Anna Gát: What to Read This Weekend #30
Dreams vs reality, Burning Man proposal, diva angst, censored science, broken communities, AI bosses, motherhood woes—Vonnegut, Frost, Zadie Smith, TypeScript, my favourite house in the whole world...
Wow, the 30th week, you guys!
This week has had both good and bad in it, copiously. On Monday I ended up in the hospital, possibly from overwork (?), the Lisbon apartment issues continue, bundled with some other US and Belgium admin adventures, the immigrant’s cross. On the upside, incredible Interintellect salons (I’m hosting one tonight with Erik Hoel on his new book). And we’re building our new platform with our superb little team, recently joined by a new designer too, who’s asking me things like: if Interintellect was a love child, whose love child would it be? (Carl Sagan and Elena Ferrante’s obviously 😍 See some images I made with Midjourney and Stability AI!)
Great readings for this weekend. Let’s dive in! xoxo Anna
Is this real life? (2020)
“Americans see the world as an action movie” [Bruno] Maçães writes… Perhaps this is Hollywood’s greatest achievement: It gets us excited about our dystopian future. The world might be ending, but at least it’s an ending that’s entertaining to watch.
Julian Lehr
How to Live Near Your Friends
So when my friends are looking for housing, I try to make moving near me an easy default choice. I have Craigslist and Zillow alerts for units available nearby. When I receive an alert, I forward it to friends who are seeking housing, and also post it to the group chat.
Priya Rose
What Are Dreams For?
Take Descartes’s dream, in which he was terrified, limping, and whirled in a vortex before meeting his acquaintance. Emotions tend to run high in dreams, perhaps because our heart rates are so often irregular in rem. The vortex in which Descartes was caught could reflect ambiguous signals from his vestibular system; his encounter with the man could flow from his brain’s baffled attempt to draw a line between self and other.
Amanda Gefter; The New Yorker
Chaos, Comedy, and ‘Crying Rooms’: Inside Jimmy Fallon’s ‘Tonight Show’
Seven former employees say their mental health was impacted by their alleged experiences working at The Tonight Show. These staffers say it was commonplace to hear people joking about “wanting to kill themselves,” and that they would refer to guests’ dressing rooms in the office as “crying rooms” because that’s where they would go to let out their emotions when they were upset with their alleged mistreatment.
Krystie Lee Yandoli; Rolling Stone
Where Did Our Belief in Abundance Come From?
Economists and historians never tire of debating the question: Did ideas improve material conditions, or did material improvement change our ideas? The answer is yes: Both are indeed true. We made progress before we started thinking about it seriously.
Johan Norberg; Discourse
The Holiness in Reality
Carl Sagan: “When we recognize our place in an immensity of light years and in the passage of ages, when we grasp the intricacy, beauty and subtlety of life, then that soaring feeling, that sense of elation and humility combined, is surely spiritual.”
Brian Gallagher; Nautilus
The Decomposition of Rotten Tomatoes: The most overrated metric in movies is erratic, reductive, and easily hacked — and yet has Hollywood in its grip
When a studio is prepping the release of a new title, it will screen the film for critics in advance. It’s a film publicist’s job to organize these screenings and invite the writers they think will respond most positively. Then that publicist will set the movie’s review embargo in part so that its initial Tomatometer score is as high as possible at the moment when it can have maximal benefits for word of mouth and early ticket sales.
Luke Winkie; Vulture
The Community Community
The replacement of community life with abstract digital life sees its most striking manifestation here, where it may become a matter of life and death.
Nathan Beacom; Comment
American Airlines demonstrated what could be the world's cheapest way to fight global warming
Breakthrough Energy, an organization founded by Bill Gates to pursue climate solutions, and Google’s Research division separately developed models to predict where contrails will form…
Tim Fernholz; Quartz
Scenius, or Communal Genius
The geography of scenius is nurtured by several factors:
> Mutual appreciation — Risky moves are applauded by the group, subtlety is appreciated, and friendly competition goads the shy. Scenius can be thought of as the best of peer pressure.
> Rapid exchange of tools and techniques…
Kevin Kelly
Americans are coping ourselves to death
My basic theory is that Americans are doing things that kill them — hard drugs, legal drugs, overeating, and suicide — as ways of coping with the stress of their lives. Which means to bring down American death rates, we should do more than just fight drugs and suicide and obesity directly; we should figure out why Americans are so desperate for coping mechanisms in the first place.
Noah Smith
Opening Night Is the Ultimate Arthouse Horror Film
Seen especially through the lens of today’s actress-led, woman-on-the-verge-of-immolation horrors such as Annihilation and the upcoming Suspiria, Opening Night is a mischievously delightful dip into a genre from an art-film guy like Cassavettes—a genre that that no one in his lifetime (or even today) would have expected to interest the auteur. But as is the case of the bulk of the famous iconoclast’s oeuvre, we are still seeing the ripple effects of a film like this today, over 40 years after its release.
Dom Nero; Esquire
Isabelle Adjani, Raging and Aging in ‘Opening Night’ (2019)
To the men around Myrtle Gordon, an actress losing her grip on reality as opening night approaches, it’s a real head-scratcher: What in the world is making her so crazy? Boys, boys, boys. It’s you.
Laura Collins-Hughes; The New York Times
The 100 Most Influential People in AI 2023
Recently, [writer Ted Chiang], 56, has stepped into a new role. In nonfiction pieces for the New Yorker, he has emerged as one of the sharpest critics of AI and the corporations behind it.
TIME
Apocalypse Not: I Got Engaged in the Mud at Burning Man
… getting engaged to the love of my life in the middle of the desert just hours before it became a giant mud puddle. In keeping with Burning Man’s alternative vibe, my betrothed, Sarah Rose Siskind, got down on one knee at the far end of the event’s playa and asked me to marry her. The easiest question I’ve ever answered.
Nick Gillespie; The Free Press
The Death of the Hired Man
Part of a moon was falling down the west, Dragging the whole sky with it to the hills. Its light poured softly in her lap. She saw it And spread her apron to it. She put out her hand Among the harp-like morning-glory strings, Taut with the dew from garden bed to eaves, As if she played unheard some tenderness That wrought on him beside her in the night. ‘Warren,’ she said, ‘he has come home to die: You needn’t be afraid he’ll leave you this time.’
Robert Frost
Against Beauty (2010)
[Zadie Smith’s] White Teeth was published in 2000, and it is intriguing to wonder what might have happened if it had been delayed by a year. After September 11, 2001, it would not have been as easy to write, or to read… Ask whether there was a post-Kennedy assassination novel, or a post-Pearl Harbor novel, and you will come closer to the effect of September 11--and get the opposite answer from the one that Smith intends. Despite her sarcasm, tragic historical events have always been legitimate inspirations for fiction. Salman Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children, for example, one of the obvious progenitors of White Teeth, is a long fictional reflection on the bloody partition of India and Pakistan and its consequences.
Adam Kirsch; The New Republic
Changes in Music, 1998-2022
And Maroon 5 is pretty much just Nickelback?
What’s mostly gone is the highly produced boy band... Male singers are more likely to combine folk and rock, which is I think part of a turn in the culture towards less formality and what people call “authenticity.” Just like how corporations are less likely to require men to wear suits and ties, people are turned off by singers that look like they were designed for mass appeal in a lab.
Richard Hanania
A fix to the mental health crisis is hiding in plain sight
We know that about half a million women struggle with postpartum depression annually… And in 36 states between 2017 and 2019, suicide, overdoses and other mental health conditions, including depressive disorder, caused 23 percent of pregnancy-related death — more than any physical cause. In one sense, a new treatment is just what’s needed to sound the alarm.
Kate Woodsome; The Washington Post
Turbo 8 is dropping TypeScript
Unlike languages like Ruby, which are languages of choice when it comes to the server side, JavaScript is a language of necessity when it comes to the client side. While you may compile dialects into it, you still have to accept the fact that running code in the browser means running JavaScript… So farewell, TypeScript.
David Heinemeier Hansson
Tour Anjelica Huston and Robert Graham’s House in California (2016)
The two- and three-story house that Graham designed for his spirited wife stands hard by the street, like a town house. A cobra-shaped cowlick at the parapet rises mysteriously behind a high terra-cotta-colored masonry wall with a three-ton stone wedged over the entrance gate. The solid fence isolates the yard in complete privacy so that visitors stepping through the gate into the garden already feel inside the house. From the outdoor walkway a wide courtyard works as an exterior room and functions as the heartspace of the place, offering elemental pleasures…
Joseph Giovannini and Tim Street-Porter; Architectural Digest
What’s the World’s Oldest Language?
Disagreements about the age of Sanskrit and Tamil illustrate the broader issues in pinpointing the world’s oldest language. “To answer this question, we’ve seen people create new histories, which are as much political as they are scientific… There are bragging rights associated with being the oldest and still evolving language.”
Lucy Tu; Scientific American
Richard Feynman’s Letter on What Problems to Solve (2014)
“You say you are a nameless man. You are not to your wife and to your child. You will not long remain so to your immediate colleagues if you can answer their simple questions when they come into your office. You are not nameless to me. Do not remain nameless to yourself – it is too sad a way to be. Know your place in the world and evaluate yourself fairly, not in terms of your naïve ideals of your own youth, nor in terms of what you erroneously imagine your teacher’s ideals are.”
Farnam Street
What if You Just Hate Making Dinner?
“No one has it all together,” [Jenny Rosenstrach, author of Dinner: A Love Story” and “Dinner: The Playbook] observes, with gentle condescension. The typical mom, she believes, too often sees dinner as “a referendum on her own self-worth.” ... Don’t “put so much pressure” on yourself, she writes, elsewhere assuring the reader, only slightly facetiously, that mothers who don’t dine nightly with their children won’t necessarily make them “meth addicts.”
Virginia Heffernan
I Left Out the Full Truth to Get My Climate Change Paper Published
So in my recent Nature paper, which I authored with seven others, I focused narrowly on the influence of climate change on extreme wildfire behavior. Make no mistake: that influence is very real. But there are also other factors that can be just as or more important, such as poor forest management and the increasing number of people who start wildfires either accidentally or purposely. (A startling fact: over 80 percent of wildfires in the US are ignited by humans.)
Patrick T Brown; The Free Press
Here's Why Automaticity Is Real Actually
For a lot of the ‘90s and ‘00s, social scientists were engaged in the project of proving “automaticity”, the claim that most human decisions are unconscious/unreasoned/automatic and therefore bad. Cognitive biases, social priming, advertising science, social contagion research, “nudges”, etc, were all part of this grand agenda…
Overall we’re pretty robust to a broad range of environmental perturbations. And one of the ways we’re robust is that when we notice red flags that people are trying to fool us, we switch out of our usual automaton mode and consider the situation carefully.
Scott Alexander
Kurt Vonnegut: Farewell, hello (2013)
"Please, please, please. Nobody else die!" That was the first line of the tribute Kurt Vonnegut wrote when his friend, the poet Allen Ginsberg, died…
Billy Pilgrim, the hapless protagonist of Slaughterhouse Five, was also a survivor of Dresden in Vonnegut's version, a man "unstuck in time"… When he is assassinated, by a raving lunatic, Billy's final words are: "Farewell, hello, farewell, hello."
Nilanjana S Roy; Business Standard
Lin May Saeed, Empathetic Sculptor Who Viewed Animals as Her Equals, Dies at 50
She was not afraid to dream big with her art and activism… “When I see a utopian approach to your question, my favorite daydream comes to mind involving how climate change is solved. Animals and aliens give a master class for homo sapiens called: How Not To Mess It Up. “
Alex Greenberger; ARTnews
The could-have-been-kings (and queens): Some disputed English monarchs
Edgar Ætheling (1066): His supporters can’t have been that enthusiastic about his claim: firstly, they’d not pushed it when Edward’s death created a succession crisis the previous January; secondly, they all wussed out the moment they came across any heavily armed Normans.
Jonn Elledge
The silver lining: the joie de vivre - The side effects of hope when things are hopeless
With Mr. D. we encountered a “wait and see” scenario. As with all our oncology patients, we discussed his case with the a-lot-of-people board. Through collective deliberation, we arrived at the decision that the questionable lung nodules had fortunately exhibited stability thus far.
If you believe in science, you would ask, “What are the data points, and what is the prognosis?” If you also happen to believe in hope, you would add, “How hopeful is the case?” …
“So, it is bad?” Mr. D. asked.
Razan Baabdullah
Some Have Yoga. I Have Montaigne.
What a great moment when, a few pages in, I encountered this line: “The places I see again and books I reread smile on me by seeming fresh and new.” Indeed, Montaigne’s words have smiled on me this time, not only by seeming fresh and new after my sojourn from his work, but also by reminding me that by now I know a little better where and how I can locate my selfhood. Dare I say I’ve become a better reader of his work as a result?"
Yiyun Li; The Atlantic