Anna Gát: What to Read This Weekend #56
WH Auden, immigrants, arms, wars, boobs, Borges, built environment, scientific replication, Dune, couples, comedians, taste, faith, reality, equality, Cambridge, Women's Day, forgiveness - and more!
Hello guys,
Exhausting week with some big ups (keep April 13 open in NYC is all I can say!), and a lot of 2024 planning work for the Interintellect team. I also watched Dune Part Two and liked it much more than the first one. (Austin Butler OMG!!!)
I’ll be in Washington DC next week and hosting a social - join here. The theme will be “life as remix”, I’m sure you’ll have tons to say…
On our Youtube, you can now watch the video from our excellent salon about marriage with Devorah Baum.
Great readings for this weekend too. Scroll all the way down: some true gems! x Anna
Sweden officially joins NATO
NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg said: “This is a historic day. Sweden will now take its rightful place at NATO’s table, with an equal say in shaping NATO policies and decisions. After over 200 years of non-alignment Sweden now enjoys the protection granted under Article 5, the ultimate guarantee of Allies’ freedom and security.”
A World Nobody Wants
Life in a recently built apartment is like a simulation that’s constantly glitching.
David Schaengold; Compact
Ambition's Gravity
Name your ambition. Make it big, something worthy of your unique talents. Approach the chaos of change with the clarity of purpose. Don’t let the machines take your job; put them to work for you.
Packy McCormick
The misanthropic history man
Harari found a solution in the reductionist pop-science formula pioneered by Jared Diamond for his 1997 bestseller Guns, Germs and Steel. In place of complexity, the story is driven by a crudely materialistic explanation of human development.
Andrew Orlowski; The Critic
Immigrant Song
As a result, Canada’s ideal of a “cultural mosaic” is contrasted with the American melting pot—whereas the US has traditionally insisted that anyone wishing to live there must adopt a US identity and learn US patriotism, Canadian guidelines have been less demanding.
George Case; Quillette
Viewing the Ob-scene: On Jonathan Glazer’s “The Zone of Interest”
The Zone of Interest adopts this position, specifically Adorno’s alignment of “bourgeois subjectivity” with both the perpetrators of Auschwitz and the position from which one moves on from it, looks back on it, views it. One of the most troubling elements of Glazer’s film is that the viewer is not allowed to withdraw from the film’s radically circumscribed scene.
David Hering; Los Angeles Review of Books
What Does Authors Equity Mean For Traditional Publishing?
In today’s digital age, giving up the rights to the most important creative project of my life, especially in a time in which creative tools are being democratized faster than ever before, was not something I wanted to do, even if it meant more book sales. And more people are realizing that despite some of the flaws of self-publishing, like lower quality hardcover books and lack of relationships to break into retailers and foreign markets, self-publishing can work incredibly well.
Paul Millerd
The Minor Joys of Chance Encounters
One of her life lessons, which she repeated several times, was that people hear, but rarely do they listen. After this admonition, I felt it would be awkward to do the opposite.
Shadi Hamid; Wisdom of Crowds
Cognition all the way down
This physiological networking fundamentally erases the boundaries between smaller agents, forming a kind of superagent in which the individual identity of the original ones is very hard to maintain.
Michael Levin and Daniel C Dennett; Aeon
The Meaning of International Women’s Day
The backwardness and lack of rights suffered by women, their subjection and indifference, are of no benefit to the working class, and indeed are directly harmful to it. But how is the woman worker to be drawn into the movement, how is she to be awoken?
Alexandra Kollontai; Jacobin
Inside the Royal Society of Literature’s civil war
In a statement to the New Statesman the RSL said: “The director rejects the editor’s account of their meeting – she did not instruct the editor or anyone else to alter the copy or pages as they were laid out. Any suggestion that the director ‘censored’ any element of the magazine is false.”
Ellen Peirson-Hagger; New Statesman
How a Delhi man got his hands back: organ donation, 12-hr surgery, 11 doctors’ team
A painter who had lost both his hands in an accident has received a new set of limbs after a donation by a woman who had pledged her organs to be used following her death and as doctors at Delhi’s Sir Ganga Ram Hospital performed a complex surgery.
The Indian Express
Sydney Sweeney has brought boobs back
Yay! Boobs are back!
Bridget Phetasy; The Spectator
The Trouble with Reality
And it’s telling, given Borges’s and Kant’s conclusions about the relationship between paradox and granularity, that the most baffling scientific observations arise when we bore down into the building blocks of reality and try to witness the moment of change at extremely small scales. Heisenberg realized this when he outlined his uncertainty principle, which demonstrates that the closer you zoom in on the
Meghan O’Gieblyn; The New York Review
Léa Seydoux: ‘Being a Woman Onscreen Is Easier in Europe’ Than ‘Harsh’ Hollywood
“I have more freedom because I’m a European actress, which suits me,” Seydoux said. “I’m not trying to be popular, I’m just trying to enjoy myself. In America you have to conform. I don’t want to adapt myself to the system, I want the system to adapt to me!”
Samantha Bergeson; IndiWire
Romantic Love is an Under-Rated Driver of Gender Equality
Where love is mutual, and both parties deeply care about the other’s happiness, they listen and learn. When she says certain language makes her uncomfortable, he quickly takes note - rather than getting angry and lashing out. Eager for her to thrive, he shares the care-work, supports her career progression, and celebrates her wins.
Alice Evans
Matti Friedman: The Song of the Israel-Hamas War
“It’s a long road to the promised land,” says Moses, trying to calm them, but Joshua retorts, “Promised to who?”
Matti Friedman; The Free Press
How Happy Couples Argue
When the psychologists coded the data, two things became obvious. First, all couples fight. Second, fights have wildly different effects on different couples. The psychologists wanted to understand why, for some couples, fights are a poison that destroys their relationship dose by dose, whereas for others, fights are more like a physical-therapy session—painful in the moment but strengthening bonds over time.
Derek Thompson; The Atlantic
In defence of David Lynch’s ‘Dune’
But Dune, like Blade Runner and 2001, aimed at depth, intricacy and wider socio-political meaning in what was becoming a fairly shallow, effects-led cinematic genre; to use science fiction to echo the complexities of our world, not escape them. In that sense it helped pave the way for more thoughtful and ambitious sci-fi epics – Gravity, Interstellar, Arrival, films based on grand conceits rather than phaser-blasted action. It did what Herbert’s novel had intended it to do – it widened the sci-fi scope.
Mark Beaumont; NME
The Denial of the Moral as Lived Experience: What became of moral formation in a democratic society?
This materialist turn in Freudian understandings of personhood was a world-historical event. And even though psychoanalysis is now largely passé, Freud’s thoroughly materialist conception of the human subject continues to suffuse contemporary culture and thought, high and low, intellectual and popular, even among those who consider themselves, if not religious, at least “spiritual.”
James Davison Hunter; The Hedgehog Review
The “blind spot” in science that’s fueling a crisis of meaning
At the heart of science lies something we do not see that makes science possible, just as the blind spot lies at the heart of our visual field and makes seeing possible.
Adam Frank, Marcelo Gleiser and Evan Thompson; Big Think
Maya Lin's original competition submission for the Vietnam Veterans Memorial
Brought to a sharp awareness of such a loss, it is up to each individual to resolve or come to terms with this loss. For death, is in the end a personal and private matter, and the area contained with this memorial is a quiet place, meant for personal reflection and private reckoning. The black granite walls, each two hundred feet long, and ten feet below ground at their lowest point (gradually ascending toward ground level) effectively act as a sound barrier, yet are of such a height and length so as not to appear threatening or enclosing.
Friendship Lines
These lines show friendships as they truly are: Not linear relationships with an x/y axis where friendship intimacy/time increases steadily. They illustrate the complex and unpredictable nature of friendships–more like seasons, less like earning reports.
Camilo Moreno-Salamanca
Taylor Swift is related to Emily Dickinson, genealogy company reveals
On Monday, the genealogy company divulged that “Swift and Dickinson both descend from a 17th-century English immigrant (Swift’s ninth great-grandfather and Dickinson’s sixth great-grandfather who was an early settler of Windsor, Connecticut)”.
Michael Sainato; The Guardian
With or Without Poise
While a friendship might be a single long conversation, it’s never the same two people who have it.
Daniel Francis Olivieri; Interintellect blog
Writer Anne Rice: 'Today I Quit Being A Christian'
Rice says the final straw was when she realized the lengths that the church would go to prevent same-sex marriage.
NPR
Certainty
I do still have opinions about things, but I try to intentionally treat them as sort of "trial" things, if that makes any sense. More like "I kinda suspect x about y, I wonder if that will end up being right?"
Travis Northcutt
The Oscars as a Rank-Order Tournament
The Academy Awards are one example of a relatively standard tournament. There are prizes to be earned through effort (making good movies, good acting, etc.), the value of the prizes are fixed and rank-based (you can either be a winner, a nominee, or none of those), and effort is not wasted even if one does not receive any prize given that their movie, their acting etc. is enjoyed by moviegoers all around the world. The somewhat counterintuitive result of tournament theory; i.e. that effort is optimal even though the prizes are allocated according to the rank, without considering the differences in the efforts, seems to hold for the Oscars and other film awards.
Peter Isztin
The Reckoning
Victor Garcia, a journalist at French magazine L’Express, saw scientists expressing skepticism about Raoult’s claims on social media. He called the IHU, assuming it had more details that could counter some of the critics’ concerns. But Garcia says he received a “strange” response from IHU researcher Jean-Marc Rolain. “I am a scientist,” Rolain said. “If I tell you to take chloroquine, you’ll listen to me.” (Rolain did not respond to multiple requests for comment.) That was “the beginning of me asking questions,” Garcia says.
Cathleen O’Grady; Science
Fitzcarraldo Editions hires Rachael Allen to launch new poetry list featuring Rebecca Tamás and Diane Seuss
Four to six books per year will be published on the list, which will also include poetry in translation
Melina Spanoudi; The Bookseller
Bluesky snags former Twitter/X Trust & Safety exec cut by Musk
“There is an urgent global need for a social network that can safely and effectively meet the needs of communities and individuals,” said Rodericks, in a statement about his hiring.
Sarah Perez; TechCrunch
Protestor Spray Paints, Slashes Cambridge Portrait of Lord Balfour, Who Established UK Support for Israel
The activist group Palestine Action shared a video on X of an unidentified protestor dousing Balfour’s portrait, a 1914 work by Philip Alexius de László, in red spray paint and then slashing the canvas nearly almost entirely to pieces. The work is housed at Trinity College, a school that is part of the University of Cambridge.
Tessa Solomon; ARTnews
Europe needs a grand strategy
How can political unity be created for joint European decision-making? Public trust in the EU rests on shaky grounds.
Marina Henke; Engelsberg Ideas
Introducing Hot Mic: A New Column Documenting Live Comedy in NYC
Are live comedy shows still relevant? And if so, what for?
Leah Abrams; Jezebel
What Independent Bookshops Really Sell
But books are different. They signal something about readers’ intelligence, identity, and closely held ideas. Books confer status—especially among the highly educated. The people who sell them know this and they used it to make their case.
Ann Bauer; Persuasion
Did immigration bring down inflation?
Maybe immigrant managers are depressing the wages of other immigrant managers. And maybe this is creating a bonanza for companies, who get to hire immigrant managers more cheaply, and who then pass the cost savings on to the customer in the form of lower inflation.
Noah Smith
Taylor Tomlinson Drops the Mic
“I’m not the first woman. I mean, Lilly Singh had her show a year ago! There isn’t anyone right now, so I guess I am the one.”
Britt Hennemuth; Vanity Fair
Cambridge academic escapes toilet using eyeliner and cotton
After multiple attempts, [University of Cambridge academic Dr Krisztina Ilko] called on her childhood love for the fictional problem-solver MacGyver to get herself out and handpicked the lock with an eyeliner and a cotton earbud. The eyeliner was used to push down the latch and she made a hook out of the earbud. After seven hours, she was able to unlock the door.
Harriet Heywood; BBC — Hungarian women, what can I say!
Dust to Dust: W. H. Auden writes poetry for a world marked by death
In the history of poetry, Auden is a figure of recovery. Amid the fragmentation wrought by early modernism, declared by its practitioners and enthusiasts to be permanent, Auden revived and updated the lyrical forms of the prewar era. In some sense, he succeeded D. H. Lawrence, whose novels and lyric poems insist on the possibility of ecstatic love, of rebirth. Lawrence’s Romantic sublime blooms: his characters throw off the shackles of modernity, of life under capitalist industry, social convention, and sexual jealousy. In his personal life, Auden accomplished many such freedoms.
Helen Rouner; Commonweal
Masturbation in marriage
I’m raising this question because of a recent Evie magazine advice column written about a woman who caught her husband using porn and is devastated by it. The over emphasis on the role of porn is masking, in my opinion, the more important question of managing sexual imbalance in marriage, because as I said in my too-long thread on Twitter/X, focusing too much on the porn question allows a woman to demonize her husband while sidestepping the real issue of how to deal with the fact that he wants more sex than she does.
Danielle Freydman
I Found David Lynch’s Lost Dune II Script
While writing this piece I reached out to Lynch for comment, since his Dune II script had never been discussed in detail publicly. He stated, through an assistant, that he “sort of remembers writing something but doesn’t recall ever finishing it.” As Dune is “a failure in his eyes and not a particular time that he likes to think of or talk about,” he politely declined to speak to me.
Max Evry; WIRED
Step by Step: Thinking through and beyond the repair manual
My new hair dryer came with a manual informing me that “special tools are required for any examination, adjustment or repair. Unqualified repair work could lead to hazardous conditions for the user.” In some cases, tinkering is actually illegal. Products are sold with “setup guides” that lack information on repair. When the washing machine locks our jeans inside, blinking its lights in a proprietary pattern, flashing a cryptic ransom message, we’re forced to search the dark web for a PDF copy of an old service manual, or plug in the magic keywords that help us sift through 18-minute videos on YouTube.
Shannon Mattern; Places
Understanding the spirit of a norm: Challenges for norm-learning agents
Social and moral norms are a fabric for holding human societies together and helping them to function. As such they will also become a means of evaluating the performance of future human–machine systems. While machine ethics has offered various approaches to endowing machines with normative competence, from the more logic-based to the more data-based, none of the proposals so far have considered the challenge of capturing the “spirit of a norm,” which often eludes rigid interpretation and complicates doing the right thing. We present some paradigmatic scenarios across contexts to illustrate why the spirit of a norm can be critical to make explicit and why it exposes the inadequacies of mere data-driven “value alignment” techniques such as reinforcement learning RL for interactive, real-time human–robot interaction. Instead, we argue that norm learning, in particular, learning to capture the spirit of a norm, requires combining common-sense inference-based and data-driven approaches.
Thomas Arnold and Matthias Scheutz
We vs Them: Pronouns in the poetry of Auden
“We” can be a pair of lovers, but also all humanity.
Paul Franz; Times Literary Supplement
“It Really Matters If Somebody Has Bad Taste”: An Interview With Book Critic Becca Rothfeld
“Now more than ever, I think, the public, of whom reviewers sometimes seem to have insultingly low expectations, feels entitled not only to her tastes but to assurance that her tastes merit praise.”
Nicholas Russell; Defector
The Dissent Hidden in an Iconic Scientific Image
Between the frontispiece to Huxley’s Man’s Place in Nature and “The Road to Homo Sapiens,” depictions of evolution as a gradual ascent from apes to humans were challenged and fell out of favor. In the early 20th century, the iconographic tradition of linear progress was kept alive, pretty much exclusively, by a woman artist who is now almost completely unknown.
Gowan Dawson; Nautilus
Rachel Cusk: The novelist on the “feminine non-state of non-being”
“How could you summon up this directionless non-state of non-being, this difficult-to-grasp phase of femininity? It would have to be in a world in which nothing worked, everything had stopped, no one could go anywhere. That then became the very environment in which I wrote at least the second half of the book.”
Merve Emre; The Yale Review
But There Are Other Geometries: On cubes, love, and fate
Auden taught himself to be the more loving one, though I cannot say I sense in his other work that he also taught himself to be happy… The Cartesian grid exemplifies elegant ordering. But there are other geometries; Riemann geometries are those of spaces stretched over something else, for instance, a grid over a sphere. Stretch me a manifold of a world where nothing is neat or reasoned or reasonable and maybe I make sense; maybe I don’t love too much anymore. Maybe someone will have me.
A.V. Marraccini; Poetry Foundation
Welcome Sweden!!