Anna Gát: What to Read This Weekend #36
Short digest today: Sapolsky, Andreessen, Arendt, Ken Follett, Petrarch, Auden, Audrey Tautou, Bernard Williams, Terrence Malick, Moshfegh, Fosse, Hanania, Israel, depression, romantics, laughter...
Dear all,
Shorter digest today as I’m travelling on the East Coast - NYC, DC, Connecticut - and preparing for our autumn festival tomorrow, with The New Yorker’s Larissa MacFarquhar, Skye Cleary and Kyla Scanlon, as well as the DC Interintellect event on November 4, with Tara Isabella Burton, Liberties Journal’s Celeste Marcus, and Luke Burgis’s Novitate Conference.
Hope I’ll see many of you there! And as always, please enjoy my selection of weekend readings below. xx Anna
In Defence of the Dark Ages
It is difficult to say who came up with the “Dark Ages”. Theodor Ernst Mommsen found traces of it in Petrarch, though these are not sufficient to assert, as Tristan Hughes of Dan Snow’s History Hit does, that Petrarch “coined” the term. What is certain is that Petrarch and other Renaissance humanists held the recent past in low esteem when compared to the glories of ancient Rome; indeed, this is the same idea that gave rise to the (less-contested) “Middle Ages”.
Their perspective was later shared, albeit for different reasons, by Protestant polemicists such as Gilbert Burnet, who, in turn, carried it forth into the Enlightenment.
Samuel Rubinstein; The Critic
Stanford scientist, after decades of study, concludes: We don’t have free will
[Robert Sapolsky], a MacArthur “genius” grant winner, is extremely aware that this is an out-there position. Most neuroscientists believe humans have at least some degree of free will. So do most philosophers and the vast majority of the general population. Free will is essential to how we see ourselves, fueling the satisfaction of achievement or the shame of failing to do the right thing.
Saying that people have no free will is a great way to start an argument. This is partly why Sapolsky, who describes himself as “majorly averse to interpersonal conflict,” put off writing his new book “Determined: A Science of Life Without Free Will.”
Corinne Purtill; Los Angeles Times
A Philosophy of Our Fellow Creatures
“Activist” might not be the first word that comes to mind to describe Martha Nussbaum, whose work as a philosopher has made her a public figure for more than three decades. But her first piece for this magazine, published in 1985, was titled “Plato and Affirmative Action.”
Lauren Kane; The New York Review of Books
Ken Follett Wants His Books to Feel as Exciting as James Bond
Q: What time of day do you write (and why)?
A: I write all day, Monday to Friday. I usually take weekends off but if I’m coming up to a deadline, I’ll write all day Saturday and Sunday as well too if I need to. I like to get up early and start at seven or eight o’clock in the morning and I finish around five o’clock in the afternoon.
Literary Hub
How America Fractured Into Four Parts (2021)
What distinguished libertarians from conventional, pro-business Republicans was their pure and uncompromising idea. What was it? Hayek: “Planning leads to dictatorship.” The purpose of government is to secure individual rights, and little else.
George Packer; The Atlantic
Remembering W. H. Auden (1975)
In the case of Auden, as in the case of Brecht, inverted hypocrisy served to hide an irresistible inclination toward being good and doing good—something that both were ashamed to admit, let alone proclaim. This seems plausible for Auden, because he finally became a Christian, but it may be a shock at first to hear it about Brecht.
Hannah Arendt; The New Yorker
The Techno-Optimist Manifesto
Our enemy is stagnation. Our enemy is anti-merit, anti-ambition, anti-striving, anti-achievement, anti-greatness.
Marc Andreessen
“Audrey Tautou: Superfacial” (2017)
In the 15 years since the film “Amélie” made her a star, the French actress Audrey Tautou has built up a parallel practice as a photographer. Working alone and using herself as a model, Tautou has captured images that dwell on the nature of public image and constructed identity.
The New York Times
Bernard Williams argued that one’s ethics is shaped by culture and history. But that doesn’t mean that everyone is right
Williams had a deep sense of the cultural and historical variety of ethical life. But he also saw that the typical way that moral relativism was taken to support toleration, notably by some anthropologists at the time, was fundamentally incoherent.
Daniel Callcut; Aeon
Popular chimpanzees set hand-holding trends for the whole group
One observation the team noticed is that the grooming handclasp does not seem to provide any survival benefit. Instead, adopting a certain handclasp style appears to be more of a social perk in some chimp communities.
Jocelyn Solis-Moreira; Popular Science
Why Is That Funny? How evolution made us laugh (2022)
Everyone laughs. And most people, most of the time, would prefer to have more of it than less. So it’s no surprise we like to be around people who can get us laughing. The fact that everyone wants to laugh suggests that laughing did something big in our evolutionary history. But what?
Brian Gallagher; Nautilus
Identity Politics, Political Ideology, and Well-being: Is Identity Politics Good for Our Well-being?
Acceptance of identity politics may account for both the increasing gap in well-being between political progressives and conservatives around 2012 as well as the recent decrease in well-being among conservatives.
George Yancey, via Tyler Cowen
To Save the Jewish Homeland: There is Still Time (1948)
Palestine and the building of a Jewish homeland constitute today the great hope and the great pride of Jews all over the world. What would happen to Jews, individually and collectively, if this hope and this pride were to be extinguished in another catastrophe is almost beyond imagining. But it is certain that this would become the central fact of Jewish history and it is possible that it might become the beginning of the self-dissolution of the Jewish people. There is no Jew in the world whose whole outlook on life and the world would not be radically changed by such a tragedy.
Hannah Arendt, re-printed in Commentary
Shakespeare is Fake: When we have objective measures, the past is never better
As Anna Gát has already pointed out, there are three ways we can understand the question of the “greatness” of Shakespeare.
Intrinsic: He produced the best plays and sonnets by some objective standard. This can be in an elitist sense focusing on the impact his work has on the most refined among us, or a more “democratic” one where the same can be said for all humans.
Relative: Shakespeare was great compared to those who came before him, or others of his time.
Generative: Shakespeare was the inspiration for a great deal of later work.
Richard Hanania
There is no such thing as weak will: Socrates on values, rationality and procrastination
How is it possible to hit the snooze button when the alarm goes off when what we really want, all things considered, is to get out of bed?
Rebecca Roache; Institute of Arts and ideas
I'm Sorry I Bit You During My Job Interview (2011)
The second time I bit you, I think I was just hungry.
Tom O’Donnell; McSweeney’s Internet Tendency
The Latin School Teacher Who Made Classics Popular
There have been many more recent retellings of Greek and Roman myths for adult and young adult readers, including Stephen Fry’s trilogy Mythos, Heroes, and Troy and Sarah Iles Johnston’s fine Gods and Mortals. But neither writes with the resonant (albeit often unearned) authority of [Edith Hamilton], and it is hard to think of a contemporary classicist who fills anything like the cultural position she enjoyed in the mid-20th century.
Victoria Houseman; The Nation
Investment Funds Are Now Selling the Rock Songs They Bought
Bob Dylan sold out his entire song catalog ($400 million—ka-ching!). Paul Simon sold out ($250 million). Neil Young sold out ($150 million). Stevie Nicks sold out ($100 million). Dozens of others sold out. As a result, rock songs have now entered their Madison Avenue stage of life.
Ted Gioia
At the Writing Academy (2016)
He said he liked Astrup, and I wasn’t the first to choose a painting by him, Olav H. Hauge had done so, too. Then he started on the poem. The first line, he said, is a cliché, you can cross that out. The second line is also a cliché. And the third and fourth. The sole value of this poem, he said after rejecting every single line, is the phrase “wide-screen sky.” I’ve never seen that before. You can keep that. The rest you can scrub.
“But then there’s nothing left of the poem,” I said.
“No,” he said. “But the description of nature and your enthusiasm for it are clichés. There’s nothing of Astrup’s mystique in your poem. You’ve completely trivialized it. But ‘wide-screen sky.’ As I said, that’s not bad.”
Karl Ove Knausgaard; The New Yorker
On making friends as an adult
As Kevin Kelly, the founding executive editor of Wired Magazine, reminded us in tip #17 of his wonderful 68 Bits of Unsolicited Advice: “Everyone is shy. Other people are waiting for you to introduce yourself to them, they are waiting for you to send them an email, they are waiting for you to ask them on a date. Go ahead.”
Vidhika Bansal
Why the ‘Mother of the Atomic Bomb’ Never Won a Nobel Prize
The American government assembled the Manhattan Project to develop such a weapon. Many of [Lise Meitner]’s peers, including Frisch and Bohr, became involved. Einstein did not, although he had written a letter to President Franklin D. Roosevelt urging him to secure uranium and fund chain reaction experiments. Meitner, though she had been invited, refused to join.
Katrina Miller; The New York Times
The New World: a misunderstood masterpiece? (2009)
Malick's mantra for The New World was "natural light, no cranes, no big rigs, handheld". In other words, barebones, stripped-to-the-chassis, organic plein-air film-making. The second unit was despatched to gather beautiful and captivating visual ephemera – including breathtaking images of the film's two lovers before a real lightning storm at sundown, and pennants of ducks quacking their way though the magic-hour's crepuscular golden light – while soundmen taped riotous birdsong, forest murmurs and the hiss and babble of water in motion. And the handheld shots in Virginia are, in fact, just one half of an overarching visual scheme…
John Patterson; The Guardian
Decline in Independent Activity as a Cause of Decline in Children’s Mental
Our thesis is that a primary cause of the rise in mental disorders is a decline over decades in opportunities for children and teens to play, roam, and engage in other activities independent of direct oversight and control by adults.
Via Derek Thompson
The lyrical pastorals of the British neo-romantics
Intensity of feeling proved too sapping to be sustained for long and, partly driven by the changing tastes of a rapidly modernising Britain, the neo-romantics gradually moved on.
Michael Prodger; New Statesman
The Mathematician Who Sculpted the Shape of Space
The world does not appear to be 10-dimensional — there seem to be just three dimensions of space and one of time. By the mid-1980s, however, a group of physicists had realized that the six “extra” dimensions of the universe might be hidden in a minute Calabi-Yau manifold (less than 10−17 centimeters in diameter). String theory, as this physical framework was called, also held that the particles and forces of nature were dictated by the Calabi-Yau shape. This theory depended upon a property called supersymmetry, which arose from symmetry that was already built into a Kähler manifold — another reason why Calabi-Yau manifolds appeared to be the right fit for string theory.
Steve Nadis; Quanta Magazine
The Smoker
One day, when Dad and I were at work in the kitchen, a guy pulled into the driveway, walked in through the side-door, took one look at the place, and lit a cigarette. He didn’t introduce himself or say hello. We knew exactly who he was.
Ottessa Moshfegh; The Paris Review
On the Choice of Parenting
Someone (I don’t remember who any more) once asked my wife that if she knew then what she knows now about our special needs son, would she have gone through with it. It being bringing our wonderful boy Aidan into the world. Her answer was, of course, yes. And mine was too. Because neither of us can imagine a world without him. He is a light that brings out the best in people. They see him and feel compelled to help; to be charitable. To be better versions of themselves in service. Around him a movable village grows. I know this because this is the impact he’s had on me. To be something I don’t think I could have been if not for the burden that he is. This has been my experience in parenting.
Sean Patrick Hughes
The Double Life of George Eliot - The novelist & the marriage question
Could any woman hope to be “free in thought and deed” in 1850s England? It would be wildly off the mark to imagine Eliot as an anti-establishment rebel, casting off conventionality to follow her whims. In fact, she longed for social acceptance and labored to convince friends that her union with Lewes was honorable… If Eliot’s thinking and writing challenged Christian conventions, it was not for the sake of undermining the faith…
Mollie Wilson O’Reilly; Commonweal
An agenda for abundant housing
Progressives and conservatives alike lament the drag that the housing crisis places on growth of the national economy. Slower and less equal income growth, in turn, fuels populist discontent, political polarization, and ideological radicalization that serve no one’s long-run advantage.
Alex Armlovich, Andrew Justus; Niskanen Center
The Metaphysics of Antisemitism
The rabbis awaited the messiah every day, but they also did not hold their breath. They didn’t buy apocalypse futures; they built schools and families and compounded Torah study and observance over generations.
Zohar Atkins
Agrippa’s Occult Philosophy
Any reader could find something of interest in this paroxysm of parataxis, a good bit of it taken directly from Pliny and none of it explicitly verified by anything resembling a test. Some of the time, at least, [Heinrich Cornelius Agrippa] served his readers as little more than a source of the homeliest of anecdotes and practices — which they both appreciated and, presumably, recycled in their turn.
Anthony Grafton; The Public Domain Review
The Entente Cordiale: bad history but good politics
Franco-German relations, the core relationship in the EU, are encased in a range of bilateral institutions and treaties, and yet they are out of joint. The 2020 Treaty of Aachen, renewing the Elysée Treaty of 1963, stipulates that both countries define joint Franco-German objectives, but this has yet to happen.
T.G. Otte; Engelsberg Ideas
A Stunning Mark Rothko Retrospective in Paris Illuminates the Artist’s Lesser-Known Sides
Rothko died by suicide in 1970, leaving behind an oeuvre that feels incomplete. Where might his art have gone next? It’s impossible to say…
Maximilíano Durón; ARTnews
Ryuichi Sakamoto’s Son on Directing His Father’s Final Concert Film, Opus
“Basically it was a delicate ballet of pushing the camera so the floorboards wouldn’t creak, then a bunch of people silently wrangling cables, so it wouldn’t interfere with the music. You could really tell that he was putting his life force into performing, which I think affected everybody else as well, like we needed to be on par with that focus.”
Michelle Hyun Kim; Pitchfork