Anna Gát: What to Read This Weekend #29
Russian poisons, mourning poets, bad parties, lonesome singles, very liberal arts — slaughter, hospitality, Merve Emre, Harold Bloom, Vaclav Havel, DH Lawrence — progress, heaven, reputation, wombs...
Hi guys,
As you know it’s one of my great pleasures in life to find the best things to read every week, and this past week has been exceptionally good. I’m still diligently working though my volume-heavy Hilary Mantel phase every night, but the below selection really is irresistible. Also, I’ve just ordered Elizabeth Bruenig’s On Human Slaughter: Evil, Justice, Mercy. And we had a great Interintellect salon with Caroline Calloway on her new book Scammer — hosted by the brilliant Katherine Dee and Tara Isabella Burton. Video soon!
Lots to read so I stop here: let’s dive in! x Anna
The fragility of artists’ reputations from 1795 to 2020
Contrary to popular wisdom, we find that most artists’ reputations peak just before their death, and then start to decline. This decline is strongest for artists who were most popular during their lifetime. We show that artists’ reduced visibility and changes in the public’s aesthetic taste explain much of the posthumous reputation decline. This study highlights how social perception of historical figures can shift and emphasizes the vulnerability of human reputation.
Letian Zhang, Mitali Banerjee, Shinan Wang, Zhuoqiao Hong
How They Tried to Kill Me
“But I didn’t think I’d been poisoned...”
“Why didn’t you think so?”
“It seemed crazy to me. And I’m in Europe.”
“So what?”
“I felt like I was safe.”
“That is what drives us crazy,” the detective said. “You come here and act like you’re on vacation. Like this is some paradise. It doesn’t even occur to you to keep yourself safe. We have political killings here. The Russian special services are active in Germany. Your carelessness, yours and your colleagues, knows no bounds.”
Elena Kostyuchenko; n+1
I’ve had it with awful dinner parties
The table will be set, with napkins, fresh bread, and good-quality salt and pepper – an element very often missing from the dinner table. How do you ask for seasoning without insulting your host? Put the bloody salt and pepper on the table.
Julie Bindel; The Spectator
Take a Wife … Please!
Americans stopped being as happy, and they stopped getting married, and either the two trends don’t have much to do with each other, or glum people aren’t in the mood for wedding planning.
Olga Khazan; The Atlantic
The Loneliest Crowd
Loneliness is less about unmet desires than unmet needs, even if precise requirements vary between individuals and situations. Dehydration is an interesting comparison: The precise quantity of water our bodies need to function normally also varies between individuals and situations, but once the threshold of inadequacy has been reached, function is impaired, and various symptoms of dysfunction emerge. A similar dynamic is true of loneliness.
But what is the nature of this unmet need?
Ian Marcus Corbin; National Affairs
The Need for Mourning
Like play, mourning holds things in suspension: presence and absence, remembering and forgetting, reality and imagination. By letting us play with what we have lost, and thereby modulate its departure, mourning is a way of treasuring, of asserting value.
Paul Franz; The Hedgehog Review
Womb for improvement
Artificial wombs could make it possible to grow a baby from conception to birth outside the mother’s body – so women who cannot give birth could still have children if they want to.
Aria Babu; Works in Progress
The Blurb Problem Keeps Getting Worse
“The biggest thing to understand is that blurbs aren’t principally, or even really at all, aimed at the consumer. They are instead aimed at literary editors and buyers for the bookstores—in a sea of new books, having blurbs from, ideally, lots of famous writers will make it more likely that they will review/stock your book.”
Helen Lewis; The Atlantic
A Radical Hospitality
The medieval Rule of St. Benedict, which offers life guidance for monks living in Benedictine monasteries, includes an approach to hospitality that situates the one being served as the person of Christ the stranger. The Rule outlines how guests are to be treated with utmost respect precisely because they are guests, not for any reason other than their basic humanity. This forms the basis for a hospitality unconcerned with superficial niceness, but instead a complete openness to the other.
Jack Nuelle; Commonweal
When Stress Comes with Your Mother’s Milk
The current consensus among those who study milk cortisol is that it serves an evolutionary purpose: to help babies adapt, physiologically and behaviorally, to the world in which they are born. Cortisol reflects a mother’s circumstances—her resources, her social conflicts, and physical threats—and calibrates her baby’s behavior accordingly.
Jena Pincott; Nautilus
Putin has declared war on Russia
Western audiences often felt better about themselves believing Putin was tyrannising over a liberal and democratic Russia, a good Russia struggling to assert itself. But this was not the real Russia.
Bruno Maçães; New Statesman
The Bloomian Merve Emre
The Merve Emre profile reminded me of Harold Bloom. People often dislike public intellectuals with charisma. Bloom, of course, was often also venerated. What he and Emre share is an ability to perform authentically.
Henry Oliver
The Prophet of Decline - Harold Bloom’s influential anxieties (2002)
“Imaginative literature is otherness, and as such alleviates loneliness,” he writes in How to Read and Why. “We read not only because we cannot know enough people, but because friendship is so vulnerable.”
Larissa MacFarquhar; The New Yorker
Why You Are Probably An NPC
When the truth is easily verifiable, such as in mathematics, consensuses are formed in the ideal way: when all the experts reach the same conclusion. But when the truth is not easily verifiable, such as in medicine or the social sciences, consensus is formed not when all the experts reach the same conclusion but when a few experts reach the same conclusion and then all the other experts simply take their word for it.
Gurwinder
The Liberal Arts Are Dying Because Liberalism is Dying
Leo Strauss was a strong proponent of liberal arts education, and yet he was also aware that it is not for everyone. Socrates was put to death because most people, rightfully prefer myth to critical thinking. Strauss understood that Athens and Jerusalem are two competing ideals, two mutually exclusive models, for organizing society… Even the ancient Greeks did not think everyone should philosophize.
Zohar Atkins
Caroline Calloway and Natalie Beach, ex-friends, now have rival books
The plot of “Scammer” was bound to be mesmerizing, but the writing did not have to be so gloriously opulent. Calloway is as disarmingly self-aware as devotees of her Instagram would expect, but she is also surprisingly lyrical. “My Adderall usage had now become a closed circuit,” she writes wrenchingly of her addiction. “I didn’t do drugs to do other things anymore — I did the drugs to feel the drugs.” The days slowed down, then accelerated: “Time canters and then gallops on amphetamines. You blink, and it’s morning. Blink again, and: 3 PM.”
Becca Rothfeld; The Washington Post
When Havel Met Biden
The KGB ousted Gorbachev in a futile attempt to save the secret police regime that was collapsing under a great wave of human emancipation. The leader of that coup was the same Gennady Yanayev that Havel had met in Prague. The experience of signing the Warsaw Pact out of existence had been a humiliating one for Gorbachev’s deputy, who had sat through the ceremony in stony silence. But Havel had not initially comprehended the possible consequences of Russian humiliation.
Oscar Clarke; Quillette
The Gospel according to DH Lawrence
‘I have my own religion’, wrote DH Lawrence, in a letter ‘which to me is the truth.’ Remembered as a prophet of the sexual revolution, Lawrence was also, in his own words, a ‘passionately religious man’, whose novels were written ‘from the true depth of [his own] religious experience’.
Zachary Hardman; Engelsberg Ideas
How Individualism Changed the Economy - The Century of the Self and Life After Lifestyle
The cigarettes became these emotional tools, an irrelevant object that became intertwined with equality. They were used by women to express their freedom - something that was completely irrational, but the object was now a symbol. Advertising was about to massively change.
Kyla Scanlon
Inventing heaven
The idea of ascent to heaven after death was more common among Greek philosophers, such as Plato. In Platonic thought, human souls originally came from the stars and re-ascended to them after death. The visible heavens, with their ceaseless, regular and uniform motions, were separate from the regions of physical change and decay below on Earth. For Plato, the heavens and their motions provided the model for the ideal, orderly motion of rational thought. Studying astronomy was a way for the human soul to reorient itself to the pure rationality of the heavens and prepare for return there after death.
Stephen Case; Aeon
Chuck Palahniuk Is Not Who You Think He Is
I originally came to Portland to argue in favor of the Palahniuk-to-incel pipeline, but once I was disabused of that premise–first by reading the novels; then by speaking with Palahniuk–I discover something completely unexpected. What becomes clear to me during the eight and a half hours I spend with Palahniuk is that he cares about his characters—about their happiness—much more than I would have assumed, and that his primary objective as a storyteller is the emotional climax a reader can be brought to. The murder? The mayhem? The soap? These are merely his tools…
Jonathan Russell Clark; Esquire
The Baseball Player-Turned-Spy Who Went Undercover to Assassinate the Nazis’ Top Nuclear Scientist
While his teammates were batting for peace, Berg was preparing for the possibility of war…. Berg was “astute and aware of international relations.” Beyond the innate curiosity that defined his behavior, he was “thinking about things in the future,” and he took the footage “just in case [the U.S.] needed it.” Unbeknownst to Berg, he was also setting into motion what ranks among the strangest career changes in baseball history. The catcher from Newark was well on his way to becoming a spy.
Zachary Clary; Smithsonian Magazine
The Scientist as a Karma Yogi - On Oppenheimer and non-utilitarian, divinely inspired decision-making
It was not until after graduate school that I read the Bhagavad Gita, the ancient yogic text Dr. Oppenheimer not only famously quotes in the film, but purportedly deeply influenced his entire life's philosophy; and through it was introduced to a different way of looking at ethics, which has also deeply influenced me and how I approach my life and work. My karma, which is not any kind of punishment from God or the universe (as it is sometimes believed to be in New Age circles), is the weight that my past actions have not only on the world, but on myself. According to the Bhagavad Gita, following my dhamma, or my divine duty, is seen to be a wiser way to choose my actions than trying to predict their consequences. Following our dhamma entails acting out of our innate divinity (something like Aristotle’s concept of virtue), rather than our more selfish instincts in order to do what God asks of us.
Christina Waggaman
Why does Kinship Vary across the World? - Inherited wealth and the deep roots of patriarchy
Patrilocal clans guarded valuable herds and land, bequeathed these to sons, and idealised female seclusion. Where land was abundant, women moved more freely and could gain status as respected authorities.
Alice Evans
Zadie Smith Makes 1860s London Feel Alive, and Recognizable
More so than any other novel Smith has written, this is a book about novelists, and it is in lambasting the egos of male writers that Smith has the most fun. “God preserve me from that tragic indulgence, that useless vanity, that blindness!” [heroine Eliza Touchet] thinks, years before she takes the plunge into novel-writing herself.
Karan Mahajan; The New York Times
Why guys who post a lot on social media are seen as less manly
Notably, men are experiencing historic rates of social isolation and facing dire mental health consequences. This health crisis is likely exacerbated by pervasive biases that make men feel like they can’t talk about their problems or ask for help. The frequent-posting femininity stereotype reveals another instance in which men are judged for attempting to express themselves and build social connections.
As New York Times correspondent Claire Cain Miller wrote in 2018, there are “many ways to be a girl but one way to be a boy,” both in Western cultures and around the world.
What will it take for that rigid definition of manhood to be broadened?
Nathan B. Warren and Andrew Edelblum; The Conversation
Beware the Metagame (2018)
If you find yourself going to a lot of conferences, opining too much on the latest fad in your field, and talking more about doing the thing than doing the job itself, then you, my friend, are getting sucked into the metagame.
Amjad Masad
Goodreads Is Terrible for Books. Why Can’t We All Quit It?
Much has been written about the practice of “review bombing”—when users flood a forthcoming book with one-star reviews out of an agenda rather than textual engagement. The point isn’t for people to talk smack about a book they didn’t like but to hurt the fate of one they probably haven’t read and that probably isn’t out yet. Goodreads’ lack of content moderation, and the ensuing capacity to spook authors into decisive action, has been a problem for at least four years.
Tajja Isen; The Walrus
Pope says some ‘backward’ conservatives in US Catholic Church have replaced faith with ideology
Many conservatives have blasted Francis’ emphasis instead on social justice issues such as the environment and the poor, while also branding as heretical his opening to letting divorced and civilly remarried Catholics receive the sacraments.
Associated Press
The Economics of Global Rearmament
The broad direction for German weapon and ammo production is clearly upward, with trend-adjusted output up roughly 40% from pre-war levels, and more volatile headline data up more than 50%.
Joseph Politano
I, Exponential - Building Modern Cathedrals
The implication that we can’t build beautiful things anymore, that we’ve lost our way, that we must reject modernity, is misguided and backwards. Certainly, no one person, no matter how insanely gifted, knows how to make anything like the Duomo. No one person knows how to make anything, even a pencil…
Exponential technology curves are emergent cathedrals to humanity’s collective efforts. I realize that statement might elicit a “I am begging tech bros to take just one humanities course.”
Packy McCormick; No Boring
Public faith (2018)
I don’t consider myself to be actively religious, but religion was part of my cultural upbringing, as well as a personal interest. I spent time around Quakerism, Catholicism, Buddhism, and Islam, read religious texts and participated on forums, studied Hebrew so I could read Torah, and even tried (several times…) to create my own religion.
I’m curious about religion for many of the same reasons I’m curious about open source. They’re organizational systems that bind people tightly together, and whose norms, fascinatingly, didn’t derive from any one place, but rather from a shared consensus iterated upon by each passing generation.
Nadia Asparouhova
Up Close and Personal : MONSTER: Living Off the Big Screen (1997)
“Monster” is John Gregory Dunne’s nonfiction account of the eight years that he and his wife, Joan Didion, worked as writers on the film “Up Close and Personal,” released in 1996. The book is a remarkable narrative--part memoir, part diary, part confessional--that tells more about the experience of writing for Hollywood than any other book ever written. It is also a very funny horror story.
Michael Crichton; Los Angeles Times
A home for retired playground animals just opened in NYC
Until now, these animals were just thrown out, but starting now, they'll be added to the "retirement home" at Flushing Meadows-Corona Park.
Time Out
What a Heat Wave Does to Your Body
The human body is astonishingly good at cooling itself off. The hypothalamus, an almond-size structure deep inside the brain, responds to heat by stimulating sweat production. It also speeds up the heart, dilates blood vessels, and shunts blood to the extremities. The basic principle is to get hot blood near the skin, where heat can dissipate in a number of ways. When we touch something cold, like gel in an ice pack (or the slush in a body bag), it can dissipate through conduction. When air currents wash over us, it can leave through convection. Heat can be lost directly, through radiation, in the form of electromagnetic waves. Most importantly, as we sweat, evaporation cools our skin. The problem with extreme heat is that it makes the first three mechanisms less effective, or even turns them into routes for gaining heat. When humidity rises, the fourth mechanism weakens, too.
Dhruv Kullar; The New Yorker
The incredible shrinking future of college
The problem now is that colleges have likely hit a ceiling in terms of how many 18-year-olds they can coax onto campus.
Kevin Carey; Vox
Francoise Gilot Was More Than Picasso’s Muse—She Lived Life on Her Own Terms
One retort would be that Gilot herself never believed that she had to sever her name from that of her former lover. Aside from writing two books about him, she was happy to exhibit her own work at the Musée Picasso in Antibes in 1987, and then in 2012 to cocurate a his-and-hers show of their work at Gagosian gallery in New York. So the answer is: yes, you do need to mention Picasso to understand Gilot, and that was something she was never ashamed of. Just don’t call her his “muse,” as did the Washington Post, among others.
Barry Schwabsky; ARTnews
We Need a New Science of Progress - Humanity needs to get better at knowing how to get better (2019)
For a number of reasons, there is no broad-based intellectual movement focused on understanding the dynamics of progress, or targeting the deeper goal of speeding it up. We believe that it deserves a dedicated field of study. We suggest inaugurating the discipline of “Progress Studies.”
Patrick Collison and Tyler Cowen; The Atlantic
Study: Sweden's 'Laissez Faire' Pandemic Policies Paid Off
The reliance on voluntary compliance meant Swedes were more willing to comply with pandemic precautions for longer. Mandatory COVID restrictions in other countries bred backlash to any countermeasures, leading to a greater number of deaths later on.
Christian Britschgi; Reason
Disappearing Books, AI Ghosts, and War Mammoths: September’s Best Sci-Fi and Fantasy Books
Ever since Emily Wilson stole our breaths in 2017 with the opening line of her translation of The Odyssey—“Tell me about a complicated man”—it’s as if we’ve been waiting for the proverbial other shoe to drop. That shoe, of course, being her translation of Homer’s other epic poem The Iliad, the prequel to Odysseus’ nigh-impossible journey home.
Natalie Zutter; Literary Hub
“Invisible Killer”: Seasonal Allergies and Accidents
Although at least 400 million people suffer from seasonal allergies worldwide, the adverse effects of pollen on “non-health” outcomes, such as cognition and productivity, are relatively understudied. Using ambulance archives from Japan, we demonstrate that high pollen days are associated with increased accidents and injuries—one of the most extreme consequences of cognitive impairment.
Mika Akesaka and Hitoshi Shigeoka
The Hidden Brain Connections Between Our Hands and Tongues
That connection is borne out by research showing that hand and mouth movements are tightly coordinated. In fact, that interplay often improves performance. Martial artists scream short explosive utterances, called kiai in karate, as they execute thrusting movements; tennis players often shout as they smack the ball. And research shows that coupling hand movements with specific mouth movements, often with vocalization, shortens the reaction time needed to do both. This neural coupling is so innate, we are usually oblivious to it.
R. Douglas Fields; Quanta
On Good Authority - Criticism after #MeToo
As #MeToo’s initial tear of reckoning echoed through the fall of 2017, [new] questions dominated cultural discourse in a way that felt potentially enduring: as the high-powered sex pests toppled like dominoes, it seemed as if a new paradigm lay ahead, waiting to be shaped. But the moment proved brief. I
R. E. Hawley; The Point