Anna Gát: What to Read This Weekend #25
Honesty and trauma, virginity and invisibility, schooling and scrolling, paintings and parties, Cohen and Kundera, robots and rock stars, schizophrenia and GenZ, therapists and dating, and more...!
Hey folks! A very intense few weeks over here in New York City, and some of the best conversations I’ve ever had in my life. The blessings of dear friends, good books, big projects… I wrote about what travelling has taught me. I would add to this the idea that fluctuating change - whether we move around or the people around us - teaches us what really is permanent in life.
You’ve been in my thoughts the whole week, and I have a very good compilation for you below: technology, society, literature, art. And some exciting, troubling questions.
On Interintellect, some new series coming up for you: longevity reading group, David Deutsch reading group, free speech for tech, existential epistemology — Kyla Scanlon’s monthly socials starting in Manhattan, self-compassion circle online — and we’re soon listing a writing support group as well (will share here) and a series on O’Shaughnessy Fellows. Come say hi - and stay tuned! x Anna
On Good Parties
Good Parties don’t merely offer us the opportunity to gather with those we love. Rather, more importantly, they teach us how to love. Good Parties foster the virtue of loving well. Good Parties improve, too, our moral vision. They teach us to see ourselves, and one another, differently. We learn to see ourselves as part of a community: one defined not by hierarchy or even shared affinity, in the capitalist-consumer sense, but simply by our love for one another.
Tara Isabella Burton; Breaking Ground
School Is Not Enough
An individual’s life can continue with an inertia that will lead them on to the next year or decade. Most young people today know approximately what they are going to be doing for the first twenty-or-more years of their life: school. Post-schooling, the inertia continues. Many a modern story opens with a worker—an office worker, usually—who is so inert that he scarcely notices the passage of time until he becomes blindsided by a sudden yank of reality that forces him out of his inertia.
Simon Sarris; Palladium
Nobody Ever Read American Literature Like This Guy Did
[D.H. Lawrence’s] bristling, inflamed, impertinent language provides a reminder that criticism is not just the work of the brain, but of the gut and the spleen as well. The intellectual refinement of his argument — fine-grained evaluations of style and form that still startle with their incisiveness; breathtaking conceptual leaps from history to myth and back again — is unthinkable without the churn of instinct and feeling beneath it.
A.O. Scott; The New York Times
The Virgin Suicides is a defining text of adolescent pain
As a teenager, I felt it with every fibre of my being when Cecilia, the doomed youngest Lisbon girl, looks at the psychologist, who’s assuring her she’s “not even old enough to know how bad life gets”, and says, with gravity and prescience, “Obviously, Doctor, you’ve never been a 13-year-old girl.” I watched it so often that I scratched the DVD, which would warp and jump.
Sophie Mackintosh; New Statesman
The elements of scientific style
Academic papers today are filled with jargon and abbreviations. Subject to the contradictory requirements of presenting impactful work and respecting arbitrary word limits, they cram a lot of information in very little space, leaving no room for interesting style or concrete examples. Unrelated ideas are strung together in wall-of-text paragraphs, providing no guidance to readers…
Étienne Fortier-Dubois; Works In Progress
Desperate Honesty
Is this neediness really distinctive of philosophers? I think it is. Back when I was in a classics PhD program, people rarely told me that I was wrong; I abandoned classics for philosophy in large part because that was where the refuters were. Now people can’t stop telling me I am wrong. Of course all humans have blindspots; anyone can get something wrong without realizing it; and intellectuals of all persuasions are prone to benefit from critical comments—nonetheless, I claim, philosophers are, and are aware that we are, in a uniquely desperate situation.
Agnes Callard; Daily Nous
Tell Me Why It Hurts - How Bessel van der Kolk’s once controversial theory of trauma became the dominant way we make sense of our lives.
Today, van der Kolk’s renown — built on translating neuroscience into language accessible to people searching for a cure for their pain — has placed him in a position straddling scientific celebrity and guru. On the first night, every attendee who took the mic — the therapists, school counselors, and medical professionals, some of whom had the tuition comped by their employers — admitted they had come for their own healing as well.
For people in “trauma-informed care,” they explained, referring to the professions stretching from schools to hospitals to social-work programs to parole offices to private psychotherapy practices, “he’s like a god.”
… “Don’t call me that,” van der Kolk snapped back, suddenly on edge. “I’m not a holy man.”
Danielle Carr; New York Magazine
The Cacophonous Miracle of “The Brothers Karamazov”
In the labor camp, Dostoyevsky experienced a political and spiritual conversion that led him to reject the French utopian socialism of his youth and embrace the idea of a benevolent autocracy guided by the Russian Orthodox faith. As a way of atoning for his earlier radicalism, he devoted much of his career to depicting wayward Russian youth confused and corrupted by Western ideas of progress. Years later, at a literary gathering, one such youth asked Dostoyevsky, “Who gave you the right to speak like this, on behalf of all Russian people?” The author lifted the hem of his pants, revealing scars left on his ankles from years of wearing shackles. “This is my right to speak like this,” he told the crowd.
Jennifer Wilson; The New Yorker
Why Novels Are a Richer Experience Than Movies
This doesn’t mean trauma isn’t real, but I think it’s possible that trauma’s popularity as an explanation of behavior came about because traumas are extrinsic events—they are things that can be filmed, they can be seen, which in turn means they can literally be shown on-screen as flashbacks. I find it no coincidence that the rise of trauma as an explanation of human behavior just so happens to correspond with the rise of our dominant narrative artform, the extrinsic medium of film, and its replacement of the intrinsic medium of the novel.
Erik Hoel; Nautilus (From The World Behind the World: Consciousness, Free Will, and the Limits of Science.)
When Harry Styles Met David Hockney: An Exclusive First Look at a Special New Portrait
“He’s not a traditional portrait painter,” says Howgate. Hockney’s interest is not in what people do, but rather in who they are. “He’s not interested in fame. He’s interested in depicting people and their relationships.”
Liam Hess; Vogue
Why doesn’t Gen Z want children?
Given that many young adults still feel like children themselves, it’s no surprise that they are delaying or rejecting parenthood, choosing instead to extend their “me time”.
Freya India; UnHerd
Looking for Eileen: how George Orwell wrote his wife out of his story
He’s paranoid, feeling he’s been tricked by a politico-sexual conspiracy of filthy women “imposing” a false “picture of themselves” on the world. He sees women – as wives – in terms of what they do for him, or “demand” of him. Not enough cleaning; too much sex. But how did she feel? My first guess: too much cleaning and not enough, or not good enough, sex.
Anna Funder; The Guardian
The Wrath of Goodreads
The terrible power of Goodreads is an open secret in the publishing industry. The review site, which Amazon bought in 2013, can shape the conversation around a book or an author, both positively and negatively. Today’s ostensible word-of-mouth hits are more usually created online, either via Goodreads or social networks such as Instagram and TikTok.
Helen Lewis; The Atlantic
The Middle East and North Africa’s patrilineal trap
As liberals self-censor to avoid aggression by religious radicals, patriarchal beliefs go unchallenged in public, and pessimism about change is reinforced by the invisibility of potential allies.
Alice Evans; Brookings Institution
Why No Roman Industrial Revolution?
So Rome didn’t have an [Industrial Revolution] because they didn’t have coal mines that they needed to pump water out of, they didn’t have a textile industry that was ready to make use of steam power, etc.
Jason Crawford; The Roots of Progress
RT-2: New model translates vision and language into action
Commands such as “pick up the bag about to fall off the table” or “move banana to the sum of two plus one” – where the robot is asked to perform a manipulation task on objects or scenarios never seen in the robotic data – required knowledge translated from web-based data to operate.
Google DeepMind
The Civil Theology of Robert Bellah
Bellah called this America’s “civil religion.” He defined the term sociologically. It described the rituals, symbols, and language of civic life, not the private beliefs of individuals. He interpreted American history through the lens of the French sociologist Émile Durkheim, who argued that all societies—even those that seemed most secular—express their identities in religious symbols. For Durkheim, the nonobservant son of a rabbi, the truth of a religion is not found where both believers and unbelievers often assume it to be—in its official dogmas—but in the practices that promote group solidarity and commemorate social bonds. Bellah maintained that, when viewed from this perspective, America clearly possessed a national cult.
Matthew Rose; Commonweal
Why People Faint at the Theater
Accounts of swooning at the theater are nothing new, though. The 1782 premiere of Friedrich Schiller’s Die Räuber, a dissection of evil played out between two brothers, took place in Mannheim, Germany. The naturalistic response by one actor, on receiving news of a character’s death, so shocked the audience that “fainting women had to be helped toward the exits.” More than 200 years later, and audiences are still passing out at the sight of actors on stage.
Christine Ro; The Atlantic
Famous Blue Raincoat — a song so mysterious, Leonard Cohen himself was never satisfied with it (2020)
The tragedy here was never the infidelity, but the way in which the narrator was resigned to the decay of his marriage. “Thanks, for the trouble you took from her eyes, I thought it was there for good, so I never tried,” he concedes in an arresting line that distils the heart of marital despair and miscommunication as well as anything you’d find in a book by Richard Yates or John Cheever.
Dan Einav; Financial Times
The Psychotherapy Myth
How can we know how effective therapy is? Are we compelled to rely upon the self-interested testimony of therapists and the therapy industry? Or the potentially misguided or mistaken testimony of patients?
Bo Winegard; Aporia Magazine
More Scrolling, More Marital Problems
More than one-third of married Americans (37%) say that their spouse is often on the phone or some kind of screen when they would prefer to talk or do something together as a couple, according to a new Institute of Family Studies/Wheatley Institute survey of 2,000 married couples ages 18 to 55.
Wendy Wang; Institute for Family Studies
Why Kundera Never Went Home
Kundera made clear that he wouldn’t write politically committed literature, about which he had a very low opinion, and his critics didn’t believe his books, full of irony, laughable intrigues, and love affairs, posed any real challenge to the regime.
That may explain why the publication of The Unbearable Lightness of Being met with an enthusiastic reception just about everywhere except in Czech opposition circles.
Petr Drulák; Compact Magazine
Tired of Dating Apps, Some Turn to ‘Date-Me Docs’
“Date-me docs” are not for everyone, said Steve Krouse, 29, who created a centralized database of “date-me docs” last year after seeing them posted on different websites. “You have to be part of a weird internet, open-source culture,” he said.
Jenny Gross and Livia Albeck-Ripka; The New York Times
Ideas of India: The Constitutional Case for Marriage Equality in India
“My personal belief is either government should not involve itself in personal law at all, and we leave it entirely to custom and contract, or—if it is involved—then all people must be treated equally. Since we are very far from the realm of the government must not involve itself, so if I were to take the current existing structure in India, then I’m obviously leaning towards the latter, which is a Uniform Civil Code not just across all faiths, but also for heterosexual and nonheterosexual couples.”
Shruti Rajagopalan; Discourse
The Art Angle: How Surrealist Artist Leonora Carrington Carved Her Space in a Male-Dominated World
This kind of a liberated self was a cornerstone of Carrington’s outlook on the world and a key to understanding the fascinating images she created. Her life story is one of world building. Dissatisfied with her well-to-do family’s vision for her future, Carrington sought freedom through boundary-pushing art.
Artnet News
Kant and the Enlightenment
Kant’s own solution can be very nicely summed up in the great motto of the Enlightenment, which Kant himself was always very keen to emphasise: dare to be wise!
Adrian Moore; Expeditions
The Story Behind Sinéad O’Connor’s Duet with Willie Nelson
Willie Nelson was also on the bill that night, and seeing the way O’Connor was treated, invited her to join him in the studio the next day. The song they recorded, released on his 1993 album, Across the Borderline, was a cover of Peter Gabriel’s “Don’t Give Up.”
John Spong; Texas Monthly
Book Review: Unraveling the Enigma of Schizophrenia
[“Malady of the Mind” author Jeffrey A. Lieberman] does concede that the search for a single gene responsible for the disorder, which lasted several decades and gobbled up billions of research dollars, ended up going nowhere and has recently been jettisoned. As he argues, psychiatrists couldn’t find a single gene because “many genes, possibly one hundred to two hundred, combine to confer disease vulnerability.”
Joshua C. Kendall; Undark
Nothing to See Here
Windows were prized as a luxury and a mark of civilization. One measure of their importance is that from 1696 to 1851 England imposed a window tax. Windows let people look out upon the landscape—ideally onto their gardens. Or the windows let people look in, which was another virtue, the antithesis of furtiveness. Jütte cites Jean-Jacques Rousseau as a champion of righteous transparency. His own heart, Rousseau said, was “transparent as crystal,” and he praised transparency in architecture: “I have always regarded as the worthiest of men that Roman who wanted his house to be built in such a way that whatever occurred within could be seen.”
James Gleick; The New York Review
The Chance for Transformation: On Giorgio van Straten’s “In Search of Lost Books”(2019)
Tensions often surround a common debate: what to do when an artist wishes to have their unpublished work destroyed after death, while a survivor’s responsibility lies in delivering to posterity — and humanity — an invaluable work. (A famous example of the latter winning out is the case of Max Brod, who, after the death of his friend Franz Kafka, didn’t destroy Kafka’s manuscripts as he had been instructed.)
Dalia Sofer; Los Angeles Review of Books
How to do things with wars - The life of the philosopher who ‘changed the whole idea of what language
Like Wittgenstein, whose stated aim was “to bring words back from their metaphysical to their everyday use”, [J.L. Austin] urged us not to make generalized assumptions about the relation between language and the world, but to look at specific instances of what we say. His scrupulous case-by-case examinations were not, Rowe concedes, bolstered by a systematic underlying argument. Cumulatively, however, they revealed that language “does not stand outside the world of human action, simply recording it”, but rather “acquires its sense – and can only acquire its sense – through its use and the fact that it is embedded in human action, behaviour, and culture”. Both Wittgenstein and Austin stressed “the kinship between philosophy and anthropology”
Jane O’Grady; Times Literary Supplement
Remembering Martin Amis
Amis was an especially gifted critic, and his discursive writings are often as perceptive as his fictions (many, in fact, find his criticism to be superior). There have been many excellent novelists who proved to be good critics (John Updike) and excellent critics who were fair novelists (George Orwell), but to be great at both is exceedingly rare.
Jared Marcel Pollen; Verso
Sanctimony Literature
In Normal People, one character remarks that an injustice has occurred for reasons she cannot comprehend: “it’s something to do with capitalism,” she concludes gravely. Her interlocuter replies dolefully, “Yeah, everything is, that’s the problem, isn’t it?”
These books — millennial agit-prop, millennial middle-brow — are inflated and animated by an unshakable faith in their own rectitude. Impossibly foreign to their guiding sensibility are such characters as Henrich von Kleist’s Michael Kohlhaas, the mesmerizingly bloodthirsty protagonist of Michael Kohlhaas, or Philip Roth’s Portnoy, the venomously sexist yet perversely charismatic anti-hero of Portnoy’s Complaint. Now all the eponyms read Gramsci, respect women, and recycle.
Becca Rothfeld, Liberties