Anna Gát: What to Read This Weekend #33
Charter cities, ChatGPT, men, wars, books, lithium, public science, optimism, luxury, loneliness, the intelligentsia — the Kama Sutra, the Iliad, Auden, Bernstein, Sabine Hossenfelder, and more
Hey friends,
A busy week over here at Interintellect: we have a new mentorship program for salon hosts, more and more beautiful online series, offlines coming up in London, San Francisco, Frankfurt, and New York City, and elsewhere, and SuperSalons about to be published with Christine Emba, Shadi Hamid, Tyler Cowen, Bruno Maçães... You can check out our salons here and join the membership tier here!
Many wonderful reads this week. Below is my selection for you. x Anna
Optimism is Always the Best Strategy
The world is changed by people who believe they can, because intentions generate the power for making change.
Sherry Ning
Why Don’t We Just Build New Cities?
We start new companies, new schools, new neighborhoods all the time. Why not a new San Francisco, Boston, or Miami?
Jerusalem Demsas; The Atlantic
A Sentimental Education
Our feelings, when unquestioned and unchallenged, never mature; indeed, they probably become cruder, especially if we indulge the simplest of them.
Alan Jacobs; The Hedgehog Review
Len vs Glenn - How Leonard Bernstein turned a crisis into a productive disagreement
Bernstein considered handing over the baton to his assistant during Gould’s performance, thereby washing his hands of it. But that would have caused a furore, and anyway it seemed like an abdication of responsibility.
Ian Leslie
Toward a vision of human flourishing
Crafting this future calls us to find fertile middle ground between science and spirituality so we can craft new stories for how to live. It calls us to recommit to timeless virtues — love and care, awe and wonder, courage and compassion, beauty and dignity — even while knowing we may fall short of our ideals. It calls us to reconsider age-old questions in the context of our time: What does it mean to be human? How ought we to live? What do we owe each other, our planet, and our posterity?
Ashley Zhang
The Worth of Wild Ideas - Even if a leading theory of consciousness is wrong, it can still be useful to science
I’ve always preferred Imre Lakatos’ views, in which a research program (which usually extends beyond a theory) is productive if, over time, it generates testable predictions which have explanatory and predictive power. If a research program does not do this, then it is degenerate and will gradually fade away. This view of science is more accommodating to the ebb and flow of ideas, and also to the possibility that some aspects—perhaps even core elements—of a scientific theory may remain unfalsifiable. Quantum mechanics, for example, is highly productive, even though nobody can figure out how to experimentally test its various interpretations (or even what they really mean).
Anil Seth; Nautilus
I Was Wrong About the Death of the Book - And Umberto Eco was right.
The book has many meanings. Books are companions, so we are not alone. Books are romantic, vessels for memory and emotion evoked by their heft and their smell.
Jeff Jarvis; The Atlantic
Of Boys and Men by Richard Reeves review – the descent of man (2022)
“The problem with men is typically framed as a problem of men,” writes [Richard Reeves]. “It is men who must be fixed, one man or boy at a time. This individualist approach is wrong.” Instead, he maintains there are structural problems, societal issues, that need to be addressed if men are not to become ever more lost, defeated and angry. For anyone who has been taking notice, there are a number of reasons to take seriously the broad thesis of Reeves’s book.
Andrew Anthony; The Guardian
J. M. Coetzee’s Interlingual Romance
With “The Pole,” Coetzee muddies the waters of national purity with his trademark clarity. The book, written in English, originally appeared in a Spanish-language translation, with the title “El Polaco,” as if to leave those of us tasked with identifying “the original” tongue-tied.
Jennifer Wilson; The New Yorker
Erwin Olaf, Photographer With an Eye for the Theatrical, Dies at 64
“We consider him a ‘Hollandse meester,’” a Dutch master, said Mattie Boom, photography curator at the Rijksmuseum, the national museum in Amsterdam. “He was making paintings with the camera.”
Nina Siegal; The New York Times
She got famous on YouTube. Now it helps fund her research in quantum gravity
As far back as the Renaissance, scientists have sought compact and elegant descriptions of space, time and motion: a sort of scientific version of Occam's razor — that the simplest explanation tends to be the correct one. But as we seek answers in a complex universe, [Sabine Hossenfelder] cautions that the quest for simplicity could be a dead end. Her 2018 book on the topic, Lost in Math: How Beauty Leads Physics Astray, served as something of a shot across the bow of modern physics.
Scott Neuman; NPR
Everything Is Hyperpolitical
“Hyperpolitics,” presents a challenge. While the expiry of “post-politics” is plain to see, so is the insufficiency of the political vocabulary we have inherited from the twentieth century for describing its successor. This indicates the need for a new framework...
Anton Jäger; The Point
The Best Criticism of Ethical Egoism
Ethical egoism doesn’t say that we ought to avoid all actions that help others. It says that what makes these actions right, when they are right, is that they are to our benefit. So, if I should help someone else, this is only because doing so would be good for me; and if I should refrain from harming someone, again, that is only because doing so is to my benefit.
Stephen Leach; Philosophy Now
Favorite Books: Recommended by Daniel Dennett
“I wanted to know how the mind works. I wanted to know what consciousness and experience are. I discovered that my fellow graduate students in Oxford thought this was an armchair philosophical question, and it isn’t. They were blithely—one might even say proudly—ignorant about the brain and about psychology. I wonder how you think you’re going to know about the mind if you don’t look at the best science. In those days, back in the 60s, the topic of consciousness was forbidden in psychology and neuroscience unless you were an emeritus professor of neurology. Then you got to write a book where you summed up your life’s work and waxed philosophical. Most of that stuff’s dreadful.”
Nigel Warburton; Five Books
The new warfare?
“When it comes to tanks, in particular, the lesson of the Ukrainian war is that tank-on-tank battles have become a rarity—which means that the relative sophistication of a tank is no longer as important.”
Via Tyler Cowen
Compounding Heritage - A look at the luxury market through three storied brands: LVMH, Hermès & Ferrari
LVMH's stock benefited from expanding global luxury markets, particularly in Asia, and its ability to adapt to changing consumer preferences. High demand for iconic brands like Louis Vuitton and Christian Dior contributed to its financial success.
Sophie; Inevitability Research
A Few Things I’m Pretty Sure About
People only communicate perhaps 1% of what’s going through their head, so the world is probably 100x crazier and messier than it looks.
Morgan Housel
So Fierce Is the World: On Loneliness and Philip Seymour Hoffman
I didn’t know … that one day, years and years later, I would watch a film in that very same theater starring this man, Philip Seymour Hoffman, that would be the saddest movie I have ever seen. How could I know then that a little while later, I would be asked to write an essay about this film, Synecdoche, New York, and that Hoffman would die of an overdose while I was in the middle of drafting the piece.
Richard Deming; The Paris Review
In the Shallows - Why do public intellectuals condescend to their readers?
Hannah Arendt, who wrote wonderfully for both the academy and the public, made many claims about thinking, but for my purposes, two are central. First, in a lecture series published in Social Research in 1971, she claims that thinking is “resultless by nature”: instead of arriving at a conclusion, thought flutters restlessly from one inquiry to the next, like a bird loath to settle on a perch. Second, she holds that thinking is a dialogue between internal interlocutors. Even private contemplation is therefore social in form, a fact that Platonic dialogues dramatize. Arendt admires Socrates because he publicized “the thinking process,” which she describes as “that dialogue that soundlessly goes on within me, between me and myself” whenever one is engaged in thinking. If thinking is a dialogue between internal discussants, how should we envision them?
Becca Rothfeld; Yale Review
Why Is Music Getting Sadder?
Not long ago, this tempo was a rarity on the Billboard chart—and when you did hear a slow song it was usually a romantic love ballad for slow dancing. But the average tempo of a hit song has been getting slower since the dawn of the new millennium, but slow dancing has almost disappeared. So we have an odd situation. The slow tune is no longer dreamy music for couples, but sad, lonely music for the isolated and depressed.
Ted Gioia
‘We’re not the first generation to wonder how genuine our leaders are’: Mary Beard on politicians as performers
The anecdotes circulated about Nero were particularly rich and nuanced. For a start, the boundary between the emperor and his acting parts was shown to be a significantly blurry one. Some of those roles, like that of the destitute beggar, did present an awkward clash with his own high status. But many, in different ways, were all too uncomfortably close to the emperor.
Mary Beard; The Guardian
The Most Precious Resource is Agency (2021)
Gaining agency is gaining the capacity to do something differently from, or in addition to, the events that simply happen to you. Most famous people go off-script early, usually in more than one way. Carnegie becoming a message boy is one opportunity, asking how to operate the telegraph is another. Da Vinci had plenty of small-time commissions, but he quit them in favor of offering his services to the Duke of Milan. And of course no one has to write a book, or start a company. But imagine instead if Carnegie or Da Vinci were compelled to stay in school for ten more years instead. What would have happened?
Simon Sarris
How not to be fooled by viral charts
In general, the first rule of viral charts is that the more eye-popping and startling they are, the more likely it is that there’s something fishy going on. As they say, “extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence.”
Noah Smith
ChatGPT can now see, hear, and speak
The new voice technology—capable of crafting realistic synthetic voices from just a few seconds of real speech—opens doors to many creative and accessibility-focused applications. However, these capabilities also present new risks, such as the potential for malicious actors to impersonate public figures or commit fraud.
OpenAI
The Kama Sutra as a Work of Philosophy (2015)
If the India portrayed in the Kama Sutra was real, how did it become such a deeply conservative place?
Manu Joseph; The New York Times
Glimpsing God
Joy is the first signpost that helped [CS Lewis] understand what God truly is. While he initially chases the irresistible sensation of Joy itself, eventually he realizes that it's the fact that there is something outside oneself to seek at all – rather than his ravenous pursuit of it – that finally becomes his proof of the divine.
Nadia Asparouhova
In Conversation: Todd Haynes
Q: I’m sure you’ve heard, the actors who played Romeo and Juliet, Leonard Whiting and Olivia Hussey, have now said Zeffirelli exploited them. Does that change your memory of watching it?
A: No. I mean, it’s sad. I know how much that film defined their careers and how much they stood by it — specifically the nudity. It was discussed quite a lot at the time and years after as they would continue to come to anniversary screenings of the film or festival events.
Madeline Leung Coleman; Vulture
Day drinking and endless croissants
Why move to Spain and then insist on continuing your strict vegetarianism? There is paella and the jamón, and besides they probably treat their animals better here anyway. Why move to Catalunya and never go to the mountains? The spires of Montserrat are so unique and striking that it’s been a holy site for centuries, not to mention a lifetime of climbing. Why move to Barcelona and never go to people-watch on the beach? There are beautiful people and pick-up volleyball games, and men who walk the beach selling cold beers who pass by whenever it seems you’re ready for another one.
Russell Max Simon
David Cronenberg: A passion for mutation (2014)
In the 1990s and 2000s, Cronenberg gradually moved away from body horror proper to make a series of more realistic movies. But even when he left sci-fi behind, he remained fixated on people who become other people.
Moira Weigel; Prospect Magazine
How Much Does It Cost to Live Like This?
What would a “nice life” look like? Do they want extreme levels of well off, or bourgeois comfort, or simply freedom from financial worry with the time to pursue a hobby?
Rachel Sugar, Jack Denton, Laura Thompson, and Adriane Quinlan; New York Magazine
Emily Wilson’s Sack of Homer
Wilson believes she has identified and brought out themes in Homer’s epic that other translators have missed. She writes in her translator’s note that the Iliad is “a poem about death”—which is a departure from the more conventional reading that it is about war—or, in the words of Simone Weil: “The true hero, the true subject, the center of the Iliad is force.” For Wilson, the poem’s major insight is that “even the greatest mortals fall and clutch the dust between their bloody fingers.”
Valerie Stivers; Compact
Somebody finally fixed the ending of The Giving Tree
“Just read The Giving Tree as usual, right up to the point where the Boy comes hustling for a house. Then feel free to print these pages and read as an alternative to everything that follows.”
Emily Temple; Literary Hub
Lithium discovery in US volcano could be biggest deposit ever found
“The US would have its own supply of lithium and industries would be less scared about supply shortages.”
Anthony King; Chemistry World
In post-communist eastern and central Europe, history is intensely personal and economics is saturated with moral feeling
The questions arose: who is responsible? Who can be trusted? For those discovering a trusted friend’s collaboration with the secret police, how they handled the situation post-1989 became crucial. Downplaying the consequences and refusing to sever ties with the past could lead to the end of the relationship, while remorse and acknowledgment of authoritarian rule’s consequences might open a path to reconciliation. People faced choices, determining their associations based on moral clarity and the pursuit of truth – or else, on avoiding unsettling questions.
Till Hilmar; Aeon
I read The Secret History through three labours; it brought me comfort in joy, as well as grief (2020)
I had re-read the book so many times that I could quote huge chunks of it. In labour this familiarity was a godsend. Forget the pain, the drugs, the sense that things weren’t progressing entirely smoothly: I was back in Hamden College, tramping the fields with Bunny, sleeping off a bender with the increasingly pressurised Charles, hiding out in an upmarket Vermont inn with Henry and Camilla. My daughter was finally born, several hours later, by emergency C-section.
Sarah Hughes; Penguin UK
Has the World Become More Gender Equal? Why Not?
Low development is not an insurmountable obstacle. Cultural liberalisation in Latin America has enabled greater female employment and activism.
Alice Evans
Bronze Age Pervert will not save the American right
The disgust and contempt for the masses of Rand’s alter ego is echoed on virtually every other page of Bronze Age Mindset. Self-published in 2018 by the internet personality known as “Bronze Age Pervert”, this personal manifesto and self-improvement manual for confused young men has had, like Rand’s novels, a perceptible influence on the American right.
John Gray; New Statesman
The internet blew up the pop star factory
The analogy between the pop music business and sensationalist news outlets is eerily fitting. In an age where clickbait and shallow content dominate the media landscape, the parallels to the manufactured world of pop stardom are uncanny.
Adam Singer
Toby Ord on the perils of maximising the good that you do
The bottom line is simple: a dash of moderation makes you much more robust to uncertainty and error. As Toby notes, this is similar to the observation that a sufficiently capable superintelligent AI, given any one goal, would ruin the world if it maximised it to the exclusion of everything else. And it follows a similar pattern to performance falling off a cliff when a statistical model is ‘overfit’ to its data.
Robert Wiblin and Keiran Harris; 80,000 Hours
A Reply to the Editors (2005)
By “hysterical realism” I have meant a zany overexcitement, a fear of silence and of stillness, a tendency toward self-conscious riffs, easy ironies, puerility, and above all the exaggeration of the vitality of fictional characters into cartoonishness. The dilemma could be put dialectically: the writer, fearful that her characters are not “alive” enough, overdoes the liveliness and goes on a vitality spree; suddenly aware that she has overdone it, she tries to solve the problem by drawing self-conscious attention to the exaggeration (“Hey, relax, this is obviously cartoonish!”). But the self-consciousness, far from healing the wound, merely makes it bloodier.
James Wood, n+1
Adam Grant and Chris Anderson Respond to Coleman Hughes
“I would love to live in a color-blind world. As an organizational psychologist, my understanding is that this isn’t the most fruitful path to a fair world. If and when the data support a different approach, I’m entirely open to changing my mind. I hope Hughes is open to changing his based on the data we have today.”
The Free Press
How to Baby-Proof Your Relationship
[Brian Doss, a professor at the University of Miami] conducted a randomized intervention comparing co-parenting and relationship interventions for couples transitioning to parenthood. His findings showed that investing in the relationship was just as helpful as investing in co-parenting. So in addition to co-parenting efforts, consider making early relationship investments. These might include things like deliberate practices of appreciation, affection, sharing fun activities, and apologizing when you’ve hurt your partner.
Yael Schonbrun and Emily Oster
Commentary by Cory Doctorow: Plausible Sentence Generators
Bullshit begets bullshit, because no one wants to be bullshitted. In the bullshit wars, chatbots are weapons of mass destruction.
Cory Doctorow; Locus
Nobody knows how consciousness works – but top researchers are fighting over which theories are really science
The charge of pseudoscience is not only inaccurate, it is also pernicious. In effect, it’s an attempt to “deplatform” or silence integrated information theory – to deny it deserves serious attention.
Tim Bayne; The Conversation
Auden was the best poet of the twentieth century
He could be poignant while he was being funny without being slushy or sentimental. That’s not the sort of circus trick any amateur acrobat can pull off. Try it at home and you’ll see.
Henry Oliver
Hotel Log Hints at Illicit Desire That Dr. Freud Didn’t Repress (2006)
“By any reasonable standard of proof, Sigmund Freud and his wife’s sister, Minna Bernays, had a liaison,” wrote Franz Maciejewski, a sociologist formerly at the University of Heidelberg and a specialist in psychoanalysis, who tracked down the record in August. Freud’s wife, Martha, knew about his trip with Miss Bernays, if not its nature.
Ralph Blumenthal; The New York Times
Age of Invention: Did the Ottomans Ban Print? (2021)
[André Thevet], as we’ve seen, was frustratingly vague on what he meant by the “use” of the printing press being banned, and who exactly was banned from using it. The fact that we know of Jews printing in Istanbul from the 1490s has led many modern writers to suppose, and thus assert, that if the Bayezid II and Selim I edicts were real then they must have applied only to Muslims, or perhaps only to the Arabic and Turkish languages, or perhaps specifically to Arabic characters.
Anton Howes
Five Models and Their Artists
Rossetti wasn’t the only one enamored by her image. In the 19th century, Elizabeth Siddal was the equivalent of a supermodel, a woman whose face redefined beauty for her generation as the foremost muse of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood. She gained renown when she modeled for John Everett Millais’s Ophelia, which required her to pose daily in a bathtub through the winter. Millais kept the water warm by putting oil lamps under the tub, but one day, the lamps went out. Millais didn’t notice. Siddal said nothing and fell seriously ill.
Paul Jones and Amina Khan; Art Institute Chicago