Anna Gát: What to Read This Weekend #14
Intellectual humility, medieval self-help, Pacino/De Niro hotness — and Courtney Love, Leo Strauss, Calvino, Delpy, Napoleon, seaflooding, creators, whiz-kids, conflict vs mistake theory, and more!
Hi everyone,
What an insane week. I went to get a massage where I had to fill in a form to rate my stress level from 1 to 10, I said “7”; the masseuse, feeling my back, said “LOL”.
I’m reading Tom Holland’s Rubicon to remind myself there are greater hardships than being a solo cowboy immigrating across 2 continents all by herself whilst leading a company and juggling existential crises. I could also be trying to invade Pontus, for example… Or start a new religion, mixing Greek and Jewish mysticism.
In any case, reading excellent things — and staring at the Tagus river — seems to help somewhat. This has been yet another good week for published material, I hope you’ll enjoy my selection as much as I did.
x Anna
P.S. Good members’ firesides coming up on Interintellect: on science funding with Stuart Buck, the writing process with Elaine Wang, alternative education with Martha and Nat Sharpe, and creative AI with Sam Patt.
“Intellectual humility” is a copout -Why builders need to raise, not lower, their epistemic bar
The best thinkers—and thus the best builders—are not intellectually humble, but intellectually ambitious.
Gena Gorlin is lowkey one of the greatest success theorists alive
Johnny Depp’s return to Cannes exposes French split over #MeToo
Feminist groups and more than 100 French actors spoke out to criticise the festival, saying Depp’s star appearance symbolised a wider problem of the French establishment protecting men who have been accused by women.
Whatever your thoughts on the Celeb Trial of 2022, this situation — during a festival year specifically dedicated to advancing women in film — is, as they say, cringe
Becoming a magician
So, in short, a helpful strategy for becoming a magician: Surround yourself with people who look like magicians to you. Then imagine yourself as one, older and wiser, in great detail.
It’s time to bring back into the public consciousness Autotranslucence’s superb essay: it taught me so much about talent, pursuit, and the lost art of apprenticeship
Robert De Niro and Al Pacino Hottie Debate Sows Division, Horniness
Young Pacino and Young De Niro are mathematically exactly the same level of hot. A hung jury!
Let me decide this for you 🤌🏼 (Vulture)
Why was the Bloomberg Terminal so successful?
Pretend for a moment that you’re a stressed bond trader in Tokyo, and you’re trying to trade Argentinean bonds with your counterpart in Paris, but you don’t understand some feature on the Bloomberg terminal. Your boss is out of the office but he told you he wants you out of the trade by the end of the trading day, or you will be fired. Your colleagues are all fucking around because they’ve hit their numbers for the quarter and closed out their trades, so they’re taking a long lunch. You don’t know anyone else on the trading floor well enough to ask him what you need to know. What do you do?
Found this excellent Quora response on Twitter!
Taking advice - The popular medieval guides to self-help
In the Middle Ages, being unwilling to take advice could earn you a moniker such as “unræd”, or “ill-counselled”, as the example of King Æthelred shows… Children learnt to read using fables, but everyone read them to understand human behaviour and the vagaries of power.
Dig into these texts, however, and you see that medieval writers knew that it is rarely productive to give advice directly, as a simple command.
Irina Dumitrescu; Times Literary Supplement
Emma Cline Tells Louise Bonnet About Her Eerie Novel The Guest
The brute reality of the body is insistent. Even if you are going to be caught up in all the human business of whatever social maneuverings, the body is this weird time clock that doesn’t go away and doesn’t operate by those rules.
Louise Bonnet; Interview Magazine
The Written World and the Unwritten World
This world I see, which is usually recognized as the world, appears to my eyes—mostly, anyway—already conquered, colonized by words, a world covered by a thick crust of discourses. The facts of our life are already classified, judged, commented on, even before they happen. We live in a world where everything is read even before it starts to exist.
Not only everything we see but our very eyes are saturated with written language.
Italo Calvino; The Paris Review
Under the Spotlight: examining Julie Delpy's complex performance in ‘Before Sunset’
“I put a lot in it of my own stuff. We did a lot of writing, Ethan and I. So, for us, it was very rewarding that people liked the film because it was more than just an acting job.”
I wish I was GenX so I could understand what’s so great about this trilogy! (Aimee Ferrier; Far Out Magazine)
Seaflooding
Because the depression is below sea level, it would generate electricity, which could be used to desalinate some of the sea water into freshwater.
Tomas Pueyo
Conflict Vs. Mistake
Mistake theorists think it’s silly to complain about George Soros, or the Koch brothers. The important thing is to evaluate the arguments; it doesn’t matter who developed them.
Scott Alexander (ht Emmet Shear)
The Way We Watch Each Other Now
It’s one thing to ponder the erosion of any reasonable expectation of privacy to be ourselves in this now general state of digitized public-ness; it’s another to examine how the ability to film one another has constructed a near-total social surveillance apparatus where we're all potential witnesses, harboring incriminating evidence by the megapixel.
Delia Cai; Vanity Fair
A Jewish Immigrant Novelist’s Radical Vision for Working Women
When critics praised Yezierska’s work in her lifetime, it was most often for its authenticity. “One does not seem to read,” the Yale professor William Lyon Phelps wrote, of “Bread Givers,” in The Literary Digest International Book Review. “One is too completely inside.”
Maia Silber; The New Yorker
Eureka! -What imagination is and how to cultivate it
[Is] the imagination really like a muscle? Most muscles, when exercised regularly, become stronger and more efficient ... I saw no firm proof in this book that exercising the imagination regularly makes you more imaginative.
Joe Moran; Times Literary Supplement
Leo Strauss and the Closed Society
In 1941, whether liberal societies could endure despite their weaknesses was a more than theoretical question. Strauss’s lecture addressed the long-standing question of how liberal societies might protect the virtues they need but often struggle to cultivate, and sometimes actively undermine. And his answer, offered in defense of what he called the “open society” (a term Karl Popper would put to different use four years later), was provocative. He argued that many virtues essential to liberalism are best understood in the moral traditions that are most opposed to liberalism. He also suggested that the vices most threatening to liberal societies are often nurtured by liberal ideals themselves. As was his style, Strauss suggested, rather than explicated, his thesis: An open society requires strengthening by moral and political imaginations that have been formed in closed societies.
Matthew Rose; First Things
Courtney Love: ‘I went through 280 macarons last week’
The best books I’ve read in the past year are, firstly, Desperate Characters by my grandmother Paula Fox. We only met once and we didn’t get on. But I am writing my autobiography and got the urge to read her books at last. She is minimal, meticulous. I try to bring the same restraint to my lyrics. And then, mind-blowing, Virginie Despentes’ King Kong Theory. The chapter on sex work – the tenderness she shows towards men and women alike is striking. Then there’s Rebecca Solnit’s Recollections of My Non-Existence and Wanderlust.
Tim Auld; Financial Times
What We Lose When We Push Our Kids to ‘Achieve’
As a parent now, I’ve seen the pure satisfaction of accomplishment, of a particular passion arduously pursued, arise in my own children. Yet I had also seen it actively discouraged by the well-meaning schools they attended…
Adam Gopnik; The New York Times
Liberty in the Shadow of Bonaparte
Adam Smith died in 1790. In the years that immediately followed, Europe would be engulfed, first, in the French Revolutionary Wars of the 1790s and, then, the Napoleonic Wars, wars that not only revolutionised the manner in which war was fought but also introduced the world to wars fought on a previously unimagined scale. In such circumstances, was it still possible to believe in progress towards a commercial society and, no less importantly, in the possibility of an extension of our individual liberties?
Jeremy Jennings; Engelsberg Ideas
I wanted to be a teacher but they made me a cop
One student cornered me after class to tell me he’s been absent so much because he’s both getting divorced and starting a business. (“Please don’t worry about it,” I said.)
Adam Mastroianni; Experimental History
How Robbie Williams became the ultimate British pop star
He remains the patron saint of pub singers, the guardian angel of the end of the night – and the man who, without doubt, puts the “Brit” in “celebrity”.
I’m including this because this pun caused me—and everyone I helpfully repeated it to—actual physical pain, and I didn’t want you to miss out on it
Regarding intellectual humility, I'm fond of a self-consciously oddball coinage from Walter Kaufman — 'humbition'. It entails that you model and measure yourself against the best, whose example is a 'reproach and a challenge': 'There is no teacher of humility like great ambition'.