Anna Gát: What to Read This Weekend #43

The American campus and the American dream, poetry and madness, pop divas and athletes, churches and corpses, eroticism and altruism, Hitler and the humanities, Chomsky at 95... and more!

Dec 09, 2023

Hello from Berlin, friends!

The snow here is making me all homesick for Budapest and the times of the past. I’m chasing spätzle, conversation, smoky bars, home-vibes. My O1 visa has landed in my passport successfully (after a time-travel trek to the US Embassy in Berlin’s ghost-haunted American sector). My friends here are making me feel very cosy and appreciated, and the local Interintellect community is delightful. (Scroll down to see a photo from our dinner last night!)

We've just wrapped up a great online SuperSalon with Tyler Cowen on his new book. And we’re listing our NYC mega-offline with Esther Perel, Merve Emre, Agnes Callard, and Skye Cleary on January 25 (will be members only). If you want to gift an Interintellect membership to a loved one, now is a good time 🥂

I’ve been reading some excellent pieces - gems really - this past week; below is my list for you. Love x Anna

The Women Who Wrote Andy Warhol’s Novel

Celebrity has a deranging effect on many people.

Rachel Connolly; The New Republic

In search of the meaning of sport

How have we created a context in which certain movements made by talented (and, in the upper echelons of the men’s game, obscenely well-recompensed) people can be beautiful and meaningful and lastingly memorable?

Lola Seaton; New Statesman

Friendship and the Common Good

What makes a person happy is participation in the happy life of another person…

Andrew Willard Jones; The Hedgehog Review

There is no escaping metaphysics

If someone asserts that science disproves the existence of God, they are in fact going beyond science and venturing into metaphysics. Equally, if science is said to be silent on the issue, that means there remains a space for metaphysical theorizing. The idea, then, is that science can’t overturn metaphysics, because in attempting to do so, science ends up making claims with the kind of scope and theoretical abstraction that means it in effect becomes a form of metaphysics itself.

Robert Stern; Institute of Arts and Ideas

Inside the erotic mind

While we tend to view sexual desire as a primal instinct to be tamed by society, our desires and how we express them are shaped by culture.

Sophie McBain; again the New Statesman

Is the American dream really dead?

It’s … interesting to see how much the tragic murders of pivotal figures such as Martin Luther King and Robert F Kennedy, both of whom were able to speak across class and colour lines, made it significantly more difficult to create a liberal coalition that would support all working people. Both King and Kennedy had worked to build a broader based coalition of voters who could counter southern racism, trickle-down economics, and a neoliberal fear (on both sides of the political aisle) of any kind of government intervention to guide the invisible hand to a more just outcome. Their deaths, and the subsequent fragmentation of the New Left into more and more finely divided interest groups, show that the talent of individual leaders can matter as much as demographics when building political power.

Rana Foroohar; Financial Times

The Wisdom of the Jewish Wedding

It is predicated on the notion that stable marriages make stable families, which foster stable communities.

Tevi Troy; Discourse

The Disadvantages of an Elite Education (2008)

I’m not talking about curricula or the culture wars, the closing or opening of the American mind, political correctness, canon formation, or what have you. I’m talking about the whole system in which these skirmishes play out.

William Deresiewicz; The American Scholar

What We Get When We Give

This feel-good chemical is linked to the brain’s reward center. And it’s released when we give to others. Scientists have actually witnessed this in the lab.

Molly McDonough; Harvard Medicine

The University presidents

This was a dark day for American higher education. I want you to keep in mind that the incentives you saw on display rule so many other parts of the system, albeit usually invisibly. Don’t forget that. These university presidents have solved for what they think is the equilibrium, and it ain’t pretty.

Tyler Cowen

Being wrong about books. How to interpret literature

The Robert Frost poem The Road Not Taken is often quoted as if it endorses the idea of taking the road less travelled. In fact, the wording makes clear that the very opposite is the moral of the poem.

Henry Oliver

*Interintellect community gathering in Berlin last night - I titled it The Anti-Nihilist Dinner*

On Mapping Conversations

The Interintellect salons that I joined lately, especially the most recent one with Kevin Kelly which reminded us to keep on following our curiosities and to live a life with optimism.

Patricia Hurducas

I Teach the Humanities, and I Still Don’t Know What Their Value Is

We humanists keep on trying to teach people what the value of the humanities is, and people keep failing to learn our lessons. This suggests to me that humanists do not know the value of the thing they are trying to defend.

Agnes Callard; The New York Times

The Use of Knowledge in Society

To assume all the knowledge to be given to a single mind in the same manner in which we assume it to be given to us as the explaining economists is to assume the problem away and to disregard everything that is important and significant in the real world.

F. A. Hayek

Effective Altruism Thinks You're Hitler

For most people, it’s very psychologically difficult to go “well, you’re pretty much right, but I’m not going to take off work for a week to save a stranger, even if they slowly die as a result.” That’s certainly my reaction, but there are rumors out there that I am psychologically abnormal. So when people hear about others donating their kidneys to strangers, they need to come up with ways to make themselves feel better. “You see, there’s something called the bodily integrity norm…”

Richard Hanania

How Was Abortion Understood Historically?

Terminating a pregnancy was seen more as part of the menstrual cycle, not part of pregnancy.

Brandon Keim; Nautilus

Twain in Vienna (2008)

"I treated myself to listening to our old friend Mark Twain in person," Freud wrote to a friend on Feb. 9, 1889, "which was a sheer delight." And Freud uses a number of Mark Twain’s stories as examples in one of his books, Jokes and Their Relation to the Unconscious, published in 1905.

Candy Fresacher; The Vienna Review

Taylor Swift Is TIME's 2023 Person of the Year

Swift’s arrival in a city energized the local economy.

Sam Lansky; TIME

Noam Chomsky at 95

“What can one say about a country where a museum of science in a great city can feature an exhibit in which people fire machine guns at Vietnamese huts, with a light flashing when a hit is scored? What can one say about a country where such an idea can even be considered? You have to weep for this country.”

The Wire

Against Content Warnings — Who Shall Remember How? Palestinian Poets Respond

“We stopped
counting
the dead

but they
stayed
dying...”

Sara Abou Rashed; Los Angeles Review of Books

On logical family (2021)

It is a vision I have encountered, variously, in divergent spaces. I have seen a version of it in queer and polyamorous spaces: the “chosen family” as a self-forged alternative to families of origin that may or may not be capable of offering love and support. But I have seen a version of it, too, in Christian spaces: in the promise of the body of Christ, as a family we can enter into via adoption and love, as an abundant and life-giving counterpart to those liberal visions of the nuclear family structures — corporations in miniature — that cleave us neatly into us and them, and envisage progeny primarily as the conduits for the transmission of generational wealthor social capital… It is a vision of life where our familial bonds are not exclusively drawn either as a result of biological relation, or as a result of sexual desire, where the family we “choose” is not merely a result of to whom we are erotically attracted. It is the creation of a family through love, and through the commitments we make to one another, a family that in turn envisages friendship, in the Aristotelian basis, rather than desire, as the primary basis for non-biological bonds.

Tara Isabella Burton

Ottessa Moshfegh and Luke Goebel Want to Make a Movie About Rats

GOEBEL: No comment.

MOSHFEGH: God, I don’t even remember. Then there was the rat emoji.

GOEBEL: When The Emoji Movie came out, we were like, “Oh, we’re doomed.”

MOSHFEGH: We can’t do that anymore.

GOEBEL: But it really wasn’t about an emoji. It was just about rats.

Emmeline Clein; Interview Magazine

Their Bodies Were Donated to Harvard. Then They Went Missing

When a grieving son or daughter hands over their loved one to Harvard, they’re trusting the storied institution to handle them with respect. They’re passing over their parent or grandparent believing that they’re in safe hands with the academy.

Brenna Ehrlich; Rolling Stone

Sorry Neocons, Adam Smith Was Not One of You (2011)

Neocons and defense hawks are using the moral cachet of Adam Smith to justify a national greatness agenda lifted from Machiavelli—which, if you come to think of it, is rather Machiavellian.

Shikha Dalmia; Reason

The (Often) Overlooked Experiment That Revealed the Quantum World

A century ago, the Stern-Gerlach experiment established the truth of quantum mechanics. Now it’s being used to probe the clash of quantum theory and gravity.

Zack Savitsky; Quanta Magazine

Ten Thousand Years of Patriarchy! (2022)

As societies grew they were threatened by in-fighting. Men squabbled over women, wealth and property. Sexual jealousy may have been mitigated by religions that idealised sexual segregation, chastity, fidelity, and veiling. Compliance was promoted by praising female virtue, social policing, state laws, and moralising supernatural punishment. Male rulers and theologians blamed floods, droughts and earthquakes on disobedient women. Amid fears of eternal damnation there emerged cults of chastity. Islam became particularly patriarchal.

Alice Evans

Gardens: An Essay on the Human Condition (2016)

In his thoughtful and wide-ranging 2008 book Gardens: An Essay on the Human Condition, Robert Pogue Harrison, a professor of literature at Stanford University, examines gardens of all sorts – real and mythical, most mundane to most majestic – and sheds light on our relationship with them, telling us why do we need them and love them so.

Tulika Bahadur; On Art and Aesthetics

It's Official: Alix Earle Certified as the Internet's It Girl

The parasocial relationship Earle has built with fans has sparked a new wave of social media fame creators can learn from.

McKinley Franklin; Variety

One Screaming Weave

[Christian Wiman] doesn’t exonerate God—what would that even mean?—or pretend that pain serves only to offer convenient moral lessons, a belittling of experience every bit as tacky as the “preachers and teachers and other professional talkers [who] treat poems like wisdom machines or shortcuts to a conclusion.”

Ed Simon; Poetry Foundation

Between pinnacle and chasm: How Virginia Woolf strove to close the gap between reality and language

Woolf’s motives were several. The diary was to be an archive for “Old Virginia”, the projected memoirist, and served as a more immediate archive, a source for scenes, phrases and characters in Woolf’s fiction. It was a record of the writing process. It was self-therapy...

Emily Kopley; Times Literary Supplement

The rights of the dead — From the Irish Giant to the Ancient One, is it ever ethical for scientists and museums to study bodies without permission?

These stories affirm that the way the living have treated dead bodies throughout history is never about the dead but about themselves.

Anita Guerrini; Aeon

Trans Philosophy Matters

For their own parts, trans girls and women are subject to a potent double bind: to be either an “evil deceiver” merely pretending to be a woman, or a “make-believer,” a deficient and laughable simulacrum of femininity.

Kate Manne; Los Angeles Review of Books

Beyoncé’s Renaissance Film Shows One of Pop’s Most Private Stars at Work

As her platform and team have grown she’s only become more meticulous, and not just because she now directs her own shows, videos, and documentaries. When you’re popular and successful enough, every facet of your being becomes performance.

Dylan Green; Pitchfork

Goodbye to Verdugo: Sometimes it feels better to live among your own kind, even if they’re Jewish

And so it’s back to the Jews I go, with my two little blue-eyed boys and my Presbyterian minister’s granddaughter-turned-pro-Israel Jewish wife.

Jeremy Stern; Tablet

Isabelle Huppert Lives from Scene to Scene

“When you can build up your own little story within the official script. The great roles, and the great films, are where you can hide yourself in this secret place.”

Rebecca Mead: The New Yorker

Parenting and Eating Disorders

“No processed foods” sounded innocent enough, especially in Los Angeles, where I live, and where you can’t swing a stick without hitting an acai bowl. But as a woman who’s struggled on and off for decades with an eating disorder, this was, to put it mildly, triggering. I’ve spent much of my life dieting, starving, and restricting foods. In recovery, one of my daily battles is internally disputing well-meaning but uninformed outside messages about health: that foods can be good or bad and that so-called bad ones (usually the fun ones — pizza, cake) should be avoided. Gently working these once-restricted foods back into one’s diet supports healing.

Emily Oster and Cole Kazdin

Macron invites pope to Notre-Dame reopening, announces creation of museum

"Since April 2019, the entire nation has been rebuilding," Macron told reporters.

Le Monde English

The Shape of a Question

Huppert’s relationship to her medium is strange, and not only for the obvious reason that she often plays similarly discomfiting, unpleasant, and unusual people. She is doing something uncommon through acting, and whatever this strange project is it defies articulation. Huppert’s belief in the limitations of language is mystical. It is symptomatic of a sophisticated lack of faith in human reason... She thinks that human behavior is chronically incomprehensible, and she makes films which reflect such a conception. Her films do not tell their viewers how to interpret them. As she puts it, she makes movies “in the shape of a question, not in the shape of an answer.” She vivifies characters without fully understanding them, and she chooses characters who thwart transparency and defy explanation. She is certainly uninterested in cultivating the kind of intelligibility that viewers crave in movies and people crave in life. Huppert does not harbor those cravings. She has remarked that “we always feel slightly misunderstood and misjudged in life. We should gain strength rather than weakness from it. I always feel misunderstood, and yet that is what I seek.” She does not analyze her roles, she feeds herself into them, syncopating herself to their rhythms or mixing their rhythm with hers.

Celeste Marcus; Liberties

Meditations on Mot: A response to Scott Alexander

“Mot is the god of sterility and lifelessness. To me, he represents the lack of technology in our lives. With technology, we can tame famine, avert drought, and cure disease. We can perform feats that our ancestors would have seen as miracles: flying through the air, and even into space. But we’re still so so far from achieving the true potential of technology—and I think of Mot as the personification of what’s blocking us.’

Richard Ngo

The prose takes off: Erica Jong’s Fear of Flying at 50

And at last, having made it to London by herself, [protagonist Isadora] realizes she has to take responsibility for her own life. She knows that she can survive, and that she will keep writing. But how will her story be resolved? Jong foregrounds the question by calling the last chapter “A 19th-Century Ending”.

Elaine Showalter; Times Literary Supplement

Warm Planet, Cool Heads

When limiting the earth’s average temperature, or the level of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, becomes the overarching goal, we lose sight of other goals — such as the U.N.’s Sustainable Development Goals: among them fresh water, education, relief from extreme poverty, and freedom from slavery.

Nicholas Clairmont; The New Atlantis

‘Be Really Tender’: 12 Famous Artists Offer Life Advice

“Don’t get rid of negative emotion, but just use it… like salt in your food.” — Yoko Ono

Brian Boucher; Artnet

On biotech platform strategy

The increasing digitization of biology has drawn the attention and money of more tech-focused founders and investors—a trend that people refer to as TechBio. This has led to some confusion, because people in tech use the term “platform” in a way that differs from how traditional biotech investors use it. For example, the prolific tech entrepreneur and investor Elad Gil has spelled out his own tech platform typology that includes software infrastructure companies like Stripe, suites of apps and developer APIs like Meta, and operating systems like Microsoft. Clearly, we all seem to be intent on making the word “platform” do as much work as possible.