Anna Gát: What to Read This Week #61
Anna Gát: What to Read This Week #61
Female violence, Fellini, tech utopia, elections, art auctions, intellectuals, piano, childlessness, Britain's woes, Virginia Woolf, Hamlet in Gaza, Coppola, James Baldwin - and the Hope Axis, always!
My friends,
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!
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.Episodes: (Scroll through if you want to jump right to the reading digest!)
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!
we are so back