here. Also, if you’re in NYC, come join me on Saturday for an in person conversation with the incredible Anna Motz, forensic psychologist researching female violence and working in a women’s prison. Find her book book—a tough but amazing read—here, a review in The New Yorker which I shared in this digest a few months ago here.

Online Interintellect salons are public for all; if you wish to join the members’ tier of Interintellect, you can now do so at 20% off here: access our community forum, offline events, members only specials, and perks!

• The Hope Axis on Youtube

• The Hope Axis on Spotify

• The Hope Axis on Substack (coming soon)

Episodes: (Scroll through if you want to jump right to the reading digest!)

and I kicked off my new podcast series The Hope Axis. We talk about the future, the economy, India, China, and of course America. We looked at ways to be excited about what's coming, and what to do about it as individuals.

The great (Default Friend) joined me for this lively discussion (debate?): we talked about happiness, free speech, online creativity, subcultures, why the internet is a good thing, what the kids do on social media these days, 90s digital anthropology, Tumblr, wokes, and more!

National Book Award winning Phil Klay, author of Redeployment and Missionaries, joined me for a conversation about comedy and the absurd, humanity and violence, fatherhood and history, and what there remains to hope and work for.

And most recently - what an important thinker still too few people know of:

NYU professor Erica Robles-Anderson joined me to discuss her theory of media generations, human suffering, ways of togetherness, what we can learn from megachurches, and the ways out of the loneliness epidemic (if that exists).

Can’t wait to hear what you think!

And now let’s jump right back into reading…. 📚

The Treason of the Experts

The rise of the “expert” has paralleled the depreciation of another figure for whom it might be confused: the public intellectual. For decades, sociologists have not so much studied intellectuals as remarked on their decline. Oft-cited exemplars of this type, from Hannah Arendt to Christopher Hitchens, have few equivalents today. Intellectuals bring distinctive, idiosyncratic outlooks to bear on the broader, abstract questions of social life—questions that often transcend disciplinary boundaries. Experts, in contrast, present their knowledge as impersonal, specialized, and practically applicable. In contrast to public intellectuals, they often operate behind the scenes, called upon to solve technical problems or comment on specific matters. 

• Ashley Frawley; Compact

Every company should be owned by its employees

Central States is one of 6,533 companies that have formed an Employee Stock Ownership Plan (or ESOP) in the United States, and that number is growing by about 250 companies annually. That’s 14.7 million employees who have ownership in companies worth, collectively, $2.1 trillion. Every year, those employees get a percentage of their salaries in company stock.

• Elle Griffin; Elysian Press

What the Childless Among Us Leave Behind

But as a woman who … is happily married but childless … unlike people with kids, I’m uniquely incentivized to forge meaningful connections within my community—if only so that when I inevitably die alone, someone finds my corpse before my cat eats it in its entirety. Jokes aside, I’m also perplexed by the notion that I have no direct stake in America, a place in which I cautiously expect to be living for at least another few decades

• Kat Rosenfield; The Free Press

A New Start-Up Wants to Make Auction Guarantees Even More Ubiquitous

Given their elite nature, it should be no surprise that auction guarantees are the latest part of the art world that a tech startup is trying to “democratize” and make more transparent.

• George Nelson; ARTnews

No, Kamala Harris Isn’t a Marxist

A couple of weeks ago, a Republican friend informed me that Vice President Kamala Harris, now the likely Democratic Party presidential candidate, had taken to quoting Karl Marx. Needless to say, I was both confused and pretty excited about this. But my heart sank… Kamala Harris is obviously not a Marxist.

• Carl Beijer; Jacobin

The Tail End - What we lose when we lose a pet

The cat is very sick, so a veterinarian whom I have never met is coming over to kill her. She arrives at 10 a.m., which feels wrong. Murders and breakups, these are not interactions for God’s hours. 

• Sloane Crosley; The New Yorker

The Real Reason People Aren’t Having Kids

In What Are Children For? On Ambivalence and Choice, Anastasia Berg, an academic and editor at The Point, and Rachel Wiseman, an editor at the same magazine, engage literature, philosophy, and anti-natalist texts to wrestle with whether children are worth having at all.

• Christine Emba; The Atlantic

Who’s offended by Virginia Woolf?

Perhaps Woolf’s cruel and offensive language is a symptom of her own fears about her mental vulnerability. Perhaps it reflects the disturbing popularity of eugenicist rhetoric in her time – as inhuman as it seems to us today. Perhaps it is a repercussion of her “energy and style”. Perhaps it reveals the pitfalls of a ruthlessly intellectual value system that prizes genius, bookish intelligence and literary flair over all else. Perhaps it exposes her as a bigot.

• Anna Leszkiewicz; New Statesman

Why Do American Presidential Campaigns Have to Be So Long?

American presidential elections are much longer than in other countries. Many nations have laws on the books that strictly curtail how long campaigns can be. Less well known is the fact that American elections were not always this long, either. 

• Julian E. Zelizer; Foreign Policy

French Secularism is Dead

French revolutionaries sacking churches, French socialists seizing church property, French secularists committed to a highly regulated preservation of their Catholic inheritance — this is the violent and ironic backstory to the now-infamous opening ceremony of the Olympics, which offended Christians around the world. The pageant was emblematic of a twisted identity, which won’t resolve its contradictions anytime soon. 

• Santiago Ramos; Wisdom of Crowds

‘Hamlet’ in the West Bank

“Shakespeare’s Hamlet was first performed in Arabic in Gaza in 1911,” Hammad writes in an essay on Palestinian theater, in which she also notes that during the first intifada, Hamlet was on the Israelis’ list of banned books in the West Bank, because lines such as “to take arms against a sea of troubles/And by opposing end them” were viewed as an incitement to violence.

• Ursula Lindsey; The New York Review

Swimming in Liberalism - Alexandre Lefebvre’s Liberalism as a Way of Life

Recall Wallace’s metaphor: most of us, says Lefebvre, are not political liberals whose constitutive identities derive from, say, Catholicism, Buddhism, Islam or some other metaphysical worldview, but are instead comprehensive liberals. In other words, while it might have been true in the 1980s that ordinary citizens’ liberal commitments were informed by supplementary traditions, among those of us under 45 there’s a reasonable likelihood that our identities and values derive principally from liberalism. We are, in Lefebvre’s words, “liberal all the way down.”

• Galen Watts; The Point

All Aboard for Virtual Utopia?

Writing a quarter century ago, the best-selling author and Google engineering director Ray Kurzweil imagined a more immediate—and invasive—integration of VR into human life, a step beyond using clumsy wearable devices. Kurzweil forecast that someday we will have “nanobots,” tiny robots roughly one nanometer in size (by comparison, a human hair is about sixty thousand nanometers thick), directly interfacing with our brains’ neocortices. These tiny devices will have the capacity to shut off the stream of neural information tied to our normal sensory systems and replace it with digitally enhanced experiences.

• William Hasselberger; The Hedgehog Review

Subdued, sleepy and despised by snobs: how minimalist piano eclipsed classical music

Beving, Melnyk and similar artists work in a solo piano soundworld sometimes known as “ambient” or “neoclassical” or “postminimalist” – although categories aren’t really its thing. As one fan put it to me with a hint of impatience: “It’s all just stuff, you know?”

• Flora Willson; The Guardian

Rudolf Carnap: Embracing logical pluralism

When logical positivism first emerged in Central Europe, after the First World War, it scandalized established philosophers by dismissing much of the substance of contemporary philosophy. It was seen as a revolutionary movement, linked by some to socialism.  Much of what the logical positivists rejected would hardly count as philosophy today (some was proto-Nazi ideology). But they also repudiated a major tranche of traditional philosophy by denying that philosophical intuition can ever transcend logic or experience. Core to logical positivism was the principle of “verificationism”. According to it, for a statement to be meaningful, it must be either analytic and justifiable a priori, or synthetic and justifiable a posteriori.

• Thomas Uebel; Times Literary Supplement

"Europe Should Be Smart Enough to Use These People Who Fled Russia"

“Nothing that I experienced over the last two years comes anywhere close to the suffering of Ukrainians every day. But in any event, I was happy when the sanctions were lifted. Now I'd like to just go ahead and build something new.”

• Benjamin Bidder und Oliver Das Gupta interview Arkady Volozh; Spiegel

The same, but worse

To those of a pessimistic persuasion, there is a common feeling that the country is crumbling and falling apart at the seams, and things are going to get worse. Perhaps Rishi Sunak’s seemingly reckless decision to maximise his chances of losing the election by going early was actually a work of genius.

• Ed West

Poet, Prophet, Prodigy - For James Baldwin on his 100th birthday

Your childhood was not marked by innocence, James, but by relentless introspection: a searching of the soul for faults and inconsistencies, the stakes of which were eternal life, or else the inferno. All this within the material context of the first decades of the American 20th century, and the ubiquitous, state-sanctioned violence against Black people that accompanied them. In reading your adult writing about this period in your life, I sense a pain that never quite subsided.

• Joshua Bennett; Poetry Foundation

Two Wars, a Wedding, and a Funeral

In ancient warfare, the greatest carnage often would take place after the losing army was routed, as the victors rushed forward to massacre the retreating soldiers. But the Roman military commander in the Empire’s western half, Flavius Aetius, exhibited little interest in pursuing the retreating Huns eastward following the Battle of the Catalaunian Plains. His strategic situation remained precarious, as he regarded the Goths—who’d become his allies of convenience against Attila—as just as much of a threat to what remained of Roman-held Gaul as the Huns.  

• Herbert Bushman; Quillette

London’s Massive Anti-Racism Demonstration Happened on My Doorstep. I’ve Never Been Prouder to Live Here

Crowded together in a display of solidarity and peaceful protest, they held signs with slogans like “Refugees Welcome,” “Immigrants Welcome and Loved,” and (my favorite) “Far Right Can Fucking Do One.”

• Laura Hawkins; Vogue

Inside the 50th Anniversary Restoration of Francis Ford Coppola’s ‘The Conversation’

For [film archivist and restoration supervisor James Mockoski], one of the pleasures of working on “The Conversation” was observing how much the film itself relates to the filmmaking process, as Gene Hackman’s Harry Caul takes the pieces of a recording apart and puts them back together again in multiple ways as he tries to determine if he has unwittingly stumbled onto a murder plot. “The process Gene Hackman is going through is the process that was going on in the making of the film,” Mockoski said. 

• Jim Hemphill; IndieWire

An Oral History of Second-Wave Feminism Makes Its Case With Style

“The Movement,” a 559-page oral history of that era in women’s liberation, is rollicking good fun. In fact, as the veteran journalist Clara Bingham demonstrates in this deftly arranged collection of remembrances, anecdotes, explications and arguments, the 10 years leading up to the Roe v. Wade decision were downright exhilarating. 

• Anna Holmes; The New York Times

What Happens in a Mind That Can’t ‘See’ Mental Images

In reality, people’s subjective experiences vary dramatically, and it’s possible that different subsets of aphantasics have their own neural explanations. Aphantasia and hyperphantasia, the opposite phenomenon in which people report mental imagery as vivid as reality, are in fact two ends of a spectrum, sandwiching an infinite range of internal experiences between them.

• Yasemin Saplakoglu; Quanta

The universe suddenly hates satire

The outcome that makes satire harder is the most likely.

• Erik Hoel

And a bonus:

I was a guest on ’s podcast where we discussed the movie La Dolce Vita. And fame, pop culture, intellectuals, spectacle, and the morality of it all… Was so much fun!

Thank you for reading!

Email me at anna@interintellect.com.

Attend our public online salons here. Join our community and find more great stuff to read and thoughtful people to discuss it with here.

Join Interintellect

Can’t wait to hang out with you at all our upcoming Interintellect offlines in New York City and elsewhere on the East Coast. This is really a kind of roadshow for me:

• Last night in Manhattan (re-watch the livestream here)

• On April 10 at Yale - with Liz Bruenig, Agnes Callard, Jennifer Banks…

• On April 13 in New York - our big The Future of Publishing festival with Coleman Hughes, Kyla Scanlon, Sahil Lavingia, Tina He, Shadi Hamid, and many more! Use the code HELLONYC25 to get a discount 📚

• On April 24, we’ll be in DC, co-hosting with Braver Angels about the philosophy of de-polarisation… On April 29, back in NYC, talking with Li Jin, Zoë Hitzig, Packy McCormick about Rawls and crypto. More soon…

And now let’s read! xx Anna

Notes on generative auto-didacticism

Eric Mazur is a professor of physics at Harvard whose students were getting perfectly adequate grades. One day though he decided to measure how much information they were retaining from his lectures. He found they largely forgot everything by the end of the lecture and even more by the time the next one came around. So he started iterating on ways to turn his lectures into a more efficient use of his students' time.

• Henry Dashwood

A Year in Berlin

M says that you really only know someone after four seasons. I'd say the same goes for cities. Oh, Berlin, I have seen you in your corpse-grey of winter and your birthday plume of summer.

• Timothy Lim

Crying Myself to Sleep on the Biggest Cruise Ship Ever

The ship makes no sense, vertically or horizontally. It makes no sense on sea, or on land, or in outer space. It looks like a hodgepodge of domes and minarets, tubes and canopies, like Istanbul had it been designed by idiots.

• Gary Shteyngart; The Atlantic

American Nightmares: Wang Huning and Alexis de Tocqueville's Dark Visions of the Future

“In the United States,” Tocqueville reports, “there is nothing the human will despairs of attaining through the free action of the combined power of individuals.”

• Tanner Greer

Jonathan Haidt on Adjusting to Smartphones and Social Media

“Complete disaster strikes me as too strong a term for something that hasn’t happened yet. I think you’re much too confident about that.”

• Tyler Cowen - Tyler and I arrived at the same suspicions at the same time (I tweeted about it a few hours before this came out from a different angle, which I don’t normally do but I have a good memory and therefore some responsibility in pointing out patterns)

In Defense of the Online Debaters

Most people, including myself, live in relatively narrow epistemological bubbles, where people around us mostly share the same views and perspectives. But my own life experiences have pushed me outside of that safe space.

• Murtaza Hussain; Wisdom of Crowds

The rich are not causing the poor

Elon Musk is not taking money from people in Africa to get rich. He’s selling a lot of cars and satellites and increasing the value of his companies. As Johan Norberg puts it: “Profits are not something you take from others, but a small share you get to keep from the value you create for others.”

• Elle Griffin

The Bad Science Behind Jonathan Haidt's Call to Regulate Social Media

Some have argued that it's obvious that social media is causing depression in teenage girls. It may be a contributing factor, but the purpose of social science research is not to confirm but to challenge our knee-jerk assumptions, because reality is so complicated. The proper scientific approach is to try to falsify your hypothesis.

• Aaron Brown; Reason

“The Small Press World is About to Fall Apart.” On the Collapse of Small Press Distribution

In his mass email, Watson said that SPD staff had been “reduced to a minimal team that is in the process of winding down operations” and that they “are not able to respond to individual queries.”

• Adam Morgan; Literary Hub

The fragile crown

Monarchy is an impossible contortion, particularly now, when we have no privacy and no patience. We used to want the royals’ silence, on which we could project anything we desired. Elizabeth II excelled at permitting this, with a show of reluctance. Now too many of us want gossip and malice, and I see this as a repudiation of monarchy, both subconscious and self-hating.

• The excellent Tanya Gold slays in New Statesman

The Parents in My Classroom: How my students stay tethered, via FaceTime and email, to their homes.

Recently, one of my ninth grade English students told me her parents rewarded her for making the honor roll by allowing her to text them during class. “They like to know what I’m doing in the classroom as it’s happening live,” she said.

• Liz Shulman; Slate — maybe having a too close relationship with very depressed parents all day long (see more below) is what’s causing teen depression? A mystery!

More people care about climate change than you think

Surveys can produce unreliable — even conflicting — results depending on the population sample, what questions are asked, and the framing, so I’ve looked at several reputable sources to see how they compare. While the figures vary a bit depending on the specific question asked, the results are pretty consistent.

• Hannah Ritchie; Our World in Data

Parents Are Almost as Depressed and Anxious as Teens

For adolescents’ worrying about a parent or caregiver can be destabilizing at a time when life seems rocky enough. Weissbourd’s data show that depressed teens are about five times more likely than non-depressed teens to have a depressed parent, and that anxious teens are about three times more likely than non-anxious teens to have an anxious parent. About 40% of those surveyed were at least “somewhat” worried about a parent’s mental health. 

• Jenny Anderson; TIME

Sigmund Freud, C.S. Lewis, and a Great Madness

Ambiguity is that particularly powerful element of well-made art that prevents us from reaching an easy conclusion… Ambiguity is a natural consequence of living in a fallen world. Without sin, there is no ambiguity; we can settle. But in the world the way it is, ambiguity serves to remind us that all is not yet well and that we are not yet home.

• J.C. Scharl; Action Institute

Systems Explain STEM vs Culture Style

Systems allow for more complex analysis, further from direct experience, using longer chains of reasoning. Such systems and their applications can be improved, and can more clearly be shown to have improved. And systems support finer and more complex divisions of intellectual labor. 

The world of thinkers can be split into those who rely more versus less on established systems. Those who rely more on systems can be more precise, numerical, agree more on claims, and better evaluate each others’ abilities. Systems people less need metaphor to understand each other, and less need alliances, prestige, and social skills to coordinate with each other. 

While systems of thought tend to make stuff easier to see, understand, or control, “culture” is our name for stuff where these things are harder; in “cultural” areas, our systems don’t work so well. Culture thinkers thus have to get used to vaguer definitions, weaker claims, qualitative concepts, and more disagreements and differing perspectives.

• Robin Hanson

Is it the phones? — Are smartphones and social media causing a mental health crisis?

Everyone seems to have decided that it’s the phones. That is, they’ve decided that heavy smartphone and social-media use is to blame for the current wave of mental illness, despair, and depression that’s affecting young people - teenage girls in particular. Except… we need to ask how strong the evidence is. 

• Stuart Ritchie, Tom Chivers; The Studies Show

Christianity, Morality, and Socialism

Consider, also, the publication and reception of the 2019 book Dominion: How the Christian Revolution Remade the World. The author, popular British historian Tom Holland, makes the sweeping claim that virtually all that we understand to be part of the rational, scientific, and progressive worldview — including the very concept of secularism itself — is the direct product of the Christian revolution. The book was a hit.

• Dustin Guastella; Jacobin

AI’s attention deficit

If you typed the prompt ‘traditional classroom’ into an AI-image generator, you might see a picture of desks in rows, a teacher at the front talking and writing on a blackboard, and some bored students with their heads slumped on the desks. This is the caricature of the traditional classroom, and it is one that has come in for some legitimate criticism. Many students have sat in classrooms like this and learned very little as the teacher’s words washed over them.

• Daisy Christodoulou; Engelsberg Ideas

Defending Pornography on Feminist Grounds: A Q&A With Nadine Strossen

“I first wrote Defending Pornography way back in 1994 because there was then prevalent across the ideological spectrum a very destructive misconception that one had to choose between being a feminist and being a free speech advocate, and that if one really supported women's rights, women's safety, women's dignity, women's equality, then one had to support censorship…”

• Elizabeth Nolan Brown; Reason

Your own personal Jesus

A search for salvation continues to animate secular thought. As Christianity has retreated, the most advanced minds have turned to secular superstitions – ersatz-scientific cults such as dialectical materialism, eugenics, transhumanism and the like. Or they deploy a hyper-liberal ideal of equality...

• John Gray; New Statesman

Our tools shape our selves

Prometheus then steals fire from the gods, presenting it to humans in place of a biological talent. Humans, once more, are born out of an act of forgetting, just like in Plato’s theory of anamnesis. The difference with Hesiod’s story is that technics here provides a material basis for human experience. Bereft of any physiological talents, Homo sapiens must survive by using tools, beginning with fire.

• Bryan Norton; Aeon

Is this the end of Israel? Six months on, Jews are starting to lose faith

We Jews need to find other ways to make our harrowing history compelling. We’ve tried losing. We’ve tried winning. I’m not sure what’s left.

• Howard Jacobson; UnHerd

What about the people who never found their calling?

Late bloomers become “truly good” piece by piece. Stamina matters. You do not simply wake up one day and discover that you are Toni Morrison.

• Henry Oliver

The Social Benefits of Getting Our Brains in Sync

The pianists seemed to read each other’s minds by exchanging looks. It was, Marek said, as if they were on the same wavelength. A growing body of research suggests that might have been literally true.

• Marta Zaraska; Quanta

My moodboard for building a business

The world would be better if there were more software companies focused on quality, craftsmanship and longevity.

• The great Sari Azout

The Deaths of Effective Altruism

The real difference between the philosophers and SBF is that SBF is now facing accountability, which is what EA’s founders have always struggled to escape.

• Leif Wenar; WIRED (HT Christine Emba)

IVF egg retrieval notes

Overall the process was way easier and less intense than I expected. It was mostly annoying, because I had to go to tons of doctor’s appointments and get my blood drawn multiple times a week, but in terms of symptoms and pain it was very low key.

• Devon Zuegel

Burnout: Stress-busting with the medieval knights

 Clearly burnout was understood perfectly in the fifteenth century, and so was its prevention: listening to music, good conversation or watching “something comic and restorative to nature – human nature being so frail that it can easily be harmed or depleted”.

• Irina Dumitrescu; Times Literary Supplement

‘Anatomy of a Fall’ Director Justine Triet Says Her Courtroom Drama Has One Thing in Common With Steven Spielberg’s ‘ET’

“What I love about the story of Spielberg and the little kid,” said Triet,” is that at the end of the emotional audition, Spielberg just says, ‘OK kid, you got the job. Because, of course, of course he did.” She remembered having the same certainty with Machado Graner. “I mean, after Milo’s audition, I just said, ‘He’s the one. Obviously.’ I sent the tape to the producer: Here he is, we found the boy.”

• Joe McGovern; The Wrap

When Metaphor Gets Literal: What my mother’s coma taught me about reading poems

In what way could a sunset resemble a patient? Perhaps that they are both horizontal, perhaps that they are both short-lived.

• Jennifer Grotz; The Yale Review

Experts warn of high levels of chemicals in clothes by some fast-fashion retailers

Miriam Diamond, a professor at the University of Toronto, oversaw the lab testing Marketplace commissioned to test for PFAS, heavy metals and phthalates in clothing. Here [in the photo] she’s holding a purse from Shein that contained over five times the amount of lead that Health Canada considers safe in children’s products.

• Jenny Cowley, Stephanie Matteis, Charlsie Agro; CBC

Does “And” Really Mean “And”? Not Always, the Supreme Court Rules. — As a result, thousands of people will serve longer prison terms.

“Similarly,” Kagan added, “if a person says, ‘I didn’t like his mother and father,’ he probably means ‘I didn’t like his mother and I didn’t like his father’—not that he didn’t like the two in combination.”

• Daniel King; Mother Jones

The Language of American Jewishness

According to comments the novelist Joshua Cohen recently made in the New Republic, I am, despite my two Jewish parents, very nearly not a Jew. Cohen dismisses any critique of Zionism made on Jewish grounds by people who “don’t speak any of the Jewish languages. They don’t know the Jewish texts or live in Israel. And if they’re going to have children, there’s nearly a 50 percent chance they’re not going to have them with Jews.” My husband was raised Protestant; I speak only English and Spanish; I live in the United States. As for the Jewish texts? I haven’t cracked Deuteronomy lately, but I, like Cohen, am a novelist, and I take seriously the power of books other than the Torah to help us comprehend both the world and ourselves.

• Lily Meyer; Literary Hub

Do you leave your home town or stay behind? It’s a question at the heart of British politics

But what of the places these graduates leave behind? The standard narrative is twofold: that of a brain drain, which produces a vicious cycle of poorly paid work that pushes graduates away, leaving even fewer opportunities in their wake; and of a trend towards the politics of reaction, as highly educated progressives leave small towns, leaving only less-educated conservatives to fill the void. Both narratives have a grain of truth to them.

• John Merrick; The Guardian

Benjamin Netanyahu Is Israel’s Worst Prime Minister Ever

Who are the “worst prime ministers”? Until now, most Israelis regarded Golda Meir as the top candidate for that dismal title. The intelligence failure leading to the Yom Kippur War was on her watch. 

• Anshel Pfeffer; The Atlantic

Do cancer drugs improve survival or quality of life?

Fojo and colleagues found that the median improvement in survival among patients treated with 71 drugs for solid tumours was just 2.1 months.

• Vinay Prasad; The BMJ

Art Bites: Who Was Marcel Duchamp’s Female Alter-Ego?

That sense of humor and subversion would lead Duchamp to conjure one of his finest creations, an alter-ego he dubbed Rrose Sélavy, in the 1920s. Her name was cheeky take on the French phrase “Eros, c’est la vie“—meaning “Eros [or love/sex], that’s life.”

• Jamie Valentino; Artnet

U.S. Approval of Interracial Marriage at New High of 94%

Non-White Americans have been consistently more approving of interracial marriages than White Americans -- but that gap has narrowed over time and, in the latest reading, has nearly closed.

• Gallup

Tom Wolfe and Me, Part II

Another time Wolfe and I were looking out of his living room window down at the Whitney Museum which he called “the worst and most unfortunate museum built in America … It looks like a machine-gun turret built by socialists to exterminate bourgeois women shopping at boutiques on Madison Avenue.

• George Gurley; New York Social Diary

In a Greek Village, One of Europe’s Last Matriarchal Societies Is Near Death

In many Aegean islands, the soil lacks fertility, making it challenging for families to rely solely on agriculture. Consequently, trade and shipping emerged as crucial avenues for income among the islanders. The commercial exchanges between Greece and other nations, coupled with a significant exodus of men from the Greek islands to work on ships, resulted in a notable shift in land inheritance dynamics. Typically, land ownership passed to women, as their permanent presence was seen as a safeguard for its integrity, and ownership of land served as a dowry.

• Anna Pantelia; New Lines

Blue (review, 1994)

[The director Krzysztof Kieślowski] trusts the human face, and watching his film, I remembered a conversation I had with Ingmar Bergman many years ago, in which he said there were many moments in films that could only be dealt with by a closeup of a face - the right face - and that too many directors tried instead to use dialogue or action.

• Roger Ebert; Chicago Sun Times — the best film about grief if you ask me, or the second best after Ordinary People

Violas in Sing Sing: It’s never too late to learn an instrument

Around 2011, I performed at Rikers Island, the main jail complex in New York City. Performing in this isolated place I realized there was a deeper appreciation for music there than in the most elite halls where I have performed around the world. This made me wonder what music could do to combat the growing injustices of America’s system of mass incarceration.

• Susannah Black, Nathan Schram; Plough

America’s Last Top Models

From 1790 to 1880, Cascio explained, the U.S. Patent Office first encouraged and then required an inventor to submit a model along with each application. These models—thousands of miniature devices, often exquisitely detailed—were then exhibited in Washington, D.C., in the office’s model gallery .... But by the late nineteenth century it had effectively shut its doors.

• Nicola Twilley; The New Yorker

Yes, IQ Really Matters

The SAT does predict success in college—not perfectly, but relatively well, especially given that it takes just a few hours to administer. And, unlike a “complex portrait” of a student’s life, it can be scored in an objective way.

• David Z. Hambrick, Christopher Chabris; Slate

Huntington Library acquires the papers of Thomas Pynchon

The Huntington Library has acquired the archives of Pynchon, 85 — a collection of typescripts and drafts of each of his novels, handwritten notes, correspondence with publishers and research — which were prepared by his son, Jackson Pynchon, the museum announced on Wednesday.

• Jonah Valdez; Los Angeles Times

Thank you for reading!

Email me at anna@interintellect.com.

Attend our public online salons here. Join our community and find more great stuff to read and thoughtful people to discuss it with here.

Join Interintellect

This is coming to you with some delay; lots to do at Interintellect!

During the next couple of days we will welcome Cass Sunstein, Rachel Nuwer, and Anil Seth and Erik Hoel at online Interintellect salons (more by Erik below). Come join us by clicking on the links and grabbing a ticket.

On April 13, we’re organising a major festival in New York, The Future of Publishing, with Infinite Books. We will be joined by Coleman Hughes, Kyla Scanlon, Sahil Lavingia, Tamara Winter, Shadi Hamid, Tara Isabella Burton, Eugene Wei, Tina He, Dan Shipper, and many more friends to investigate where our love of books, writing and reading is going — use the DIGEST20 discount code to get 20% off for the next 3 days!

In New York, I will also see you on April 6 celebrating spring rebirth — faith and progress — with Plough and Wayfare magazines. And now let’s dive into all that’s to read from the past week… Scroll all the way down; pure gems! Love x Anna

"When tenderness is detached from the source of tenderness, its logical outcome is terror. It ends in forced-labor camps and in the fumes of the gas chamber.” - Flannery O'Connor

As Long as You Both Shall Live

A day in the life of a marriage cannot be substituted for the day before or the day after it. People do not live on a loop, and even if they rehearse their arguments, even if they tell the same stories again and again, their performances almost always deviate from the script. “That recording is not reality. If you have an extreme moment in life, an emotional peak, and focus on it, of course, it crushes everything,” Sandra insists. “It’s our voices, but it’s not who we are.”

• The great Merve Emre; The New York Review

Inside the New Wave of Old-School Education

“If you are not given an education and the basic human skills of reading, writing, communicating, thinking, deliberating, you’re at mercy of being left in the dust; you’re being left where the animals are.”

• Julia Steinberg; The Free Press

Flannery O’Connor

Flannery O’Connor is one of the most evocative writers of the gospel in fiction who has ever lived. “The stories,” she wrote, “are hard but they are hard because there is nothing harder or less sentimental than Christian realism. … When I see these stories described as horror stories I am always amused because the reviewer always has hold of the wrong horror.”

• Susannah Black Roberts; Plough

How to save your friends

Unless they’re literally in the middle of an emotional breakdown, people actually appreciate straightforward, direct questions about what’s motivating their behaviors or how they plan to change. Of course it also depends on your tone: you have to be asking your challenging questions in the context of a genuine desire to help them.

• Kasra

The great rewiring: is social media really behind an epidemic of teenage mental illness?

An analysis done in 72 countries shows no consistent or measurable associations between well-being and the roll-out of social media globally. Moreover, findings from the Adolescent Brain Cognitive Development study, the largest long-term study of adolescent brain development in the United States, has found no evidence of drastic changes associated with digital-technology use.

• Candice L. Odgers; Nature

Antidotes to cynicism creep in academia

Table of Contents: 1. So. Many. Problems. 2. Problems with scientific papers 3. Problems with peer-review 4. Problems with the publishing industry 5. Problems with work pressure and incentives 6. Antidotes to cynicism creep

• Dr Eiko Fried - juicy!

The Rise and Fall of the Trad Wife

Feed the algorithm or die.

 - Sophie Elmhirst; The New Yorker

What's up with modern love?

The idealist in me would like to say that being ambitious about platonic love is how you start to be ambitious about everything else, including romantic love. The cynic in me points out there are a thousand and one articles telling people that they should have better friendships and very few telling them how. 

• Ava Huang

A.I.-Generated Garbage Is Polluting Our Culture

There’s so much synthetic garbage on the internet now that A.I. companies and researchers are themselves worried, not about the health of the culture, but about what’s going to happen with their models.

• My friend Erik Hoel; The New York Times

Does one have to be a genius to do maths?

The answer is an emphatic NO. In order to make good and useful contributions to mathematics, one does need to work hard, learn one’s field well, learn other fields and tools, ask questions, talk to other mathematicians, and think about the “big picture”. And yes, a reasonable amount of intelligence, patience, and maturity is also required. But one does not need some sort of magic “genius gene” that spontaneously generates ex nihilo deep insights, unexpected solutions to problems, or other supernatural abilities.

• The great Terence Tao

Nietzsche’s Quarrel with History

Nietzsche was convinced that a culture too concerned with goodness would never be able to achieve greatness.

• Jennifer Ratner-Rosenhagen; The Hedgehog Review

Reflections in the Mirror

In that moment, I understood how far I had come. I had spent so many years hating the person in the mirror, unable to recognize myself in it. Now, standing before my reflection, my heart is full. I can finally accept and love the woman I am, flaws and all.

• María Jimena Sánchez; Interintellect blog

How Old Do I Look?

That is what midlife panic has always, actually, been about: not the fantasy of being young again, but the reality of being too old to start over, which perhaps carries a special sort of horror for the generation that invented not just the personal brand, but the personal rebrand.

• Kat Rosenfield; The Free Press

Ambition

My ambition is more like: I want to learn how to become who I am. I want to grow, and experience deep relationships and intimacy and beauty and knowledge and wisdom. I want to alter the world around me, to bend it toward love and kindness and goodness. I feel these things growing inside of me…

• Travis Northcutt

Essay 60

The parents pass on laurels you never wanted. You win but you win what? Living is winning.

• By me; back on my eleven sentence essays…

Where Do Works of Art Belong?

The Elgin marbles are obviously part of Greece’s cultural heritage. But contemporary Greek citizens are not the sole inheritors of ancient Athens.

• Megan Gafford; Quillette

How ‘Kung Fu Panda’ Conquered China – And China Conquered Hollywood

Although the original “Kung Fu Panda” came out over a decade ago, its legacy has never been more relevant. In addition to shaping the strategies Hollywood employs to infiltrate the Chinese market, it has also motivated China to improve its animation industry, in the hope of extending its soft power to other regions of the globe. With the fourth installment currently in theaters, this process is still ongoing.

• Tim Brinkhof; New Lines Magazine

Affirmative action: Rethinking the limits of consent

After all, both consent-as-conversation and liberal consent-as-contract share the same focus: the individual, rather than social and cultural structures. They also share an unwarranted optimism.

• Geertje Bol; Times Literary Supplement

Notes on Craft

When you have taught enough fiction writing classes, you begin to take a dim view of craft. I mean craft as maxims, adages, top-down pedagogy.

• Greg Jackson; Granta

Automated Intimacy

Between Tocqueville’s frontiersman and the Replika app lie two hundred years of industrialization, urbanization, deindustrialization, and deurbanization — an experience bound to mark the current phase of isolation, stalked by memories of a previous organizational age.

• Anton Jäger; Jacobin

The Two Kinds of Moderate

It is not merely a manipulative rhetorical trick to say "if you're not with us, you're against us," but often simply false.

• Paul Graham

The Age of Amorality

Strategy involves setting priorities, and U.S. officials believed that lesser evils were needed to avoid greater ones, such as communism running riot in vital regions or democracies failing to find their strength and purpose before it was too late.

• Hal Brands; Foreign Affairs

The Trouble of Modern Parenting and Why We Don't Have Kids

The good news for the anti-parenthood tribe is that they’re winning… It’s a good time to start asking questions about what the world looks like when the average age of an American is no longer 39 as it is today and it’s 50 like it is in Japan. Or when less than one in seven Americans are under the age of 20.

• The good Sean Patrick Hughes

Good Birth, Good Death

Dante knew all this. It is on March 25, 1300, that he comes to himself in a dark wood and begins his journey into the afterlife. The date is, of course, appropriate, for Dante’s poem is at once about one man’s journey through the three stages of the afterlife and also about the entire economy of salvation. The world is a divine comedy; the world began on March 25…

• Jeff Reimer; Comment

For Book Recommendations, People Are Always Better Than Algorithms

The best kinds of books are the ones with attributes that are unquantifiable, which is a big reason why people are so much better at recommendations than algorithms are. There are so many different things to like (or dislike) about a work, special qualities that go beyond plot and setting and genre that can’t be revealed from metadata: voice, tone, philosophical outlook. What is unquantifiable is horrifying to the corporate overlords, of course, but it’s the magic that connects readers with particular books.

• Maris Kreizman; Literary Hub

A fight to protect the dignity of Michelangelo’s David raises questions about freedom of expression

“It raises not just legal issues, but also philosophical issues. What does cultural patrimony mean? How much of a stranglehold do you want to give institutions over ideas and images that are in the public domain?”

• Colleen L. Barry; Associated Press

A patchwork family

We are alive in the now, in our new family. Our new reality, with a gash and then a scar – a golden scar – at its centre, is hard won. We are happy in the home we have built. As [Rachel Cusk] wrote in Aftermath: ‘We belong more to the world, in all its risky disorder, its fragmentation, its freedom.’ Our beautifully mended pot with its gold and celebration of difference is also highly functional, watertight and of great use to all.

• Lily Dunn; Aeon

How Culture Normalises Patriarchy

Loving mothers reproduce patriarchal sons | Men amass advantage and expect respect | Concern for social approval | Male-dominated public spaces are seen as lecherous | Dissent is suppressed | Despondency traps | Cultural celebrations naturalise inequalities | Religion

• Alice Evans

Stephen King’s Carrie and the horror of girlhood

Stephen King published Carrie in April 1974 at the age of 26. It began as a short story after King read an article suggesting that instances of telekinesis had been observed in girls in early adolescence around the time of menstruation. He refers in his memoir On Writing to a friend who suggested he try to write a female character, and he began to imagine a composite of two girls he had been to high school with: one shy, bullied and dressed in the same clothes every day, the other growing up in a house of oppressive religious piety. Carrie was released to initially modest acclaim and decent sales, but the paperback became a mega-hit following Brian De Palma’s dreamlike 1976 film.

• Megan Nolan; New Statesman

Make Yourself Human Again

If artificial intelligence will eventually be more efficient or powerful than humans at all tasks, and will replace humans in everything from industry to politics to philosophy, then what’s left for humanity? If humans aren’t the center of the moral universe, then what?

• Wolf Tivy; Palladium

“Unflinching In How Bats**t Crazy It Is”: Megalopolis Early Reactions Tease Coppola’s Truly Bizarre Epic

One attendee told him that the film had "zero commercial prospects," and that it's "unflinching in how batsh-t it is." The film was described as a mix of "Ayn Rand, Metropolis, and Caligula."

• Ryan Northrup; Screen Rant - got me excited at the least

Who the Hell Came Up With an Artemisia Gentileschi “Rape Room”?

It is precisely these events that the exhibition revolves around. Upon entering, visitors are greeted with a timeline of “Artemisia’s abuse,” a map on a wall recounting the places where the violence occurred and the tribunal of the trial, setting the tone for the rest of the rooms.

• Ginevra Rollo; Hyperallergic

The Two Friends Who Changed How We Think About How We Think

Before long, Kahneman and Tversky were in constant conversation. They worked intensely in a small seminar room or a coffee shop, or while taking a long walk. The sessions were private; no one else was invited to join. As they began to produce work together, each sentence would be written, rewritten, and rewritten again, with Kahneman manning the typewriter. (Tversky never did master the art of the keyboard.) On a good day, they would write a paragraph or two. Everything was produced jointly; they did not really know where one’s thought ended and the other’s began. Graduate students “now wondered how two so radically different personalities could find common ground, much less become soul mates.”

• Cass R. Sunstein and Richard Thaler; The New Yorker - RIP Kahneman

U.S. Support for Israel’s War Has Become Indefensible

I’m a New Yorker. For me, 9/11 was the unbearable loss of thousands of lives. But I’m also a veteran of America’s War on Terror, so for me, 9/11 was also the pretext for disastrous, poorly conceived wars that spread death and destruction, destabilized the Middle East, created new enemies, and empowered Iran.

• Phil Klay; The Atlantic

Genius and blood: How cheap light transformed civilization

This first transformative breakthrough in lighting technology was, however, nothing in comparison to the second lighting revolution powered by coal-driven electrification. The dawn of electric illumination began in earnest when Thomas Edison began marketing and installing the first commercially available lightbulbs in the 1880s. From there, market forces and innovation pushed the availability, quality, safety, and ubiquity of artificial light dramatically upward while pushing its cost down to a level of essentially universal accessibility for all of humanity.

• Tony Morley; Big Think

Open Letter to Anti-Zionists on Twitter

I don’t want Israel to drift to the right. I find the values of Theodor Herzl and David Ben-Gurion to be almost as good as any human values have ever been, and I’d like Israel to keep them.

• Scott Aaronson

When Sleep Deprivation is an Antidepressant

Gehrman acknowledged that what separates those for whom therapeutic sleep deprivation is effective and those who just get cranky and want to go to sleep is a mystery as old as Heinroth’s first observations of the effect.

• Charles Digges; Nautilus

George Steiner, The Art of Criticism No. 2

“There are novels that one would call great but that will live because of their ideological, intellectual content. A lot of Thomas Mann might strike one that way. Musil's Man without Qualities is written about by as many philosophers as literary critics. But this is rare.”

• Ronald A. Sharp; The Paris Review

Richard Serra, Minimalist Sculptor Whose Steel Creations Awed Viewers, Dies at 85

Serra’s sculptures defined a generation of art-making. Working on an unusually large scale, Serra crafted gigantic artworks that enlisted spirals, cubes, and cones of steel. These works loom over viewers, threatening to squash them.

• Alex Greenberger; ARTnews

Daddy Longlegs Have Four Extra, Hidden Eyes, Researchers Say

Contrary to popular belief, daddy longlegs are not spiders, but rather, they’re part of a group of arachnids known as harvestmen. While spiders can have up to eight eyes, the estimated 6,500 species of daddy longlegs usually have just two. But while looking through a microscope at an embryo of Phalangium opilio—a daddy longlegs species—scientists recently discovered four additional eyes that never fully develop.

• Sarah Kuta; Smithsonian Magazine — take that Fiona Apple!

Prisoners of Zembla: What Nabokov teaches us about scholars and writers

Under such a deluge of cleverness it is easy to miss that Nabokov also includes a few genuine reflections on the writer’s craft in the novel… 

• Irina Dumitrescu; Times Literary Supplement

A deep history of Canadian populism

Much like the agrarian populism of the western and southern United States, the Canadian prairies have supported successive movements opposed to the nation’s urban elites and the concentration of political and economic power. This fed into politics on the Left, including the growth of unionised labour and the emergence of the New Democratic Party. Canadian populists also embraced right-wing agendas such as social conservatism. Over time, the centre of gravity in Canadian conservatism shifted from east to west, as the nation made the journey from being a British Dominion to an independent power in the western hemisphere.

• David Cowan; Engelsberg Ideas

Writing My Autobiography

A serious biography takes up what the world thinks of its subject, what his friends and family think of him, and—if the information is available in letters, diaries, journals, or interviews—what he thinks of himself. An autobiography is ultimately about the last question: what the author thinks of himself. Yet how many of us have sufficient self-knowledge to give a convincing answer? In her splendid novel Memoirs of Hadrian, Marguerite Yourcenar has Hadrian note: “When I seek deep within me for knowledge of myself what I find is obscure, internal, unformulated, and as secret as any complicity.”

• Joseph Epstein; First Things

Negativity drives online news consumption

Although positive words were slightly more prevalent than negative words, we found that negative words in news headlines increased consumption rates (and positive words decreased consumption rates).

• Claire E. Robertson, Nicolas Pröllochs, Kaoru Schwarzenegger, Philip Pärnamets, Jay J. Van Bavel & Stefan Feuerriegel; Nature

Self-deception, love, and grace

I think most (all?) people, myself included, deceive themselves every day about a myriad of things. And that’s ok! This can be a healthy way of dealing with what can often be the difficult realities of life. 

• Travis Northcutt - again!

Am I Anti-Woke?

Woke’s rules are new. It is not conventional left-liberalism, as is sometimes claimed, but a mutation of it which became mainstream in the last ten years. Even Obama is unwoke.

• Ian Leslie

Three Reasons Why Culture Efforts Fail

To foster long-term growth, leaders should focus on the benefits of shifting company culture. Changing culture isn’t easy, of course, and it takes time. A McKinsey survey of some 3,000 executives found that only one in three organizational change efforts succeeds.

• Rich Lyons; Forbes

How the Story Turns Out

We live in an unheroic and disillusioned moment, and—as to sales—a moment when ambitious novels have become a niche taste.

• Scott Sherman and Edwin Frank; The Point

When it is and isn’t OK to recycle text in scientific papers

In scientific writing, one common form of text recycling is the reuse of text from methods sections. It is very common that the methodology used in a given study is similar or identical to the methods used in previous work from the same author or authors. In these cases, we consider reuse of text to be appropriate or even desirable to ensure clarity and consistency.

• Nature

Thank you for reading!

Email me at anna@interintellect.com.

Attend our public online salons here. Join our community and find more great stuff to read and thoughtful people to discuss it with here.

Join Interintellect

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

Thank you for reading!

Email me at anna@interintellect.com.

Attend our public online salons here. Join our community and find more great stuff to read and thoughtful people to discuss it with here.

Join Interintellect

Hello from Budapest. These are not easy days. My family — already brimming with drama — has been struck by grief. I am grieving.

I am grateful for the welcome distractions of work, be it this weekend digest, or all the wonderful conversations coming up on my platform, Interintellect.

I will write more about my dad later, and the onslaught of feelings his illness and unexpected passing two days ago had brought to me. Adult life is just a temporary escape from frailty, that’s all.

I have in fact written quite a bit about my family these past years, and the many ruptures that run throughout. I’ll leave you with one piece now to capture some of it, the impossibility, and nevertheless the hope, of it all: On Separation.

And now, let’s read others! Since I’m back “home” in Budapest, I have collected some excellent Hungarian content for your erudition and pleasure. I hope you’ll enjoy it. Love x Anna

The Atomic Bomb Considered As Hungarian High School Science Fair Project

The joke was that this explained why the Manhattan Project was led by a group of Hungarian supergeniuses, all born in Budapest between 1890 and 1920. These included Manhattan Project founder Leo Szilard, H-bomb creator Edward Teller, Nobel-Prize-winning quantum physicist Eugene Wigner, and legendary polymath John von Neumann… The coincidences actually pile up beyond this. Von Neumann, Wigner, and possibly Teller all went to the same central Budapest high school at about the same time, leading a friend to joke about the atomic bomb being basically a Hungarian high school science fair project.

But maybe we shouldn’t be joking about this so much. Suppose we learned that Beethoven, Mozart, and Bach all had the same childhood piano tutor. It sounds less like “ha ha, what a funny coincidence” and more like “wait, who was this guy, and how quickly can we make everyone else start doing what he did?” In this case, the guy was Laszlo Ratz, legendary Budapest high school math teacher.

• Scott Alexander

Magda Szabó and the Cost of Censorship

“I have come to realize that if I can’t bear to speak the truth even to you then I am beyond all help,” Eszter Encsy, the narrator of Magda Szabó’s 1959 novel, The Fawn, says…

The censors hounded [Szabó]. They hoped to splinter the New Moon group, hungry for the cultural legitimacy the writers’ acquiescence might lend the regime. Szabó claimed to have lost the will to write. She took a job teaching children. But, all the while, she was writing fiction, keeping it secret even from other New Moon writers. 

• Charlie Lee; The New Yorker

The writer of our discontent: Remembering when a Hungarian staging of Richard III became a way to take on eastern Europe’s dictators

Richard III was staged in Kaposvár which had the country’s very best theatre at the time. This was 1982. The superb actors wore camouflage military uniforms, and the action took place behind prison bars. At the end of the performance, Richmond’s speech was broadcast on closed-circuit television to the auditorium. A talented extra played the role of the obnoxious figure, but that wasn’t why charges were brought against the production, they were brought because the Earl of Richmond wore dark glasses. A few weeks earlier, on 13 December 1981, General Wojciech Jaruzelski declared a state of emergency in Poland. For health reasons he wore sunglasses every time he appeared in public. László Babarczi, the director of the play, was reprimanded. He defended himself by stating that the actor did not wear sunglasses.

• György Spiró; Index on Censorship

Just divine: Nicholas Lezard is on a personal crusade after reading Journey by Moonlight, the compulsive page-turner by Antal Szerb

I can't remember the last time I did this: finished a novel, and then turned straight back to page 1 to start it over again… The story, written in 1937, is of a bourgeois Hungarian businessman on holiday in Venice with his wife…

I found out only after finishing it that Journey by Moonlight is the novel most loved by all cultivated Hungarians. Please believe me when I tell you that a cultivated Hungarian is about as cultivated as you can get while remaining in the presence of warmth and humanity.

• Nicholas Lezard; The Guardian

This Nomadic Eccentric Was the Most Prolific Mathematician in History

Erdős was a notoriously bad house-guest. In Hoffman’s book, mathematician Michael Jacobson of the University of Colorado Denver recounts a story in which Erdős came to his home, and they worked on math until 1:00 A.M., when Jacobson finally succumbed to exhaustion. Erdős, who tended to put in 19-hour days, stayed up and, at 4:30 A.M., banged pots in the kitchen incessantly to wake up his host. Jacobson eventually teetered downstairs in his bathrobe. He described the ensuing interaction with his colleague to Hoffman: “What were the first words out of his mouth? Not ‘Good morning’ or ‘How’d you sleep?’ but ‘Let n be an integer.’”

• Jack Murtagh; Scientific American

‘Ben Hur,’ but Bigger and Better — Hungarian writer György Spiró’s newly translated novel ‘Captivity’ powerfully sets the perils of modern Jewry in Early Christian Rome

There is always something a little comic about historical fiction that enlists real personalities as characters. The comedy comes from the overdetermination: The only witness to life in Jewish Alexandria that we possess is Philo, the philosopher, and so it is inevitable for Uri to become Philo’s confidant. Likewise, no novel set in Judea in 33 CE is going to miss the chance to bring Jesus on stage, and Spiró does just that. Indeed, circumstances work out perfectly for Uri to be thrown in jail in the very same cell with Jesus and the two thieves on the eve of the crucifixion. But Spiró handles this episode with a light touch—Jesus goes unnamed, and it takes the reader a moment to realize that the middle-aged, balding, puffy prisoner is actually the Christian messiah. Uri himself doesn’t realize this until much later in the book, when the growing cult of “the Nazarenes” has turned Jesus into the Son of God. “I saw him! I spoke with him!” Uri tells his own son, Marcellus, who has converted to Christianity. “He was human just like you or me! … He was a man, a wretched, decent, and honest man like you or me!”

• Adam Kirsch; Tablet

Book Review: Raise A Genius!

I was hoping that this book would explain Lazslo Polgar’s secrets for raising gifted children. It does so only in very broad strokes. Nor does he seem to be holding much back. But it looks more like he doesn’t really have secrets, per se. The main things he does differently from everyone else are the things he’s talked about in every interview and documentary: he starts young (around the time the child is three), focuses near-obsessively on a single subject, and never stops.

• Scott Alexander again

Andy Grove: Refugee, Tech Pioneer And Immigrant Entrepreneur

“I was born in Budapest, Hungary, in 1936,” writes Grove in his memoir Swimming Across. “By the time I was 20, I had lived through a Hungarian fascist dictatorship, German military occupation, the Nazis’ ‘Final Solution,’ the siege of Budapest by the Soviet Red Army, a period of chaotic democracy in the years immediately after the war, a variety of repressive Communist regimes and a popular uprising that was put down at gunpoint.” …

Grove’s contributions to America far exceed those whose careers or government positions have been devoted to preventing refugees like Grove from reaching the United States. In 1997, he was named Time magazine’s Man of the Year for being “the person most responsible for the amazing growth in the power and the innovative potential of microchips.” Grove died in 2016, but his life serves as an example of how America gains when it opens its doors.

• Stuart Anderson; Forbes

‘I shall hate her still’ — The twisted tale of a friendship soaked in enmity

The presence of the uncanny recurs in Szabó’s work. Occasionally, as in her later novel Katalin Street (1969; see TLS, May 29, 2020), this crosses over into the supernatural, but more often its presence is ambiguous, a feeling that something about a person or situation is indefinably wrong. The Door (1987), Szabó’s best-known novel, features an old woman with a peculiarly close bond to a dog. In The Fawn the impression is of a skewed fairy tale. 

• Nick Holdstock; Times Literary Supplement

Review: In ‘1945,’ Hungarian Villagers Are Forced to Revisit Wartime Sins

Ferenc Torok’s lean, suggestive Hungarian feature, “1945,” shot in gorgeous, high-contrast black-and-white, is a Holocaust film built, consciously or not, on a reversal of the tropes of the western, down to ticking clocks that might as well be nearing high noon. 

• Ben Kenigsberg; The New York Times

László Fehér

Certain archetypal motifs constitute ongoing and recurring themes in his work, such as stairs, water and houses. Despite their mystical content, these motifs retain their everyday character and spontaneity. Although the dominant colours in his work have changed over the years, its unchanging essence, the message, is an intricate relationship between the human figure and its surroundings: emotionally complex, often visually shocking, and at once harmonious and disharmonious. Today, his works are found in many private and public collections, in Hungary and around the world.

• Q Contemporary

The Path to Autocracy

As Szabolcs Panyi, an investigative journalist, told me, Orbán can count on his propaganda machine reaching most Hungarians while constantly disparaging independent journalists. “You know,” he says, describing the playbook of delegitimizing objective reality, “there’s no facts, it’s just opinion, everything is partisan.” He says it’s a “psy-op” intended “to try to shift our focus from our work to what they are saying about us.”

• Ben Rhodes; The Atlantic

Robert Capa, the world's best-known war photographer had a passionate desire for peace

"It's not enough to have talent, you also have to be Hungarian", said Robert Capa, the greatest war reporter in the history of photography, born as Endre Ernő Friedmann in Budapest. During his daring and adventurous life, he captured five wars from the firing line, and then, fulfilling his own destiny, lost his life on the battlefield…

In 1945, he returned to Paris, where he fell in love with Swedish actress Ingrid Bergman, whom he followed to Hollywood, where they lived together for two years. The actress was married and was ready to leave her husband for Capa, but the photographer refused to commit. Instead, in 1947, he and his fellow photographers, such greats as Henri Cartier-Bresson and William Vandivert, founded Magnum Photos, named after the champagne they drank when they founded it. It was the first cooperative agency of international freelance photographers, and Capa was finally able to photograph civilian life. He and John Steinbeck were the first American correspondents to travel to the Soviet Union beyond the Iron Curtain, and Steinbeck published a book about the trip, entitled A Russian Journal, richly illustrated with Capa's photographs.

• Dr Adrián Szász; Képmás

Ágota Kristóf's The Notebook awoke in me a cold and cruel passion

The Notebook tells the story of young twins living with their grandmother in a small Hungarian town during the last years of the second world war and the early years of communism. The twins are thoroughly immoral – they lie, blackmail, kill – yet they stand for authentic ethical naivety at its purest.

• Slavoj Žižek; The Guardian

Gloomy Sunday

“Gloomy Sunday” is a song composed by Hungarian pianist and composer Rezső Seress and published in 1933, as “Vége a Világnak” (“End of the world”).

It became well known throughout much of the English-speaking world after the release of a version by Billie Holiday in 1941. Lewis’s lyrics referred to suicide, and the record label described it as the “Hungarian Suicide Song”. There is a recurring urban legend that claims that many people committed suicide with this song playing…

The BBC banned Billie Holiday’s version of the song from being broadcast, as being detrimental to wartime morale

• billieholiday.com

The Philosophy of Anger

My parents decided to leave Hungary when the synagogue on our block was blown up. (After that, the Jews in the area went to my grandmother’s house to pray, secretly.) When we arrived in New York City, my parents pulled me out of public school after I was beaten up for wearing a necklace with a Star of David. They could not afford private school, but Orthodox Jewish elementary schools were willing to accept my sister and me for free, as charity cases. Why? Because the Holocaust, of course…

• Agnes Callard; Boston Review.

The Obsessive Fictions of László Krasznahorkai

Ascribing Krasznahorkai’s allure to plot is rarely fruitful; at best, the events are an armature over which the thickened material of consciousness can drape and flow. (Another of Krasznahorkai’s translators, the poet George Szirtes, has described his work as “a vast black river of type.”)

• Dustin Illingworth; The Paris Review

The trauma doctor: Gabor Maté on happiness, hope and how to heal our deepest wounds

When he was 11 months old, his mother sent him with a stranger to be cared for by his aunt. In the book, he quotes her diary from the time: “My dear little man,” she starts, explaining that she was forced to part with him because “your little organism could not possibly endure the living conditions [in the] fenced-in Budapest ghetto”.

• Ellie Violet Bramley; The Guardian

Polymorphous Adversity - Péter Nádas’s new novel explores the nexus of eros and politics

No one who has read Péter Nádas’s novel A Book of Memories (1997) will be surprised that the very first character introduced in Parallel Stories, a middle-aged man who happens to be a corpse, immediately becomes an object of desire: The male police officer investigating the scene sniffs the dead man’s penis in order to determine what kind of sex it might have recently had. Let’s pretend that he’s all business; “the secretion tests would provide exact details.” Meanwhile, the student who discovered the body—in Berlin, just after the dismantling of the wall—finds himself called upon by God to confess to the murder. He, too, feels sexually attracted to the dead man, and evidently also to the brown-eyed police investigator. “He could no more break free of the trusting pair of brown eyes than he could of the figure of the unknown corpse, the gentle, white, bladelike stripes of snow, the magical coolness of the discovery.”

• William T. Vollmann; Bookforum

”I always walk on the shadowy side of life” — One Woman in the War: Introduction

Before the publication of One Woman in the War in 1991, Alaine Polcz was widely recognized as a psychologist ministering to the needs of disturbed and incurably ill children and their families, as the author of numerous articles and several books on thanatology, and as the founder of the hospice movement in Hungary. To those who knew her through these dedicated engagements with death and the dying, the account of her experiences in the closing months of the Second World War was a revelation of past horrors in Hungary which, until then, had lingered on in the farthest reaches of the national memory as rumor and suspicion about the violent acts committed against women during a time of chaos, havoc, and savagery.

• Central European University

Just for kicks: how a kung-fu fighting female TV detective reshaped gender norms in the Eastern Bloc

As if militant feminism was yet another “exotic” notion to be exploited in a manner no different to kung-fu.

• Yoana Pavlova; Calvert Journal

The Hungarian Ban on Gender Studies and its Implications for Democratic Freedom

On October 12, 2018, the Hungarian government officially removed Gender Studies Masters and PhD degrees from the list of accredited subjects in the country. The government also issued a decree rescinding the accreditation and funding for Gender Studies programs at two Hungarian universities, Eötvös Loránd University (a state-run school) and Central European University (also known as CEU), two of the top universities in the country…The Hungarian government did not provide any explanation for its action…

• Becky Prager; Harvard Journal of Law and Gender

Pieces of a Woman follows the course of child birth, death and remembrance

Pieces of a Woman is the Hungarian Mundruczó’s English-language debut. His earlier works, including the Cannes nominees White God (2014) and Johanna (2005), were altogether more slippery, more mysterious, more surreal. Pieces of a Woman feels more tonally aligned with the flinty realism of Kenneth Lonergan’s Manchester by the Sea, another Massachusetts-set film about a grieving parent.

• Catherine Wheatley; British Film Institute

Marcel Breuer: the Bauhaus furniture master with a passion for architecture

Marcel Breuer is famous for his tubular steel furniture, yet his real interest was architecture. For our Bauhaus 100 series, marking 100 years of the influential school, we profile the Hungarian designer who championed a rational approach to design…

• Jon Astbury; Dezeen

Magyars in the Movies

Casablanca (1942) … Adolf Zukor was one of the architects of the Hollywood film industry. Born to a Jewish family in rural Hungary, he was just 15 when he lost both of his parents, then subsequently emigrated to America and made his fortune in the fur business. In 1903 he started a venture with Marcus Loew for a new chain of movie theaters. In 1912 he established Famous Players, which evolved over time into Paramount Pictures…

• Funzine

A Review of: Detective Story by Imre Kertesz

In 1975, thirty years after his liberation from a concentration camp, the Hungarian author Imre Kertész published his first novel, Sorstalanság, which has been translated into English as both Fateless and Fatelessness. Whichever you prefer—I like Fatelessness, personally—it’s one of those destined-to-be-a-classic books against which everything else he writes, including Liquidation, Kaddish for an Unborn Child, and his newly translated Detective Story, will forever be contrasted. That it took him three decades to compose his masterpiece and so matter-of-factly describe a Holocaust-era childhood should come as no surprise. But what can any artist really say about our greatest human atrocities that isn’t self-evident? Both Fatelessness and Detective Story reveal that the answer, for Kertész, has something to do with fate—and the lack thereof…

• Andrew Ervin; The Believer

The Siege of Budapest: One Hundred Days in World War II — Review

By the time the city came under attack in December 1944, the highest drama had already passed. As the front had moved closer to Hungary earlier in the year, the government, in the person of Regent Miklós Horthy, tried to open channels of negotiation with the Western Allies. The Germans responded by clamping down on their wavering ally, occupying the entire country. Not coincidentally they also rounded up, deported and murdered most of the Hungarian Jewry, until that moment the last national Jewish community of any size still extant in Nazi-occupied Europe. Then, in October 1944, the Horthy government actually tried to abandon the Axis and take Hungary out of the war. The Germans again responded quickly, arresting the regent within hours…

• HistoryNet

The Round-Up (Miklós Jancsó, Hungary 1966)

 In fact, the power of the state is so complete that even the tantalizing openness of nature is illusory. If anyone makes a break for it, there is literally nowhere to hide.

• Hamish Ford; Senses of Cinema

Canadian Psychologist Who Used LSD Forty Years Ago Permanently Barred from Entering U.S.

Andrew Feldmar, a psychologist who has worked for the UN to help Chernobyl victims, was accustomed to traveling to the U.S. five or six times a year to visit his children, according to a story this week in the Tyee, an independent Canadian newspaper. But when a border guard pulled the 66-year-old out of line last summer for a random search, Feldmar's trip quickly turned into a bad one. The guard turned up online evidence that Feldmar had dabbled in drugs for therapeutic research in the past. Of course, that was nearly four decades ago. And everyone was high then.

• Luke O’Brien; WIRED

We Made It: The Bogányi Piano

Is there no way the sound can ever be improved? That is the possibility which has gnawed away at Hungarian concert pianist Gergely Bogányi for years. “The imagination of a musician is always at a higher level than the actual sound,” he explains. “The notes coming out of pianos were always different to the ones in my head.” His great compatriot Franz Liszt was always worrying away about improving sound quality, so it was a great surprise to Bogányi when he had a chance to play on Liszt’s piano, which is housed in a museum in Budapest. “I was quite shocked. That was the sound was much warmer and a more human sound than the modern pianos.” It was much closer to the sound he heard in his imagination when playing. But unfortunately those older pianos are simply too brittle to withstand the barrage of a modern concert performance. Then about ten years ago Bogányi started talking in earnest to a piano technician.

• Jasper Rees; The Arts Desk

Thank you for reading!

Email me at anna@interintellect.com.

Attend our public online salons here. Join our community and find more great stuff to read and thoughtful people to discuss it with here.

Join Interintellect

Exhausting week with some big ups (keep April 13 open in NYC is all I can say!), and a lot of 2024 planning work for the Interintellect team. I also watched Dune Part Two and liked it much more than the first one. (Austin Butler OMG!!!)

I’ll be in Washington DC next week and hosting a social - join here. The theme will be “life as remix”, I’m sure you’ll have tons to say…

On our Youtube, you can now watch the video from our excellent salon about marriage with Devorah Baum.

Great readings for this weekend too. Scroll all the way down: some true gems! x Anna

Sweden officially joins NATO

NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg said: “This is a historic day. Sweden will now take its rightful place at NATO’s table, with an equal say in shaping NATO policies and decisions. After over 200 years of non-alignment Sweden now enjoys the protection granted under Article 5, the ultimate guarantee of Allies’ freedom and security.”

A World Nobody Wants

Life in a recently built apartment is like a simulation that’s constantly glitching.

• David Schaengold; Compact

Ambition's Gravity

Name your ambition. Make it big, something worthy of your unique talents. Approach the chaos of change with the clarity of purpose. Don’t let the machines take your job; put them to work for you.

• Packy McCormick

The misanthropic history man

Harari found a solution in the reductionist pop-science formula pioneered by Jared Diamond for his 1997 bestseller Guns, Germs and Steel. In place of complexity, the story is driven by a crudely materialistic explanation of human development.

• Andrew Orlowski; The Critic

Immigrant Song

As a result, Canada’s ideal of a “cultural mosaic” is contrasted with the American melting pot—whereas the US has traditionally insisted that anyone wishing to live there must adopt a US identity and learn US patriotism, Canadian guidelines have been less demanding.

• George Case; Quillette

Viewing the Ob-scene: On Jonathan Glazer’s “The Zone of Interest”

The Zone of Interest adopts this position, specifically Adorno’s alignment of “bourgeois subjectivity” with both the perpetrators of Auschwitz and the position from which one moves on from it, looks back on it, views it. One of the most troubling elements of Glazer’s film is that the viewer is not allowed to withdraw from the film’s radically circumscribed scene.

• David Hering; Los Angeles Review of Books

What Does Authors Equity Mean For Traditional Publishing?

In today’s digital age, giving up the rights to the most important creative project of my life, especially in a time in which creative tools are being democratized faster than ever before, was not something I wanted to do, even if it meant more book sales. And more people are realizing that despite some of the flaws of self-publishing, like lower quality hardcover books and lack of relationships to break into retailers and foreign markets, self-publishing can work incredibly well.

• Paul Millerd

The Minor Joys of Chance Encounters

One of her life lessons, which she repeated several times, was that people hear, but rarely do they listen. After this admonition, I felt it would be awkward to do the opposite.

• Shadi Hamid; Wisdom of Crowds

Cognition all the way down

This physiological networking fundamentally erases the boundaries between smaller agents, forming a kind of superagent in which the individual identity of the original ones is very hard to maintain.

• Michael Levin and Daniel C Dennett; Aeon

The Meaning of International Women’s Day

The backwardness and lack of rights suffered by women, their subjection and indifference, are of no benefit to the working class, and indeed are directly harmful to it. But how is the woman worker to be drawn into the movement, how is she to be awoken?

• Alexandra Kollontai; Jacobin

Inside the Royal Society of Literature’s civil war

In a statement to the New Statesman the RSL said: “The director rejects the editor’s account of their meeting – she did not instruct the editor or anyone else to alter the copy or pages as they were laid out. Any suggestion that the director ‘censored’ any element of the magazine is false.”

• Ellen Peirson-Hagger; New Statesman

How a Delhi man got his hands back: organ donation, 12-hr surgery, 11 doctors’ team

A painter who had lost both his hands in an accident has received a new set of limbs after a donation by a woman who had pledged her organs to be used following her death and as doctors at Delhi’s Sir Ganga Ram Hospital performed a complex surgery.

• The Indian Express

Sydney Sweeney has brought boobs back

Yay! Boobs are back!

• Bridget Phetasy; The Spectator

The Trouble with Reality

And it’s telling, given Borges’s and Kant’s conclusions about the relationship between paradox and granularity, that the most baffling scientific observations arise when we bore down into the building blocks of reality and try to witness the moment of change at extremely small scales. Heisenberg realized this when he outlined his uncertainty principle, which demonstrates that the closer you zoom in on the

• Meghan O’Gieblyn; The New York Review

Léa Seydoux: ‘Being a Woman Onscreen Is Easier in Europe’ Than ‘Harsh’ Hollywood

“I have more freedom because I’m a European actress, which suits me,” Seydoux said. “I’m not trying to be popular, I’m just trying to enjoy myself. In America you have to conform. I don’t want to adapt myself to the system, I want the system to adapt to me!”

• Samantha Bergeson; IndiWire

Romantic Love is an Under-Rated Driver of Gender Equality

Where love is mutual, and both parties deeply care about the other’s happiness, they listen and learn. When she says certain language makes her uncomfortable, he quickly takes note - rather than getting angry and lashing out. Eager for her to thrive, he shares the care-work, supports her career progression, and celebrates her wins.

• Alice Evans

Matti Friedman: The Song of the Israel-Hamas War

“It’s a long road to the promised land,” says Moses, trying to calm them, but Joshua retorts, “Promised to who?”

• Matti Friedman; The Free Press

How Happy Couples Argue

When the psychologists coded the data, two things became obvious. First, all couples fight. Second, fights have wildly different effects on different couples. The psychologists wanted to understand why, for some couples, fights are a poison that destroys their relationship dose by dose, whereas for others, fights are more like a physical-therapy session—painful in the moment but strengthening bonds over time.

• Derek Thompson; The Atlantic

In defence of David Lynch’s ‘Dune’

But Dune, like Blade Runner and 2001, aimed at depth, intricacy and wider socio-political meaning in what was becoming a fairly shallow, effects-led cinematic genre; to use science fiction to echo the complexities of our world, not escape them. In that sense it helped pave the way for more thoughtful and ambitious sci-fi epics – Gravity, Interstellar, Arrival, films based on grand conceits rather than phaser-blasted action. It did what Herbert’s novel had intended it to do – it widened the sci-fi scope.

• Mark Beaumont; NME

The Denial of the Moral as Lived Experience: What became of moral formation in a democratic society?

This materialist turn in Freudian understandings of personhood was a world-historical event. And even though psychoanalysis is now largely passé, Freud’s thoroughly materialist conception of the human subject continues to suffuse contemporary culture and thought, high and low, intellectual and popular, even among those who consider themselves, if not religious, at least “spiritual.”

• James Davison Hunter; The Hedgehog Review

The “blind spot” in science that’s fueling a crisis of meaning

At the heart of science lies something we do not see that makes science possible, just as the blind spot lies at the heart of our visual field and makes seeing possible.

• Adam Frank, Marcelo Gleiser and Evan Thompson; Big Think

Maya Lin's original competition submission for the Vietnam Veterans Memorial

Brought to a sharp awareness of such a loss, it is up to each individual to resolve or come to terms with this loss. For death, is in the end a personal and private matter, and the area contained with this memorial is a quiet place, meant for personal reflection and private reckoning. The black granite walls, each two hundred feet long, and ten feet below ground at their lowest point (gradually ascending toward ground level) effectively act as a sound barrier, yet are of such a height and length so as not to appear threatening or enclosing.

Friendship Lines

These lines show friendships as they truly are: Not linear relationships with an x/y axis where friendship intimacy/time increases steadily. They illustrate the complex and unpredictable nature of friendships–more like seasons, less like earning reports.

• Camilo Moreno-Salamanca

Taylor Swift is related to Emily Dickinson, genealogy company reveals

On Monday, the genealogy company divulged that “Swift and Dickinson both descend from a 17th-century English immigrant (Swift’s ninth great-grandfather and Dickinson’s sixth great-grandfather who was an early settler of Windsor, Connecticut)”.

• Michael Sainato; The Guardian

With or Without Poise

While a friendship might be a single long conversation, it’s never the same two people who have it.

• Daniel Francis Olivieri; Interintellect blog

Writer Anne Rice: 'Today I Quit Being A Christian'

Rice says the final straw was when she realized the lengths that the church would go to prevent same-sex marriage.

• NPR

Certainty

I do still have opinions about things, but I try to intentionally treat them as sort of "trial" things, if that makes any sense. More like "I kinda suspect x about y, I wonder if that will end up being right?"

• Travis Northcutt

The Oscars as a Rank-Order Tournament

The Academy Awards are one example of a relatively standard tournament. There are prizes to be earned through effort (making good movies, good acting, etc.), the value of the prizes are fixed and rank-based (you can either be a winner, a nominee, or none of those), and effort is not wasted even if one does not receive any prize given that their movie, their acting etc. is enjoyed by moviegoers all around the world. The somewhat counterintuitive result of tournament theory; i.e. that effort is optimal even though the prizes are allocated according to the rank, without considering the differences in the efforts, seems to hold for the Oscars and other film awards.

• Peter Isztin

The Reckoning

Victor Garcia, a journalist at French magazine L’Express, saw scientists expressing skepticism about Raoult’s claims on social media. He called the IHU, assuming it had more details that could counter some of the critics’ concerns. But Garcia says he received a “strange” response from IHU researcher Jean-Marc Rolain. “I am a scientist,” Rolain said. “If I tell you to take chloroquine, you’ll listen to me.” (Rolain did not respond to multiple requests for comment.) That was “the beginning of me asking questions,” Garcia says.

• Cathleen O’Grady; Science

Fitzcarraldo Editions hires Rachael Allen to launch new poetry list featuring Rebecca Tamás and Diane Seuss

Four to six books per year will be published on the list, which will also include poetry in translation

• Melina Spanoudi; The Bookseller

Bluesky snags former Twitter/X Trust & Safety exec cut by Musk

“There is an urgent global need for a social network that can safely and effectively meet the needs of communities and individuals,” said Rodericks, in a statement about his hiring.

• Sarah Perez; TechCrunch

Protestor Spray Paints, Slashes Cambridge Portrait of Lord Balfour, Who Established UK Support for Israel

The activist group Palestine Action shared a video on X of an unidentified protestor dousing Balfour’s portrait, a 1914 work by Philip Alexius de László, in red spray paint and then slashing the canvas nearly almost entirely to pieces. The work is housed at Trinity College, a school that is part of the University of Cambridge.

• Tessa Solomon; ARTnews

Europe needs a grand strategy

How can political unity be created for joint European decision-making? Public trust in the EU rests on shaky grounds.

• Marina Henke; Engelsberg Ideas

Introducing Hot Mic: A New Column Documenting Live Comedy in NYC

Are live comedy shows still relevant? And if so, what for?

• Leah Abrams; Jezebel

What Independent Bookshops Really Sell

But books are different. They signal something about readers’ intelligence, identity, and closely held ideas. Books confer status—especially among the highly educated. The people who sell them know this and they used it to make their case.

• Ann Bauer; Persuasion

Did immigration bring down inflation?

Maybe immigrant managers are depressing the wages of other immigrant managers. And maybe this is creating a bonanza for companies, who get to hire immigrant managers more cheaply, and who then pass the cost savings on to the customer in the form of lower inflation.

• Noah Smith

Taylor Tomlinson Drops the Mic

“I’m not the first woman. I mean, Lilly Singh had her show a year ago! There isn’t anyone right now, so I guess I am the one.”

• Britt Hennemuth; Vanity Fair

Cambridge academic escapes toilet using eyeliner and cotton

After multiple attempts, [University of Cambridge academic Dr Krisztina Ilko] called on her childhood love for the fictional problem-solver MacGyver to get herself out and handpicked the lock with an eyeliner and a cotton earbud. The eyeliner was used to push down the latch and she made a hook out of the earbud. After seven hours, she was able to unlock the door.

• Harriet Heywood; BBC — Hungarian women, what can I say!

Dust to Dust: W. H. Auden writes poetry for a world marked by death

In the history of poetry, Auden is a figure of recovery. Amid the fragmentation wrought by early modernism, declared by its practitioners and enthusiasts to be permanent, Auden revived and updated the lyrical forms of the prewar era. In some sense, he succeeded D. H. Lawrence, whose novels and lyric poems insist on the possibility of ecstatic love, of rebirth. Lawrence’s Romantic sublime blooms: his characters throw off the shackles of modernity, of life under capitalist industry, social convention, and sexual jealousy. In his personal life, Auden accomplished many such freedoms.

• Helen Rouner; Commonweal

Masturbation in marriage

I’m raising this question because of a recent Evie magazine advice column written about a woman who caught her husband using porn and is devastated by it. The over emphasis on the role of porn is masking, in my opinion, the more important question of managing sexual imbalance in marriage, because as I said in my too-long thread on Twitter/X, focusing too much on the porn question allows a woman to demonize her husband while sidestepping the real issue of how to deal with the fact that he wants more sex than she does.

• Danielle Freydman 

I Found David Lynch’s Lost Dune II Script

While writing this piece I reached out to Lynch for comment, since his Dune II script had never been discussed in detail publicly. He stated, through an assistant, that he “sort of remembers writing something but doesn’t recall ever finishing it.” As Dune is “a failure in his eyes and not a particular time that he likes to think of or talk about,” he politely declined to speak to me.

• Max Evry; WIRED

Step by Step: Thinking through and beyond the repair manual

My new hair dryer came with a manual informing me that “special tools are required for any examination, adjustment or repair. Unqualified repair work could lead to hazardous conditions for the user.” In some cases, tinkering is actually illegal. Products are sold with “setup guides” that lack information on repair. When the washing machine locks our jeans inside, blinking its lights in a proprietary pattern, flashing a cryptic ransom message, we’re forced to search the dark web for a PDF copy of an old service manual, or plug in the magic keywords that help us sift through 18-minute videos on YouTube.

• Shannon Mattern; Places

Understanding the spirit of a norm: Challenges for norm-learning agents

Social and moral norms are a fabric for holding human societies together and helping them to function. As such they will also become a means of evaluating the performance of future human–machine systems. While machine ethics has offered various approaches to endowing machines with normative competence, from the more logic-based to the more data-based, none of the proposals so far have considered the challenge of capturing the “spirit of a norm,” which often eludes rigid interpretation and complicates doing the right thing. We present some paradigmatic scenarios across contexts to illustrate why the spirit of a norm can be critical to make explicit and why it exposes the inadequacies of mere data-driven “value alignment” techniques such as reinforcement learning RL for interactive, real-time human–robot interaction. Instead, we argue that norm learning, in particular, learning to capture the spirit of a norm, requires combining common-sense inference-based and data-driven approaches.

• Thomas Arnold and Matthias Scheutz

We vs Them: Pronouns in the poetry of Auden

“We” can be a pair of lovers, but also all humanity.

• Paul Franz; Times Literary Supplement

“It Really Matters If Somebody Has Bad Taste”: An Interview With Book Critic Becca Rothfeld

“Now more than ever, I think, the public, of whom reviewers sometimes seem to have insultingly low expectations, feels entitled not only to her tastes but to assurance that her tastes merit praise.”

• Nicholas Russell; Defector

The Dissent Hidden in an Iconic Scientific Image

Between the frontispiece to Huxley’s Man’s Place in Nature and “The Road to Homo Sapiens,” depictions of evolution as a gradual ascent from apes to humans were challenged and fell out of favor. In the early 20th century, the iconographic tradition of linear progress was kept alive, pretty much exclusively, by a woman artist who is now almost completely unknown.

• Gowan Dawson; Nautilus

Rachel Cusk: The novelist on the “feminine non-state of non-being”

“How could you summon up this directionless non-state of non-being, this difficult-to-grasp phase of femininity? It would have to be in a world in which noth­ing worked, everything had stopped, no one could go anywhere. That then became the very environment in which I wrote at least the second half of the book.”

• Merve Emre; The Yale Review

But There Are Other Geometries: On cubes, love, and fate

Auden taught himself to be the more loving one, though I cannot say I sense in his other work that he also taught himself to be happy… The Cartesian grid exemplifies elegant ordering. But there are other geometries; Riemann geometries are those of spaces stretched over something else, for instance, a grid over a sphere. Stretch me a manifold of a world where nothing is neat or reasoned or reasonable and maybe I make sense; maybe I don’t love too much anymore. Maybe someone will have me.

• A.V. Marraccini; Poetry Foundation

Thank you for reading!

Email me at anna@interintellect.com.

Attend our public online salons here. Join our community and find more great stuff to read and thoughtful people to discuss it with here.

Join Interintellect

Tomorrow, come and hang at an online event I’m hosting with Kat Rosenfield. It will be on Millennial Women 💅🏻 Tickets here!

This will be a counterpiece to a previous salon we did with Christine Emba and Shadi Hamid, on men. Video below:

Let’s dive into this weekend’s readings! I have a couple of surprises for you… xx Anna

Life is short, though I keep this from my children.
.... Life is short and the world
is at least half terrible, and for every kind
stranger, there is one who would break you,
though I keep this from my children. I am trying
to sell them the world. Any decent realtor,
walking you through a real shithole, chirps on
about good bones: This place could be beautiful,
right? You could make this place beautiful. -- Maggie Smith

Love a Moral Luck

This idea of moral luck also helps me be kinder with myself and others, because luck can be fickle. We can be spectacularly wrong in our judgements of what will be good for us. We need to forgive ourselves for having taken the wrong bets, dust off and try again, attending to our true nature.

• Eli Parra; Interintellect blog — Eli won our most recent essay contests! 🎉

Untangling Religion From Our AI Debates

Recent tumults at OpenAI have cascaded into accusations that certain camps subscribe, whether unwittingly or not, to so-called secular religions.

• Thomas Moynihan; Noēma

A Grim View of Marriage—And an Exhortation to Leave It

At one point, [Lyz Lenz] writes that marriage “is how women are disappeared,” a jarring choice given that, in the past 60 years, the phrase to be disappeared has most often referred to dissident victims of  far-right regimes. Elsewhere, she tells the reader that “no one really knows lonely better than a married woman sitting next to her silent husband”—a claim an unhappily married woman might agree with, and one that might make a grieving widow, or a woman with an incarcerated partner, throw the book across the room.

• Lily Meyer; The Atlantic

Polymaths Are Late Bloomers

Now the fact that polymaths peak later in life might be a bit discouraging news to young polymaths. So yes, they should start out more with the usual non-polymath strategy, and then cautiously explore the possibility of dabbling in more areas. 

• Robin Hanson

Why We Don't Trust Each Other Anymore

The words we are using kinda suck. I had the chance to talk with John Burn-Murdoch at the Financial Times about this idea of language and how it shapes progress. His piece “Is the west talking itself into decline?”  analyzes how language can do a lot in shaping our economic reality - and he highlighted that the words that we use are no longer positive and focused on growth, but rather they are fearful and focused on worry. “Progress can come from many different ways, but one that is often overlooked is the role of culture and language…”

• Kyla Scanlon

I can’t picture things in my mind. I didn’t realize that was unusual

Overall, people with aphantasia don’t seem to have serious problems navigating their day-to-day lives, unlike those with more severe memory conditions like episodic amnesia. The ways it affects me have been more understated. In therapy, I struggled with therapeutic techniques that relied heavily on visualization.

• Shayla Love

Did novels stop mattering in the 2010s?

Maybe my longstanding worry that the academization of writing will make novels as culturally irrelevant as poetry makes me spook at shadows. Or maybe it’s the internet, and its fracturing of fame into the more local and minute e-fame. Or maybe it’s the publishing industry, and what books are being written. Or maybe people just don’t read books anymore, no matter their content. But I’d love a counterexample. Or hell, just a new novel. For God’s sake, it’d be nice to read a fresh contemporary novel I felt excited by.

• Erik Hoel — about something many of us are thinking about

$1 Billion Donation Will Provide Free Tuition at a Bronx Medical School

Dr. Ruth Gottesman, a longtime professor at the Albert Einstein College of Medicine, is making free tuition available to all students going forward.

• Joseph Goldstein; The New York Times

The Future of Patriarchy?

Patriarchy persists via male solidarity and ideologies that men are high status, while women are low status…. Interventions to 'empower women' that fail to rupture fraternal solidarity, as well as ideals of seclusion and status, will be ineffective.

• Alice Evans

The surprising, beautiful horror of happy married sex (A response to Becca Rothfeld piece in my previous Digest)

Everywhere those women look—along with the many more women not interested in polyamory but who are regularly invited to prefer a life of casual sexual relationships—hidden from them is this one profound truth: Women in loving, stable, monogamous marriages have better sex.

• Danielle Freydman

New Mothers in Gaza: ‘Birth doesn’t wait’

Delivery is also a harrowing experience. With doctors stretched too thin, women in labor must often give birth without them—in makeshift shelters or in the street, using whatever tools they can find. Those who do make it to a hospital often find that there’s no pain medication, antibiotics, or sterilized equipment. There have been reports of postmortem cesarean sections to save a baby after the mother has died—sometimes from a medical condition, but sometimes after a bombing.

• Regina Munch; Commonweal

Algorithms are everywhere

In Filterworld, Chayka includes a quote from the late, great anthropologist David Graeber: “The ultimate, hidden truth of the world is that it is something that we make, and could just as easily make differently.”

• Bryan Gardiner; MIT Technology Review

Michelangelo's Poem About How He Hated Painting the Sistine Chapel

He had an enlarged thyroid gland (known as a goiter), his spine was crooked and knotted, his chest was tight and twisted, his thighs cramped constantly, and his ass ached from strain. The sucker punch? The paint that dripped steadily from his brush and onto his face.

• Richard Whiddington; Artnet — Never meet your heroes.

The sexual revolution that failed

The parallels between the life of the Disney princess who trades her voice for love and the Playboy centrefold who lost her twenties to Hefner are clear.

• Pippa Bailey; New Statesman

Turner stops me in my tracks’: four Tate curators discuss their favourite artworks

"It’s uplifting to know that you’re not alone in grief, and that others have found ways to channel it into a communication even if it’s a communication that can’t say everything."

• Martha Alexander; The Guardian (actually paid content - but great!)

Georgia’s Proposed Ban Could Change the Landscape for Hired Pregnancies

Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine two years ago highlighted the precarities of the business, when expectant mothers were suddenly forced to relocate within the country and foreign couples jostled with the prospect of entering a war zone to attend the birth of their child. The war quickly booted Ukraine from its place as the world’s second-largest surrogacy market after the United States. Georgia and Cyprus have since absorbed most of Ukraine’s share.

• Caitlin Allen; New Lines Magazine

The “Disney adult” industrial complex

The grown-up Disney superfan has become a much-mocked phenomenon online. But creating these consumers was always part of the corporation’s plan.

• Amelia Tait; New Statesman

The other Moses — A Jewish philosopher who influenced Aquinas and Spinoza

These days Maimonides is no doubt more often mentioned than read, or even read about. Fortunately he now takes his rightful place in the “Jewish Lives” series published by Yale University Press, along with Jacob, Moses, Elijah, Moses Mendelssohn, Martin Buber and, of course, Groucho Marx, Barbra Streisand and Bugsy Siegel.

• Stephen Nadler; Times Literary Supplement — 🤯

The 22-Year-Old Who Unlocked the Secrets of Ancient Rome

The deciphered text was an Epicurean work of criticism, likely by the scholar Philodemus, who lived in the first century BCE. In it, Philodemus criticizes the Stoics, who, he writes, “have nothing to say about pleasure.”

• Julie Steinberg; The Free Press

Taylor Swift never bores her fans — never ever, ever, ever

Her first hit, “Tim McGraw,” was released in 2006 — during the presidency of George W. Bush and before the iPhone. Here we are, 18 years later, and Swift’s fans are hardly bored by her. If anything, their devotion seems more intense than ever. Why is that? A large part of the answer is simple: Swift is a master of the surprise signal. She spurs curiosity. She’s the reigning queen of dishabituation. Taylor never repeats herself. She’s 34 and already has an Eras Tour, signaling her capacity for reinvention.

• Cass R. Sunstein; The Boston Globe — Reminds me how Taylor Swift is like a fashion brand that has “seasons”. Genius = transposing innovation from one area to a new, unexpected area.

Female neediness is real, but it's not a tragedy

In a recent essay, Astral Codex Ten argues that our attitude to love, with its adherence to freedom amidst inherent unfairness and risk, embodies libertarian values in a world increasingly devoid of such freedoms, making it a unique and vital realm where individual choice and adventure still prevail. Well, reactionary feminists want to take the choice from love too.

• Ruxandra Teslo

What’s life like for Russia’s political prisoners? Isolation, poor food and arbitrary punishment

“For political prisoners, the situation is often worse, because the state aims to additionally punish them, or additionally isolate them from the world, or do everything to break their spirit.”

• Dasha Litvinova; Associated Press

Postcards from before the war

Israel is kept afloat by a communitarian ethic encapsulated by a line from the Talmud: “All of Israel is responsible for one another.” Deaths of despair are so low, at least in part, because most Israelis feel a deep sense of belonging. Family life plays a greater role in Israel than elsewhere: Friday night dinner, a custom religiously observed even by secular Israelis, functions as a weekly Christmas or Thanksgiving.

• Samuel Rubinstein; The Critic

The Passions of John Stuart Mill (2008)

Mill revered Carlyle’s originality of vision and soul, while Carlyle, though he mocked Mill’s pensive faith in rational argument, recognized that the younger man had the far more finished and exact mind. The friendship survived even the most scarifying incident in the history of letters, when Mill’s housemaid accidentally burned the only manuscript of Carlyle’s history of the French Revolution in the kitchen fire. 

• Adam Gopnik; The New Yorker — Bill Bryson severely contests such a burning could be accidental; the housemaid of a writer like Mill must have been familiar with the idea of a manuscript

From Canvas to Screen: Your Essential Guide to Artist Biopics

Dalí’s cinematic hold, however, has nothing on Van Gogh, who can count at least five biopics to his name. Kirk Douglas was first to step into the artist’s shoes for Lust For Life (1956), an account sensitively directed by Vincente Minnelli. In 1990, Vincent and Theo centered on Van Gogh’s relationship with his brother, who cemented the artist’s legacy, through a pair of powerful performances by Tim Roth and Paul Rhys. The painter’s final days are also traced in Van Gogh (1991), anchored by a César Award–winning turn by Jacques Dutronc, and At Eternity’s Gate (2018), a Willem Dafoe vehicle that runs with the theory that Van Gogh died by manslaughter. 

• Min Chen; Artnet

Shattering Violence, Shimmering Prizes

[Emily Wilson] made the Odyssey sing anew largely because of the unyielding constraints she set for herself.

• Stephanie McCarter; The Pennsylvania Gazette

Deep learning models reveal replicable, generalizable, and behaviorally relevant sex differences in human functional brain organization

Our findings advance the understanding of sex-related differences in brain function and behavior. More generally, our approach provides AI–based tools for probing robust, generalizable, and interpretable neurobiological measures of sex differences in psychiatric and neurological disorders.

• Srikanth Ryali, Yuan Zhang, Carlo de los Angeles, Vinod Menon

How to win an Oscar? Sex, spin and very dirty tricks

In his book The Oscar Wars, author Michael Schulman reports in exhaustive detail the nefarious campaigning tactics Weinstein would deploy, most notoriously to ensure that Miramax’s Shakespeare in Love beat DreamWorks and Paramount’s Saving Private Ryan to the 1998 Best Picture Oscar. This included telling The New York Times that Saving Private Ryan rapidly went downhill after its famous beach landing opening scene. There were also reports of freelance Miramax publicists “totally trashing” Steven Spielberg’s movie to other journalists.

• Geoffrey Macnab; Independent

Harvard's Quest for New Arts & Humanities Dean: Faculty Demand Role in Restructuring

In the wake of Dean Kelsey's departure, the Harvard community stands at a crossroads. The search for a new dean is more than a routine administrative change; it's a moment of reflection and potentially transformative change for the Arts and Humanities division. As faculty members articulate their hopes and concerns, the upcoming months will be critical in shaping the future direction of humanities education at Harvard, with implications that may resonate well beyond its ivy-covered walls.

• Salman Akhtar; BNN

A Dialogue with the Team Behind "The Point"

“A question we ask often when reading a piece is, Would this really provoke our readers to look at something differently, consider something they haven’t before, shed new light on a matter of concern for them, or would it just confirm whatever opinions and prejudices they already have with, say, the aid of some theoretical apparatus?”

• The University of Chicago Press blog

Olivia Rodrigo’s Tour Will Raise Money for Abortion Funds

"If you can’t make it to the tour, or just want to support these groups even harder, you can find your local abortion fund on the NNAF site."

• Susan Rinkunas; Jezebel 

How Corporations Rule

While the classic corporation sought to bring every part of the production process under one roof, Nike reverted to a 19th-century style of doing business, contracting production out to sweatshops abroad and retaining only a small core of design staff. As the corporation shed its bureaucratic functions, it became harder to imagine it taking on government-like functions. 

• Hamilton Craig; Compact

‘One of the most accomplished pieces of social history I have read’—Noel Malcolm’s ‘Forbidden Desire’ reviewed

Malcolm ranges with equal authority from Scotland and Scandinavia to north Africa, from the Iberian west to the Ottoman heartlands of the east, and from Europe to European colonies in Asia and the Americas. As befits one drawing his net so widely, he has been rigorous in deciding what to omit. His focus is exclusively on male-male sexual acts, and not on what you might think of as homosexuality itself.

• Rhodri Lewis; Prospect Magazine

Hatred Alone Is Immortal: Why we should be concerned, above all, with the education of the passions

What we first need is the acceptance of David Hume’s famous statement from his Treatise on Human Nature: “Reason is, and ought only to be, the slave of the passions and can never pretend to any other office than to serve and obey them.”

• Alan Jacobs; The Hedgehog Review

Appreciating *Casablanca*

A beauty of Rick’s character arc is that … Rick’s upward potentiality is remarked upon in advance by Laszlo and by Renault; we watch Rick gradually stop pretending that he doesn’t care.

• Dan Klein; for Bryan Caplan

Secularization Comes for the Religion of Technology

The “religion of technology” is a term coined by David Noble in his book bearing the same title. Noble was quite explicit about the fact that he was not proposing a metaphor. He was not suggesting that technology was like a religion, or that people relate to their devices in quasi-religious ways. All true perhaps, but Noble wasn’t interested in such things. He argued that, from roughly the turn of the first millennium onward, there was a concrete, objective historical relationship between religion, specifically Christianity, and the Western techno-scientific enterprise. 

•  LM Sacasas; The Convivial Society

Alan Watts, Beat Generation Philosopher And Seminal Counterculture Figure, Gets His Recorded Works Recycled

The late Alan Watts, a philosopher, scholar, speaker, writer, and seminal figure in the counterculture of the Beat Generation, is getting a new publishing deal more than 50 years after his death.

• Bruce Haring; Deadline — Just normal stuff.

The future belongs to those who prepare like Dwarkesh Patel

His most recent piece, Will scaling work?, explores the AI takeoff question. It was referenced by Stripe co-founder Patrick Collison and recommended by OpenAI ex-interim CEO Emmett Shear. At the end of his recent Substack post, he disclaims “[F]or what it’s worth, my day job is as a podcaster.” But the disclaimer is quickly followed up with “[T]he people who could write a better post are prevented from doing so, either by confidentiality or opportunity cost.”

• Shreeda Segan; Meridian

Land of the Negative

America is an outlier: New polling by the Pew Research Center indicates that the U.S. is a global outlier when it comes to majority attitudes toward social media. "People in emerging economies are particularly likely to say social media has advanced their democracy," reports Pew. 

• Liz Wolfe; Reason

An Interview with Scott Alexander

“Judging from X/Twitter, from comment sections, and from personal conversations, the average person has no shortage of ideas they're excited to talk about. I'm the same, but I get nervous that a short comment wouldn't present my case clearly, so I end up having to expand it into a long essay. Usually I have some point I want to make...”

• Sotonye

Personality Tests Aren’t All the Same. Some Work Better Than Others

On average, the Big Five test was about twice as accurate as the MBTI-style test for predicting these life outcomes, placing the usefulness of the MBTI-style test halfway between science and astrology—literally. 

• Spencer Greenberg; Scientific American

Thank you for reading!

Email me at anna@interintellect.com.

Attend our public online salons here. Join our community and find more great stuff to read and thoughtful people to discuss it with here.

Join Interintellect

The method really works for resting and recharging. Check out my meditation spot yesterday 👆🏻

And, below, my digest for the rest of your weekend — some SUPERB reads! Enjoy, share, comment, get in touch x Anna

The new city in California

I spent the last few weeks studying California Forever’s plan and talking to their team, and I’m impressed by the depth of their thinking. I also know several of the key people involved, so some of what I know is from talking with them on background as well. I’ve written up what I’ve learned into this series…

• Devon Zuegel

All Good Sex Is Body Horror

Most people would give anything to be turned into anything else, because most sex is mediocre, and the measure of its mediocrity is that it leaves us unaffected.… Can a person consent to dying? Can she consent to a complete renewal, which amounts to the same thing?

• Becca Rothfeld; The New Yorker — this week’s most formidable read!

Am I the Literary Assh*le? — To Blurb, To Follow, To Ghost (Or Not to Ghost)?

Honestly, who wants to spend their extremely limited free time making content that they don’t care about? We’re writers and artists...

• Kristen Arnett; Literary Hub

How to be a good podcast guest

The podcast experts I heard from said that people tend to think too much about the microphone and headphones, and not enough about room and location. The smaller the space, the better. 

• Paul Bloom

Survivorman (2009)

Do you think you could be that good and strong?
Yes, yes, you think, but you’re probably wrong.

• Sherman Alexie; The New Yorker

What Do Women Want? (2018)

The story is one of renewal and it’s one that I return to often even though its characters and concerns – women and men, women who love men – might seem to some old-fashioned. It never gets old for me.

• Devorah Baum; Granta — Do read Devorah’s excellent new book too, and keep an eye out for the video from our Interintellect salon a few days ago!

Lies We Tell Kids (2008)

Imagine if you tried to keep someone in as protected an environment as a newborn till age 18. To mislead someone so grossly about the world would seem not protection but abuse. 

• Paul Graham

Yoko Ono’s seriously playful art

You are reminded how the Second World War looms in her past, and you note her ongoing determination to escape its long shadow. So there is a kind of dance going on all the time – between wit and solemnity; between profundity and silliness.

• Tracey Thorn; New Statesman

On the desperation of female neediness

The alternative reality to male hornyness, in my opinion, is female neediness. Where men want sex, women want romance. Men want adventure; women want commitment. It is all on a spectrum, and there are exceptions to the rule, but that’s not my experience…

• Stella Tsantekidou

A Tale of Haunted Love Captures Wartime Ukraine

Many veterans have struggled to adjust to the civilian world in recent years, and a number of them have turned to Ukraine in order to feel useful once again. At least 50 Americans have so far been killed in Ukraine, and the overwhelming majority of them were veterans…

• Natalia Antonova; Foreign Policy

Do You Know What You Want?

Since I wasn’t up to wanting, I wasn’t up to living: to having a life, in the way lives can be had in the modern world. What I had, what I often still seem to myself to have, is like the tuning-up of a life…

• Oliver Traldi; Wisdom of Crowds

Gimme Welter

To want something with sufficient fervor is to want it beyond the possibility of ever getting enough. Is it this longing, phenomenologically keen enough to strike some of us as fact, that has led religious thinkers to posit the existence of eternity, the logic being that we seem to need it? Desire is as good a guide to truth as anything else, but until eternity arrives, we will have to find somewhere to fit our appetites.

• Becca Rothfeld (again); Harper’s Magazine

Are You Asexual Or On Antidepressants?

This is more than just low libido. It can be a total loss of libido, genital numbness, erectile dysfunction, an inability to orgasm and complete lack of sexual attraction.

• Freya India — Horrifying and describes so (SOOOO) many women I know, and the main reason why I never touch hormonal contraception or any medication other than ibuprofen.

Can We Still Build Big Things?

SpaceX is now the go-to company for cheap, reliable launch services. But it wants to be much more. 

• David Masci; Discourse

"You Don't Have to Write an Essay About Your Marriage and Your Divorce"

“This is what someone like Elizabeth Hardwick was so good at doing when she writes “Seduction and Betrayal” or any of the essays collected in that volume. You know what's going on in her life, and yet she's taking all of that energy and she's writing about Dorothy Wordsworth, or she's writing about the Bronte Sisters, or she is writing about Don Giovanni. And so I am increasingly very much in favor of criticism as a form of sublimation.”

• Sara Fredman interviews Merve Emre

Photographing Days of Heaven (2021)

In the filmmaking process, the communication between a director and a cameraman is often ambiguous and confused because the majority of directors don’t understand the technical details required in cinematography. With Terry, there was never any miscommunication. He always understood exactly my cinematographic preferences and explanations. 

• Néstor Almendros; The American Society of Cinematographers — Glorious!!

How Feminism Ends

Despite my natural affection for my female body, I know that having one is, objectively, a waste of my time. Having a female body is a part-time job. It splits your focus. It eats your mind. Even the most ambitious females tend to see the benefits of the extensive self-maintenance routines that preserve a female body—retinol and Pilates for the wealthy, makeup and carefully chosen clothes for everyone else. 

• Ginevra Davis; American Affairs

At Ease Amid the Ruins

Simone Weil was the closest thing to a saint, albeit a highly unorthodox one, in a century that did not have many of them. Along with Simone de Beauvoir, she was one of the first women to graduate from the École Normale Supérieure in Paris. (She finished first in the exam for the certificate of “General Philosophy and Logic,” while de Beauvoir finished second.) From 1931 to 1938 Weil taught philosophy at the high school level. Physically clumsy to the point of comedy, with a particular distaste for food, she seemed bodiless and otherworldly to those who knew her. In 1934 she took a leave of absence from her lycée and, after submitting several applications, landed a job in a factory as an unskilled laborer. It did not go well. 

• Robert Pogue Harrison; The New York Review

Attorney for the Animals, Your Honor — RIP

I met Steve 12 years ago after attending a discussion about how whales and dolphins are so intelligent that they deserve to have legal rights.

• Brandon Keim; Nautilus

Michiko Kakutani Was the Most Feared Woman in Publishing. What Happened?

Why has a respected and feared book critic turned to writing books, and particularly these kinds of books? Why does Michiko Kakutani want to be David Brooks, or Yuval Noah Harari, synthesizing potted history and the Way We Live Now between the pages of hardcovers? And … well … is it good?

• Dan Kois; Slate — Also: why NOT?

US Media Is Collapsing — Here’s How to Save It

Near-term policy reform is just the beginning, of course. To create an equitable and sustainable media ecosystem, we should change our mindset about and framing of what media is. Not-for-profit media must become the norm — not the exception. Media, after all, is a form of education.

• Alissa Quart; Jacobin — This is a terrible idea.

What a century-old painting taught me about being present as a physician today (2021)

Presence is the mindfulness that one individual brings to an encounter with another. It’s a defining element of human connection. In medicine, it’s what happens when a clinician’s connection is untrammeled by a screen or other competing inputs. It’s the focus of mind, spirit, and intent around a moment in time that’s about another person and his or her most pressing problem. Presence, be it in a clinic exam room or with a friend over coffee, is a uniquely human gift.

•  Bryan Vartabedian; STAT News

Why People Fail to Notice Horrors Around Them

Though more slowly than we may like, resistance efforts often do emerge in response to injustice or horror; consider the French Resistance, the civil rights movement, Black Lives Matter and #MeToo… Those are people who have not habituated to the evils of their society

• Tali Sharot and Cass R. Sunstein; The New York Times

Judaism’s Psychedelic Renaissance (2021)

Even Richard Nixon is quoted as saying “it’s a funny thing [that] every one of the bastards that are out for legalizing marijuana is Jewish.” 

• Madison Margolin; Tablet

Sex, Lies, and the Internet (2015)

Each of Franzen’s novels places a naturalistic story of domestic strife and estrangement (and sexual combat) within the larger workings of a “paranoid” conspiracy: political skulduggery in The Twenty-Seventh City, mysterious earthquakes in Strong Motion, mind-numbing pharmaceuticals in The Corrections, and ecological and military malfeasance in Freedom.

• Eleftheria Alexandri; The New Republic

A New Last Chance (2017)

Like many of her generation, Halem arrived at a fateful biological crossroads in her late 30s. After training in general surgery, she specialized in dermatology and came to New York when she was 38. “Figured I would meet somebody here, have a baby,” she says in her upbeat, rapid patter. When that didn’t happen, she decided to go it alone and consulted an IVF clinic when she was 40. 

• Stephen S. Hall; The Cut

The Ordinary Heroism of Alexei Navalny

Whatever criticisms one might have of Navalny, and even though he was the product of a dire situation that is quite different from ours, we can still profit from his example in the West: he was neither cynical nor credulous, two stances which so often come down to the same thing. He remained focused and directed his ire at the right people. He went down fighting.

• John Ganz

Well-functioning democracy for neither me nor for thee?

Skepticism about democracy — yet never ever explicitly voiced — is a growing problem among Democratic Party thinkers…  On one hand, they wish to turn around and call people on the Right, or libertarians, “undemocratic,” or “anti-democratic,” or whatever.  On the other hand, when it comes to actual decisions of great consequence, they are the ones terrified of the democratic processes they themselves have created.  They know that, but can’t quite bring themselves to voice their doubts in those terms.

• Tyler Cowen

What's going on with assembly theory?

The proposal is simple and elegant: consider (i) a set of fundamental building blocks (like colored squares or alphabet letters in the figure below), and (ii) a set of rules/mechanisms to assemble those units into new products, that can be later used as new additional building blocks. The formation of complex structures depends on specific assembly pathways: therefore the final product strictly depends on initial conditions and the “story” of the assembling building blocks.

• Manlio De Domenico

Models on the frontline: AI's defensive role

A key question concerns the "vulnerable world hypothesis", which argues that technological progress has made it much easier to cause mass harm (offense) than to prevent such harm (defense). Certain technologies like nuclear weapons and engineered pathogens enable small groups or individuals to wreak catastrophic damage. Defensive technologies may not fully counteract these offensive threats.

• Séb Krier; AI Policy Perspectives

Love and Death in the Archives

When I think of death, I think of love. I am convinced that I’m not alone in this.

• Elizabeth Bruenig; The Atlantic

Motorpsycho Nightmare

As a political moderate, I have no idea what today’s Right or Left would make of Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance. Both would probably find plenty to dislike… In 1979, five years after the book’s publication, 22-year-old Chris Pirsig was stabbed to death in a mugging that occurred outside a San Francisco Zen meditation center. He lives on now only as a character in his father’s book. And not a very well-realized character either—something closer to a ghost.

• Kevin Mims; Quillette

The State of the Culture, 2024

In 2024, musicians are actually worth more old than young, dead than alive. This raises the obvious question. How can demand for new entertainment shrink? What can possibly replace it?

• Ted Gioia — A must read!

What’s the secret to the perfect restaurant soundtrack?

Music is known to drive behaviour. Loud music turns tables. An abrupt end signals closing time (or a power outage). Evening playlists tend to follow a similar template. Light ambient or sexy instrumentals encourage early- evening cocktails. A buzzy but unobtrusive soundtrack of, say, R&B or soul complements dinner.

• Ajesh Patalay; Financial Times

Motivation of non-monogamous adults to engage in sex with their different partners (2022)

The results indicated that there are significant differences in motivation to engage in sex with one’s primary versus secondary partner for most of the reasons. Additionally, this study investigated whether there are differences in motivation to engage in sex with different partners depending on the relationship arrangement. 

• Anna Kelberga and Baiba Martinsone

From Homer to Gaza, the History of Books in Wartime

“In this war, we know, books are weapons,” President Roosevelt said in 1942.

• Claudia Roth Pierpont; The New Yorker

Reading Well

You should buy books on a whim, whenever possible, enough that you start to forget about them. You shouldn't know the whole contents of your own shelves.

• Simon Sarris

Good Life (2019)

In Part I, the Despacito video has to deliver on two promises made during the intro by the man and the woman we’re rooting for. On the one hand, Fonsi has to indeed show her, and us, around, and prove that this place he was so proud of on the seashore is indeed wonderful. On the other hand, Rivera has to live up to the expectations she created with her kindness and her beauty when she arrived: it’s one thing to be nice to one kid, but what about the entire neighbourhood? 

• By me…

Experiencing the Universe Unfold (2022)

Decision-making is a process in nature. And a beautiful one at that, in which the ever-changing dance of electrical firing in the brain is in constant dialog with the outside world and other beings…

• Annika Harris

Academics win claim against Oxford University over ‘sham contracts’

The University and College Union, which represents lecturers and other university staff, has campaigned on the issue of casualisation in higher education, taking extensive industrial action in recent years over insecure contracts, as well as pay and conditions.

• Sally Weale; The Guardian

Why listening well can make disagreements less damaging

Our results showed that high-quality listeners facilitated positivity resonance in speakers, as indicated by speakers’ ratings of social connection and comfort, which motivated speakers to seek (and gain) self-insight.

• Guy Itzchakov; Psyche

Flushing Ayn Rand

Perhaps what makes Freiman’s book so compelling is [Ayn Rand's] ability to use wit and humor to open our eyes to paradox. Showing how attempts to “make the world a better place” are often just a means to feed our fragile egos, she invites readers to laugh at themselves a little and to take themselves less seriously.

• Stephen G. Adubato; Compact

The ancient palindrome that explains Christopher Nolan’s Tenet (2020)

So in a sense, the Sator square is seeded throughout Tenet, woven into its fabric in a way that is easy to miss. Yet it’s unmistakably present, and since the movie itself contains sequences that move, in essence, forward and backward — and are the same yet different when you watch them — it functions, in a way, like a kind of cinematic Sator square.

• Alissa Wilkinson; Vox — I still don’t like that movie!

How Sora Works (And What It Means)

GPT-4 has been trained to take in a sequence of tokens and output the next token in the sequence. Sora has been trained to do the same thing: It takes in a sequence of patches and outputs the next “patch” in the sequence. Patches are innovative—and Sora appears to be so powerful—because they allowed OpenAI to train Sora on an immense amount of image and video data.

• Dan Shipper; Every

Making things is hard

Accepting that it’s difficult and that’s a good thing has been really helpful for me. 

• Ava Huang

The Russian leopard has not changed its spots

Tucker Carlson’s visit to Russia last week was deeply illuminating – less for Vladimir Putin’s condescending lecture to the former Fox News host that trafficked in the selective history and lies used to justify his war against Ukraine, than for a telling and tragic juxtaposition that followed.

• Will Quinn; Engelsberg Ideas

British Theatre’s Coolest Power Couple Are Set To Take The West End By Storm

“Who do we want to be to our children when we’re dead and gone? How do we want them to remember us?” says Donnelly of the questions posed by the production, in which she’ll play a 1970s showbiz matriarch, holed up on her deathbed in Blackpool as her adult children gather to say goodbye. They’re an increasing preoccupation for the Esther Perel and Gabor Maté fan, “because of the way that children will reflect back to you yourself and, mainly, all your failings”.

• Kate Lloyd; Vogue UK

Thank you for reading!

Email me at anna@interintellect.com.

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