Interintellect’s founder and CEO Anna Gát has been interviewed by Joel J Miller, the author of The Idea Machine — a great book about books — and the Substack Miller’s Book Review.
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”.
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:
Who wants what from whom?
What happens if they don’t get it?
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: