Anna Gát: What to Read This Weekend #55
Poetry, war, world-making. Brains, biopics, anarchists. Birth, ennui, moral luck. Polymaths, puzzles, mothers. Gods, men, women. And philanthropists, lovers, haters. Writers, utilitarians, and more!
Hello friends! I’ve just left Ruxandra Teslo’s first ever Interintellect event, a members-only fireside about feminism and progress. It was great!
Tomorrow, come and hang at an online event I’m hosting with Kat Rosenfield. It will be on Millennial Women 💅🏻 Tickets here!
This will be a counterpiece to a previous salon we did with Christine Emba and Shadi Hamid, on men. Video below:
Let’s dive into this weekend’s readings! I have a couple of surprises for you… xx Anna
Life is short, though I keep this from my children. .... Life is short and the world is at least half terrible, and for every kind stranger, there is one who would break you, though I keep this from my children. I am trying to sell them the world. Any decent realtor, walking you through a real shithole, chirps on about good bones: This place could be beautiful, right? You could make this place beautiful. -- Maggie Smith
Love a Moral Luck
This idea of moral luck also helps me be kinder with myself and others, because luck can be fickle. We can be spectacularly wrong in our judgements of what will be good for us. We need to forgive ourselves for having taken the wrong bets, dust off and try again, attending to our true nature.
Eli Parra; Interintellect blog — Eli won our most recent essay contests! 🎉
Untangling Religion From Our AI Debates
Recent tumults at OpenAI have cascaded into accusations that certain camps subscribe, whether unwittingly or not, to so-called secular religions.
Thomas Moynihan; Noēma
A Grim View of Marriage—And an Exhortation to Leave It
At one point, [Lyz Lenz] writes that marriage “is how women are disappeared,” a jarring choice given that, in the past 60 years, the phrase to be disappeared has most often referred to dissident victims of far-right regimes. Elsewhere, she tells the reader that “no one really knows lonely better than a married woman sitting next to her silent husband”—a claim an unhappily married woman might agree with, and one that might make a grieving widow, or a woman with an incarcerated partner, throw the book across the room.
Lily Meyer; The Atlantic
Polymaths Are Late Bloomers
Now the fact that polymaths peak later in life might be a bit discouraging news to young polymaths. So yes, they should start out more with the usual non-polymath strategy, and then cautiously explore the possibility of dabbling in more areas.
Robin Hanson
Why We Don't Trust Each Other Anymore
The words we are using kinda suck. I had the chance to talk with John Burn-Murdoch at the Financial Times about this idea of language and how it shapes progress. His piece “Is the west talking itself into decline?” analyzes how language can do a lot in shaping our economic reality - and he highlighted that the words that we use are no longer positive and focused on growth, but rather they are fearful and focused on worry. “Progress can come from many different ways, but one that is often overlooked is the role of culture and language…”
Kyla Scanlon
I can’t picture things in my mind. I didn’t realize that was unusual
Overall, people with aphantasia don’t seem to have serious problems navigating their day-to-day lives, unlike those with more severe memory conditions like episodic amnesia. The ways it affects me have been more understated. In therapy, I struggled with therapeutic techniques that relied heavily on visualization.
Shayla Love
Did novels stop mattering in the 2010s?
Maybe my longstanding worry that the academization of writing will make novels as culturally irrelevant as poetry makes me spook at shadows. Or maybe it’s the internet, and its fracturing of fame into the more local and minute e-fame. Or maybe it’s the publishing industry, and what books are being written. Or maybe people just don’t read books anymore, no matter their content. But I’d love a counterexample. Or hell, just a new novel. For God’s sake, it’d be nice to read a fresh contemporary novel I felt excited by.
Erik Hoel — about something many of us are thinking about
$1 Billion Donation Will Provide Free Tuition at a Bronx Medical School
Dr. Ruth Gottesman, a longtime professor at the Albert Einstein College of Medicine, is making free tuition available to all students going forward.
Joseph Goldstein; The New York Times
The Future of Patriarchy?
Patriarchy persists via male solidarity and ideologies that men are high status, while women are low status…. Interventions to 'empower women' that fail to rupture fraternal solidarity, as well as ideals of seclusion and status, will be ineffective.
Alice Evans
The surprising, beautiful horror of happy married sex (A response to Becca Rothfeld piece in my previous Digest)
Everywhere those women look—along with the many more women not interested in polyamory but who are regularly invited to prefer a life of casual sexual relationships—hidden from them is this one profound truth: Women in loving, stable, monogamous marriages have better sex.
Danielle Freydman
New Mothers in Gaza: ‘Birth doesn’t wait’
Delivery is also a harrowing experience. With doctors stretched too thin, women in labor must often give birth without them—in makeshift shelters or in the street, using whatever tools they can find. Those who do make it to a hospital often find that there’s no pain medication, antibiotics, or sterilized equipment. There have been reports of postmortem cesarean sections to save a baby after the mother has died—sometimes from a medical condition, but sometimes after a bombing.
Regina Munch; Commonweal
Algorithms are everywhere
In Filterworld, Chayka includes a quote from the late, great anthropologist David Graeber: “The ultimate, hidden truth of the world is that it is something that we make, and could just as easily make differently.”
Bryan Gardiner; MIT Technology Review
Michelangelo's Poem About How He Hated Painting the Sistine Chapel
He had an enlarged thyroid gland (known as a goiter), his spine was crooked and knotted, his chest was tight and twisted, his thighs cramped constantly, and his ass ached from strain. The sucker punch? The paint that dripped steadily from his brush and onto his face.
Richard Whiddington; Artnet — Never meet your heroes.
The sexual revolution that failed
The parallels between the life of the Disney princess who trades her voice for love and the Playboy centrefold who lost her twenties to Hefner are clear.
Pippa Bailey; New Statesman
Turner stops me in my tracks’: four Tate curators discuss their favourite artworks
"It’s uplifting to know that you’re not alone in grief, and that others have found ways to channel it into a communication even if it’s a communication that can’t say everything."
Martha Alexander; The Guardian (actually paid content - but great!)
Georgia’s Proposed Ban Could Change the Landscape for Hired Pregnancies
Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine two years ago highlighted the precarities of the business, when expectant mothers were suddenly forced to relocate within the country and foreign couples jostled with the prospect of entering a war zone to attend the birth of their child. The war quickly booted Ukraine from its place as the world’s second-largest surrogacy market after the United States. Georgia and Cyprus have since absorbed most of Ukraine’s share.
Caitlin Allen; New Lines Magazine
The “Disney adult” industrial complex
The grown-up Disney superfan has become a much-mocked phenomenon online. But creating these consumers was always part of the corporation’s plan.
Amelia Tait; New Statesman
The other Moses — A Jewish philosopher who influenced Aquinas and Spinoza
These days Maimonides is no doubt more often mentioned than read, or even read about. Fortunately he now takes his rightful place in the “Jewish Lives” series published by Yale University Press, along with Jacob, Moses, Elijah, Moses Mendelssohn, Martin Buber and, of course, Groucho Marx, Barbra Streisand and Bugsy Siegel.
Stephen Nadler; Times Literary Supplement — 🤯
The 22-Year-Old Who Unlocked the Secrets of Ancient Rome
The deciphered text was an Epicurean work of criticism, likely by the scholar Philodemus, who lived in the first century BCE. In it, Philodemus criticizes the Stoics, who, he writes, “have nothing to say about pleasure.”
Julie Steinberg; The Free Press
Taylor Swift never bores her fans — never ever, ever, ever
Her first hit, “Tim McGraw,” was released in 2006 — during the presidency of George W. Bush and before the iPhone. Here we are, 18 years later, and Swift’s fans are hardly bored by her. If anything, their devotion seems more intense than ever. Why is that? A large part of the answer is simple: Swift is a master of the surprise signal. She spurs curiosity. She’s the reigning queen of dishabituation. Taylor never repeats herself. She’s 34 and already has an Eras Tour, signaling her capacity for reinvention.
Cass R. Sunstein; The Boston Globe — Reminds me how Taylor Swift is like a fashion brand that has “seasons”. Genius = transposing innovation from one area to a new, unexpected area.
Female neediness is real, but it's not a tragedy
In a recent essay, Astral Codex Ten argues that our attitude to love, with its adherence to freedom amidst inherent unfairness and risk, embodies libertarian values in a world increasingly devoid of such freedoms, making it a unique and vital realm where individual choice and adventure still prevail. Well, reactionary feminists want to take the choice from love too.
Ruxandra Teslo
What’s life like for Russia’s political prisoners? Isolation, poor food and arbitrary punishment
“For political prisoners, the situation is often worse, because the state aims to additionally punish them, or additionally isolate them from the world, or do everything to break their spirit.”
Dasha Litvinova; Associated Press
Postcards from before the war
Israel is kept afloat by a communitarian ethic encapsulated by a line from the Talmud: “All of Israel is responsible for one another.” Deaths of despair are so low, at least in part, because most Israelis feel a deep sense of belonging. Family life plays a greater role in Israel than elsewhere: Friday night dinner, a custom religiously observed even by secular Israelis, functions as a weekly Christmas or Thanksgiving.
Samuel Rubinstein; The Critic
The Passions of John Stuart Mill (2008)
Mill revered Carlyle’s originality of vision and soul, while Carlyle, though he mocked Mill’s pensive faith in rational argument, recognized that the younger man had the far more finished and exact mind. The friendship survived even the most scarifying incident in the history of letters, when Mill’s housemaid accidentally burned the only manuscript of Carlyle’s history of the French Revolution in the kitchen fire.
Adam Gopnik; The New Yorker — Bill Bryson severely contests such a burning could be accidental; the housemaid of a writer like Mill must have been familiar with the idea of a manuscript
From Canvas to Screen: Your Essential Guide to Artist Biopics
Dalí’s cinematic hold, however, has nothing on Van Gogh, who can count at least five biopics to his name. Kirk Douglas was first to step into the artist’s shoes for Lust For Life (1956), an account sensitively directed by Vincente Minnelli. In 1990, Vincent and Theo centered on Van Gogh’s relationship with his brother, who cemented the artist’s legacy, through a pair of powerful performances by Tim Roth and Paul Rhys. The painter’s final days are also traced in Van Gogh (1991), anchored by a César Award–winning turn by Jacques Dutronc, and At Eternity’s Gate (2018), a Willem Dafoe vehicle that runs with the theory that Van Gogh died by manslaughter.
Min Chen; Artnet
Shattering Violence, Shimmering Prizes
[Emily Wilson] made the Odyssey sing anew largely because of the unyielding constraints she set for herself.
Stephanie McCarter; The Pennsylvania Gazette
Deep learning models reveal replicable, generalizable, and behaviorally relevant sex differences in human functional brain organization
Our findings advance the understanding of sex-related differences in brain function and behavior. More generally, our approach provides AI–based tools for probing robust, generalizable, and interpretable neurobiological measures of sex differences in psychiatric and neurological disorders.
Srikanth Ryali, Yuan Zhang, Carlo de los Angeles, Vinod Menon
How to win an Oscar? Sex, spin and very dirty tricks
In his book The Oscar Wars, author Michael Schulman reports in exhaustive detail the nefarious campaigning tactics Weinstein would deploy, most notoriously to ensure that Miramax’s Shakespeare in Love beat DreamWorks and Paramount’s Saving Private Ryan to the 1998 Best Picture Oscar. This included telling The New York Times that Saving Private Ryan rapidly went downhill after its famous beach landing opening scene. There were also reports of freelance Miramax publicists “totally trashing” Steven Spielberg’s movie to other journalists.
Geoffrey Macnab; Independent
Harvard's Quest for New Arts & Humanities Dean: Faculty Demand Role in Restructuring
In the wake of Dean Kelsey's departure, the Harvard community stands at a crossroads. The search for a new dean is more than a routine administrative change; it's a moment of reflection and potentially transformative change for the Arts and Humanities division. As faculty members articulate their hopes and concerns, the upcoming months will be critical in shaping the future direction of humanities education at Harvard, with implications that may resonate well beyond its ivy-covered walls.
Salman Akhtar; BNN
A Dialogue with the Team Behind "The Point"
“A question we ask often when reading a piece is, Would this really provoke our readers to look at something differently, consider something they haven’t before, shed new light on a matter of concern for them, or would it just confirm whatever opinions and prejudices they already have with, say, the aid of some theoretical apparatus?”
The University of Chicago Press blog
Olivia Rodrigo’s Tour Will Raise Money for Abortion Funds
"If you can’t make it to the tour, or just want to support these groups even harder, you can find your local abortion fund on the NNAF site."
Susan Rinkunas; Jezebel
How Corporations Rule
While the classic corporation sought to bring every part of the production process under one roof, Nike reverted to a 19th-century style of doing business, contracting production out to sweatshops abroad and retaining only a small core of design staff. As the corporation shed its bureaucratic functions, it became harder to imagine it taking on government-like functions.
Hamilton Craig; Compact
‘One of the most accomplished pieces of social history I have read’—Noel Malcolm’s ‘Forbidden Desire’ reviewed
Malcolm ranges with equal authority from Scotland and Scandinavia to north Africa, from the Iberian west to the Ottoman heartlands of the east, and from Europe to European colonies in Asia and the Americas. As befits one drawing his net so widely, he has been rigorous in deciding what to omit. His focus is exclusively on male-male sexual acts, and not on what you might think of as homosexuality itself.
Rhodri Lewis; Prospect Magazine
Hatred Alone Is Immortal: Why we should be concerned, above all, with the education of the passions
What we first need is the acceptance of David Hume’s famous statement from his Treatise on Human Nature: “Reason is, and ought only to be, the slave of the passions and can never pretend to any other office than to serve and obey them.”
Alan Jacobs; The Hedgehog Review
Appreciating *Casablanca*
A beauty of Rick’s character arc is that … Rick’s upward potentiality is remarked upon in advance by Laszlo and by Renault; we watch Rick gradually stop pretending that he doesn’t care.
Dan Klein; for Bryan Caplan
Secularization Comes for the Religion of Technology
The “religion of technology” is a term coined by David Noble in his book bearing the same title. Noble was quite explicit about the fact that he was not proposing a metaphor. He was not suggesting that technology was like a religion, or that people relate to their devices in quasi-religious ways. All true perhaps, but Noble wasn’t interested in such things. He argued that, from roughly the turn of the first millennium onward, there was a concrete, objective historical relationship between religion, specifically Christianity, and the Western techno-scientific enterprise.
LM Sacasas; The Convivial Society
Alan Watts, Beat Generation Philosopher And Seminal Counterculture Figure, Gets His Recorded Works Recycled
The late Alan Watts, a philosopher, scholar, speaker, writer, and seminal figure in the counterculture of the Beat Generation, is getting a new publishing deal more than 50 years after his death.
Bruce Haring; Deadline — Just normal stuff.
The future belongs to those who prepare like Dwarkesh Patel
His most recent piece, Will scaling work?, explores the AI takeoff question. It was referenced by Stripe co-founder Patrick Collison and recommended by OpenAI ex-interim CEO Emmett Shear. At the end of his recent Substack post, he disclaims “[F]or what it’s worth, my day job is as a podcaster.” But the disclaimer is quickly followed up with “[T]he people who could write a better post are prevented from doing so, either by confidentiality or opportunity cost.”
Shreeda Segan; Meridian
Land of the Negative
America is an outlier: New polling by the Pew Research Center indicates that the U.S. is a global outlier when it comes to majority attitudes toward social media. "People in emerging economies are particularly likely to say social media has advanced their democracy," reports Pew.
Liz Wolfe; Reason
An Interview with Scott Alexander
“Judging from X/Twitter, from comment sections, and from personal conversations, the average person has no shortage of ideas they're excited to talk about. I'm the same, but I get nervous that a short comment wouldn't present my case clearly, so I end up having to expand it into a long essay. Usually I have some point I want to make...”
Sotonye
Personality Tests Aren’t All the Same. Some Work Better Than Others
On average, the Big Five test was about twice as accurate as the MBTI-style test for predicting these life outcomes, placing the usefulness of the MBTI-style test halfway between science and astrology—literally.
Spencer Greenberg; Scientific American
Bryan's last name is spelled "Caplan" rather than "Kaplan". Also, the linked post on his blog is a guest piece by Dan Klein.