Earlier this year, Joel was Anna’s guest at an in-person Interintellect conversation in New York City. Now it was he who asked the questions!

Anna and Joel focused on cultural liberation discussing life, reading, Interintellect’s philosophy, cultural institutions, Shakespeare, Hungarian novels, language, taste, canon, AI and cognitive autonomy, the humanities, as well as Anna’s concepts of personal culture and the “sovereign reader”.

MILLER’S BOOK REVIEW 📚

A Bet on American Intellectual Life—and Beyond

When The Idea Machine came out last fall, Anna Gát invited me to Manhattan for an Interintellect salon to discuss it. Anna’s the founder and CEO of the company, which provides a platform for people to host online and in-person gatherings. A small room with big questions about a topic I’d given more than a decade of my life to? Of course I went…

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a day ago · 36 likes · 3 comments · Joel J Miller

An excerpt from Joel’s interview:

There’s the big canon—however squishy it is at the margins—and all our little canons, our personal favorites. Keeping both gives us room to follow our whims and abandon books we dislike. I endorse. But how do we distinguish an honest judgment of personal taste from stalling out midstream in a demanding book? What’s your personal rule on that?

It is important to bear in mind that when it comes to taste we really only have personal opinion. There are many self-appointed and state-appointed gatekeepers, revered traditions, people whose job title suggests they know what’s up, people who are themselves artists and so we think they have better, more expert taste for other artists, etc. And yet, there are no real objective measures for what makes an artwork great, for anyone. Ever.

We have impression (how a piece of art feels in the moment, how beautiful or formally interesting we find it), intuition (how true we feel its message is, what other truths it reminds us of), what Jauss would call horizon of expectations (how we compare the work to past works and norms we have encountered), and context knowledge (what we know about a particular work at hand before we immerse ourselves in it). What we walk away thinking about a work of art we have just encountered will be a combination of these four things.

A canon is the accumulated such opinions of many independent people across often a vast span of time. We praise Hamlet not just because it is good—in that primal, first impression, intuitive sense—but because it is so good that innumerable people across centuries have independently come to the same conclusion that it is a masterpiece. Canons in this sense are basically statistical. The opinions of many, including the right gatekeepers and curriculum-makers, elevate you into it, and then subsequent generations of opinions keep you there. No small feat! When something is called a “classic,” that is worth being taken seriously.

A few years ago, a blogger asked his X followers what makes Shakespeare so great because he didn’t get it. I responded,

I think this is helpful for understanding how cultural canonization—I wrote one of my dissertations on this—is always a kind of matrix of such various considerations. We test art against multiple expectations and qualifications both personally and as a culture.

Having run a cultural institution for intellectual conversations for so many years, both hosting these conversations and just attending countless salons online and offline in our spaces, I am more confident than ever in advising people to trust their own taste. Across tens of thousands of such conversations, I have never met a person who didn’t have an innate capacity for good taste.

Taste is not something we copy or learn from others, but something we are all born with and must learn to feed and amplify in both ourselves and others. A great way to improve one’s own taste is not just filling our brains with the art of others, but by creating things ourselves as well, seeing the whole process from the inside. If you write yourself, even if only privately, you will understand books better—you don’t have to be a Pulitzer-winning author to have this power.

And so a “canon” is never fixed and it is never a monologue. It is the legacy and tradition that aggregate the opinions of other people on the one side, and your own impressions, intuitions, and judgements on the other, always interacting, always—when done well—influencing one another. In 2026, a well-timed blogpost, podcast episode, or Letterboxd review can rediscover a “lost” work of art for the entire global community. We are all stewards of the canon. The canon is us.

And another:

Your sovereign reader still depends on other people—friends, critics, librarians, booksellers, book clubs (and even nonpeople like algorithms and LLMs)—to find the next book. Who or what has earned the most influence over your own reading life, and how has that changed over time?

In “The Sovereign Reader” I talk about building a cultural “map,” a mental system of orientation for yourself, over time—this in fact is the greatest asset one can have when building a personal culture. Just like in a big city, knowing where you are without having to ask is a guarantee of happy independence.

Ever since I was little, I’ve loved referencing—associations, understanding how different items of knowledge relate to each other. How one word connects to others via etymological roots. How one writer inspired another. Why two works of art appearing at the same time coincidentally might suggest some shared source worth investigating.

Luckily, my Hungarian education was very chronological, and so in many different classes one would learn what happened in various fields in a given era: in literature class we would, I don’t know, discuss Baroque poems, philosophy, theology; in physics class what Torricelli was up to; while our history teacher would guide us through the battles and revolutions of the 1600s. This perhaps old-fashioned model of instruction forever instilled in me a respect for simultaneity, contemporaries, sceniuses, and Zeitgeist.

It’s never too late to start: Grab a book about the Reformation, the Industrial Revolution or the Roaring Twenties, and start building your mental map. Once you have the foundations—any—you can start adding things to it as you go along, and just like a cab driver has the whole city modelled in his mind, you will soon have most of culture, at least as a shape, but enough to orient you.

And lastly:

Plays, screenwriting—you spent a dozen years writing dialogue between imaginary people before building a company nurturing dialogue between real ones. What does a playwright understand about conversation that the rest of us might miss?

David Mamet, in his great book on drama Three Uses of the Knife, writes that every scene in a play has to be able to answer three questions:

1. Who wants what from whom?

2. What happens if they don’t get it?

3. Why now?

In film-writing, a key rule is that every scene has to either advance the plot or reveal character. (If it doesn’t, it will be cut.) Indirectly, revealing character of course also advances the plot in that it helps the audience understand and accept later choices made by that character.

Using Aristotelian as well as far more recent rulebooks, dialogue-writing tightly concentrates a lot of knowledge about personality, incentives, desires, and subtext that a novel can treat as loosely as it pleases. While watching the TV series Mad Men, which contains some of the finest dialogue-writing from the past one hundred years, I always marvel at how this series feels like reading Proust, that it is the same kind of depth, layeredness, and sad wisdom. But of course, a scene in Mad Men is distilled to maximum information density, a constraint that famously never troubled Proust.

An excellent interview worth reading in full:

MILLER’S BOOK REVIEW 📚

A Bet on American Intellectual Life—and Beyond

When The Idea Machine came out last fall, Anna Gát invited me to Manhattan for an Interintellect salon to discuss it. Anna’s the founder and CEO of the company, which provides a platform for people to host online and in-person gatherings. A small room with big questions about a topic I’d given more than a decade of my life to? Of course I went…

Read more

a day ago · 36 likes · 3 comments · Joel J Miller

Join the Conversation

Danielle Crittenden’s newest book, Dispatches from Grief, begins from a powerful loss: the death of a child. What follows is the work of grieving, writing, and living in the wake of heartbreak and absence. Join us for a discussion of a terrain that touches on the deepest wells of human experience. Suffering and lamentation shape a deeply personal journey, but what endures is a confirmation of those universal possibilities for connection and love.

[Guest:] Danielle Crittenden is a journalist, author, and former host of The Femsplainers Podcast. Her work has appeared in The Wall Street Journal, The New York Times, The Washington Post, and The Atlantic. She is the author of four previous books, including What Our Mothers Didn’t Tell Us: Why Happiness Eludes the Modern Woman.

[Host:] Erica Robles Anderson is a cultural historian who studies forms of collective life. She is currently completing a trilogy of books about traditional narratives as under-recognized drivers of change. Robles Anderson is a professor of media, culture, and communication at New York University.

Book a Ticket

Attend this Series

Event announcement from :

The Long Now Foundation and Interintellect invite you to an interactive workshop series with Bayo Akomolafe, a postactivist philosopher, poet, and storyteller, exploring the questions, “What if time misbehaves?” and “What stirs when the clock’s grip loosens?”

Algorithms, news feeds, and notifications fragment our days with urgency. It feels like we’re always running out of time. In 01999, Long Now cofounder Stewart Brand wrote, “Civilization is revving itself into a pathologically short attention span.” Today that feels truer than ever; the accelerating tempo is exhausting. But if you’ve ever felt like “more time” wouldn’t actually fix what feels broken, this series is for you. The Untimely is an invitation to step sideways.

Across three sessions on Zoom, including breakout room discussion, participants go deeper into new temporal practices and perspectives. Experience alternative tempos that might help reorient our thinking, behavior, and decision-making for the long term.

May 21, 9 AM –11 AM PT

• Part 1: A Fascinating Account of the Meridian Conference of 1884

• We begin with the colonial history of how the world’s time zones were invented – a story involving railroad executives, imperial cartography, and the burial of 300 local times.

May 27, 9 AM –11 AM PT

• Part 2: The Clock’s Hidden Life

• Participants map the specific clocks that govern their lives and ask, “what rhythms were displaced when the schedule moved in?”

June 10, 9 AM –11 AM PT

• Part 3: Making Sanctuary for Temporal Fugitives

• We conclude with a collective experiment in temporal sanctuary. Participants practice holding temporal knots without forcing their resolution, experiencing the untimely rather than flattening it back into the schedule.

Hosted in partnership with The Long Now Foundation, where Bayo is a member of The Council at Long Now. Facilitation led by Jiordi Rosales.

Attend this Series

It is a fun side effect of my work that I rarely get starstruck anymore: beyond the natural stage fright, I have to say I’ve grown accustomed to the greatest minds of our time popping up on the platform I built, Interintellect.

But every once in a while, even I get caught unaware by the sheer delight, excitement, and disbelief I am feeling at the sight of a new salon guest. This is exactly how I’m feeling now, listing a conversation with the one and only Sebastian Junger.

I will be co-hosting this with the great — writer, veteran, special needs dad — online, on April 23.

Join Our Salon

There are only a few living people who have taught me as much about what good writing is, and, crucially, what real humanity is, as Sebastian Junger. His generational military reporting — War, Tribe — sits alongside visceral, personal “peacetime” nonfiction such as the recent In My Time of Dying, an account of his own brush with death.

Come and share in our joy on April 23: bring your questions and comments on war and peace, family and tribe, living and dying — be they urgent and personal or universal and timeless.

Love x

Anna

Starting on May 17, NYU professor of cultural history and civil rights activist and combat veteran are starting an 8-part online monthly reading group to read and discuss the first tome — The Path to Power; around 750 pages — of Robert Caro’s legendary 4-book biography series The Years of Lyndon Johnson, with the 5th book being written now and expected soon.

Attend the Caro / LBJ series

“Join us as we take the journey together, chapter by chapter, through an in-depth portrait of strategy, ambition, and the transformation of public cultures and institutional landscapes. We’ll think about key moves that shaped twentieth-century political possibilities and offer lessons and cautions for the twenty-first.”

Attend the reading series

On March 31, Interintellect is teaming up with the French Embassy in the USA for NIGHT OF IDEAS, at Villa Albertine in New York.

The event is an all-nighter of ideas and conversation (and music and cocktails!), free and open to the public. It will take place in a beautiful mansion overlooking Central Park.

RSVP below:

• Interintellect workshop with NYU cultural historian Dr. : Universal Basic Good Life

• Enlightenment-style Interintellect salon hosted by and me: Being Human Is Being Equal: New York Salon About Dignity and Participation

“Marking the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence, this year’s Night of Ideas explores the roots of our modern democracies, asking what remains of Enlightenment ideals—and what might come next.

Bringing together artists, writers, performers, philosophers, and community advocates from both sides of the Atlantic, the event will examine reason and the rule of law, freedom of expression, scientific inquiry, and equal access to education and culture, while confronting the pressures these democratic ideals face today. The main stage will feature a series of conversation-starting flash talks by leading American and international thinkers and activists across generations.

Throughout the evening Albertine Books will present readings on the promises and contradictions of American democracy, curated by Harper’s Magazine, now celebrating its 175th anniversary, and on French-American literary exchange, curated by New York Review Books.

A series of intimate salons will animate the night. In the Enlightenment era, salons served as vital social infrastructure—spaces where ideas were tested in real time against other minds. Night of Ideas revives this tradition by hosting participatory conversations focused on the future of equality in partnership with Interintellect. Participants can also register for writing workshops led by members of Oulipo, the literary collective whose ranks have included Georges Perec and Italo Calvino.

The program will include live music and immersive virtual reality experiences, culminating in a festive closing session. It will take place at Villa Albertine’s headquarters in the Payne Whitney Mansion (972 Fifth Avenue), just across the street from the Metropolitan Museum of Art".”

Program: https://nightofideas.org/new-york/schedule/

We hope to see you there!

x Anna

On April 14, I will be hosting an 18+ online salon about Diderot’s scandalous novel The Nun. Starting at 8:30 ET.

Written in the 1760s but published only after Diderot’s death, The Nun is a crowd-shocking Enlightenment novel masquerading as a personal confession.

It tells the story of Suzanne Simonin, a young woman forced into convent life against her will, and through her eyes reveals the cruelty that religious institutions can hide.

Diderot asks the timely, troubling question: what does goodness mean inside a system that takes away your freedom?

Raymond Trousson — Belgian literary historian of the French Enlightenment — argued that in The Nun “Diderot succeeded in making his heroine not the embodiment of an idea, but a touching and pathetic character, even if her innocence and ignorance, necessary to the narrative, do not always convince.”

Attend 'The Nun' salon

Like we reported the other week, Interintellect — my buzzing, beloved apolitical discussion platform — is entering its “boom town” stage for reading and book clubs that anyone can join.

Love owning a human brain? Then why not use it some more? Come read, learn, challenge yourself — and make lasting friends while doing so 📖

I’m here to help you find your favorites, and hop on anytime. Take a look at my previous post as well:

Now, to add to this illustrious list of Goethe, Kundera, Austen, the listings on Interintellect continue to galore.

Always open-minded and open to all, you don’t need to be an expert or scholar to encounter these important works on Interintellect. Revisit beloved reads from the past or dive in for the first time: your hosts will be there to make sure the conversation is enriching for all.

Robert Musil. Friedrich Nietzsche, Charles Dickens are just some of the new discussion groups starting where you can spend time with great books, explore paradigm-shifting ideas, and meet new friends on Interintellect.

Hope to see you there…!

x Anna

Become an Interintellect member

The Man Without Qualities reading series with Hollywood screenwriter Michael Sonnenschein

Book here.

Reading On Liberty: A Chapter by Chapter Reading Group with Piers Turner and Adam Gjesdal

Book here.

Fog, Filth, and Reform: Dickens and Victorian London’s Water Crisis — A one fiction + one nonfiction reading club with Victoria Wilson

Book here.

Reading JA Baker’s The Peregrine —With Anna Gát

Book here.

Reading Friedrich Nietzsche Together: On the Genealogy of Morals — With James Cussen

Book here.

Become a member

Dear Friends,

As we’re all getting snowed-in on the East Coast, it’s good to be reminded that Interintellect has many new and ongoing reading groups — both series and one-off events — that you can join!

I like to think of 2026 as the Year of Conversation. We tried not talking with each other, not talking things out, and we have seen where that leads. I am proud that Interintellect has always been a safe haven for group discovery: people come together every day from all walks of life to join our online and offline salons and discuss the timeless questions of philosophy, science, the arts, and history.

What does it mean to be a good person? Why does freedom matter so much? How do we form better relationships, and communities? How to live with more dignity, and give more dignity to the minds of others?

One of the most fun ways of starting deep-running conversations with friends and strangers is to huddle together and talk about books we have just read or re-read. As the founder and CEO of this fantastic organization, I take my role as book curator very seriously. Many of you know about the exceptional author talks we have on week after week. But we also do cozy, personal, seminar-style reading groups of varying lengths. Some are open to the public and you can grab a ticket (members attend free, subject to availability), while some are members only — check out the membership plans here.

Here are the next opportunities to read together and discuss books on Interintellect:

Two Masterpieces by Jane Austen

Hosted by

E.L. Doctorow’s Ragtime

Hosted by me

The Age of Innocence in an Age of Guilt

Hosted by

Double Play Reading: Hamlet / Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead

Hosted by me

NYC In Person Book Club: The Warmth of Collectivism vs the Frigidity of Rugged Individualism — Atlas Shrugged

Hosted by Dr Rania Nasis

The Unbearable Lightness of Being (18+)

Hosted by me

The Golden Bowl Revisited

Hosted by me

The Odyssey

Hosted by

D.H. Lawrence’s Women in Love

Hosted by me

Goethe’s Elective Affinities

Hosted by me

Shock Effects: Isaac Babel and Stephen Crane

Hosted by

The Strange Stability of American Liberalism -- Reading Louis Hartz’s The Liberal Tradition in America

Hosted by me

Reading Karl Popper Together: Open Society and Its Enemies (Vol1: Plato)

Hosted by me

Life in the Global Village: Marshall McLuhan, Silicon Valley, and the Future of Globalization

Hosted by

Book Therapy: Share Your Life Story, Leave With Personal Book Recommendations

Laughing at Evil: Writers, War and the Absurd -- With Phil Klay

Hosted by

New York In Person! The Masculine Mystique: Sex, Rivalry, and Monstrosity at the Movies — with Oliver Traldi

Hosted by me

Sir Tom Stoppard: England’s Mitteleuropa Jewish Intellectual

Hosted by

Can’t wait to discuss it all with you!

Warmly,

Anna

This coming Saturday, we have a very special gathering for all book lovers in town:

How Books Built— and Still Build— the World: With Joel Miller

(tickets 🎟️)

Joel Miller, of the great Substack “Miller Book Review”, is coming to talk about his new book The Idea Machine about how reading can change your life.

MILLER’S BOOK REVIEW 📚

Tour My Upcoming Book, ‘The Idea Machine’

The release date for my book, The Idea Machine, is almost here! It officially launches November 18. But why wait? I’d love for you to get an early peek at everything inside. The operative question is how? The easiest way to answer that question is to ask another…

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10 months ago · 93 likes · 16 comments · Joel J Miller

A casual conversation in a beautiful space. Friendly and curious humans. Great cocktails.

Come along!

x

Get your ticket!

Join Interintellect founder for a conversation with Pulitzer Prize–winning historian and journalist Anne Applebaum on autocracy, democracy, and whether the 21st century’s “autocratic moment” is a myth or a reality.

Across the world, democratic norms are under pressure. Populists win elections, illiberal leaders consolidate power, and once-stable institutions face erosion from within. From Russia to Hungary, from the United States to India, the rules of the democratic game are being rewritten ... or ignored.

👉🏻 Is this a passing phase, or a deeper transformation?

Anne Applebaum has spent decades tracing the anatomy of modern authoritarianism — how it emerges not only from coups and revolutions but from cynicism, disinformation, and institutional fatigue. In works like Twilight of Democracy and Autocracy, Inc., she has chronicled the moral and psychological shifts that make societies vulnerable to control. What happens when democratic publics stop believing in truth? Or stop believing that truth matters?

This isn’t about nostalgia for an idealized past. It’s about asking how democracies renew themselves after disillusionment. Can open societies re-learn persuasion, trust, and civic imagination in an era of manipulation and fatigue? Or has the democratic project entered its own late stage?

Together we will explore:

• Why do modern autocrats thrive in information-saturated societies?

• What role do elites play in democratic decay — and renewal?

• Is the “autocratic turn” a global epoch, or a story we’re telling ourselves about change and loss?

• What must democracy become if it is to survive the 21st century?

Links:

https://www.theguardian.com/books/article/2024/jul/17/autocracy-inc-by-anne-applebaum-review-the-devil-you-know

https://www.amazon.com/Autocracy-Inc-Dictators-Want-World/dp/0593471202/

https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2021/03/anne-applebaum-autocracy-inc/617793/

Open Letters, from Anne Applebaum

The Hungarian Model

If anyone had been placing bets back in 1989, trying to guess which Warsaw Pact state would emerge most rapidly and successfully from communism, most of the money would have been on Hungary. Thanks to a regime that began experimenting with economic liberalism in the 1980s, Hungary was known back then as “the happiest barrack in the socialist camp.” In the 1990s, Hungary’s educated population, rapid privatization, great architecture and decent food meant that Hungary attracted a disproportionate amount of foreign investment, given its small size…

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a year ago · 691 likes · 19 comments · Anne Applebaum

About Anne Applebaum

Anne Applebaum is a Pulitzer Prize–winning historian and staff writer at The Atlantic. Her books include Gulag: A History, Iron Curtain, and Twilight of Democracy. She writes widely on authoritarianism, information warfare, and the crisis of liberal democracy, and is a Senior Fellow at the Agora Institute at Johns Hopkins University.

About Anna Gát

Founder and CEO of Interintellect. Anna hosts salons on politics, culture, technology, and public life, and writes the blog

My Friends,

An exciting new salon has just been listed on Interintellect: Knowing When to Leave? The Power of Old Men with Samuel Moyn.

🎟️ Grab a ticket!

This is something I think about a lot. My friend and frequent collaborator always says: Success is succession. And across all walks of life in the Western world today, we seem to be facing a succession crisis.

To me, this raises a couple of troubling questions:

• If we are so “distrustful” of experts, elites, and older people’s technological or moral competency, why do we give the highest positions to older and older people, and tolerate stuck succession cycles in areas of financial or cultural power?

• If knowledge work is undergoing such transformation, where are the stable, longterm, empathetic, and transparent mentorship systems that are both (1) run by people with actual actionable insights about the future, and (2) able to ensure those receiving mentorship can also one day have a good model for becoming mentors themselves?

• If feminism has “gone too far” and culture is so “feminized”, where are the women in these ossified leadership structures? Or are women supposed to be the “new generation”? If so, where are they receiving guidance?

The well-known historian has approached these questions from his own angles. Read his excellent essay in Granta, and his piece in the New York Times to learn more.

I want to hear your thoughts and I hope to see you at this important conversation!

x Anna

Join Anna Gát for a conversation with historian Samuel Moyn on succession, gerontocracy, and why the old won’t let go.

King Charles ascended the throne at 73. The 2024 election pitted two men in their late seventies against each other. Boomers cling to corner offices while millennials wait in the wings. The biggest show of the past decade was literally called Succession.

What’s going on?

We’re living through a succession crisis that goes far beyond any single election or leader. At a time when we celebrate youth culture, the old have never held more power -- or held onto it longer. Modern medicine extends lifespans while wealth concentrates upward and property rights entrench generational advantages. The result: political, corporate, and cultural institutions run by people who simply won’t leave.

Yale historian Samuel Moyn has been tracking this phenomenon across politics, wealth, and power. His forthcoming book Gerontocracy in America asks uncomfortable questions: How did the revolutionaries’ promise to overthrow the “old regime” turn into its restoration? What happens when there’s no good mechanism for succession? And can a society organized around the permanent power of the elderly ever truly serve the young?

This isn’t about being anti-old. It’s about understanding how the indefinite extension of power -- political, economic, cultural -- reshapes society. From King Lear’s refusal to relinquish the crown to Ruth Bader Ginsburg’s decision to stay on the bench, the drama of succession unleashes consequences far beyond individual choices.

Together we will ask:

Why gerontocracy is the historical norm, not the exception. How modernity promised liberation from elder rule—and failed. The succession crises playing out across institutions. Whether knowing when to leave is possible at all.

Suggested readings:

• “America Has a Gerontocracy Problem” — The New York Times

https://www.nytimes.com/2024/07/14/opinion/america-gerontocracy-biden-trump.html

• “The Trouble with Old Men” — Granta

https://granta.com/the-trouble-with-old-men/

About Samuel Moyn:

Samuel Moyn is the Kent Professor of Law and History at Yale University. His work spans political thought, legal history, and the structures of power. He has written for The New York Times, The Guardian, The London Review of Books, and many other publications. His forthcoming book Gerontocracy in America: How the Old Hoard Power and Wealth — and What to Do About It is coming in 2026.

About Anna Gát

Founder and CEO of Interintellect. Anna hosts salons on politics, culture, technology, and public life.

Hosted by Interintellect founder .

Book a Ticket

Democracy is in a "tough stretch" - but the choices ahead remain ours to make.

Join us for this important conversation with Daron Acemoglu, 2024 Nobel Prize winner in Economic Sciences and MIT Institute Professor, whose groundbreaking research reveals why some nations prosper while others fail. As democracy faces its lowest support in the industrialized world and autocratic solutions gain appeal, Dr. Acemoglu brings both sobering warnings and genuine hope about the path forward.

In his Nobel Prize speech, Dr. Acemoglu warned that "inclusive institutions – including democratic participation, the rule of law, and broad access to economic opportunities" are now in danger. Yet he maintains that "what worries us also gives us hope. We can build better institutions and choose a direction for technology that creates more good jobs."

During this online salon, we will explore..

• The democracy paradox: Why has democracy failed to deliver on its promises of shared prosperity, and how has this failure fueled the rise of authoritarian appeals?

• The "Putin Path": What are the warning signs of democratic erosion, from government equity stakes in private companies to attacks on independent agencies? How do we recognize coercion dressed as policy?

• Institutions vs. oligarchy: Are we witnessing the rise of oligarchy or its subjugation by executive power - and which is more dangerous for shared prosperity?

• The AI disruption: How will artificial intelligence "disrupt everything, everywhere, all at once" - and can democratic institutions adapt quickly enough to govern it?

• Trust and aspiration: How do we rebuild belief in democratic institutions when young people increasingly view autocratic solutions as acceptable?

• The medium-term crisis: Why won't we see the true economic costs of institutional decay for 5-10 years - and how do we mobilize opposition when consequences are delayed?

Daron Acemoglu is Institute Professor of Economics at MIT and co-recipient of the 2024 Nobel Prize in Economic Sciences (with Simon Johnson and James Robinson) for research on how institutions shape global inequality. His seminal work established that inclusive institutions - those allowing broad political and economic participation - create more stable, prosperous societies.

Author of influential books including Why Nations Fail and Power and Progress, Dr. Acemoglu has become one of the most vital voices on the intersection of technology, institutions, and prosperity. His forthcoming book explores how to remake liberal ideals for the algorithmic age.

His recent warnings about the United States following a "Putin path" of executive overreach, his analysis of how presidents can destroy any company they choose, and his insights on why expertise has lost public trust make him essential for understanding our current moment.

***

This 90-minute salon will feature a moderated conversation between Anna and Professor Acemoglu, followed by a conversation with the attendees. Come prepared with your questions about democracy's future, economic institutions, and the choices that lie ahead.

***

• https://mitsloan.mit.edu/ideas-made-to-matter/democracy-a-tough-stretch-new-nobel-winners-explain-how-to-strengthen-it

• https://www.nobelprize.org/prizes/economicsciences/2024/acemoglu/speech/

• https://www.wsj.com/economy/america-capitalism-future-expert-predictions-d854ad8b?st=uNoFCk&reflink=desktopwebshare_permalink

• https://www.ft.com/content/4e3f1731-3d63-4b31-88ce-c3f5157d8170

• https://cafe.com/stay-tuned/intel-federal-reserve-tariffs-economy-trump-daron-acemoglu/

Book a Ticket

To our great delight, we now have so many Substack stars on Interintellect, this warrants a special newsletter edition.

At public online salons and members only offline socials around the world, Interintellect gathers the world’s most exciting thinkers and seekers for open, multilateral conversations for learning and fun.

I’ve put together a little selection for you — excellent conversations you can join and take part in:

Broken Clocks and Conspiracies: Talking Democracy with John Ganz

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The Purpose of 21st Century Painting

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Masculinity at the End of History: NYC Salon with Matthew Gasda

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How Books Built— and Still Build— the World: With Joel Miller

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Dear just hosted a salon with Dr. Sophia Rosenfeld about ‘The Age of Choice’ - and preferences, curation, algorithms, and Jane Austen…

Video coming soon!

To Autumn: An Evening with John Keats's Odes

Follow — so many excellent literary salons on our platform!

The great on my personal podcast The Hope Axis

Tyler joined me for a lively, wide-ranging conversation exploring hope from the perspective of insiders and outsiders, the obsessed and the competitive, immigrants and hard workers. We talk about talent and luck, what makes America unique, whether the dream of Internet Utopia has ended, and how Gen-Z might rebel. Along the way: Jack Nicholson, John Stuart Mill, road trips through Eastern Europe, the Enlightenment of AI, and why courage shapes the future…

After the Backlash: Rebuilding a Case for U.S. Power with Shadi Hamid

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Our friend on my personal podcast The Hope Axis!

We talked about the mystery of inspiration, why intellectualizing art is a bad idea, the visceral encounter with the artwork, why the only realm where the gods are still active is art, US versus UK artists, our search for transcendence, and - as always - hope.

Can the Humanities Be Saved? - With Jennifer Frey and Anastasia Berg

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René Girard's Popular Justice - With Geoff Shullenberger

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Kill Your Parents: Life as an Immigrant and Outgrowing Your Origin Story

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Interintellect Host Training with Miriam Lu and Shahid Nowshad

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And finally — on my personal podcast The Hope Axis

We discussed Millennial women, victimhood narratives, the enduring appeal of rich husbands, why we're bad at aging gracefully, and much more.

✨ Would you like to host your own Interintellect salons? Head over here.

Karl Popper’s The Open Society and Its Enemies is a defense of freedom and democracy against the allure of rigid ideologies. Written during World War II, it shows how closed systems of thought—whether in philosophy or politics—can feed authoritarianism, and it sets out the idea of an “open society” built on criticism, debate, and constant revision. For readers today, it remains a sharp guide to recognizing the dangers of populism and dogma while offering a hopeful vision of communities that stay free by staying open.

Volume 1 consists of 4 parts and so will our series:

• Sat, January 10 (12pm New York / 5pm London): The Myth of Origin and Destiny

• Sat, February 14 (12pm New York / 5pm London): Plato's Descriptive Sociology

• Sat, March 14 (12pm New York / 5pm London): Plato's Political Programme

• Sat, April 11 (12pm New York / 5pm London): The Background of Plato's Attack

Except lively 90 minutes salon discussions hosted on Zoom. Members attend for free.

Yearly memberships are recommended so you can continue to access the dedicated Discord channel between episodes for further discussion.

x Anna

A superb new Interintellect social has just been listed!

Masculinity at the End of History: NYC Salon with Matthew Gasda

🔥 Matthew Gasda back on Interintellect

🔥 Hosted by Tara Isabella Burton

🔥 A Manhattan social, October 27.

👉🏻 Come! 🎟️

Playwright and essayist Matthew Gasda joins novelist and cultural theorist Tara Isabella Burton for an intimate conversation about his American Affairs essay, “Masculinity at the End of History.” We will discuss how liberal modernity shapes male identity and aspiration today, including work, status, sex, family, and art, and what renewal might look like.

RSVP

See you there —

x Anna

Hello friends,

My new blog is called American Innocence.

American Innocence by Anna Gát

Tyranny as Tragedy

Hello friends! I’ve finally got the “American Innocence” domain, and so I am starting the blog I’ve been meaning to for a while, about my new life in America. Expect a wide assortment of various ideas that I’ve been musing about, being newly based in New York and traveling around this fascinating country a lot. As always, I’m super excited for your comm…

Read more

a year ago · 4 likes · Anna Gát ✨

My first post, Tyranny as Tragedy, looks at how the structure of dramatic storytelling — comedy as life, tragedy as death — can help us understand human choices, political power, and why the “inevitable” often isn’t.

If you’re curious about theater, history, or the fragile line between freedom and oppression, I’d love for you to read along and join the conversation.

x Anna

It has always been important to me to run Interintellect as a for-profit company. However noble our ideals might be around the art of discussion, lifelong learning, and rebuilding the commons, our system is sustainable and growing because just like Substack, our platform empowers people to make money doing what they love and what we want to see them doing more of.

As a triple immigrant myself, having restarted my life from zero multiple times, I understand well that hosting, or doing any similar form of intellectual labor, for free would tilt the system so that eventually only very rich or crazy people would run events, people who don't care about economic success for one reason or another. I'm pretty sure we hear enough from those groups as it is.

Do you ever wonder how it can be that today there are more smart people in the world than ever, but somehow the world feels like it's falling apart? Well, it’s because the largest chunk of people, hovering somewhere in the middle — brilliant, curious, ethical, busy, eager to contribute and to make friends, like so many of you — will only come and keep coming if they can potentially turn their passion into a business.

In a way, this is the American Dream: merging the common good with rational self-interest for the benefit of all.

It has been my great pleasure watching Interintellect hosts flourish online and offline, earn a (side) income, see how happy their audience is to pay them for their work, even tip them in gratitude. The experience can be transformative; for many this is just the confidence boost they needed!

Also, since Interintellect is home to some very spirited, sometimes worldview-challenging conversations (philosophy, technology, poetry, history), enabling our hosts to charge for their events creates a further safe-space layer. One reason we haven't had any toxic incidents in 6 years (!) is because attendees pay, either via public ticket or by joining our membership tier. This is not just about revealed preference, but about involving the attendees in raising the quality of every conversation.

These are the systems that work, the systems I believe in: equal chance in the game based on your talent and work ethic. And then the reward you so dearly deserve.

Forward!

Anna Gát

Founder and CEO, Interintellect

I’ve just listed a new online series on Interintellect that is going to be a lot of fun.

How to Have Good Taste: Recognizing Beauty as the Human Superpower in the Age of AI

A six-part monthly online salon series running from July 12 until December 13.

Come along…!

If you want to attend the episodes for free, you now get a 20% discount on our memberships — offer open until May 20!

See you there x

Anna

Introduction: What is taste?

Are we born with a sense of taste? Is taste acquired? Is it an instinct? A form of knowledge?

How do we know what is tasteful? How do we know who has good taste? How do we know if we have good taste?

• Sat JULY 12, 12 pm ET

The Eye of the Beholder — Are painting and sculpture the ultimate art forms?

Does art have to be beautiful? Does art have to “say something”? How do we know when something is beautiful? How do we know when something is art (e.g., the painting is art but the frame is not)? Do artworks need to age well? Whom to listen to to know good art?

• Sat AUGUST 16, 12 pm ET

The Songs of Angels: On musical taste as a taste for the indescribable, the transcendent

Why do people make music? Is AI music real music? What is it that we feel when music overpowers us? What is the role of music in bringing people together? Can anybody make good music? Will classical music survive? What about electronic music — will that stay around? Can popular music be high art?

• Sat SEPTEMBER 13, 12 pm ET

The Journey’s Hero: Literature as the ultimate form of self-expression

Why are humans compelled to tell stories? Where does poetry come from? Are all classic poems good? Why do novels feel so personal? Does one have to go to university to write literature? Does one have to read literature chronologically, from older to newer? What’s the relationship between cultural politics and which novels count as good? Is theater always political? What is a “canon”?

• Sat OCTOBER 11, 12 pm ET

Moving in Pictures: Cinema as meta-art where it all comes together

Are movies even art? Where is the line between lowbrow and highbrow art anyway? Has the quality of movies peaked and now they will forever be bad? What’s the role of other art forms — design, music, writing — in how a movie comes together? Who gets to decide if a movie is good or not (is it the audience, the artist, the critic)? What’s wrong with just enjoying a movie?

• Sat NOVEMBER 15, 12 pmET

The Social Graces: Life as art, social sophistication as a kind of taste

What makes good conversation an art? How to cultivate better taste in what one talks about, where one eats, what one wears? The role of artistic taste in improving social life for everyone. What’s the difference between taste and snobbery? How to discover (or create) one’s own style? What’s the role of location and class in all this?

• Sat DECEMBER 13, 12 pm ET

Let’s learn the secrets of Good Taste….

On Interintellect.

My dear friends,

The archeologist Monica L. Smith has a theory about cities: She says cities grew out of ancient festival venues where we used to come together for yearly gatherings from nearby settlements. At these seasonal fiestas we’d mingle, showcase the ideas and inventions we’d come up with since last year, encounter new languages, try exotic foods, and fall in love. Dr. Smith says we found these gatherings so enjoyable that eventually we never left. Because why have intellectual and creative fun for only a few days per year? First we just installed a few specialists to hang around the sacred sites all year, then more people moved there to serve these shamans and priests, and the next thing we knew, we had… cities! Quite literally: infinite fun.

This is how Interintellect came to exist too. At first we gathered every once in a while, otherwise being busy making other things. Then the day came when the possibility of an ongoing festival of culture became a reality. A virtual city of minds! Great conversation, great art, and great friendship (no shouting, no toxicity — just a love for timeless learning and inquiring together) that’s happening every day, in multiple time zones. Welcome to life in Interintellect!

Just listed for you:

🏛️ Humanities Status Games: Philosopher Dan Williams vs. Critical Theory

🗣️ Retiring Dale Carnegie, with Kim Scott: A Better Language for American Collaboration

🎭 A Streetcar Named Desire - Online Play Reading (members only)

🏙️ Jane Jacobs reading group: The Death and Life of Great American Cities

🏡 Beyond the Nuclear Family: Rebuilding Extended Family and Other Communal Cultures in Contemporary Western Society

Other recommendations:

• The Art of War: San Francisco in-person with Interintellect and Arena Magazine to investigate the new technology and aesthetics of warfare

• Gender, Politics, and the New Right - With Mana Afsari

• Online play-reading of A Streetcar Named Desire (If you want to read a role, there is a form to fill out which you’ll find in the event description)

• Prisoners of Geography At Ten: A Conversation with Tim Marshall

• Can Men and Women Ever Be Friends? Washington DC in-person

• Antimemetics: Why Some Ideas Resist Spreading - With Nadia Asparouhova

• Left to Our Own Devices: The Future of Political Journalism with Conor Friedersdorf (The Atlantic)

• What does the body know? - With Peyton Harvey

• Democracy and Morality: Tocqueville Reading Group with Anna Gát

• Terraforming Earth and Beyond - With Casey Handmer

• Einstein's Spiritual Journey. MOVED ONLINE - With Dr Kieran Fox and Brian Gallagher

• Is Richard Nixon Back? Contested Memories as Political Weapons - With Julia Sonnevend and Michael Koncewicz

• Money Lies and God. A discussion with author Katherine Stewart

• How to Be a Grown Up: A Conversation with Raffi Grinberg

• An Introduction to Philosophy of Religion - With Professor Charles Taliaferro

• Techno-Capital and the End of History - With Samuel Hammond

• Religion and Community in the Age of AI - With Miriam Gerber Lu and Shahid Nowshad

To see more of our events, head 👉🏻 here.

I look forward to seeing you at our events soon!

Want to attend for free? We have a 20% membership discount now that you can unlock: “MayDay” coupon code

Love x

Anna