Anna Gát: What to Read This Weekend #59
Saving your friends, autobiographies, Easter, Israel, Flannery O'Connor, academia, Paul Graham, wokes, teens, AI, trad wives, Dante, intimacy, Edison, Kung Fu Panda, math genius, modern dating & more
Dear Friends,
This is coming to you with some delay; lots to do at Interintellect!
During the next couple of days we will welcome Cass Sunstein, Rachel Nuwer, and Anil Seth and Erik Hoel at online Interintellect salons (more by Erik below). Come join us by clicking on the links and grabbing a ticket.
On April 13, we’re organising a major festival in New York, The Future of Publishing, with Infinite Books. We will be joined by Coleman Hughes, Kyla Scanlon, Sahil Lavingia, Tamara Winter, Shadi Hamid, Tara Isabella Burton, Eugene Wei, Tina He, Dan Shipper, and many more friends to investigate where our love of books, writing and reading is going — use the DIGEST20 discount code to get 20% off for the next 3 days!
In New York, I will also see you on April 6 celebrating spring rebirth — faith and progress — with Plough and Wayfare magazines. And now let’s dive into all that’s to read from the past week… Scroll all the way down; pure gems! Love x Anna
"When tenderness is detached from the source of tenderness, its logical outcome is terror. It ends in forced-labor camps and in the fumes of the gas chamber.” - Flannery O'Connor
As Long as You Both Shall Live
A day in the life of a marriage cannot be substituted for the day before or the day after it. People do not live on a loop, and even if they rehearse their arguments, even if they tell the same stories again and again, their performances almost always deviate from the script. “That recording is not reality. If you have an extreme moment in life, an emotional peak, and focus on it, of course, it crushes everything,” Sandra insists. “It’s our voices, but it’s not who we are.”
The great Merve Emre; The New York Review
Inside the New Wave of Old-School Education
“If you are not given an education and the basic human skills of reading, writing, communicating, thinking, deliberating, you’re at mercy of being left in the dust; you’re being left where the animals are.”
Julia Steinberg; The Free Press
Flannery O’Connor
Flannery O’Connor is one of the most evocative writers of the gospel in fiction who has ever lived. “The stories,” she wrote, “are hard but they are hard because there is nothing harder or less sentimental than Christian realism. … When I see these stories described as horror stories I am always amused because the reviewer always has hold of the wrong horror.”
Susannah Black Roberts; Plough
How to save your friends
Unless they’re literally in the middle of an emotional breakdown, people actually appreciate straightforward, direct questions about what’s motivating their behaviors or how they plan to change. Of course it also depends on your tone: you have to be asking your challenging questions in the context of a genuine desire to help them.
Kasra
The great rewiring: is social media really behind an epidemic of teenage mental illness?
An analysis done in 72 countries shows no consistent or measurable associations between well-being and the roll-out of social media globally. Moreover, findings from the Adolescent Brain Cognitive Development study, the largest long-term study of adolescent brain development in the United States, has found no evidence of drastic changes associated with digital-technology use.
Candice L. Odgers; Nature
Antidotes to cynicism creep in academia
Table of Contents: 1. So. Many. Problems. 2. Problems with scientific papers 3. Problems with peer-review 4. Problems with the publishing industry 5. Problems with work pressure and incentives 6. Antidotes to cynicism creep
Dr Eiko Fried - juicy!
The Rise and Fall of the Trad Wife
Feed the algorithm or die.
- Sophie Elmhirst; The New Yorker
What's up with modern love?
The idealist in me would like to say that being ambitious about platonic love is how you start to be ambitious about everything else, including romantic love. The cynic in me points out there are a thousand and one articles telling people that they should have better friendships and very few telling them how.
Ava Huang
A.I.-Generated Garbage Is Polluting Our Culture
There’s so much synthetic garbage on the internet now that A.I. companies and researchers are themselves worried, not about the health of the culture, but about what’s going to happen with their models.
My friend Erik Hoel; The New York Times
Does one have to be a genius to do maths?
The answer is an emphatic NO. In order to make good and useful contributions to mathematics, one does need to work hard, learn one’s field well, learn other fields and tools, ask questions, talk to other mathematicians, and think about the “big picture”. And yes, a reasonable amount of intelligence, patience, and maturity is also required. But one does not need some sort of magic “genius gene” that spontaneously generates ex nihilo deep insights, unexpected solutions to problems, or other supernatural abilities.
The great Terence Tao
Nietzsche’s Quarrel with History
Nietzsche was convinced that a culture too concerned with goodness would never be able to achieve greatness.
Jennifer Ratner-Rosenhagen; The Hedgehog Review
Reflections in the Mirror
In that moment, I understood how far I had come. I had spent so many years hating the person in the mirror, unable to recognize myself in it. Now, standing before my reflection, my heart is full. I can finally accept and love the woman I am, flaws and all.
María Jimena Sánchez; Interintellect blog
How Old Do I Look?
That is what midlife panic has always, actually, been about: not the fantasy of being young again, but the reality of being too old to start over, which perhaps carries a special sort of horror for the generation that invented not just the personal brand, but the personal rebrand.
Kat Rosenfield; The Free Press
Ambition
My ambition is more like: I want to learn how to become who I am. I want to grow, and experience deep relationships and intimacy and beauty and knowledge and wisdom. I want to alter the world around me, to bend it toward love and kindness and goodness. I feel these things growing inside of me…
Travis Northcutt
Essay 60
The parents pass on laurels you never wanted. You win but you win what? Living is winning.
By me; back on my eleven sentence essays…
Where Do Works of Art Belong?
The Elgin marbles are obviously part of Greece’s cultural heritage. But contemporary Greek citizens are not the sole inheritors of ancient Athens.
Megan Gafford; Quillette
How ‘Kung Fu Panda’ Conquered China – And China Conquered Hollywood
Although the original “Kung Fu Panda” came out over a decade ago, its legacy has never been more relevant. In addition to shaping the strategies Hollywood employs to infiltrate the Chinese market, it has also motivated China to improve its animation industry, in the hope of extending its soft power to other regions of the globe. With the fourth installment currently in theaters, this process is still ongoing.
Tim Brinkhof; New Lines Magazine
Affirmative action: Rethinking the limits of consent
After all, both consent-as-conversation and liberal consent-as-contract share the same focus: the individual, rather than social and cultural structures. They also share an unwarranted optimism.
Geertje Bol; Times Literary Supplement
Notes on Craft
When you have taught enough fiction writing classes, you begin to take a dim view of craft. I mean craft as maxims, adages, top-down pedagogy.
Greg Jackson; Granta
Automated Intimacy
Between Tocqueville’s frontiersman and the Replika app lie two hundred years of industrialization, urbanization, deindustrialization, and deurbanization — an experience bound to mark the current phase of isolation, stalked by memories of a previous organizational age.
Anton Jäger; Jacobin
The Two Kinds of Moderate
It is not merely a manipulative rhetorical trick to say "if you're not with us, you're against us," but often simply false.
Paul Graham
The Age of Amorality
Strategy involves setting priorities, and U.S. officials believed that lesser evils were needed to avoid greater ones, such as communism running riot in vital regions or democracies failing to find their strength and purpose before it was too late.
Hal Brands; Foreign Affairs
The Trouble of Modern Parenting and Why We Don't Have Kids
The good news for the anti-parenthood tribe is that they’re winning… It’s a good time to start asking questions about what the world looks like when the average age of an American is no longer 39 as it is today and it’s 50 like it is in Japan. Or when less than one in seven Americans are under the age of 20.
The good Sean Patrick Hughes
Good Birth, Good Death
Dante knew all this. It is on March 25, 1300, that he comes to himself in a dark wood and begins his journey into the afterlife. The date is, of course, appropriate, for Dante’s poem is at once about one man’s journey through the three stages of the afterlife and also about the entire economy of salvation. The world is a divine comedy; the world began on March 25…
Jeff Reimer; Comment
For Book Recommendations, People Are Always Better Than Algorithms
The best kinds of books are the ones with attributes that are unquantifiable, which is a big reason why people are so much better at recommendations than algorithms are. There are so many different things to like (or dislike) about a work, special qualities that go beyond plot and setting and genre that can’t be revealed from metadata: voice, tone, philosophical outlook. What is unquantifiable is horrifying to the corporate overlords, of course, but it’s the magic that connects readers with particular books.
Maris Kreizman; Literary Hub
A fight to protect the dignity of Michelangelo’s David raises questions about freedom of expression
“It raises not just legal issues, but also philosophical issues. What does cultural patrimony mean? How much of a stranglehold do you want to give institutions over ideas and images that are in the public domain?”
Colleen L. Barry; Associated Press
A patchwork family
We are alive in the now, in our new family. Our new reality, with a gash and then a scar – a golden scar – at its centre, is hard won. We are happy in the home we have built. As [Rachel Cusk] wrote in Aftermath: ‘We belong more to the world, in all its risky disorder, its fragmentation, its freedom.’ Our beautifully mended pot with its gold and celebration of difference is also highly functional, watertight and of great use to all.
Lily Dunn; Aeon
How Culture Normalises Patriarchy
Loving mothers reproduce patriarchal sons | Men amass advantage and expect respect | Concern for social approval | Male-dominated public spaces are seen as lecherous | Dissent is suppressed | Despondency traps | Cultural celebrations naturalise inequalities | Religion
Alice Evans
Stephen King’s Carrie and the horror of girlhood
Stephen King published Carrie in April 1974 at the age of 26. It began as a short story after King read an article suggesting that instances of telekinesis had been observed in girls in early adolescence around the time of menstruation. He refers in his memoir On Writing to a friend who suggested he try to write a female character, and he began to imagine a composite of two girls he had been to high school with: one shy, bullied and dressed in the same clothes every day, the other growing up in a house of oppressive religious piety. Carrie was released to initially modest acclaim and decent sales, but the paperback became a mega-hit following Brian De Palma’s dreamlike 1976 film.
Megan Nolan; New Statesman
Make Yourself Human Again
If artificial intelligence will eventually be more efficient or powerful than humans at all tasks, and will replace humans in everything from industry to politics to philosophy, then what’s left for humanity? If humans aren’t the center of the moral universe, then what?
Wolf Tivy; Palladium
“Unflinching In How Bats**t Crazy It Is”: Megalopolis Early Reactions Tease Coppola’s Truly Bizarre Epic
One attendee told him that the film had "zero commercial prospects," and that it's "unflinching in how batsh-t it is." The film was described as a mix of "Ayn Rand, Metropolis, and Caligula."
Ryan Northrup; Screen Rant - got me excited at the least
Who the Hell Came Up With an Artemisia Gentileschi “Rape Room”?
It is precisely these events that the exhibition revolves around. Upon entering, visitors are greeted with a timeline of “Artemisia’s abuse,” a map on a wall recounting the places where the violence occurred and the tribunal of the trial, setting the tone for the rest of the rooms.
Ginevra Rollo; Hyperallergic
The Two Friends Who Changed How We Think About How We Think
Before long, Kahneman and Tversky were in constant conversation. They worked intensely in a small seminar room or a coffee shop, or while taking a long walk. The sessions were private; no one else was invited to join. As they began to produce work together, each sentence would be written, rewritten, and rewritten again, with Kahneman manning the typewriter. (Tversky never did master the art of the keyboard.) On a good day, they would write a paragraph or two. Everything was produced jointly; they did not really know where one’s thought ended and the other’s began. Graduate students “now wondered how two so radically different personalities could find common ground, much less become soul mates.”
Cass R. Sunstein and Richard Thaler; The New Yorker - RIP Kahneman
U.S. Support for Israel’s War Has Become Indefensible
I’m a New Yorker. For me, 9/11 was the unbearable loss of thousands of lives. But I’m also a veteran of America’s War on Terror, so for me, 9/11 was also the pretext for disastrous, poorly conceived wars that spread death and destruction, destabilized the Middle East, created new enemies, and empowered Iran.
Phil Klay; The Atlantic
Genius and blood: How cheap light transformed civilization
This first transformative breakthrough in lighting technology was, however, nothing in comparison to the second lighting revolution powered by coal-driven electrification. The dawn of electric illumination began in earnest when Thomas Edison began marketing and installing the first commercially available lightbulbs in the 1880s. From there, market forces and innovation pushed the availability, quality, safety, and ubiquity of artificial light dramatically upward while pushing its cost down to a level of essentially universal accessibility for all of humanity.
Tony Morley; Big Think
Open Letter to Anti-Zionists on Twitter
I don’t want Israel to drift to the right. I find the values of Theodor Herzl and David Ben-Gurion to be almost as good as any human values have ever been, and I’d like Israel to keep them.
Scott Aaronson
When Sleep Deprivation is an Antidepressant
Gehrman acknowledged that what separates those for whom therapeutic sleep deprivation is effective and those who just get cranky and want to go to sleep is a mystery as old as Heinroth’s first observations of the effect.
Charles Digges; Nautilus
George Steiner, The Art of Criticism No. 2
“There are novels that one would call great but that will live because of their ideological, intellectual content. A lot of Thomas Mann might strike one that way. Musil's Man without Qualities is written about by as many philosophers as literary critics. But this is rare.”
Ronald A. Sharp; The Paris Review
Richard Serra, Minimalist Sculptor Whose Steel Creations Awed Viewers, Dies at 85
Serra’s sculptures defined a generation of art-making. Working on an unusually large scale, Serra crafted gigantic artworks that enlisted spirals, cubes, and cones of steel. These works loom over viewers, threatening to squash them.
Alex Greenberger; ARTnews
Daddy Longlegs Have Four Extra, Hidden Eyes, Researchers Say
Contrary to popular belief, daddy longlegs are not spiders, but rather, they’re part of a group of arachnids known as harvestmen. While spiders can have up to eight eyes, the estimated 6,500 species of daddy longlegs usually have just two. But while looking through a microscope at an embryo of Phalangium opilio—a daddy longlegs species—scientists recently discovered four additional eyes that never fully develop.
Sarah Kuta; Smithsonian Magazine — take that Fiona Apple!
Prisoners of Zembla: What Nabokov teaches us about scholars and writers
Under such a deluge of cleverness it is easy to miss that Nabokov also includes a few genuine reflections on the writer’s craft in the novel…
Irina Dumitrescu; Times Literary Supplement
A deep history of Canadian populism
Much like the agrarian populism of the western and southern United States, the Canadian prairies have supported successive movements opposed to the nation’s urban elites and the concentration of political and economic power. This fed into politics on the Left, including the growth of unionised labour and the emergence of the New Democratic Party. Canadian populists also embraced right-wing agendas such as social conservatism. Over time, the centre of gravity in Canadian conservatism shifted from east to west, as the nation made the journey from being a British Dominion to an independent power in the western hemisphere.
David Cowan; Engelsberg Ideas
Writing My Autobiography
A serious biography takes up what the world thinks of its subject, what his friends and family think of him, and—if the information is available in letters, diaries, journals, or interviews—what he thinks of himself. An autobiography is ultimately about the last question: what the author thinks of himself. Yet how many of us have sufficient self-knowledge to give a convincing answer? In her splendid novel Memoirs of Hadrian, Marguerite Yourcenar has Hadrian note: “When I seek deep within me for knowledge of myself what I find is obscure, internal, unformulated, and as secret as any complicity.”
Joseph Epstein; First Things
Negativity drives online news consumption
Although positive words were slightly more prevalent than negative words, we found that negative words in news headlines increased consumption rates (and positive words decreased consumption rates).
Claire E. Robertson, Nicolas Pröllochs, Kaoru Schwarzenegger, Philip Pärnamets, Jay J. Van Bavel & Stefan Feuerriegel; Nature
Self-deception, love, and grace
I think most (all?) people, myself included, deceive themselves every day about a myriad of things. And that’s ok! This can be a healthy way of dealing with what can often be the difficult realities of life.
Travis Northcutt - again!
Am I Anti-Woke?
Woke’s rules are new. It is not conventional left-liberalism, as is sometimes claimed, but a mutation of it which became mainstream in the last ten years. Even Obama is unwoke.
Ian Leslie
Three Reasons Why Culture Efforts Fail
To foster long-term growth, leaders should focus on the benefits of shifting company culture. Changing culture isn’t easy, of course, and it takes time. A McKinsey survey of some 3,000 executives found that only one in three organizational change efforts succeeds.
Rich Lyons; Forbes
How the Story Turns Out
We live in an unheroic and disillusioned moment, and—as to sales—a moment when ambitious novels have become a niche taste.
Scott Sherman and Edwin Frank; The Point
When it is and isn’t OK to recycle text in scientific papers
In scientific writing, one common form of text recycling is the reuse of text from methods sections. It is very common that the methodology used in a given study is similar or identical to the methods used in previous work from the same author or authors. In these cases, we consider reuse of text to be appropriate or even desirable to ensure clarity and consistency.
Nature