Anna Gát: What to Read This Weekend #28
Music and fascism, marriage as a crime, immortality in a lab, Auroville in crisis, how not to be disgusting — pity marketing, codpieces, cruel mothers, altruism, disinformation, birth rates, oligarchs
Hey folks,
Wow, this was an EXCELLENT week for all things reading! You can now preorder Becca Rothfeld’s first collection of essays, and buy this fascinating book as I just have (for a review, see the first link below). On Interintellect, we’re starting a Writing Support Group, a David Deutsch reading group, and a longevity book club that might be of interest to you. And the second episode of our self-compassion gatherings is also coming up. We’re currently prepping for Erik Hoel’s SuperSalon and our Caroline Calloway event. I’m also hosting a Host Training session next week.
So a lot happening, and setting time aside each week to compose this digest is such a relaxing, meditative exercise for me, and giving me so much pleasure. Thank you for reading, it’s truly my privilege… 🥰 Anna
To stand and adore - The consolations of art, documented by a guard at the Met
The cathartic power of looking folds into the cathartic power of writing. The ensuing section of [Patrick Bringley’s] book describes an exhibition of unfinished artworks at the Met’s short-lived satellite in the Breuer Building. Pliny the Elder thought that the incomplete works of great artists were more admirable than perfected works because they exposed the thought processes of their makers. “One good reason to look at someone else’s creation is because you’re studying how you might build something yourself.”
Caroline Vout; Times Literary Supplement
What Is Time For? - Everyone is too busy. How would we spend our time if we weren’t?
What is leisure, and why is it necessary for human beings? The leisure that I am interested in is not the first thing you may imagine: bingeing Netflix on the couch, lounging at the beach, attending a festive party with friends, or launching yourself from the largest human catapult for the thrill of it. The leisure that is necessary for human beings is not just a break from real life, a place where we rest and restore ourselves in order to go back to work. What we are after is a state that looks like the culmination of a life.
Let’s pause and ask ourselves: What parts of our lives seem to be the culminating parts, the days or hours or minutes where we are living life most fully? When do you stop counting the time and become entirely present to what you are doing? What sorts of activities are you engaged in when this takes place?
Zena Hitz; Plough
The Egoists and the Altruists
From the Arendt-Weil perspective, selfhood is refined and cultivated through belonging and through properly ordered relationships. Both lived through the nightmare of fascism and Soviet Communism. Both saw what evil could emerge from improperly ordered relationships. Neither was falsely optimistic about the world. And neither was falsely optimistic about the self … That was nonsense, of course, from the Rand-Beauvoir perspective.
Mark Dunbar; The Hedgehog Review
How to read the canon
Some stuff is foundational. If you are serious, you need to know Homer, the Bible, Shakespeare, Ovid, etc. Follow the footnotes. Dip in and out. Go back to them. Read children’s editions. Whatever. Just stick at it. The more you know, the more you get from what you read.
Henry Oliver
The rise of pity marketing - On social media, the sob story has become a successful strategy for struggling artists bidding for virality
Using a “sob story” to advertise yourself is nothing new, and not all cases of public pitifulness come with an ulterior motive. But despite the suggestion that talking about failure continues to be “taboo”, the act of monetising narratives of failure has become commonplace online. It’s a blunt marketing tool that appeals to our most basic human impulses, and knows that – regardless of originality or quality – if we feel bad enough for someone, we might click “buy”. The trend emerges alongside the rise in pity as a social media currency, such as the popularity of “pity me” personal essays.
Sarah Manavis; New Statesman
Raising humanity's psychological ceiling
The more ambitious and innovative your life projects … the more formidable your psychological needs—and the fewer the psychological resources that have been developed for navigating those needs. But this doesn’t mean you either have to settle for misery and burnout or lower your ambitions. Rather, it means you need to be that much more vocal in articulating and advocating for your needs, and that much more entrepreneurial (or, as Paul Graham would put it, relentlessly resourceful) about hunting down the best available resources and boostrapping them to suit your specific psychological purposes.
Gena Gorlin
Zadie Smith’s weighty Mantel piece
Is there a way of knowing other people? Perhaps not – but in The Fraud, writing and reading are ways of trying. While reading a novel by George Eliot, Eliza is delighted to discover, to William’s derision, that it is simply about ‘People’.
Lucy Thynne; Engelsberg Ideas
Marriage Is an Abduction (2014)
[The books We Need to Talk About Kevin and Gone Girl] restage marriage as a violent crime—an abduction. An independent, expressive single woman is taken from New York; her beautiful body is disfigured, or threatened with disfigurement; and her accomplishments are systematically taken away or negated, rendered worthless by comparison to that all-trumping colossus of meaning, childbirth. (Clearly, many women find happiness in much this way; but, equally clearly, many of them don’t and can’t.) These narratives speak less to the specific challenges of having a sociopath for a child or a spouse than to the pathology of the unstated assumptions that we all pass along and receive. They speak to the revelation lying in wait for women when they hit the ages of marriageability and childbirth: that their carefully created and manicured identities were never the point; the point was for it all to be sacrificed to children and to men…
Girls are set up for a horrific disappointment, but boys are set up to be horrifically disappointing. Boys are taught to protect, but how do you protect someone who has the same basic rights as you do, and from whom you are also demanding a huge sacrifice? How do you protect someone who is too good for you—not too pure or too lofty but actually better than you at day trading, running marathons, and looking like a million bucks?
Elif Batuman; The New Yorker
James Baldwin, The Art of Fiction (1984)
“Talent is insignificant. I know a lot of talented ruins. Beyond talent lie all the usual words: discipline, love, luck, but, most of all, endurance.”
Jordan Elgrably; The Paris Review
The “bullshit jobs” idea isn’t helpful
The fact that a small number of educated leftists still think their jobs (or most jobs) are pointless drudgery invented by a malevolent capitalist system seems more like a function of elite overproduction than of any inherent deficiency in said system.
Noah Smith
Effective Altruism Is a Short Circuit
The desire to do good when you don’t have to has a strangely powerful attraction. We Americans seem ever more obsessed with our desire to “be a good person,” or at any rate, to be declared “not the asshole.” But it is no longer enough to simply be a Presbyterian. We don’t have a united sense of how being good is supposed to look or play out anymore.
Mary Townsend; The Bulwark
16 Fertility Scenarios
Global human population will soon peak, then fall, due to falling fertility. Here are 16 scenarios by which this fertility fall might end:
Extinction: No other scenario appears by deadline. …
Big War: Causes sudden poverty, which causes fertility rise. …
Parenting Factories: Big boarding schools regiment kid lives, lower costs to raise kids. …
Robin Hanson (the first part of the quote is from his Twitter)
Is Yevgeny Prigozhin really dead? Not everyone is convinced
“And to disappear forever, having taken one of his many spare passports, a burnt-out airplane is a good way to do it,” wrote one prominent Russian political scientist on social media. “The crows won’t collect the bones, the remains are in ashes, the trail has gone cold.”
Andrew Roth; The Guardian
Rather Ridiculous Than Criminal - How not to be disgusting in Renaissance Italy
He who in common intercourse with his acquaintance conforms with a boundless obsequiousness to the will of others must be deemed a mere parasite, a scaramouch, or a buffoon, rather than a well-bred man or a gentleman. As, on the contrary, he who is quite careless and indifferent whether he pleases or displeases his company is deservedly esteemed a rude, ill-bred, clownish fellow. Therefore, when we consult not our own pleasures but those of our friends, our behavior will be pleasing and agreeable.
Giovanni Della Casa; Lapham’s Quarterly (from 1691!)
Three strange takes on the philosophy of music
[Theodor Adorno] disliked popular music because it was a commodity with limited artistic merit and the potential to drive the masses toward homogeny and fascism — which meant that all jazz stinks all the time.
Scotty Hendricks; Big Think
Haruki Murakami’s latest has readers and reviewers perplexed
Sociologist Daisaburo Hashizume contemplates … : “The ultimate goal of literature is not another world beyond this one, but the ability for anyone to travel freely between the dreams woven by literature and this world, and enrich their life.”
Thu-Huong Ha; The Japan Times
Automatic Disinformation Threatens Democracy— and It’s Here
An age in which nobody trusts anything may sound like a victory for critical thinking, but it has always been the precise goal of those who wish to flood the zone with shit; it’s exactly according to the plan of the “firehose of propaganda model”, oft associated with Putin and contemporary Russia.
Gary Marcus
List of War and Peace characters
B:
Napoléon Bonaparte (1769-1821) – The Great Man, ruined by great blunders.
Vincent Bosse – French drummer-boy, captured by Denisov
Wikipedia (alphabetical list)
Parental Selection in Human Evolution- The hidden reason why babies cry
One reason young people are less likely to form families now is that they are optimizing for social status. The basic idea is that there is an evolutionary misfiring, so to speak. The desire for status arose in order to increase the likelihood of finding a partner and having offspring. But because humans are mismatched with the modern environment, we chase status at the expense of other goals.
Rob Henderson
Bertrand Russell: On Avoiding Foolish Opinions
Be very wary of opinions that flatter your self-esteem. Both men and women, nine times out of ten, are firmly convinced of the superior excellence of their own sex. There is abundant evidence on both sides. If you are a man, you can point out that most poets and men of science are male; if you are a woman, you can retort that so are most criminals. The question is inherently insoluble, but self esteem conceals this from most people.
Farnam Street
Brain-reading devices allow paralysed people to talk using their thoughts
“For those who are nonverbal, this means they can stay connected to the bigger world, perhaps continue to work, maintain friends and family relationships,” said [67-year-old Pat Bennett, who has motor neuron disease, also known as amyotrophic lateral sclerosis] in a statement to reporters.
Miryam Naddaf; Nature
The Death of an Indispensable Person
He is lost without Carmen. And who wouldn’t be? She was a fortress of strength. She came to New York from Puerto Rico when she was 13; went to work at various factories in Lower Manhattan starting at 16 (until the day she died, she couldn’t eat a hot dog, having seen, literally, how the sausage got made); and then worked as a cleaning woman, both in schools and in Midtown office towers. She eventually opened a day care in her home in the Bronx. She also fostered children for a time … “She was a provider,” Evelyn explained to me.
Jennifer Senior; The Atlantic
Canada mulling 'game plan' if U.S. takes far-right, authoritarian shift
[Mélanie Joly] drew an analogy to her government's experience working with the administration of former U.S. president Donald Trump, which sought to limit long-established trade in crucial sectors. Trump is again running for the Republican nomination in next November's election, and has promised "retribution" against his opponents and civil servants.
MSN via The Canadian Press
To Observe the Muon Is to Experience Hints of Immortality
The central contention of physics has it that the building blocks of the universe will endure even if, or even when, the humans who tally them, and the planet we live on, all die. To see into the deathless universe is to try to see nothing so flamboyant as Wordsworth's favorite daffodils and walnut groves, but to peer into the coldest spaces, the black holes and the fractional electric charge of theoretical subatomic particles. These entities have no blood flow, of course, but also no DNA; they're not susceptible to pandemics, however virulent, or the dividends and ravages of carbon. They don't live, so they don't die. To model the universe as precisely as possible is to try to see the one thing that even the strictest atheist agrees is everlasting—to try to achieve, in a lab, an intimation of immortality.
Virginia Heffernan
The gap between law and practice in gender rights
Changes in the formal law do not affect economic and social outcomes for women. This gap is twofold. First, customary law negates evolutions in formal law towards greater women’s rights. Second, in dual systems where customary law exists alongside statutory law, judges often refer cases to the customary system, thus denying women standing in the courts. The result is an ever-widening gap between formal law and practice.
Simeon Djankov; VoxEU CEPR
In Praise of the Meandering Career - Build a compass, not a map
Nearly three out of every four college graduates work in a field unrelated to their major. The average worker holds over a dozen jobs by their fifties. And over half of today’s college students will work jobs that don’t yet exist…
The truth is that the careers of our grandparents’ generation no longer exist. With the pace of technological advancement, no single job or company can be relied upon to deliver lasting stability. The pillars of institutional excellence are eroding before our eyes, and those who know how to carve their own path already have a leg up.
Simone Stolzoff; Every
A closer look at codpieces: the swagger and thrust of sixteenth-century men's fashion (2020)
What is interesting about these portraits is the attitude of the subject to the codpiece that he is wearing. To us, a codpiece looks outrageous, over-the-top, rearingly priapic, almost ridiculous in its claims. And yet it was seldom even remarked upon or written about at the time. Things were as they were.
Michael Glover; Art UK
Dickens’s London is more elusive than the artful dodger himself
It was here, in other words, that Dickens began his childish habit of fictionalising London. It is here at the bottom of the stairs that Nancy met Mr Brownlow and Rose Maylie to tell them the truth about Oliver Twist, thereby sealing her own fate, since Sikes will murder her for blabbing. Strangely, a blue plaque near the modern steps of the new (1962-73) London Bridge tells the unwary that this was where Nancy was murdered, whereas readers of the book will remember her being clubbed to death indoors.
A.N. Wilson; The Spectator
True Crime, True Faith: The Serial Killer and the Texas Mom Who Stopped Him
Morin asked Palm to attend his 1985 execution, but she decided it was more important to be with her husband that day. She visited the killer on death row at the infamous Ellis 1 Unit, near Huntsville, Texas, the day before, though…
“He was happy,” Palm tells me. “He said, ‘I’m ready to die. I feel good. I’m gonna be with the Lord.’” I have a hard time believing Morin could really be happy hours before his execution until Palm shows me Polaroids the warden took that day: Morin’s grinning like a high school senior on the last day of school.
Julie Miller; Vanity Fair (via Agnes Callard and Elizabeth Bruenig - thank you!)
The two kinds of progressives - Moralists vs. pragmatists
Over the past 20–30 years, the voting base of the Democratic Party has become a lot more educated and upscale. One might have predicted that would lead to the adoption of a more moderate stance on economic issues, but that hasn’t really happened.
Matthew Yglesias
Holiday(less) seasons
Approaching the end of summer I am thinking about...Christmas, the optimal timing of holidays, and consumption-smoothing. Why don't we have a major holiday during the summer, while we have several during cool or cold periods?
Peter Isztin
Auroville: Summary of the current crisis
This note outlines the deep crisis in this usually peaceful community dedicated to human unity in diversity – a living embodiment of Vasudhaiva Kutumbakam, ‘the world is one family’.
Auroville Media Liaison
The genius of David Jones
His magisterial essay Art and Sacrament argues that man’s “art is sign-making”, a gratuitous act that is inherently sacramental in nature through its pointing to something other. For Jones, “man is unavoidably a sacramentalist” regardless of whether he is a Christian.
Christopher Akers; The Critic
Central functions, Mesopotamia
We have further evidence leading us to the assumption that the highly developed economic organization during the period of early high civilization required not only abstract methods of control but also other organizational aids.
Michael C. Heller; Social Science Files
‘Maximum New York’ Fundraising Memo: It's Time to Go Fast
Far fewer people than you’d expect understand even the basics of government, let alone how to do something productive with it—and this includes members of NYC’s government…
[The solution is] straightforward, but not easy: a rigorous, practice-based civics class that people actually want to take. That much has already been accomplished with The Foundations of New York (applications now open).
Daniel Golliher; Maximum New York
The dark side of using AI to design drugs (2022)
Some virtual molecules showed few similarities to any existing toxins, suggesting entirely new classes of lethal biochemical weapons could be conjured up that circumvent current watch lists for known precursor chemicals.
Anjana Ahuja; Financial Times
Five famous musicians who are also science stars
[Brian May] returned to his celestial work and in 2007 published a PhD dissertation with an appropriately groovy title: “A Survey of Radial Velocities in the Zodiacal Dust Cloud.”
Ben Guarino; The Washington Post
This is how your brain distinguishes reality from imagination
‘If I hadn’t known I was imagining, I would have thought it real,’ one participant said.
Shayla Love; Psyche
And something extra for today…. ✨
Read Something Wonderful
A new reading tool by our friends at Matter.