Anna Gát: What to Read This Weekend #15
RIP Martin Amis, rediscovering Donna Tartt, Descartes's princess, Russian propaganda, romance novels, spacetime, visiting Saudi Arabia, the death of the high school debate, 'Succession', LSD, and more
Hi everyone,
This was a busy week at Interintellect, building and reorganising, and prepping for new SuperSalons, for example with Andrew J. Scott on longevity, Peter Atwater and Bronwyn Williams on decision-making, and Jennifer Banks and Christine Emba on the philosophy of birth.
I’m slowly settling in, soon some 30 boxes of my books will arrive to Southern Europe from Northern Europe. Some day, dreams the tired and lonely immigrant, maybe all my books will be in one country again (instead of four).
I’ve been reading Donna Tartt’s The Secret History this past week. The novel is stirring up the many things I read and learned about the great GenX writers, everything that seemed so cool and grownup to me in the ‘90s, the Danny Boyle movies I was too young to watch, my stealth copy of American Psycho in high school, vowing never ever to read Houellebecq (and failing). My memories of that famed American cohort of thinkers that rose to prominence at a time when, as Elizabeth Wurtzel understood before her death, there was still magazine advertising, and academic and publishing jobs, to sustain a tiny intelligentsia, it held on until the end of the ‘90s in the UK and the US, and in France for a little longer. Before Sokal, before Krauss… Before we knew Britney Spears wasn’t a virgin and that presidents could get blowjobs. The special few years when the women producing books and thoughts may have felt liberated, even accepted, without the various shames and ambiguities that now come with it. It was the culture of my teens. Its foundations now fall apart every time I scratch the surface, but it did make me go and study liberal arts in college and choose what kind of a person I would become—just a little too late, a little out of sync with the times, sitting in dusty spaces lined with old books where all change registers slowly.
(Read more about The Secret History and the college that inspired it.)
Innovative people fuel combust their frustrations, many the notion that they were born just a few years too late, that they missed out on something—that they have to somehow (re-)build that something. There are no “creative” people, there are just people who have to first build a world in which they can then exist.
The Secret History reminds me not just of that one particular, retrospectively blessed-looking moment of intellectual renewal, the scene (or scenius) Tartt was part of, but of how, as they’re happening, blessed moments always appear to us as beginnings, after which we expect so much more to follow, when in reality they are zeniths. It’s the highest points we remember (even when those aren’t the happiest), all the smart kids in one place making something great, before everyone disperses and the next generation moves in and all the magic is gone and the game restarts. The upside of our era’s revolution, of how communal and creator existence has moved online, is that instead of dispersions and deaths we can, potentially, have an ongoing mutation of scenes. And then there are, of course, the downsides.
Many in the media and the educated classes live as if the world of The Secret History still existed, as if there were still linear paths to “knowledge work” success dotted by benevolent and egalitarian gatekeepers eager to help. And then the pots of gold and the applause of society, a Super Mario of intellectual esteem, surely. And in the morning they get up and go to work as secretaries and nannies and software engineers and investors’ party-organisers and Uber drivers and kettlebell trainers and Instagram eyebrow-plucking tutorial makers; my company just listed a customer service job and almost everybody who applied has a postgraduate degree in psychology. There’s a lot of talk about the loneliness, infertility, depression, and political nihilism of the young, perhaps this sorry state of dreamlessness and voicelessness is something to look into.
Knowing that the game has changed is very heavy knowledge, but it also gives one hope for the future: you know that help is needed, that the demand is there. For new platforms, new grant-funding models, audience management, curation. For connecting—and empowering—minds. Surplus frustrations can be channeled into construction, disruptors like Interintellect—or: Substack!—are working toward their own blessed moments. May we work toward them wisely.
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Excellent pieces to read this week as well:
At High School Debates, Debate Is No Longer Allowed
In debate, “unsafe” conversations should be encouraged, even celebrated. How better for young people from all backgrounds to bridge the divides that tear us apart, and to discover what unites them? The debate I knew taught me to think and learn and care about issues that affected people different from me.
James Fishback; The Free Press
Time is an object
A new form of physics called assembly theory suggests that a moving, directional sense of time is real and fundamental. It suggests that the complex objects in our Universe that have been made by life, including microbes, computers and cities, do not exist outside of time: they are impossible without the movement of time. From this perspective, the passing of time is not only intrinsic to the evolution of life or our experience of the Universe. It is also the ever-moving material fabric of the Universe itself. Time is an object. It has a physical size, like space.
Sara Walker; Aeon
Winning on the home front - The triumph of the Kremlin propaganda machine
The second element of the Kremlin’s devastatingly successful battle for the hearts and minds of Russia’s youth has been a huge and well-organized plethora of online groups and youth clubs to suit every personality.
Owen Matthews; Times Literary Supplement
The Gamification of Romance - What happens when desire goes online?
This “desirevolution” is a transformation not only in how we go about finding love and sex, but in what we fundamentally want from our erotic lives.
Matt McManus; Commonweal
The Age of Adolescence -Judy Blume and the eternal young adult
When adulthood is no longer a moral achievement but a hormonal eventuality, there is nothing to aspire to or prepare for—no higher education, no vocation, no marriage or motherhood (except as an undesired mistake).
Rita Koganzon; The Point
The Physicist Who Glues Together Universes
After watching these and an uncountable number of other cosmic histories play out in the digital memory of her computers, Loll no longer takes anything for granted—certainly not the humdrum three dimensions of space and one dimension of time that make up the fabric of our reality. “Nothing is preordained,” said Loll...
Charlie Wood; Quanta
Who Does Saudi Better: Google or Reddit? -As the kingdom goes digital, the best information is not where you might think
So I found myself in Riyadh, excited but cautious, not in the “use-your-best-judgment” casualwear that Reddit assured me would be fine, but in a plain black abaya with a scarf around my neck—just in case Google was right—and anxious about maintaining proper phone hygiene. But the longer I was there, the easier it was to see that the Redditors were right.
Katherine Dee; Tablet
The (unjustly forgotten) genius of pianist Clara Haskil
Haskil was not an assiduous live performer, however. She was not big on social interactions, and, more importantly, she didn’t have an agent. Fortunately, we can enjoy her legacy through her recordings.
Virginia Sánchez Rodríguez; The Conversation
The mind-body problem was discovered by a princess - Philosophical letters from a possible Renaissance romance
Two nerds, stuck in the Renaissance, exchanging the emails of the day, meeting only a few times in person, perhaps under the auspices of great passion. And scholars have indeed speculated about a romantic liaison.
Erik Hoel
The Winter of The Information - Revisiting the four-month scandal that made Martin Amis the center of the literary world.
In some ways the novel never had a chance. It never had a chance to be edited (he barely had time to deal with all the commas the proofreaders tried to put into the American edition). It certainly never had a chance to escape all the information readers already knew about it. When readers opened the book, they saw a story of literary jealousy that uncannily, distractingly, mirrored aspects of the metastory surrounding the book’s sale. Amis later wrote that The Information arrived on the scene “noisily and as it were triumphantly, creating a cognitive dissonance about itself. Because the book was about losing, not winning, about failure—my failure.”
Dan Kois; Slate
‘There are no words for the horror’: the story of my madness
You don’t have to master psychiatric vocabulary to understand that I wasn’t doing well. If you want to go into the nuances, “significant moral suffering” is worrying, but less so than “intense moral suffering”, which I was soon to experience, and which is itself less worrying than “intolerable moral suffering”.
Emmanuel Carrère; The Guardian
What We Owe Our Trees
[You] are asked to think differently about trees. They’re out there. They’re smart. They will outlast us.
Jill Lepore; The New Yorker
Anatomy of a romantic hero
Though the moral, political and intellectual risks of reading romance fiction now seem greatly exaggerated, it is still often described in the same terms: as frothy and trashy gratification. It occupies a unique position as perhaps the most popular and maligned of genres…
Anna Leszkiewicz; New Statesman
Neal Stephenson on Depictions of Reality (2019)
Well, I think, at the end of the day, people are not going to agree on facts unless there’s a reason for them to do so. I’ve been talking about a really interesting book called A Culture of Fact by Barbara Shapiro, which is a sort of academic-style book that discusses how the idea of facts entered our minds in the first place because we didn’t always have it. Procedures were developed that would enable people to agree on what was factual, and that had a huge impact on culture and on the economy and everything else.
And now that’s, as I said, going away, and the only way to bring it back is, first, to have a situation where people need and want to agree on facts.
Tyler Cowen; Conversations with Tyler
Why Scientists Need to Get High
There is no perfect or correct way to do self-experimentation. Part of you is an observer and part of you is a subject, and you’re trying to find the right point between objective data and a fuller sense of the subjective experience. So maybe you end up with a hybrid of science and literature.
Steve Paulson; Nautilus
⭐️ BONUS:
Not Serious People: A ‘Succession’ Reading List
Here are just five of the wonderful pieces written during the course of its phenomenal run, covering the show’s style, substance, and real-world inspiration.
Chloe Walker; Longreads