Anna Gát: What to Read This Weekend #23
Oppenheimer, Kundera, Ferrante, Lady Gaga, St. Augustine, Bolaño, Bergman, the death of Socrates—porn, envy, monks, cults, sitcom sets, sickle sell disease, math inequality, Hollywood on strike & more
Hello from London (on my way to New York)!
Just watched Oppenheimer, with Tyler Cowen’s Emergent Ventures alumni, London grantees. I don’t want to include any spoilers (Will the bomb work?? Will the Titanic sink??), but let me just leave here a couple of thoughts:
Why are movies in the digital era so damn long? Do we really need meandering 3 hour movies? I’ve recently rewatched Belle de Jour at an outdoor screening in Lisbon, it was 100 minutes, deep and complex and all-knowing to the point of suffocation, with zero frame or dialogue superfluous in it. They shot everything on film of course back then. Had to economise (AKA make necessary editorial decisions).
(Nolan shoots on film, but you see my wider point re: some important editorial constraint being gone.)
Why can people no longer write good dialogue and light actresses properly in movies? What happened with subtext, hints, ellipses? There’s a character in Oppenheimer who’s an alcoholic and it’s literally shown and emphasised 57 times like the audience is full of idiots and we wouldn’t immediately get it.
Perhaps related to unconstrained digital film-length: why doesn’t a mainstream movie in 2023 have to decide what movie it wants to be? Oppenheimer is 3 movies with 3 endings. (1) Movie about a political inquest and conflicts. (2) Movie about scientific collaboration, innovation, and bureaucracy. (3) Movie about lone genius’s messed up love life amidst the tides of history.
The movie I would have loved to see: Excited scientists work as a team on super secret important project, until they change human history with the monster they’ve made, and then have to deal with the consequences. Flawed leader has inner conflicts that escalate into outer ones. All this grows beyond team’s control, tears team apart. Lesson, pain, catharsis. Leader looks at red sunset. The end.
Remember how Inception could be summed up in one line: “Man wants to go home”? (How and from where — who helps/hinders him — a mere decoration...) No such one-liner exists for Oppenheimer, I’m afraid.
I urge everyone to read Lessing on dramaturgy. Or David Mamet’s Three Uses of the Knife. And of course my selection below, for your weekend! x Anna
A ‘Barbenheimer’ Reading List
Barbie and J. Robert Oppenheimer have each been the subject of numerous critical and journalistic examinations over the years, and they cast long cultural shadows well before they became central characters in $100 million films. With that in mind, we’ve rounded up some of our favorite reads about the weirdest dynamic duo of 2023, presented as a quartet of Barbenheimer-style doubleheaders.
Longreads
Britain is a developing country
As exciting as AI and other frontier technologies are, pinning the country’s hopes on them misunderstands how far behind the US we are across the board. The US isn’t rich just because it has a big tech sector: every single US state is richer per person than the UK, even places like Mississippi and West Virginia without big tech or advanced manufacturing sectors.
The UK is thinking like a frontier economy when it should be thinking like a developing country.
Sam Bowman
The death of Socrates
In her compelling The Death of Socrates, Emily Wilson mentions an academic debate that absorbed some classicists in the 20th century. They argued that Plato must have fictionalised and sanitised Socrates’ death because hemlock usually produces nastier symptoms including vomiting and convulsions. But it turns out there are many varieties of hemlock, and that so-called water hemlock does indeed work on the peripheral nervous system, producing numbness and death by paralysis of the respiratory system or heart.
Nigel Warburton; The New European
Milan Kundera, The Art of Fiction No. 81
“People often talk about Chekhov’s philosophy, or Kafka’s, or Musil’s. But just try to find a coherent philosophy in their writings! Even when they express their ideas in their notebooks, the ideas amount to intellectual exercises, playing with paradoxes, or improvisations rather than to assertions of a philosophy. And philosophers who write novels are nothing but pseudonovelists who use the form of the novel in order to illustrate their ideas. Neither Voltaire nor Camus ever discovered “that which the novel alone can discover.” I know of only one exception, and that is the Diderot of Jacques le fataliste. What a miracle!”
Christian Salmon; The Paris Review
The Old Guard Is Out at Penguin Random House
Penguin Random House, the biggest book publisher in America, is cleaning house. After CEO Markus Dohle failed in his attempted megamerger with Simon & Schuster last fall, he departed in December… There were layoffs Monday, but what’s really transforming the publishing house are the buyouts currently underway. Many of the most influential editors have quietly decided to take the buyout, some for fear of being laid off later, others because they simply no longer recognize the place at which they’ve spent their entire careers.
Shawn McCreesh; Intelligencer
The big questions - What physics can teach us about the human condition
Sabine Hossenfelder is a physicist who works on quantum gravity, with a blog that has made her known as a gadfly in her field. A previous book took on one of the sacred cows of theoretical physics – the pursuit of beauty in theorizing – and in Existential Physics she attempts to bring established science to bear on the kinds of questions that ordinary people ask. As she puts it, “people don’t care much whether quantum mechanics is predictable, they want to know whether their own behavior is predictable”; “they don’t care much whether galactic filaments resemble neuronal networks; they want to know whether the universe can think”.
Jenann T. Ismael; Times Literary Supplement
When to Dig a Moat - Uncertainty, Success, and Defensibility
Competition is inevitable. In a slower-moving or more technically novel space, competition may be fine because you’ll have had time to build proto-moats and customer loyalty. In a space that’s moving as quickly as generative AI, the chances that you’ve dug strong enough moats by the time that competitors come are slim.
Packy McCormick
How Photographer Will Vogt Captured the Seedy, Greedy Eighties on Camera
Edith Wharton was the only great literary artist who was actually an initiate of the world of American wealth and privilege, although at this distance her characters seem antique. Fitzgerald wrote brilliantly about the America plutocracy—of observing this world as if from the other side of the glass, but he writes better about it than anyone since Wharton. (His short story The Rich Boy is one of his greatest accomplishments, its presentation of the world of inherited American wealth much more nuanced than in The Great Gatsby.) Clearly, there’s no pane of glass separating Vogt from his subjects. He’s right there in the ballroom, in the pool, on the boat, with his subjects.
Jay McInerney; Interview Magazine
Porn Set Women Up From the Start
If the “joke” of Deep Throat was that it told women they could be most gratified and most liberated while on their knees, the prevailing message of the era for men was that objectification could be damaging. That year, Burt Reynolds posed nude for Cosmopolitan, resplendently hirsute—with a strategically placed arm—on a bearskin rug. The caption accompanying the image stated frankly that women’s “visual appetites,” while equal to men’s, had long been neglected, and that Cosmo was trying to redress the balance.
Sophie Gilbert; The Atlantic
Refusing to teach kids math will not improve equity
The idea behind universal public education is that all children — or almost all, making allowance for those with severe learning disabilities — are fundamentally educable. It is the idea that there is some set of subjects — reading, writing, basic mathematics, etc. — that essentially all children can learn, if sufficient resources are invested in teaching them.
Noah Smith
Education as Privilege Laundering
Students at elite schools tend to invest far more time and energy into cultivating their image, reputation and social ties than they do in cultivating their minds. But here’s the rub: it generally pays off well for them.
Musa al-Gharbi; Inside Higher Ed
Hollywood on Strike
Talent … has to realize that they and the studios are not divided by this new paradigm, but jointly threatened.
Ben Thompson
A sense of self - Communication between the brain and other organs shapes how we think, remember, and feel
Scientists are starting to unravel how our wet, spongy, slippery organs talk to the brain and how the brain talks back. That two-way communication, known as interoception, encompasses a complex, bodywide system of nerves and hormones…
The findings, published last year in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, might revive the notion that stress causes stomach ulcers.
Emily Underwood; Science
The self-creation myth - In the absence of God, we have crafted our selves into brands and deities
In Self-Made, [Tara Isabella Burton'] argues: “Our faith in the creative and even magical power of the self-fashioning self goes hand in hand with the decline in belief in an older model of reality: a God-created and God-ordered universe in which we all have specific, pre-ordained parts to play.”
Rachel Cunliffe; New Statesman
Where loneliness can lead - Hannah Arendt enjoyed her solitude, but she believed that loneliness could make people susceptible to totalitarianism (2020)
Arendt’s argument about loneliness and totalitarianism is not an easy one to swallow, because it implies a kind of ordinariness about totalitarian tendencies that appeal to loneliness: if you are not satisfied with reality, if you forsake the good and always demand something better, if you are unwilling to come face-to-face with the world as it is, then you will be susceptible to ideological thought. You will be susceptible to organised loneliness.
Samantha Rose Hill; Aeon
The Upper West Side Cult That Hid in Plain Sight
By the nineteen-eighties, Newton and his top therapists had demoniac control over their patients’ sex lives, social lives, how they earned or spent money (much of their income was swallowed up in dues, fines, and “assessments” owed to the institute), and how they raised—or, usually, didn’t raise—their children. The idyllic commune was overrun by snakes and pestilence: financial exploitation, physical and sexual abuse, child neglect, and mushrooming paranoia.
Jessica Winter; The New Yorker
TV and movie sets used to be messy. What happened?
In the 1990s, the exceptionally pristine Banks mansion spoke to the family’s extreme wealth all the more compared to Jerry Seinfeld’s workaday apartment. Today, the crumb-strewn apartments of Always Sunny speak to the characters’ dirtbaggery all the more next to the showroom-like Modern Family homes.
[Jeff Mann, a production designer who worked on Mr. and Mrs. Smith and Tropic Thunder] also thinks the aspirational display of social media might be a force behind the disappearance of mess.
Constance Grady; Vox
‘My Dinner With André’ at 40: Still Serving Hot Takes (2021)
Part satire, part autofiction, part confessional, “My Dinner With André” never loses the plot; it doesn’t have one to begin with.
Mariella Rudi; The New York Times
Ang Lee and six other filmmakers on how Ingmar Bergman inspired them
At first Bergman was against the idea of meeting. That was until he saw The Ice Storm (1997), Lee’s masterpiece on American suburbia in the 1960s. Lee for his part knew exactly why he hoped for a meeting.
Maaret Koskinen and Louise Thanem Wallenberg; The Conversation
French Feminist Rabbi Captivates Multifaith Crowds With Musings on Mortality (2022)
“I try to build bridges between worlds that have stopped talking to each other,” [Rabbi Delphine Horvilleur] said. “Some people will use this moment to create ideologies that demonize people. But what is the meaning of my life if confinement makes me blind to the other?”
Julia Lieblich; The New York Times
My Beautiful Friend - Envy as a way of life
Doesn’t being graceful just mean not having to think? Nothing is laborious, everything is effortless... The awkward plain girl is driven, instead, to self-obsession.
Grazie Sophia Christie; The Point
Culture War as Imitation Game
Humans like not only to imitate but to be imitated — just not too much. A colleague flatters me if he adopts one of my tactics; he threatens me when it earns him the attention of one of my clients. If he becomes too much like me, the two of us are drawn into a game of reciprocal imitation for not only new clients, but perhaps even new cars, houses, and other totems of success.
Luke Burgis; The New Atlantis
How to Think Like a Medieval Monk
When they practiced inducing emotions through meditation, the monks were in fact drawing on the brain’s property of neuroplasticity—its ability to learn, adapt, and change itself based on its environment. Although doubtless they would have other philosophical disagreements, a medieval Cistercian and a modern neuroscientist would agree on the principle that certain feelings and emotions can be changed through meditative exercises.
Julia Bourke; Lapham’s Quarterly
What’s Wrong With the “What’s Wrong With Men” Discourse
A lot of women writers implicitly understand that our current political and cultural turmoil is primarily driven by polarisation along sex lines, and are worried about where all of this is leading.
Conor Fitzgerald
On delight, discovery, and fluidity in life
My takeaway through it all is the fluidity of life — everything changes. Nothing is constant. It’s inevitable. Our situations, careers, trajectories, our health, state of being, wants and desires, even the deepest points of joy and pain: the state of everything can and does change.
You shed layers of your identity, and you step into your new costume. You learn new protocols, your framing of everything and your perspective. It can change with time, even if you ever imagined it would, in your wildest dreams. So be fluid. Be open to the pull, if you feel a tug. This is water, my friend.
Mashal Waqar
The Complicated Afterlives of Roberto Bolaño
D.T. Max’s biography of David Foster Wallace appeared four years after his suicide. Blake Bailey’s biography of Phillip Roth came out three years after his (before being disowned by its publisher because of a scandal worthy of a Roth novel). And some biographies appear while the author is still alive, like Gerald Martin’s doorstopper on Gabriel García Márquez…
Why isn’t there yet a Bolaño biography?
Aaron Shulman; Literary Hub
Adam Smith: Myths and Realities
For Smith, the crux of people’s economic problem is twofold: First, people don’t have the time to achieve what they want by divining and then appealing to other people’s sympathies, especially when they live and work at some distance, and when everyone “stands at all times in need of the co-operation and assistance of great multitudes, while [a person’s] whole life is scarce sufficient to gain the friendship of a few persons.” …
Second, Smith admired people’s benevolence but adds that it is “vain” for a person to expect to receive all that is wanted from other people’s “benevolence only.”
Richard McKenzie; AdamSmithWorks
‘I Found a Friend’: Remembering Tony Bennett and Lady Gaga’s Remarkable Partnership
Bennett spoke about working with Gaga on “The Lady Is a Tramp”: “She came in so prepared and so knowledgeable about what to do. She’s as good as Ella Fitzgerald or anybody you want to come up with. And that’s without her dancing and her philosophies about breaking myths that are incorrect and social situations. She’s very strong. I know it sounds way out, but she could become America’s Picasso if they leave her alone and let her just do what she has to do. She is very, very talented.”
Jon Blistein; Rolling Stone
Love in the Time of Sickle Cell Disease
Nkechi revealed her genotype just days after meeting Subomi, and he didn’t stop loving her. He liked that she held her ground, didn’t worry about the future, and could make even his stolid father laugh. She also had a quick temper, but he preferred her foot- stomping, door- slamming outbursts to his quieter family life…
Krithika Varagur; Harper’s Magazine
St. Augustine's Phenomenology of Modern Fashion's Logic (2021)
This bias for the novel shapes the way moderns experience time and history. For moderns, the past is not merely what has gone before but (all things being equal) signals deprivation. The past is “old,” “passé,” “tired,” and therefore obsolete. In turn, the new prizes “the now.” For moderns, the now is where it’s at.
Robert Covolo; Church Life Journal
Progress Summit, UnConference - I was at the Civic Futures summit this week, co-hosted with Bennett Institute for Public Policy
While a conventional conference treats attendees like a passive audience to be entertained by the organizers, the unconference format gives everyone a say.
Benjamin Yeoh
Our Dad Directed 'The Wicker Man'. It Tore Our Family Apart
I get told all the time that I am so lucky to be the son of Wicker Man's director, Robin Hardy, especially as the film and its enduring legacy turns 50…
The film did me nothing but harm—it bankrupted my father, tore apart my parents' marriage, caused us to sell our house to pay the debts, and even still, after all the success the film has had, we haven't seen a penny.
Justin Hardy and Dominic Hardy; Newsweek
Michael Nielsen (Postdoc '98-'00), Quantum Physicist, Author, and Open Science Advocate (2022)
“I'm just finishing a short book with a friend and colleague Kanjun Qiu. It's really just to sort out in our minds what metascience is about. In particular, we're interested in the question of how do scientific institutions change? How does the collection of customs and social practices, which are used collectively by all the institutions in our discovery ecosystem, how do those change over time? Is it possible to make them change and upgrade more rapidly?”
Interview with Michael Nielsen; Caltech
Email me at anna@interintellect.com.
We need interintellect films.
I’m pretty sure Oppenheimer was shot on film.