Anna Gát: What to Read This Weekend #26
CS Lewis, PJ Harvey, Iris Murdoch, Spinoza, scientific communities, sexual revolutions, the death of the novel, mRNA, fertility prejudice - Sparta, Silicon Valley, masculinity, climate crises and more
Hi everyone,
I’ve just watched Barbie - literally, just now - and I’m still processing. Altogether, I liked it more than I thought I would, I felt it was far more of a parody of Western Millennial womanhood (and manhood) than some universal commentary on gender norms. But I’m a (more or less) Western and definitely Millennial woman, so it did hit me like a smaller truck: our aimlessness, our hypocrisies, our caring, our going at the wrong enemy. (It might just be the Pinocchio of the Millennial woman: she wants to be a real girl so much!)
At Interintellect, we have some exceptionally cool things coming up. Online, a salon with Caroline Calloway (more on her and her new book below), hosted by the great Tara Isabella Burton and Katherine Dee. My friend Erik Hoel will also joins us - he also has a new book out! - and this will be hosted by myself. The brilliant Kyla Scanlon is starting an offline Interintellect series (yearlong, monthly) in Manhattan. I hope to see you there!
Video recaps of recent salons: Simone Stolzoff on work and meaning, Celeste Marcus from Liberties with Benjamin Moser, Taylor Lorenz talking with me about being extremely online…
And, as always, please scroll down to read my selection of the past week’s readings for your weekend… x Anna
How Should One Read a Book? - Read as if one were writing it
To be able to read books without reading them, to skip and saunter, to suspend judgment, to lounge and loaf down the alleys and bye-streets of letters is the best way of rejuvenating one’s own creative power.
Virginia Woolf; Yale Review
You'd Be Happier Living Closer to Friends. Why Don't You?
What would have to change, for you to move closer to the people who nourish you, who support you, who make your life better and easier in so many ways? Why does it still feel weird to buy a house together, or even just look for separate apartments close by?
Anne Helen Petersen
Exploratory notes: Community as the unit of scientific contribution (2022)
In many ways, our research institutions and social processes are a system for producing … communities, far more than any individual discovery. Put another way: they are a system for producing new types of expertise. It's in that sense that fields – or communities of practice – are the basic unit of advance in science.
Michael Nielsen
Digital dark age
What happens in 30 years when my kids want to look at pictures of me, but sorry baby, they were spread across Instagram, Google Photos, and iCloud, none of which exist anymore?
Katherine Dee
On the Phenomenon of Bullshit Jobs
[Rather] than allowing a massive reduction of working hours to free the world's population to pursue their own projects, pleasures, visions, and ideas, we have seen the ballooning of not even so much of the ‘service’ sector as of the administrative sector, up to and including the creation of whole new industries like financial services or telemarketing, or the unprecedented expansion of sectors like corporate law, academic and health administration, human resources, and public relations….
These are what I propose to call ‘bullshit jobs’.
David Graeber; The Anarchist Library
Paul Graham on Ambition, Art, and Evaluating Talent
“[When]— basically, anybody outside Silicon Valley who wants to blame Silicon Valley for something, well, who do they blame? They’ve never heard of the people who are actually powerful in Silicon Valley. They only know a handful of people who have consumer brands, me among them. Basically, the world sucks because of tech, and tech sucks because of Paul Graham, [laughs] because they’ve never heard of any of the other people.
I don’t seem to get quite so much of that anymore. I don’t know. I’m glad about that. With YC, definitely, I didn’t know how prominent YC was becoming, and how many people would be out to get us as a result.”
Tyler Cowen
Living Well Is the Best Revenge -The couple who inspired F. Scott Fitzgerald’s “Tender Is the Night” (1962)
[The] Murphys gave a party at the Villa America that could have been, and probably was, the model for the Divers’ famous dinner party in “Tender Is the Night.” Fitzgerald again seemed to be under some compulsion to spoil the evening, which he later re-created with such sensitivity in his novel.
Calvin Tomkins; The New Yorker
The new crisis of masculinity
“So we’ve seen the economy change in ways that have moved away from the strength jobs, from traditional union jobs and factory and labor jobs that were mostly seen as male jobs and helped promote this idea of the man as the provider who can take care of a whole family on one income. Now it’s more about soft-skilled credentialism and that favors jobs that tend to skew toward women. Because of the feminist movement and women’s advances — which, to be clear, is a great thing — women have entered schools and the economy in force and they’re doing really well. And I think men are beginning to feel a little bit worried and lost in comparison.”
Sean Illing interviews Christine Emba; Vox
A brilliant biography of an elusive genius
Another of Spinoza’s beautiful Latin phrases that many use without knowing its provenance is sub specie aeternitatis (“under the aspect of eternity”). Our lives are filled with ephemera and vanities, but Spinozan ethics is oriented towards the pursuit of truth and emancipation from the self. The best-known part of his philosophy, De servitute humana (“Of human bondage”), is his account of our enslavement to the passions. The paradox of Spinoza’s rationalist ethics is that this strict determinist, who denies free will in any form, can nevertheless offer a vision of liberation.
Daniel Johnson; The Critic
Men are lost - Here’s a map out of the wilderness
Of course, a masculinity defined solely in opposition to women — or to the gains of feminism, more specifically — doesn’t provide a true road map to the future. Perhaps most alarmingly, many of the visions of masculinity these figures are pushing are wildly antisocial, untethered to any idea of good.
Christine Emba; The Washington Post
The Picasso problem
Nevertheless, for all his casual or considered misogyny … when Olga Khokhlova died in 1955 following 20 years of estrangement – not divorce – Picasso’s former mistresses called him up and proposed marriage “now that he was free” (at least, according to the then maîtresse-en-titre Jacqueline Roque). Of course, Picasso’s morality is of interest only because of his art.
Michael Prodger; New Statesman
Tentacle Erotica (2011)
The scholar Charles Stuckey first brought to light the possible connections between Painlevé’s La Pieuvre and Picasso’s paintings, though the octopus analogy had been made before to describe the permutations to which Picasso subjected his lover’s likeness. “A woman seated in a chair could resemble the convulsed tentacles of an octopus,” Roland Penrose wrote in his biography of Picasso, here referring not to Marie-Thérèse but to a 1929 portrait of Olga in an armchair, her thin, ropy limbs draped about her in repose.
Michael Cary; ARTnews
Art in Mad Men: Cooper’s Office – The Dream of the Fisherman’s Wife (2010)
Similar themes of human females having sexual intercourse with sea life have been displayed since the 17th century in Japanese netsuke, small carved sculptures only a few inches in height and often extremely elaborate.
Art in Mad Men
Spartans Were Losers
Sparta’s military mediocrity seems inexplicable given the city-state’s popular reputation as a highly militarized society, but modern scholarship has shown that this, too, is mostly a mirage. The agoge, Sparta’s rearing system for citizen boys, frequently represented in popular culture as akin to an intense military bootcamp, in fact included no arms training or military drills and was primarily designed to instill obedience and conformity rather than skill at arms or tactics.
Bret Devereaux; Foreign Policy
The Ideal Man Exists - But we refuse to admit it
[When] it comes to gender, at least, young men and boys are telling us, often literally, that they desperately need and desire direction, norms, and a concrete rubric for how to be a man —not just a “good person,” — and that in fact the lack of said norms is causing considerable distress. Why not meet them where they are, instead of blithely telling them that, actually, they should just get more like you?
Christine Emba; Wisdom of Crowds
What Socrates Can Teach Us About AI
The philosopher Harry Frankfurt famously argued that bullshit is speech that is typically persuasive but is detached from a concern with the truth. Large language models are the ultimate bullshitters because they are designed to be plausible (and therefore convincing) with no regard for the truth. Bullshit doesn’t need to be false. Sometimes bullshitters describe things as they are, but if they are not aiming for the truth, what they say is still bullshit.
Carissa Véliz; TIME
Reproductive health needs more hard science, not just more apps
From a career perspective, as noted historian economist Claudia Goldin stresses, the gender wage gap is in large part a “motherhood gap”: the gap is much smaller for women without children. However, when women become mothers their earnings take a major hit & do not really recover. She has proposed solutions for this, including “changes in the labor market, especially how jobs are structured and remunerated to enhance temporal flexibility”. However, recent data points to the fact that generous childcare policies do not lead to gender convergence. But it seems to me like a more fundamental solution is ignored, perhaps because it’s so outside our current grasp: enabling women to take control of their fertility and have kids later in life, when their careers are more advanced.
Ruxandra
In Defence Of Caroline Calloway
Born in Florida to downwardly mobile parents with a penchant for hoarding, Caroline explores her early obsession with poshness that is cemented at boarding school (“As every student at Phillips Exeter Academy will learn, it’s not who you know. It’s whom.”). SCAMMER is the story of an artist’s genesis, one in which Caroline portrays herself as doggedly, impressively resolute: “Some people are plagued by uncertainty – they don’t know what they want to do with their lives. My affliction is that I have only ever wanted to be one very specific thing,” she writes.
Kitty Grady; British Vogue
The Geography of Personality
There are certain rooms in houses that may make you feel petulant and childish. There are great cities that may make you feel instantly small. (I know some people are energized by New York. I feel crushed by it.) There may be beautiful vistas that alienate you rather than embrace you. As I get older, I try to resist letting the patterns and preferences of others dictate where I go. So much of travel is spent trying to find a better version of yourself.
Benjamin Carlson
Plastic People
What Barbie does and doesn’t know is the central narrative conceit of the film. After being called a fascist, for instance, Barbie wails: “But I don’t control the railway or the flow of commerce!” It’s one of the film’s funniest moments, a joke that stems from an implausible excess of historical knowingness—a point that Ben Shapiro harped on in his forty-three-minute rant about the film’s incoherencies.
Jane Hu; Dissent
I Was Wrong About Trigger Warnings
In my interviews with women who have experienced sexual violence, I try not to put the traumatic event at the center of our conversations. My aim instead is to learn as much as I can about them as people—their families, their work, their interests, what makes them happy, and where they feel the most themselves. And I always end our conversations by asking them to reflect on how far they’ve come, and what they are proudest of.
That last question often elicits a powerful response. I started asking it because I hoped to let the women I met feel seen in full, beyond the worst things that had happened to them.
Jill Filipovic; The Atlantic
The Novelist’s Complicity
And if television can reach a wider audience than novels ever did, isn’t the goal of broadening empathy better served by those superbly well-written TV dramas?
The question, however, remains: Should the demise of the literary novel trouble us? I think the answer is “yes,” but not nearly as much as some literary novelists would have you think.
Zia Haider Rahman; The New York Review
How Misreading Adam Smith Helped Spawn Deaths of Despair
Drug deaths account for more than half of all deaths of despair in the United States and more in Scotland... The increases are more rapid for men than for women: women are less likely to die of heart attacks than are men, and so have benefited less from the decline in heart disease that had long been a leading cause of falling mortality. Scotland does worse than the UK, and is more like the United States, though Scots women do worse than American women; a history of heavy smoking does much to explain these Scottish outcomes.
Angus Deaton; Boston Review
Like-minded sources on Facebook are prevalent but not polarizing
These precisely estimated results suggest that although exposure to content from like-minded sources on social media is common, reducing its prevalence during the 2020 US presidential election did not correspondingly reduce polarization in beliefs or attitudes.
Nature
Milan Kundera’s sexual revolutions
[He] is ... vehement in calling the West a different civilisation, too. He even refers to central-European culture (baroque, drawn to the irrational, musical) as the “opposite pole” from that of France (classical, rational, literary).
Christopher Caldwell; New Statesman
The Three-City Problem of Modern Life
C. S. Lewis, in the first chapter of his book The Abolition of Man, writes that “the Chest” of a person is the central meeting place, the middle term, between their visceral, intellectual, and spiritual dimensions. He was writing well before the rise of Silicon Valley, of course. But his haunting phrase could just as well describe the future that we’re building—one without a “middle section,” or without a Chest—without an intersection and unifying core or center. The future will be dystopian, he writes, because “we make men without chests and expect from them virtue and enterprise. We laugh at honor and are shocked to find traitors in our midst.”
Luke Burgis; WIRED
‘A smorgasbord of unlikability’: the authors helping ‘sad girl lit’ grow up
The book’s cover will probably feature a devastated-looking woman with her hair covering her face or her head cradled in her hands.
What you’ll have been reading is sad girl literature – a trend in literary fiction that has come to dominate publishing in the last decade. Books in this genre focus on navel-gazing characters defined by their vulnerability and erratic behaviour. The popularity of these books is difficult to overstate…
Sarah Manavis; The Guardian
Forging the mRNA Revolution — Katalin Karikó
“So there is a very small difference between DNA and RNA. The major one is that the DNA is double-stranded, the RNA is single-stranded. But beside that, the chemical composition is just hydroxyl, and extra hydroxyl is present on the sugar part of RNA which makes it very labile. You don't even need an enzyme to cut it up. If you just store it in a room temperature, sooner or later your RNA is degraded.
This is its role also in the body. And that was the reason, actually from the '50s, they already were looking for this messenger RNA, and they couldn't find it because it was so labile. So in 1961, in two papers published in Nature, the word labile was in the title in both of those papers. Labile.”
The Jolly Swagman Podcast
Global Boiling
This decade is different. We are being battered by extraordinary events at an accelerating clip, and today’s public is increasingly aware that we live in an omnicidal anthropocene. That awareness, however, does not necessarily lead to action.
Kate Mackenzie, Tim Sahay; Phenomenal World
Michael Rosen: ‘Caring Is the Greatest Thing We Can Do for Each Other’
“I’ll just say that an enormous amount of what you are talking about here — life, death, that moment, that border, whether you are going to now or when it is, and my attitudes to it — is informed by people from the [British National Health Service]. I did two years of medical training, and, of course, that was totally imbued with a vision of the NHS. You develop an attitude to the mind and body — once you’re getting into handling a cadaver, studying physiology — that’s scientific. That formation taught me to be quite medical about my attitudes to life and death.”
Ronan Burtenshaw; Tribune
The nice and the good - Four women philosophers at odds on the nature of morality
In her most famous essay, “The Idea of Perfection” (1964), Murdoch rails against Stuart Hampshire’s picture of rational action, will and choice (now long lost to history), according to which, in her rendering, “morality is a matter of thinking clearly and then proceeding to outward dealings with other men”. “On this view”, she complained, “one might say that morality is assimilated to a visit to a shop. I enter the shop in a condition of totally responsible freedom, I objectively estimate the features of the goods, and I choose. The greater my objectivity and discrimination the larger the number of products from which I can select … Both as act and reason, shopping is public.”
Kate Manne; Time Literary Supplement
Some Awkward Truths About the ‘Big Lie’
While Americans have plenty of capacity to engage in political violence (given the extraordinary ubiquity of guns in this country, for instance), the appetite to engage in political violence does not seem to be especially strong.
Musa al-Gharbi
Edward Said: The condition of exile (2022)
Reading Said, one gets the sense that his strong political convictions were constantly being modulated by the highly nuanced effect of his style. Although he was a fervent partisan in the struggle against Western hegemony, he considered a “critical consciousness” essential for the kind of “secular criticism” he valued, especially if such criticism was oppositional by nature.
Anouar Majid; Times Literary Supplement
Making a Living Is More Than Work - Thoreau’s loafing and the purpose of life
Independent, yes. Work loving, no. If Thoreau has a reputation for being suspicious of work, it is well earned. In Walden and elsewhere, he is a relentless critic of common ways of working…
Jonathan Malesic; The Hedgehog Review
I’m moving into my own place, and I’m sad about it
We seem to be doing life backward: We live alone and expend effort to gather together, as if that’s the healthy baseline; instead of starting with togetherness as the foundation, and striking out for aloneness when we need it.
Catherine Woodiwiss
Feeling the Sting of Time with PJ Harvey
I wasn’t intending to make an album out of the poetry book. I usually have a melodic idea and a chord progression, and then I just form nonsensical words to play with the melody. I often pull at poems, just to see if they sing. My head was so engrossed in the writing of “Orlam” that it felt natural for me to sing my way through it. As I’ve become more involved in learning the craft of poetry, it’s become difficult for me to see music or drawing or poetry as different categories. They often bleed into each other.
Amanda Petrusich; The New Yorker
How To Overhaul Higher Education
Making college better will depend, to a great extent, on what happens beyond the walls.
William Deresiewicz; Persuasion
I look forward to your list every week, and this one does not disappoint. Thanks for your great curation!
Hey Anna - loving this curation of readings. It's a refreshing way to spend a Saturday morning.
We wrote a thing on Barbie & Oppenheimer ... would be interested in your takehttps://reidsonfilm.substack.com/p/barbenheimer