Anna Gát: What to Read this Weekend #13
Doomers and Boomers, ghostwriters and cancer, kidnapped from Ukraine, mothers enslaved to Hegel, happier men (or are they?), and AGI, sociopaths, groupies, Nazis, priests, horses, dinosaurs—and more!
Hello everyone! An unusually long reading list for this weekend — simply because so many good articles have been published. As for books, this past week I’ve been to a used book store in Lisbon called Bivar and acquired a smaller tower. Finished Julian Barnes’s The Man in the Red Coat, more entertaining and informative than cohesive, about the belle époque French surgeon, gynaecologist, and medical innovator Samuel Pozzi, but also about Proust, Montesquiou, Sarah Bernhardt, salons, aristocrats, syphilis, and Oscar Wilde. I’ve also started Iris Murdoch’s A Word Child, about a failed self-made man in 1970s London; I’m at a part where life-saving mentors are discussed, and it reminded me why people still watch and love Dead Poets Society, whatever Roger Ebert thought about it, and why Maria Konnikova’s Garmezy piece made me cry.
I am slowly - knock on wood - coming out of the housing crisis that’s overshadowed my first month in Lisbon. (I now have lawyers, I’m doing it à l’américaine…) I like joking about how much I resemble an EM Forster heroine, and now here I am moping around a hotel with a book, stressing about real estate.
In the meantime, I have listed a salon about friendship (come!), and we have some exciting exchanges coming up on Interintellect with, for example, Razib Khan and Taylor Lorenz.
Now let’s dive in, and read some excellent pieces this weekend too!
How thought itself can drive tumour growth - non-paywalled: Here
The degree of functional connectivity between glioblastoma and the normal brain negatively affects both patient survival and performance in language tasks. These data demonstrate that high-grade gliomas functionally remodel neural circuits in the human brain, which both promotes tumour progression and impairs cognition.
Nature
How to buy a dinosaur
“When I joined Christie’s, in 2007, the going rate for a triceratops was about half a million dollars. Now it’s $6 million. Yet if you look at where the most expensive fossils are today versus the most expensive paintings, we’re still a long way from Peak Dinosaur.”
Richard Askwith; The Times
The Art of the Doomer - on worldviews and cognitive models
the world doesnt shrink to your size just because you lack the depth to understand it…
Kyla Scanlon
The Death of the Groupie
Lori Mattix maintains that the sex she had with David Bowie while underage was consensual, though some may disagree that her consent was possible at 15. “I was an innocent girl, but the way it happened was so beautiful,” she said in 2015. “Who wouldn’t want to lose their virginity to David Bowie?”
Lauren O'Neill; The New Statesman
The Abducted Children of Ukraine
Parents and helpers alike are keeping quiet about just how they bring their children back and which routes they use within Russia in order to avoid endangering future missions to repatriate children. In addition to the aid organizations and government agencies in Ukraine, church groups and Russian volunteers are also reportedly active. Save Ukraine usually brings several children back to the country at the same time, from different places in Russia or in the occupied territories.
Ann-Dorit Boy, Fedir Petrov und Alexander Sarovic; Der Spiegel
Notes from Prince Harry's Ghostwriter
While I always emphasized storytelling and scenes, Harry couldn’t escape the wish that “Spare” might be a rebuttal to every lie ever published about him. As Borges dreamed of endless libraries, Harry dreams of endless retractions, which meant no end of revelations.
J.R Moehringer; The New Yorker
Hamlet, and a Political Awakening, Stir in the West Bank
In “Enter Ghost,” concealment and subterfuge end poorly, as the title — and “Hamlet” — would suggest. Indeed, the novel seems to argue, real growth and connection, both political and personal, cannot begin until everyone’s ghosts have emerged from hiding.
Lily Meyer; The New York Times
Sparta’s Self-inflicted Wound
Sparta’s origins were so egalitarian, they would have made the Soviets blush and the Nazis despair, a particular irony given that Sparta was held up by Hitler as a model for National Socialism.
James Darnton; Engelsberg Ideas
Jealous Laughter
The men might not like it, but in 2023 women are overwhelmingly the ones who write, read, edit and buy books, particularly fiction. Female friendships, rather than literary marriages or bros with quills, are a force for the creation and continuation of literary culture in a way that simply hasn’t been true before.
Joanna Biggs; Granta
Nazi Racism and the Church
What seems certain is that without converts to Catholicism, the church in Europe would never have “thought its way” out of the challenges of racist anti-Judaism. If Providence remains visibly active for the Catholic Church in history, it can surely be seen in how the church has absorbed light from outsiders—persons originally beyond its visible membership, who devoted their lives to a religion based on love of neighbor, and in doing so reminded us that the church is, as Jacques Maritain’s friend Charles Journet wrote in 1951, at once “purer and vaster than we know.”
John Connelly; Commonweal
The Best of All Possible Wars: Warfare, Worldmaking, and the Creative Imagination
We don’t usually associate warfare with the creative imagination. War is a matter of politics, law, and military strategy. The brute realities of violence seem a far cry from the refined realm of creative aesthetic imaginaries. And yet, the 21st century has witnessed a pervasive militarization of aesthetics, with Western military institutions co-opting the creative worldmaking of art and aesthetics and merging it with the destructive forces of warfare.
Anders Engberg-Pedersen; Los Angeles Review of Books
Excerpts from AI-Written Rom-Coms That Prove Human Writers Are Obsolete.
WILLY: But how can an undercover prince love me, a child surgeon who saves countless adorable lives?
PRINCE PETER: We will be equals once I am a child surgeon, too. Hand me the knife.
Martti Nelson; McSweeney's Internet Tendency
Slaves to Love - The mother-child dialectic
Seeking reassurance during that first year of parenting two, I turned to the work of the pediatrician and psychoanalyst Donald Winnicott. He is perhaps best known for his concept of the “good-enough mother,” the caregiver who, through sometimes failing and frustrating their child, ultimately facilitates the development of the child’s ability to cope with their own finitude in an imperfect world. But I was more taken by a quite different short piece of his, “Hate in the Counter-Transference.” In it, Winnicott lists eighteen reasons why the mother hates her baby. The eighth reason is that “he is ruthless, treats her as scum, an unpaid servant, a slave.” It was an extreme way of putting it, but it resonated.
Jessie Munton; The Point
The Gender Well-being Gap
Women say they are less cheerful and calm, more depressed, and lonely, but happier and more satisfied with their lives, than men.
Tyler Cowen; Marginal Revolution
Language models can explain neurons in language models
Language models have become more capable and more broadly deployed, but our understanding of how they work internally is still very limited. For example, it might be difficult to detect from their outputs whether they use biased heuristics or engage in deception. Interpretability research aims to uncover additional information by looking inside the model.
OpenAI
Everyday Philosophy: The bravery of dissent
There is … a long British tradition of meeting dissent with disproportionate measures. Sometimes even philosophers end up on the receiving end of this. Bertrand Russell, for example, was imprisoned twice for his beliefs: the first time in 1918, when he was sentenced to six months in Brixton Prison for writing an editorial in a pacifist weekly paper (he used the courtroom as a platform to spread his views more widely). He lost his fellowship at Trinity College Cambridge, as a result of this.
Nigel Wartburton; The New European
Geeks, MOPs, and sociopaths in subculture evolution
The sociopaths quickly become best friends with selected creators. They dress just like the creators—only better. They talk just like the creators—only smoother. They may even do some creating—competently, if not creatively. Geeks may not be completely fooled, but they also are clueless about what the sociopaths are up to.
Meaningness
What every CEO should know about generative AI
CEOs want to know if they should act now—and, if so, how to start. Some may see an opportunity to leapfrog the competition by reimagining how humans get work done with generative AI applications at their side. Others may want to exercise caution, experimenting with a few use cases and learning more before making any large investments.
McKinsey Digital
Before Dylan, There Was Connie Converse. Then She Vanished.
Connie Converse was a pioneer of what’s become known as the singer-songwriter era, making music in the predawn of a movement that had its roots in the Greenwich Village folk scene of the early 1960s.
But her songs, created a decade earlier, arrived just a moment too soon. They didn’t catch on. And by the time the sun had come up in the form of a young Bob Dylan, she was already gone. Not simply retired. She had vanished from New York City, as she eventually would from the world, along with her music and legacy.
Howard Fishman; The New York Times
At the Kentucky Derby, horses are worked to death for human vanity
“The horses are unable to withstand moving at such speed when they are so young and underdeveloped. They are pushed to exhaustion. The repetitive percussive drill of training and running kills some of them, and ruins others for life.”
Brian Kateman; Vox
The big idea: why colour is in the eye of the beholder
“Colour,” Umberto Eco once said, “is not an easy matter.” It is indeed elusive and illusive. Pretty much everything we take to be self-evident about it really isn’t self-evident at all. Scientists have shown that the sky isn’t blue, the sun isn’t yellow, snow isn’t white, black isn’t dark and darkness isn’t black.
One cause of the problem – or perhaps its symptom – is language.
James Fox, The Guardian
Thinking Is Risky - A call for intellectual ambition.
It is an obvious point, but what is necessary in order to risk being wrong in the ways that they did is a confidence that one may also end up being right. Or, to put it another way, to explore the world with the kind of naked aspiration that they display requires having real confidence that there is a world there to explore and that it is worth exploring it.
Samuel Kimbriel; Wisdom of Crowds
