Anna Gát: What to Read This Weekend #34
Nation-making, Nobel Prizes, outer limits of philosophy and knowledge, adulting, school debates, startups, poets, muses, population genetics, science funding, civilization states, curing depression...
Hey folks! This was a special week for me as a dear friend visited me in Lisbon before I’d head off to the US! So, I took 3 days off, we went to the beach, shopping, and ate amazing seafood. I feel blessed to have been able to host her. At Interintellect, this was a very big week: we listed online SuperSalons with Bruno Maçães (hosted by Bronwyn Williams) on the geopolitical future, as well as Christine Emba and Shadi Hamid (hosted by me) on the crisis of masculinity. We have more amazing listings coming up, including with Tyler Cowen (hosted by Alaka Halder) on December 8, ticket link coming next week! If you’re free on Tuesday, come to my online conversation Forgetting and Forgiving: A Story-Sharing Salon.
And there’s this beautiful new video our team made for Alex Criddle’s upcoming online salon series Breakthroughs: The Great Paradigm Shifts of History:
Excellent pieces to read this week as well. Scroll down to see my selection for you. x Anna
How to make a nation
“We are fascinated by, and some of the time long to return to, those small, confined collectivities that seem to have provided a degree of security and stability absent from the present. Nostalgia always points us toward what we have lost and would like to have again, or at least to what we think we would like to have again.” Enthusiasts for localism, integralism, and communitarianism tend to share aspects of this fascination.
Brian Smith; Engelsberg Ideas
The ends of knowledge
Once we start looking for the ends of knowledge, then, we notice that interlocking questions about purpose and completeness are central to many of our scholarly undertakings.
Rachael Scarborough King; Aeon
Nobel peace prize 2023: jailed Iranian women’s rights campaigner Narges Mohammadi wins award
Asked how she will physically be awarded the prize in December, [Berit Reiss-Andersen, chair of the Norwegian Nobel Committee] says she hopes that the Iranian government will make “the right decision” by releasing her to receive the prize.
The Guardian Live
Parenting Is Always a Ghost Story: A Conversation with Yael Goldstein-Love
“We’re haunted by our own experiences of being parented, as well as by our parents’ experiences of being parented...”
Claire Jarvis; Los Angeles Review of Books
Will Funders Have The Patience to Reform Science?
The reform of science cannot be motivated only by the outcomes it delivers, because those outcomes may be (very) long in coming.
Tim Hwang
How do I know I’m an adult? I’m given unsolicited feedback
The ‘feedback’ I receive has increased significantly since the Covid lockdowns: I went into the pandemic aged 29 and came out at 31. Apparently, during that time of great isolation, I was supposed to have assembled the picture-perfect family.
Kate Andrews; The Spectator
You can't fake the core
Sometimes what we want is impossible. The life you want to live is not the life that wants to live in you. And to be become who you actually are, to honor your calling, your feelings, your joy, requires you choosing the life that wants you back.
Ava; Bookbear Express
On Genius, Intellect, and Obsession
Genius is often depicted as innate and general intellectual ability; someone is born a genius or they aren’t. I think this depiction is wrong - genius doesn’t arise of its own accord, and is in fact a consequence of a lifelong process predicated on other in-born characteristics. I once said … that genius is about caring about something more than a reasonable person cares about anything; actualized genius is the product of obsessive patterns of thought, coupled with raw intellectual power, carried through a lifetime.
Anton Troynikov
For Argument's Sake - In praise of high school debate (2022)
“Next,” the suit would yell, scattering sheaves of paper onto the ground as soon as he finished reading them. Next would be the “counterplan,” an alternative policy proposal that supposedly averted whatever nuclear catastrophe the plan prevented and also averted an additional nuclear catastrophe that the plan caused. Perhaps NATO or the U.N. should be the one to offer incentives, or so the negative would propose…
Becca Rothfeld; The Yale Review
An Owner's Guide to the Human Genome: an introduction to human population genetics, variation and disease
In this book I describe the forces that govern genetic variation including mutation, drift, recombination and selection, as well as what genetics teaches us about human history, and the role of genetic variation in human phenotypes and diseases. When complete, the book will combine the three pillars of human population genetics - population genetics, population history, and trait genetics - under a single umbrella, with a focus on examples and applications in human genetics.
Jonathan Pritchard; Stanford University
As Western Liberalism Declines, Civilization States Return
A civilization state is rooted in a fully developed political philosophy rather than a racial or national identity. To the extent that a civilization state expresses a theory of how best to organize political society, it tends to transcend religious belief in the direction of rational thought. But as opposed to liberalism, the civilization state refrains from expressing a final truth.
Bruno Maçães; Noema
Burnout dominated 2021. Here’s the history of our burnout problem. (2022)
The term “burn-out” was already in circulation in [Herbert Freudenberger’s] professional world. An official at a rehabilitation center for young adult offenders in Southern California mentioned it as a “phenomenon” among treatment staff in a 1969 paper. St. Mark’s Free Clinic workers used the term to describe themselves, but they may have picked it up from the East Village streets, where people used it to describe heroin users’ veins: Inject into a spot long enough, and it becomes useless, burned out. In a 1980 book, Freudenberger compared “Burn-Outs” like himself to burned-out buildings.
Jonathan Malesic; The Washington Post
The Great Silence - The path to Jon Fosse’s Septology
Fosse must, if his critical reception is any indication, tap into something that a Knausgaard does not. Far from the latter’s consummate autofictional ego, who has excelled at what the critic Lee Konstantinou has called “the aesthetic gesture … that takes place at the intersection of genre and marketing,” Fosse seems less like a producer of commodities than a country priest distributing pamphlets.
Ben Libman; The Point
Review of 1,039 studies indicates exercise can be more effective than counselling or medication for depression
We reviewed 97 review papers, which involved 1,039 trials and 128,119 participants. We found doing 150 minutes each week of various types of physical activity (such as brisk walking, lifting weights and yoga) significantly reduces depression, anxiety, and psychological distress, compared to usual care (such as medications). The largest improvements (as self-reported by the participants) were seen in people with depression, HIV, kidney disease, in pregnant and postpartum women, and in healthy individuals, though clear benefits were seen for all populations.
Ben Singh, Carol Maher, and Jacinta Brinsley; PsyPost
Wittgenstein vs Wittgenstein
Logical analysis brought philosophy to maturation the way math did for physics, allowing it to put away the childish things of its past by “clear[ing] up two millennia of muddle-headedness about ‘existence,’ beginning with Plato’s Theaetetus” (Russell 1945, 831). In particular, logic enabled him to avoid anything that remotely smacks of Kantian anti-realism. The idea that “the mind is in some sense creative... is essential to every form of Kantianism” but “all knowledge must be recognition, on pain of being mere delusion; Arithmetic must be discovered in just the same sense in which Columbus discovered the West Indies, and we no more create numbers than he created the Indians” (Russell 1996, 450–51). Only thus is it the world that our philosophy is capturing and not our own shadows on the wall.
Lee Braver; Institute of Art and Ideas
Anduril: Acquiring Prime - Analyzing Anduril's M&A Strategy and the Future of Defense
Every successful company has a “thing.” Of all of the many things they do, there’s one that’s the secret sauce, the thing they do better than anyone else. SpaceX can get kilograms to orbit more cheaply than anyone else. Meta connects people. Google dominates search…
Anduril’s “thing” … is its ability to sell modern defense capabilities into the DoD.
Packy McCormick; Not Boring
Feeling Stressed? Read a Poem
With their daughter in the hospital suffering from kidney failure, Jonathan Bate and his wife Paula Byrne waited. “In that darkest moment, when she was struggling to survive, it was very hard to think of anything other than the prospect of losing her,” Bate says today. Bate and Byrne, both renowned literary scholars and biographers, found no relief. “We waited in the hospital and there was nothing to read but a tatty celebrity magazine,” Bate recalls. Following a kidney transplant, with their daughter doing well, Bate and Byrne had an idea. “What about putting together an anthology of poems to help people through dark times?” Bate says. “Perhaps a mindful reading of a poem can help restore the balance of the nervous system.”
Marissa Grunes; Nautilus
Weight-loss shots like Ozempic are changing the game for some women with obesity and hormone disorders trying to conceive
Experts say that little Bryce Phillip Bradley is far from the only baby whose conception appears to have been helped along by drugs like Ozempic and Mounjaro. While designed as a stunningly effective treatment for diabetes, these medications — known as GLP-1 inhibitors — are perhaps better known for their success in helping patients shed pounds. Doctors told Insider they are also helping some women with PCOS … get pregnant.
Emily Farache; Insider
Why Characters Write: First-person narrators and the stories they tell.
The problem is more acute in stories narrated in the first person, since, fairly or not, that mode of narration more directly raises the logistical question of how we readers have access to the story. Is someone speaking? Was this story written down at some point? If so, why? And by whom?
Richard Hughes Gibson; The Hedgehog Review
They Studied Dishonesty. Was Their Work a Lie?
Even if the defamation counts are dismissed soon, Gino’s suit will cost Data Colada tens of thousands of dollars in legal fees. The research community has rallied behind the members of Data Colada; a group of colleagues set up a GoFundMe on their behalf, which raised almost two hundred thousand dollars in twenty-four hours. Ariely’s lab has lost two of its biggest funders, and morale is low. Although he remains brash and witty in conversation, he also has an aspect of melancholic self-pity.
Gideon Lewis-Kraus; The New Yorker
Peak decisiveness
At dinner a friend recounts the exact moment he dropped out of college to build his startup. He walked out of his lecture, laptop under arm, and booked a ticket to San Francisco on a whim. At the time, it felt easy. Obvious. He says he only realized the gravity of that decision far later down the road.
Nix
Don’t Trade Your Autonomy For Stability
It’s not that entrepreneurs are natural rule-breakers. Rather … they want self-direction. They aren’t going to take the world at face value. They have to figure it out for themselves.
Henry Oliver; Entrepreneur First
On Crestfallenness: A Pilgrim, Not a Tractor
What’s desire, for poets? Well, I’ll speak for myself. I want to tell you everything, and I also want to keep silent. I want my poems to stitch magical knots in the air, to make an elaborate web leading back through time.
Kiki Petrosino; Poetry Foundation
Grow the Puzzle Around You
When it came to investing, I had something that my cofounders didn’t have: I was the Social Radar. I couldn’t judge our applicants’ technical ability, or even most of the ideas. My cofounders were experts at those things. I looked at qualities of the applicants my cofounders couldn't see. Did they seem earnest? Were they determined? Were they flexible-minded? And most importantly, what was the relationship between the cofounders like? While my partners discussed the idea with the applicants, I usually sat observing silently. Afterward, they would turn to me and ask, "Should we fund them?"
Jessica Livingston
“Latin autodidacts, you’re working way too hard!” – How to learn Latin by yourself in 2023
Have you noticed how intrigued and inspired young people get when they see living people speak a dead language? In an age where old content gets buried under mountains of new content every single day, people who produce Latin are making our language seen and heard, especially by the younger generations.
Found in Antiquity
Nvidia Outlines Jensen 'Huang's Law' of Computing
According to Dally's recent Hot Chips 2023 conference talk, the chart above shows a 1000-fold increase in GPU AI inference performance in the last ten years. Interestingly, unlike Moore's Law, process shrinking has had little impact on the progress of Huang's Law, said the Nvidia Chief Scientist.
Mark Tyson; Tom’s Hardware
When poetry was everything: English verse before and after Chaucer
Immersing ourselves in the poetry of the long medieval period also implicitly highlights the absolute contrast between the place of poetry today and the place of poetry then... Poetry was everything, and it was everywhere.
Marion Turner; Times Literary Supplement
Silent Partner - What do Nabokov’s letters conceal? (2015)
It seems inapt to call Véra’s love selfless, however: the two selves of the Nabokovs were valves of the same heart. And extravagant devotion may sometimes be the expression of vicarious grandiosity.
Judith Thurman; The New Yorker
Ads Don't Work That Way
This meme or theory about how ads work — by emotional inception — has become so ingrained, at least in my own model of the world, that it was something I always just took on faith, without ever really thinking about it. But now that I have stopped to think about it, I'm shocked at how irrational it makes us out to be. It suggests that human preferences can be changed with nothing more than a few arbitrary images. Even Pavlov's dogs weren't so easily manipulated…
Kevin Simler
Medieval ‘birthing girdle’ parchment was worn during labour, study suggests (2021)
Made from materials such as silk, paper and parchment, and inscribed with prayers and invocations for safe delivery, birthing girdles were one of the most common spiritual charms loaned out by monasteries to their parishioners. Despite a ban on girdles by bishops in the wake of the Reformation, women were known to have used them surreptitiously up until the early 17th century, and this may have been one of the clandestine birthing girdles that remained in circulation.
Cambridge University
Great followers are companions and co-creators
Zarathustra doesn’t want to be a shepherd or a sheepdog coercing flocks of believers. He knows that leadership is relational and reciprocal, and what he’s really looking for are great companions – or people he can teach to become great allies and fellow travellers. He says: “I need living companions who follow me because they want to follow themselves – wherever I want.”
Skye Cleary; Philosophy at Work
Life Got You Down? Time to Read The Master and Margarita (2018)
Written in the 1930s but not published until the 1960s, The Master and Margarita is the most breathtakingly original piece of work.
Viv Groskop; Literary Hub
Single moms know marriage would be ideal, but how do they get one?
Single parenthood will persist unless better spouses appear. Can the chattering classes help with that?
Christine Emba; The Washington Post
Shipping Out: On the (nearly lethal) comforts of a luxury cruise (2008)
Somewhere past the big gray doors behind the rest rooms' roiling lines is a kind of umbilical passage leading to what I assume is the actual Nadir, which outside the hangar's windows presents as a tall wall of total white metal. The Chicago lady and BIG DADDY are playing Uno with another couple, who turn out to be friends they'd made on a Princess Alaska cruise in '93. By this time I'm down to slacks and T-shirt and tie, and the tie looks like it's been washed and hand-wrung. Perspiring has lost its novelty. Celebrity Cruises seems to be reminding us that the real world we're leaving behind includes crowded public waiting areas with no A.C. and indifferent ventilation.
David Foster Wallace; Harper’s Magazine
"Nothing Matters"
[An] experience of nihility has perhaps always haunted humanity. Yet all cultures have somehow surmounted it. Indeed, culture as such – as the cultivation of meaningful mores and purposeful projects – could be understood to be a collective endeavour of overcoming a latent sense that everything is senseless, a semantic horror vacui or “kenophobia” (fear of emptiness). Nevertheless, at a certain point in European history – in the waning decades of the nineteenth century to be precise – this sense of senselessness surfaced with an insuppressible vengeance and was given a name: nihilism.
It was Friedrich Nietzsche who pronounced, or at least prepared to pronounce, in a notebook entry from 1885-86: “Nihilism stands at the door”.
Bret W. Davis; The Philosopher
The best way to build yourself is to build
Our choice of the particular work we do depends on the whole context of our life and society and current needs, of course; but there is also just a general orientation that emerges out of almost any set of accumulated experiences of doing something useful, particularly as part of a coordinated exchange with others. And there is profound, life-giving value in even the seemingly mundane ways we apply our minds and direct our focused efforts toward purposeful ends that matter to us. This could be as complex as building an entire company, or it could be as simple as flipping burgers at a restaurant. It could also be volunteering at a shelter, if we make a serious and sustained project of it.
Dr. Gena Gorlin
The Sublime Spectacle of Yoko Ono Disrupting the Beatles (2021)
At first I found Ono’s omnipresence in the documentary bizarre, even unnerving. The vast set only emphasizes the ludicrousness of her proximity. Why is she there? I pleaded with my television set. But as the hours passed, and Ono remained — painting at an easel, chewing a pastry, paging through a Lennon fan magazine — I found myself impressed by her stamina, then entranced by the provocation of her existence and ultimately dazzled by her performance.
Amanda Hess; The New York Times
How to think about ethical dilemmas
Ethical questions come into play any time foreseen harms are in the mix. We can’t avoid these questions by resolving never to hurt anyone. This is impossible. It harms your child to take her to the doctor for a shot – not just the pain, but the anxiety and the deprivation of her freedom to keep playing at home. You need to let a couple of your employees go – no fault of their own, just a downturn in the business – but being fired still harms them emotionally as well as financially. Since harms are unavoidable, it can’t always be wrong to cause harm. Sometimes it can be morally justifiable. But how do you know?
Timm Triplett; Psyche
Anne Boleyn’s blunders
The humiliating spectacle of the divorce proceedings in the early 1530s, culminating in the hasty cobbling-together of an independent English ecclesiastical court to do what the King wanted (with the consequent rejection of the Pope’s jurisdiction), did not inspire confidence abroad. In late 1535 a French diplomatic mission to England made it clear that Anne was an embarrassment and that any hopes of an Anglo-French entente cordiale, based on resistance to the Pope and recognition of Henry’s marriage to Anne (and of Elizabeth, the daughter Anne had borne to Henry), were pure fantasy. And Cromwell, meanwhile, had recognised that English mercantile interests dictated a mending of fences with the empire rather than the futile courtship of a French leadership only interested in instrumentalising England in their continental ambitions.
Rowan Williams; New Statesman
My Strategies for Dealing With Radical Psychotic Doubt: A Schizo-Something Philosopher’s Tale
When I first became a psychiatric patient, I worried about taking antipsychotic medication. This was my problem: Either the mainstream world is real, I am mentally ill, and antipsychotics will help me, or the demon world is real, demons are out to get me, in which case antipsychotics might hide them from me, making me a much more vulnerable target. What should I do?
Sofia M I Jeppsson; Schizophrenia Bulletin. Oxford Academic
Liv Ullmann and I: The director of 'The Road Less Travelled' on collaborating with the Norwegian icon
The challenges and contradictions of the female experience lie at the heart of A Road Less Travelled. The narrative takes the first person form, with Ullmann even reading sequences from her book, Changing, to give space to her own stories, including the roadblocks Ullmann suffered as a female first-time director, the notion of ‘female anger’ still being viewed as an ‘unfeminine trait,’ and the sense of shame she experienced living under the societal projection of her ‘muse’ dynamic to Bergman. As talking head Cate Blanchett recognises in the series, "she always bares her soul".
Davina Catt; Vogue Scandinavia
John Locke & Personal Identity
Man, according to Locke, is made of two sorts of substance: the physical matter (ie the body) and the non- physical matter (ie the soul). A person, o n the other hand, in addition to having physical substance and a soul, also possesses consciousness, which in a way unites soul and substance together while giving perception to the being. Specifically, a person is a thinking being that has reason and reflection and can consider itself as itself, the same thinking thing, in different times and places. This he can do only through consciousness.
Nurana Rajabova; Philosophy Now
Unesco planning virtual museum of stolen cultural artefacts
“Something similar happens, that we also don’t understand, in the relationship between a cultural artefact and its community. Cultures that have been robbed of artefacts are like a tree’s roots looking for nourishment.”
Jon Henley; The Guardian
When (not) to use monetary prices?
Based on this criteria, I would, for instance, recommend allocating kidneys through a price mechanism, but allocating important job positions through e.g. tournaments.
Peter Isztin
Lost and Found
Someone forgets something on a bus or a train. Most commonly, it’s a wallet or a cell phone. It could be glasses, a book, a pair of shoes, X-rays, skis, a hat, a backpack, a banjo. These items are then found, usually by someone on the cleaning crew or a bus driver or a fellow passenger; they are catalogued on-site and packed into big burlap sacks, which are delivered weekly to the central lost and found.
Sophie Haigney; The Paris Review
2008 seems like the wrong year for the DFW essay? The book it was anthologized in came out in ‘97 :)
Love these weekly recs, keep up the great work Anna!