Anna Gát: What to Read This Weekend #37
Middle East and Russia, death and miracles, placentas and patriarchy, friendship and gravity, flirting and writing. And Orwell, Camus, George Eliot, Gary Becker, Taylor Swift, Thomas Mann, Streisand.
Hello from New York City, friends! Just got back from the OSV retreat in Connecticut, heading to the Novitate Conference in DC, and can’t wait for winter to arrive all of a sudden on Wednesday 😬
Keeping this short because there’s so much insanely good stuff to read this weekend. Click, share, and let me know what you think! x Anna
Age of Miracles
If you’re reading this, you have the chance to live in an Age of Miracles. Of the 100 billion people who have walked the earth, we’re the lucky ones who get to experience the best part. But it’s going to take some work.
Packy McCormick
The Trap — I Refuse to be Recruited
The division of the world into intrinsically opposed hordes and swarms attacks the very notion of shared humanity. I refuse to indulge in the despair that accepts the logic of the enemies of mankind.
John Ganz
If you’re so smart, why don’t you lead a better life?
The world of ideas is an intoxicating one. There is a deep joy inherent in thinking about things in terms of concepts and abstractions and theories and mental models and frameworks. People often think in metaphors whether they realize it or not, and building up a larger metaphorical vocabulary brings us many benefits. But at the end of the day, how well-dressed and well-tossed a word salad is often doesn’t correlate to how well it works!
Shahid HN (via Interintellect)
Why Smart Leaders Do Stupid Things -- Is Foreign Policy Rational?
If Russia goes on to lose the war in Ukraine or if Putin loses power because of the conflict, the authors contend, it will therefore not be because the invasion was irrational.
Keren Yarhi-Milo; Foreign Affairs
Perilous Joy: George Eliot and the marriage question
Where earlier biographers had diagnosed in Eliot a weakness for male companionship, Rose saw that Eliot had rightly felt and fearlessly expressed her awareness that only sexual fulfillment would unlock her creativity. The bravest thing about her union with Lewes was her insistence on its rightness, which shocked stealthy libertines even more than pulpit bashers. As a husband in spirit rather than law, Lewes could invert accepted understandings of his marital power and devote himself to the realization of Eliot’s promise.
Michael Ledger-Lomas; The Point
The Practice of Friendship
Friendship transcends physical proximity and shared interests—it’s more fundamental than that. If friendship is shared context, all you need to do to make friends is to establish shared context, and all you need to deepen a friendship is to add more.
Tasshin
How I CEO (part #1): On not being the bottleneck.
As CEOs, our role is to steer the ship without stifling its momentum. Of course, in the early days, you will often be an individual contributor and part of the critical path to progress. Still, even then, it’s important to try to remove yourself as the bottleneck on as much of the process as possible.
Immad Akhund
My Old Friend Is Ripping Down Posters of Kidnapped Children
I haven’t talked to Sarah in twelve years. I don’t know how she went from the girl I performed with at Kresge Hall, ranting about feminism and consent—typical college-aged defiance and edge—to standing on a street corner, tearing apart pictures of kidnapped Israelis and flinging them to the ground like a dirty tissue.
Candace Mittel Kahn; The Free Press
Mood altering — How the French Revolution emerged from the streets
The “happenings”, or reaction-producing events, that Darnton covers include key moments in public life, such as state events, declarations of war, royal accessions, changes of minister and the like, but they also range through all other manner of public affairs, scandals, fads and crazes.
Colin Jones; Times Literary Supplement
WH Auden: September 1, 1939
The enlightenment driven away,
The habit-forming pain,
Mismanagement and grief:
We must suffer them all again.
Into this neutral air
Where blind skyscrapers use
Their full height to proclaim
The strength of Collective Man,
Each language pours its vain
Competitive excuse…
Italo Calvino’s imaginary worlds
One of the many wonderful things about Calvino is that he is never fashionably cynical. Happy endings – where appropriate – are embraced. This happy new beginning allowed Calvino to write the kind of fantasy fabulae that opened up the stolid ground of the middle-class novel. Instead of pretending to talk about real life, Calvino went wildly into the life of the imagination. He discovered that he did not need to write directly about the world he lived in in order to mirror it. Like Perseus fighting the Gorgon, Calvino no longer looked straight at the monster, but at the reflection of the monster in his shield.
Jeanette Winterson; New Statesman
Visa’s wisdom
Repeat after me, if you feel like it:
Life is hard, and full of rejection and failure.
But.
I will never be the one to count myself out.
I will never take up arms against myself.
I will never be the one to sabotage me.
I’m on my side and I root for me to succeed.
Congrats to Sharan and Visa for the arrival of their first baby! 💗
Bros Are Coming for BookTok. These TikTokers Aren’t Having It
“A lot of people would just automatically assume since I’m a guy talking about [these books] I must think it’s the best literature in the world and I know better than they do,” Ludwig says. “And that’s not the case. Good literature is good literature. Unfortunately, these bros have ruined a lot of the dialogue surrounding certain classics.”
CT Jones; Rolling Stone
GOAT. The role of personality in economics.
Cowen is now putting his ideas into practice in his new book GOAT: Who is the Greatest Economist of all Time and Why Does it Matter?
GOAT has a Plutarchan structure, with each chapter assessing one economist individually. Importantly, Cowen closely relates the life and personality of the economist to their work and ideas. He sees that the personal and the impersonal are more closely related than we often admit.
Henry Oliver
No Human Being Can Exist
Those of us, like my friend, who are summoned by Western media outlets to provide a Palestinian perspective on the disaster unfolding in Gaza are well aware of the condition on which we are allowed to speak…
Saree Makdisi; n+1
Beyond all reason: Wuthering Heights – still baffling, still strange
Heathcliff looms over Wuthering Heights. In a story dominated by family dynamics, he has no parents, and his origins are unknown.
Dinah Birch; Times Literary Supplement
A Post Mortem on the Gino Case
The story so far is very banal. I, a (very) early-career researcher, took a deep dive into a famous paper and discovered inconsistencies. These stories always start with “that’s odd…”, “it doesn’t make any sense…”, or “there is something off here…”. Then, I second-guessed myself, a lot. After all, the authors are famous, serious people; and the paper is published in a prestigious peer-reviewed journal. So I thought “I must have misunderstood,” “I must be missing a part of the puzzle,” “it was probably addressed during the peer review process”… Then, as I finally grew more confident that the issues were real and substantial, I decided to write about them.
Zoé Ziani
What’s punishment like in small-scale societies?
Contrary to the idea that third-party punishment is universal and has shaped the evolution of human cooperation, people often seem indifferent to transgressions that do not affect them directly, even for serious transgressions such as murder.
Pat Barclay; Human Behavior and Evolution Society
What The Left Can Learn From Camus After Hamas' Attack on Israel
Out of this context comes the quip from Camus that been misquoted into a cliché, though it is kind of perfect in its moral simplicity. “People are now planting bombs in the tramways of Algiers,” he said. “My mother might be on one of those tramways. If that is justice, then I prefer my mother."
Elisabeth Zerofsky; Wisdom of Crowds
Why Do We Get Sick? The New Science of Evolutionary Medicine
The human body is a mosaic of trade-offs. Things that benefit us in one area often hurt us in another—and these unavoidable trade-offs mean that we’re stuck with some built-in flaws and foibles.
Laith Al-Shawaf; Areo
Toss the Link Salads? Or Eat Them?
The Hungarian founder of the global literary salon organization Interintellect, Anna Gát releases a weekly digest called What to Read This Weekend, where she shares links and quotes to everything she read and liked that week. It’s rich with essays you probably wouldn’t find on your own, some new and some older.
Charlotte Dune
A Review of Daniel Stein, Interpreter by Ludmila Ulitskaya
Despite a continual metamorphosis, Daniel Stein, Interpreter, never retreats from its history—not even in the dramatic conversion from Judaism to Christianity that Daniel undergoes while hiding in a Polish nunnery. The change seems out of character, yet according to Daniel’s reading of the New Testament, Christian revelation is itself a Jewish discovery.
Josh Billings; The Literary Review
The moms eating placenta gummies and smoothies: ‘Celebrities made this mainstream’
Traditionally, the practice is mostly used by midwives or doulas who present the postpartum snack in domestic settings. You might imagine a new mother eating a placenta that’s been cooked with spices and herbs (like ginger or garlic) a few hours after she’s had a home birth. But now, companies like Lancaster Placenta Co have rebranded placentophagy as lab-grade and mess-free, giving birth to a mini-industry of placenta encapsulation.
Alaina Demopoulos; The Guardian
The now-underrated Gary Becker
Becker emphasized gains from specialization between household members, such as husbands and wives. Obviously, a lot has changed since Becker wrote on the household gender division of labour. But should his insights be considered passé? I think not. There is still division of labour within the household, but now complete specialization is quite rare, and furthermore, specialization often takes forms different from the Beckerian “market vs household” division. Beckerian economics can help us make sense of these changes.
Peter Isztin (via Interintellect)
Reproducibility trial: 246 biologists get different results from same data sets
In a massive exercise to examine reproducibility, more than 200 biologists analysed the same sets of ecological data — and got widely divergent results. The first sweeping study of its kind in ecology demonstrates how much results in the field can vary, not because of differences in the environment, but because of scientists’ analytical choices.
Anil Oza; Nature
RIP Culture War Thread (2019)
It doesn’t matter if taboo material makes up 1% of your comment section; it will inevitably make up 100% of what people hear about your comment section and then of what people think is in your comment section. Finally, it will make up 100% of what people associate with you and your brand. The Chinese Robber Fallacy is a harsh master…
Scott Alexander
Satan in Goray, by Isaac Bashevis Singer (1956)
Satan in Goray shows us the crumbling fabric of Jewish life in a mid-17th century community (an actual one) that, having endured the horrible Chmelnitzky pogroms, was overwhelmed by the mad hopes and despairs of the Sabbatai Zvi movement.
Judd L. Teller; Commentary
Rose-Tinted Patriarchy
When women work for family-owned enterprises, they remain under the control of kin. Market, factory and office employment offer far greater possibilities for female solidarity. Through paid work in the public sphere, women gain esteem, build diverse friendships, discover more egalitarian alternatives, collectively criticise patriarchal privileges, and become emboldened to resist unfairness.
Of all women workers in India, only 15% are in services. Only a tiny tiny minority have the opportunity to mix and mingle, build friendships and expand their horizons.
Alice Evans
The Marked Woman (2017)
Like their parents, Mollie and her sisters had their names inscribed on the Osage Roll, which meant that they were among the registered members of the tribe. It also meant that they possessed a fortune. In the early eighteen-seventies, the Osage had been driven from their lands in Kansas onto a rocky, presumably worthless reservation in northeastern Oklahoma, only to discover, decades later, that this land was sitting above some of the largest oil deposits in the United States. To obtain that oil, prospectors had to pay the Osage in the form of leases and royalties.
David Grann; The New Yorker
Is It Time To Trust-Bust Taylor Swift? - The pop singer's new concert film inadvertently makes the case for big businesses with sweeping market power.
Swift used her star leverage not only to sell tickets to her own movie but to reshape the rest of the market: After reportedly entering into talks with several Hollywood studios to distribute the film and coming away disappointed, Swift circumvented the usual distribution arrangements and struck a distribution deal directly with the AMC theater chain.
Peter Suderman; Reason
Spanish clergy sexually abused more than 200,000 children, commission finds
“Today, we are a slightly better country, because a reality that everyone was for years aware of but no one talked about, has been made known,” the Socialist prime minister told reporters in Brussels.
Al Jazeera English
Menopausal chimpanzees deepen the mystery of why women stop reproducing
The females in a group of wild chimpanzees (Pan troglodytes) are the first non-human primates to be documented experiencing menopause.
Dyani Lewis; Nature
A Widow, 91, Speaks of ‘Unwritten Memories’ (1975)
Born Katia Pringsheim, she was the daughter of a Munich professor of mathematics and the granddaughter of a Jewish businessman… She had four brothers, and, she confided, as a child, she thought that if only she‐could sleep on her back all night she would wake up as a boy. But she would always wake up on the side. So she stayed a girl, and that girl fell in love with [Thomas Mann], first met on a Munich tramway.
When they married in 1905, she was 21 and he, 29. He was already a celebrated writer because in 1901, he had published “Buddenbrooks,” that classic novel about the decadence of a patrician family, directly transposed from the story of Mann's own family in Lübeck, and in 1903 one of his finest short stories, Tonio Krõger.
Andreas Freund; The New York Times
‘We are in the most sustained period of high crisis since 1962’ — in conversation with Philip Zelikow
“I think that the Hamas attack is the opening salvo of a commitment to violent revolutionary assault designed to polarise the Islamic world and make the position of the Saudis and their partners increasingly difficult… Many Americans have not begun to fully internalise the scale of risks, though the President has started to emphasise the stakes of this moment."
Angus Reilly; Engelsberg Ideas
Malibu Barbra: Inside Barbra Streisand’s World
Her vexed relationship with achievement underlies both the book and our conversation. She is supremely confident in her abilities and instincts, especially as a director—“I see everything as a movie,” she says—but she also tells me, without a trace of false modesty, that she believes both her good reviews and her bad ones because, as she says, “I’m not completely sure that what I do is so great.”
Radhika Jones; Vanity Fair
The Last Time I Saw Yaakov: No matter how political things seem, they are invariably personal (1995, just before Rabin’s assassination)
Two things about leaving Israel had been a huge relief to me: the absence of any clear risk of getting my limbs blown off; and the freedom from the endless talk about Israeli and Arab politics. In time, the circular arguments — the Holocaust and the necessity of a Jewish State, Palestinian terrorism, Arab antisemitism, Arab manipulation of the Palestinians as a tool against Israel, the Zionist justification of Israel — faded from my mind. So much so that when, on a Paris metro, a young Palestinian man, seeing a Star of David around my neck, felt obliged to make the victory sign at me and say “Vive la Palestine,” I felt nothing but agreement and curiosity. “Je suis tout fait d’accord,” I told him, “but why are you telling me this?”
“Because you’re a Jew.”
“Yeah, exactly. A Jew, not an Israeli.”
“But the two are like this,” he said, holding up two intertwined fingers, and was surprised when I began to laugh.
Neil Gordon; Boston Review
George Orwell Was a Temperamental Conservative and Ideological Radical
“Eileen once went out for the night,” Taylor writes, “leaving a shepherd’s pie in the oven for her husband and a dish of eels on the floor for the cat, and came home to find that Orwell had eaten the eels.”
Gustav Jönsson; Jacobin
Killers of the Flower Moon Turns Out to Be the Simplest, Slipperiest of Things
In so many ways, though, this is Lily Gladstone’s movie. She plays Mollie with a mix of standoffishness and exhausted hope. She can tell early on that Ernest is out for her money. So is every white man around her. But she comes to see charm and slivers of decency in him, too. As the horrors mount around her, Mollie navigates her queasy, gathering suspicions as well as her affection for her husband. Ernest is … well, he’s earnest. When he tells Mollie he loves her, she believes him. And so do we.
Bilge Ebiri; Vulture
Why Write Philosophy?
Few people write philosophy articles without at least some graduate training, but even the rankest of amateurs will not hesitate to try his hand at sketching, painting, song-writing, singing, or writing fiction or poetry.
… Where art-making is concerned, the activity itself is commonly viewed as self-justifying. Even if the product is mediocre or worse (and even if, as with unrecorded dance and performance art, it will not endure beyond the moment), the process of producing it is somehow viewed as having independent value. Insofar as this view can be defended, it suggests a second possible answer to our question; for writing philosophy is itself making a kind of art.
George Sher; Philosophy Now
One Flirting Technique Almost Always Works, According To Psychologists
People think that humour, or being able to make another person laugh, is most effective for men who are looking for a long-term relationship. It’s least effective for women who are looking for a one-night stand.
IFLScience
How to Procure Advanced Military Tech
Why does the Pentagon struggle to buy high-powered military technologies?
What tools let the American military work with startups?
Why are the incentives to manufacture military tech in the US so weak?
Jake Leffew; Statecraft
How to beat maths anxiety
Struggling with maths and having anxiety around it aren’t always linked. Some people who perform poorly in maths don’t get anxious about it, whereas others who are good at maths worry about it a lot.
Shayla Love; Psyche
A Grief Shared
I was back at college by the day my father died, in the middle of a Boston winter. I hugged my closest friend at the time, an atheist Jewish woman named Amy, in the quiet leafiness of Harvard Yard. She wept more than I did. She found herself discomfited by the finality of death, imagining what it would mean for her parents to lapse entirely from existence. I was aglow with faith in God, true, but I also didn’t have much of a connection to my father as a person. He had always been a startling absence in my life. The fact that the cause of absence was death now, rather than madness or my anger, was immaterial. I suppose I did mourn his death, but that mourning started long before he died and faded quickly once he was safely on the other side. What grief I experienced had to do with my vision of what ought to have been.
Samuel Brown; Wayfare
Staff at NYC cultural center resign after acclaimed author's event canceled
On Friday, 92NY was supposed to host [Viet Thanh Nguyen], who is promoting his new memoir A Man of Two Faces. The acclaimed author has won the Pulitzer Prize for fiction for his book The Sympathizer, and writes often about the experience of refugees. Earlier in the week, Nguyen joined more than 700 other writers in signing an open letter published in the in the London Review of Books calling for a ceasefire in Gaza.
Andrew Limbong; NPR