Anna Gát: What to Read This Weekend #27
Live Players and Shape Rotators, ethics and empires, elephants and Jordan Peterson, Nobel winners, therapy speak, tyranny, wolves, and incest — art, revolutions, generations, realistic depressions...
Hello everyone,
Greetings from sunny-windy Lisbon. We’ve just wrapped up Tara Isabella Burton’s Interintellect SuperSalon, hosted by Tufts’s Thomas Arnold and Wayfare Magazine’s Zach Davis. What a treat! (Come to the next one?)
An abundance of fantastic reads this past week - hope you’ll enjoy browsing through them over the weekend! Let’s dive in…
What the heck happened in 2012?
I remember someone in graduate school, which I entered in 2010, confessing to me after a few beers that the rise in politicalization among our peers around 2012-2013 (as my fellow grad students either suddenly bought into wokeness and started using its reasoning and language or staked out controversial or secretively resistant anti-woke positions) reminded him of “the invasion of the body-snatchers.” His theory was that the body-snatching was happening through their phones.
My friend would not be surprised to learn that the major political reorientation of the decade sprung into existence the second everyone got smartphones.
Erik Hoel
Depressive realism
What if reality truly sucks and, while depressed, we lose the very illusions that help us to not realise this?
Julie Reshe; Aeon
Emotional Realism Is the Toxic Positivity Alternative That Few Seem Ready For
We have a long way to go before emotional realism becomes real. We can start moving in the right direction by realizing that we don’t need to use therapy-speak to talk about our negative emotions. They aren’t always symptoms of mental health struggles. We don’t always need to “process” them and they don’t necessarily stem from trauma. We don’t have to “practice self-care” when we feel them. Instead, let’s try treating negative emotions just like positive ones. After all, no one tells you that you need to “process” your joy.
Krista Thomason; Teen Vogue
A Song of Shapes and Words - What a bad time (2022)
My first disclaimer is that you need to be open minded for this. Don’t take it too literally. I will cite several questionable, possibly incorrect factoids about psychometrics, but the methodology doesn’t matter. We’re here to have a good time…
Roon
Live versus Dead Players (2018)
A live player is a person or tightly coordinated group of people that is able to do things they have not done before. There are two attributes that are necessary for a player to be considered live: tight coordination and a living tradition of knowledge.
Samo Burja
Corporate Tyranny
In his debate with Alexandre Kojève about tyranny and philosophy, Leo Strauss exposes another way we’ve outpaced the classical conception of tyranny: “Present day tyranny, in contradistinction to classical tyranny, is based on the unlimited progress in the ‘conquest of nature’ which is made possible by modern science.” In its desire to override the passions which made human societies necessarily dangerous (and thus necessarily political), the contemporary tyranny would seek to intervene with technology to redefine human nature itself, even at the level of biology.
Jon Askonas; Plough
Counter Culture
“The spectator is a prince who rejoices everywhere in his incognito,” Baudelaire crows in “The Painter of Modern Life,” his infamous 1863 essay delineating the new phenomenon of the flâneur. But I felt incognito, too, when for a span in my 20s, I worked behind a series of counters. There, hidden in plain sight, I spent my days looking. I was a spy..
Rhian Sasseen; Poetry Foundation
Competing With Your Younger Self
And for many of us, the competition with ourselves has long been our main driving force. The question is: How can I compete with my younger self? How do I know if I’m outpacing her?
Emily Oster
Why You Should Stop Caring What Other People Think (2014)
We crave the Puppet Master’s approval more than anyone’s, and we’re so horrified at the thought of upsetting the Puppet Master or feeling their nonacceptance or ridicule that we’ll do anything to avoid it. When we get to this toxic state in our relationship with a Puppet Master, that person’s presence hangs over our entire decision-making process and pulls the strings of our opinions and our moral voice.
Tim Urban; Wait But Why
Son of a Coach - Wisdom from a lifetime listening to what it takes to win
Sometimes you just have to get mean. One of my dad’s favorite movies was The Outlaw Josey Wales. He got a lot of mileage out of Wale’s most famous quote.
“Now remember, when things look bad and it looks like you're not gonna make it, then you gotta get mean. I mean plumb, mad-dog mean. ‘Cause if you lose your head and you give up, then you neither live nor win. That's just the way it is.”
If you don’t have that in you, then maybe hard things like winning aren’t for you.
Sean Patrick Hughes
How the Booksellers of Paris Are Preparing for Next Summer’s Olympics
“I hate sport. That’s personal, but I hate sport, and I have a horror of circus games, and, how to put this. You are American? So you know Jean Baudrillard. For us he was a friend, Jean Baudrillard. So he has The Consumer Society, like Debord has The Society of the Spectacle, and all that sticks to us like shit. No, frankly, the Olympic Games—for me they leave me neither hot nor cold. They leave me totally indifferent.”
Jacqueline Feldman; The Paris Review
The Real Ownership Economy - Bring back baby bonds
We have failed our kids. We have to think about the next generation and build for them rather than always focusing on the returns of the current generation.
Kyla Scanlon
Impact of major awards on the subsequent work of their recipients
Nobel Laureates and MacArthur Fellows received fewer citations for post- than for pre-award work. This was driven mostly by Nobel Laureates.
Andrew Nepomuceno, Hilary Bayer, and John P.A. Ioannidis — via Tyler Cowen; Marginal Revolution
An Interview with Eugene Wei About Twitter, Threads, and Taylor Swift
“[There] probably won’t be another Twitter again at that specific time and place with its very unique form factor, it found this odd product-market fit with a particular niche of users and it’s unclear that that set of conditions will ever be replicated again. So I both am empathetic towards [Elon Musk] trying to shake things up but also as I wrote in my piece — there’s a sense in which maybe trying to abandon that local maximum, there isn’t a bigger hill to climb actually, that is going to be the terminal value of what Twitter will be.”
Ben Thompson; Stratechery
The Problem With Letting Therapy-Speak Invade Everything (2022)
It’s not just that this Instagram therapy gives its adherents a convenient excuse to bail on dinner parties or silence our phones when friends text us in tears. Rather, it’s that according to this newly prevalent gospel of self-actualization, the pursuit of private happiness has increasingly become culturally celebrated as the ultimate goal…
Yet it is precisely that rejection of our communal lives that makes therapy culture — at least the version of it on social media and in wellness advertisements — such an imperfect substitute.
Tara Isabella Burton; The New York Times
The Art Market Has Taken a Hit. Are We About to Enter Bargain City?
Sales at Sotheby’s (which generated $1.7 billion between January 1 and May 20), Christie’s ($1.7 billion), and Phillips ($254.9 million) have fallen 22 percent from the equivalent period in 2022. Of the top three national art markets, just one—China—increased its auction revenue.
Katya Kazakina, Artnet News
Metascience Since 2012: A Personal History
[If] there were metascience entrepreneurs, I played a significant part as a metascience venture capitalist—not the only one, but the most active. While I worked at what was initially known as the Laura and John Arnold Foundation (now publicly known as Arnold Ventures), I funded some of the most prominent metascience entrepreneurs of the past 11 years, and often was an active participant in their work. The grants I made totaled over $60 million dollars.
Stuart Buck; Good Science Project
Jordan Peterson: Agent of chaos
“Sanity,” Peterson claims, “is knowing the rules of the social game, internalising them, and following them.”
Johanna Thomas-Corr; New Statesman
“Ugly, gouty, fat”: the problem of Queen Anne’s body (2019)
The Whig politician John Clerk, after twice encountering the Queen during an acute attack of painful gout, wrote in horror of Anne’s “frightful” “red and spotted” face, “negligent dress”, “nasty bandages” and “dirty-like rags”, surmising that Anne “appeared to be the most despicable mortal I had ever seen in any situation”.
Anna Leszkiewicz, New Statesman
Reintroducing wolves to Britain is pure insanity
Since London is over-run with foxes and city dwellers like the idea of wolves, an obvious solution presents itself. Let’s release wolves into the London suburbs and drop a few breeding pairs into Hyde Park and St James’s Park where they will no doubt enrich the ‘eco-system’ so beloved on the pro-wolf lobby.
Christopher Snowdon (hopefully joking in) The Spectator
So you want to be a historian (1991)
Do you like to read -- not just history books but all kinds of things? Literature, certainly, because good literature does what good history ought to: helps us imagine the lies and thoughts of strangers, while never forgetting that they are, in fact, strangers. The most dangerous lie in any work of history is the use of the word we to refer to people of the past. The people of the past are not we to us, but they: strangers, no matter how close we feel to them.
Barbara Jeanne Fields, Washington Post
Philosophy of Nature by Paul Feyerabend (2018)
Feyerabend was convinced that science, especially quantum mechanics, was rediscovering the importance of the subjective, and was about to welcome the existence of paranormal phenomena and the hidden powers of the human mind. It isn’t at all clear what sort of new science he envisioned, but it’s safe to say that it was nothing like what has actually happened in the intervening four decades. If anything, science has become even more ‘Parmenidean’ – even more abstract.
Massimo Pigliucci; Philosophy Now
The Bonn Summit and the road to globalisation
Each state would stimulate domestic demand for foreign goods and services, which would in turn foster growth among all parties. In particular, if Germany and Japan expanded their economies this would enable the Carter administration to reduce the US balance of payments deficit and stabilise the stagnating dollar in the system of flexible exchange rates. It was economic policy for a fragile political order…
Angus Reilly; Engelsberg Ideas
50 Years After Hiroshima (1995)
The failure of these reasons to reflect the limits on the conduct of war is evident, so I focus on a different matter: the failure of statesmanship on the part of allied leaders and why it might have occurred. Truman once described the Japanese as beasts and to be treated as such; yet how foolish it sounds now to call the Germans or the Japanese barbarians and beasts! … Churchill later granted that he carried the bombing too far, led by passion and the intensity of the conflict. A duty of statesmanship is not to allow such feelings, natural and inevitable as they may be, to alter the course a democratic people should best follow in striving for peace.
John Rawls; Dissent
Kurt Weill opera silenced by Nazis to be heard again after 80 years (2019)
The “Zeitoper”, or topical musical comedy, which Weill created with writer Georg Kaiser, details a convoluted attempt on the life of a fictional tsar. Before the tsar arrives in the Parisian studio, five anarchists switch the real photographer, Angèle, with a stand-in and hide a gun inside her camera.
Vanessa Thorpe; The Guardian
Infinite Ethics: Infinite Problems
Reflecting on ethics makes a whole host of principles seem obvious. Infinite ethics shows how some of the most obvious principles—things so obvious that if a theory denied them, we’d take that to be enough to refute the theory—come into conflict with each other. Infinite ethics laughs at your attempts to bring your views into reflective equilibrium. It mocks your attempts to hold onto principles like that an infinitely large universe, where there are 100 quadrillion miserable people per galaxy and only one happy person is bad.
Bentham's Newsletter
Angels & Insects (film review, 1996)
The story works like the trap of some exotic insect, which decorates the entrances with sweet nectars and soft fragrances, and then prepares an acid bath inside. Notice the countless touches that show the harsh pecking order in mid-19th century Britain: the servants who turn to face the wall when a master or mistress passes; the cocky arrogance of Edgar, who feels birth has given him the right to insult his social inferiors; the repressed anger of old Sir Harald, whose insect collection replaces a great many other things he would love to pin wriggling to a corkboard.
Roger Ebert; Chicago Sun Times
The Decay Of Lying: An Observation (1889)
“Pure modernity of form is always somewhat vulgarising. It cannot help being so. The public imagine that, because they are interested in their immediate surroundings, Art should be interested in them also, and should take them as her subjectmatter. But the mere fact that they are interested in these things makes them unsuitable subjects for Art. The only beautiful things, as somebody once said, are the things that do not concern us.”
Oscar Wilde
Richard III: Team rebuilds 'most famous spine' (2014)
University of Leicester osteoarchaelogist Dr Jo Appleby, of the university's School of Archaeology and Ancient History, concluded: "Although the scoliosis looks dramatic, it probably did not cause a major physical deformity.
"This is because he had a well-balanced curve.”
BBC
New neuroscience research indicates that the fear of being evaluated underpins social anxiety disorder
Unlike the fear of negative evaluation, which is a symptom of other disorders as well, the fear of positive evaluation is a symptom that is unique to social anxiety disorder.
Vladimir Hedrih; PsyPost
1968 Has Ended
If we want a lively and intriguing and dynamic art world, along with politics that fit the contemporary moment, then we can’t have every generation celebrating every previous generation. A little gratitude and appreciation for history is always a good start—but that appreciation should also come with a desire to surpass.
Charles Schifano
The Great Inflection? A Debate About AI and Explosive Growth
“I think this historical evidence is compelling enough to require one to assess the arguments for expecting about 20% growth rates in gross world product on its merits, rather than supposing that we should ignore this possibility until we have very strong watertight models of the economic effects of AI.”
Matt Clancy vs Tamay Besiroglu; Asterisk
Thailand's National Animal Is Pushing Back against Habitat Loss
Elephants in the wild must walk around 10 kilometers (around six miles) to find enough food to fill their bellies. And the amount of elephant habitat in the Khao Ang Rue Nai preserve is around 1,000 square kilometers (around 300 square miles). It’s a rather simple calculation, Cheachean says, to figure out that it would ultimately become too small.
Villagers report seeing baby elephants with increasing frequency.
Maria Stöhr and Luke Duggleby; Spiegel International
Some notes on Australia’s Big Things
At any rate, Wikipedia claims there are “over 230” big things, but then goes on to list 266. Who knows.
Jonn Elledge
My Generation
My psychiatrist tells me this feeling is normal, that it is at worst a “midlife crisis” and not a full-fledged psychotic break.
Justin E. H. Smith; Harper’s Magazine
Ágota Kristóf and the Agony of the “Enemy” Language
One of the greatest pleasures of The Notebook is how easily the world bends to the twins’ treatment of it. We are encouraged to believe that it does so precisely because of their emotional detachment from it, their ability to hold themselves apart from others and their behavior… Slavoj Žižek, in a text included as an afterword for a collected version of the trilogy published in 2022, calls the twins “ethical monsters.” The little village in which they live becomes the site of their experiments.
Missouri Williams; The Nation
Quantum Complexity Shows How to Escape Hawking’s Black Hole Paradox
“You need to be independent of all the pieces of the system, but not independent of the system, which is like aaargh,” [physicist Daniel Harlow] said, throwing up his hands in frustration.
Charlie Wood; Quanta
A Talisman Against the Taliban
There are no genuinely good times in refugee work. Even when you’re successful, that only means that you have helped refugees lose everything but their lives—possessions, home, business, fortune, job, purpose, land, mountains, fields, mosque, community, neighbors, streets, language—successfully.
Nevertheless, there are gradations of suffering, and while it is not exactly happy work to help people flee the land of their childhood impressions, first loves, and native tongue, it is better than failing to help people flee. And so as January of 2022 came around, and flights out of Afghanistan stalled, a more difficult period began.
Phil Klay; TIME
Why we’re still obsessed with Shakespeare
For 400 years his influence has evolved, but never been threatened by disappearance, and his work remains a kind of proving ground for English literary criticism, exemplifying the patterns and problems that shape the discipline at large.
Chris Townsend; Times Literary Supplement
How does a jet engine work? By running hot enough to melt its own innards.
The first part of the core is the compressor stage, where the air is—you guessed it—compressed.
Rob Verger; Popular Science
Why the ‘interdisciplinary’ push in universities is actually a dangerous antidisciplinary trend (2022)
In a truly interdisciplinary project each participant has a different perspective on the problem. They negotiate through these differences to a shared – and often highly innovative – approach. That is one reason interdisciplinary teams are so powerful.
Paul E. Griffiths; The Conversation
Could a Large Language Model Be Conscious?
Consciousness also matters morally. Conscious systems have moral status. If fish are conscious, it matters how we treat them. They’re within the moral circle. If at some point AI systems become conscious, they’ll also be within the moral circle, and it will matter how we treat them. More generally, conscious AI will be a step on the path to human level artificial general intelligence. It will be a major step that we shouldn’t take unreflectively or unknowingly.
This gives rise to a second challenge: Should we create conscious AI?
David J. Chalmers; Boston Review