Anna Gát: What to Read This Weekend #60
Anna Gát: What to Read This Weekend #60
Christianity, socialism, psychoanalysis, pornography, coming of age, Silicon Valley, Israel, medieval burnout, climate change, EA, marriage, immigration, egg-freezing, Anatomy of a Fall, and more...
Hello from Brooklyn, dear friends — just arrived in time for the earthquake!
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
Enjoying the newsletter thanks.
Classic critique of cruising…Anna, can you find a pro cruising article to share?