Anna Gát: What to Read This Weekend #22
Poison and nostalgia, culture war and real wars, Kundera and Fleabag, Twitter and Kierkegaard, Pynchon and bad moms, Dawkins and celebs—and God, Barbie, common knowledge, necrophiliac ducks, and more!
Hi folks — what an exciting week! I’m still reading A Place of Greater Safety and having a (bloody) blast. We’re organising a conversation on Interintellect with one of my all time favourite authors, and quietly fangirling all day. More on this soon…
Another superstar has already been listed - an Interintellect salon with the great Tara Isabela Burton on her new book, hosted by Wayfare’s Zach Davies and Tuft’s Thomas Arnold, we’ll discuss self, technology, religion, ritual. (Zach and Thomas met at my offline social with Sasha Sagan, at MIT, last month, and, as usual, we discovered interesting overlaps.)
It is July 14, the birthday of French freedom, so below you’ll find some, as they say, thematic content. I’m pleased to be sharing this superb batch of must-reads after a strong week, and some classics (Sebald, Steiner, Hossenfelder). Enjoy reading and tell me what you think! x Anna
Milan Kundera: Novelist of European nostalgia
‘France has become the country of my novels; I have simply followed them there.’
The always great Agnès Poirier; Engelsberg Ideas
How to win a Victorian culture war
People speculated freely on Brontë’s personality. Who could have written such a book other than a woman who had “long forfeited the society of her own sex”? Matthew Arnold called Jane Eyre, “a hideous, undelightful, convulsed, constricted novel… one of the most utterly disagreeable books I’ve ever read.” He attributed this to the fact that “the writer’s mind contains nothing but hunger, rebellion and rage.”
Henry Oliver
Proof You Can Do Hard Things
But I recently realized there is a very good reason to take Calculus. It’s to prove you can do hard things.
The ability to do hard things is perhaps the most useful ability you can foster in yourself or your children.
Nat Eliason
How to Blow Up a Timeline
I ran a report recently on all the accounts I follow on Twitter. I hadn’t realized how many of them had been dormant for months now. Many were people whose tweets used to draw me to the timeline regularly. I hesitate to unfollow them; perhaps they’ll return? But I’m fooling myself. They won’t. Inertia again. A user at rest tends to stay at rest, and a user that flees tends to be gone for good. Even worse, many accounts I follow look to have continued to tweet regularly over the past year. I just don’t see their tweets anymore. The changes to the Twitter algorithm bulldozed over a decade’s worth of Chesterton fences in a few months.
Eugene Wei
An unusual way to figure out if humanity is toast
As you might expect, experts on a particular risk usually put bigger odds on that risk wiping out humanity or killing 10 percent of the population than did experts on other risks. Nuclear experts put 0.55 percent odds on nuclear-induced extinction by 2100; experts on other risks put the odds at 0.19 percent, almost three times smaller. Both AI experts and nonexperts rated AI-caused extinction as the biggest risk, with a 3 percent extinction risk from AI experts and 2 percent from experts on other risks.
Dylan Matthews; Vox
The Bold Jewish Woman Who Created Barbie
Male retailers questioned why Ruth gave the plaything breasts, insisting girls wanted infant dolls. “They want to pretend to be older girls,” Ruth argued, deciding the sophisticated doll would encourage girls to imagine grown-up possibilities.
Susan Shapiro; Tablet
Equal Partners, Infinite Debt - Marriage Advice from Søren Kierkegaard
Isn’t Kierkegaard’s notion of “infinite debt” just another way for parents and spouses—mothers and wives especially—to be crippled by paralyzing guilt that they are never doing enough, that they should be devoting every one of their waking hours to their loved ones? … The debt of love is not completable the way a mortgage debt is—at no point can we compile enough acts of love to do justice to our beloved. Nonetheless, we honor, and thus fulfill, the demands of the debt whenever we perform an act of love, no matter how great or small.
Dallin Lewis; Wayfare Magazine
The Slackification of the American Home (2019)
When Tonya Parker, a mom in Illinois, wanted to better organize her family life a little over a year ago, the first thing she did was set her kids up on Trello, a web-based project-management tool. Parker’s four children, ages 9 to 18, now use Trello, which is more typically used at work, to keep up with chores…
Taylor Lorenz and Joe Pinsker; The Atlantic
Twitter Is Fragmenting
Imagine a neighborhood bar. It’s like the one in Cheers, where everybody knows your name, and they’re always glad you came. Now imagine the bar got bought by a rich asshole.
Nathan Baschez; Every
History Illustrated: Why storming of the Bastille still matters
To this day, the French continue to fight for social justice…
Happy birthday, French liberty! This is from Al Jazeera
"The Most Gentle of Lethal Methods": The Question of Retained Consciousness Following Decapitation
It did not take long for the assumption that the guillotine provided painless, instantaneous death to come under challenge. On July 17, 1793, Charlotte Corday was executed via guillotine in front of a curious crowd. Much to the astonishment of the spectators, when the executioner raised up her head and allowed observers to slap it, the cheeks reddened as though she was blushing in indignation. By 1795, physicians such as Samuel Thomas von Sömmerring began to argue that perception may persist in the brain after decapitation…
Matthew D. Turner
To converse well
The search for satisfaction by our desiring self seems to me at the heart of good conversation. We seek to fill the lack in ourselves by engaging with someone who is Other – who comes from another position, another background, another set of experiences.
Paula Marantz Cohen; Aeon
Simone Weil’s great awakening
Weil volunteered to fight in Spain (although she never faced real combat) not because she believed in the cause of Spanish freedom from Franco, but because she experienced the visceral need to stand by those who were helplessly exposed to the horrors of war.
Yet for her, the primary duty of the philosophical person, and particularly a politically active one, remained rigorous self-examination – guided by the conviction that true moral enlightenment was only to be found beyond the spheres of man-made languages.
Wolfram Eilenberger; New Statesman
What’s So Funny?
There is no formula which explains why a certain thing should be funny, or guarantees that it will be funny. Actually the lack of formula seems a definitional component of humor, since so much of what is funny depends on an element of surprise or unexpectedness. As it does on mysteriousness: the more you spell out a joke, or explain why something is funny, the less so it becomes.
Rachel Connolly; Liberties
'In 4-5 years, there won't be any classical artists' - Interview with Maria João Pires
Because maybe in a few years there won’t be any more classical artists. I’m not talking about two generations. Maybe four or five, I don’t know. Because the way we teach today has absolutely nothing to do with it. Imagine Beethoven: who is the living person who can play Beethoven? It’s [Alfred] Brendel! He can’t anymore, he doesn’t play anymore.
Sobering words from one of my favourite pianists. By Norman Lebrecht; Slippeddisc
My first fight in Thailand - How training with champions made me step into the ring (2018)
But my lingering sense of failure lasted only 8 hours. The next morning, I woke up with a new determination to get my Muay Thai mojo back. I had always known that I had to put in hours to see results. Last year, it had taken me 30 days of training every day to even be able to land a proper right kick.
My friend Mathilde Léo literally kicks ass 💗
Common Knowledge and Aumann’s Agreement Theorem (2015)
My favorite Soviet joke involves a man standing in the Moscow train station, handing out leaflets to everyone who passes by. Eventually, of course, the KGB arrests him—but they discover to their surprise that the leaflets are just blank pieces of paper. “What’s the meaning of this?” they demand. “What is there to write?” replies the man. “It’s so obvious!” Note that this is precisely a situation where the man is trying to make common knowledge something he assumes his “readers” already know.
Scott Aaronson
Are You My Mother? - Transference and the contemporary classroom
Whether to play transference for romance, tragedy, or comedy, whether to present it as sentimental, farcical, or sexual in monologue or dialogue, are choices that one makes in life, as in literature." Emre has left Twitter, but luckily not the internet.
Merve Emre; The New Yorker
Crows and magpies using anti-bird spikes to build nests, researchers find
Rather than finding old strips of anti-bird spikes at rubbish dumps, Moeliker, who previously won an Ig Nobel prize for documenting the first known case of homosexual necrophilia among ducks, says crows and magpies appear to be finding and removing the metal strips from buildings. “They are ripping the stuff off. It’s been observed in several kinds of birds,” he said.
Ian Sample; The Guardian
The invention of God
Many atheists have denied the existence of God because of the existence of evil. How could God create a world containing so much cruelty, suffering and injustice?
John Gray; New Statesman
Was New Atheism a mistake? - Richard Dawkins on God, vaccines and his poetic spirit
“I do not believe in anything beyond the material world, no matter how poetic you feel, no matter how much you’re in love, or no matter how deeply you feel emotionally about looking at nature, looking at fields of wheat, looking at the stars. These are all human reactions, which I feel as strongly as anyone. But there is nothing supernatural about that.”
Freddie Sayers; UnHerd (I think… Well, not a mistake, a “phase”.)
Physicist Sabine Hossenfelder: ‘There are quite a few areas where physics blurs into religion’ (2022)
There are quite a few areas where the foundations of physics blur into religion, but physicists don’t notice because they’re not paying attention.
Killian Fox; The Guardian
Nostalgia for the Absolute (1974)
Those great movements, those great gestures of imagination, which have tried to replace religion in the West, and Christianity in particular, are very much like the churches, like the theology, they want to replace. And perhaps we would say that in any great struggle one begins to become like one's opponent.
George Steiner forever
Introduction: Theological Variations- Rumors of the death of theology have been much exaggerated
Who is the great theologian of contemporary America? Paradoxically, the title might go to a novelist who would almost certainly never lay claim to that distinction: Thomas Pynchon.
I didn’t name my company after Pynchon for no reason. By Jay Tolson; The Hedgehog Review
Castration, gang-rape, forced nudity: How Russia’s soldiers terrorise Ukraine with sexual violence
“It took more than a year for me to say anyhing about the sexual violence,” [Alisa Kovalenko, a Ukrainian film director aged 34] told the Telegraph. “I gave all the other details [about the captivity] except this. It was very painful. I didn’t want to traumatise my family.”
“I hid deep inside myself,” she added.
Harriet Barber; The Telegraph
How Palantir Is Shaping the Future of Warfare
How much could the Palantir software achieve in a place like Bakhmut where street warfare has been dominant? In a way the question may miss the point. If Ukraine were able to deploy the full force of algorithmic warfare, Bakhmut might never become necessary. Could Russia have moved its large weapons systems to Bakhmut if Ukraine had from the beginning had access to all the components of a software system like Palantir’s?
Bruno Maçães; TIME
Murder By Poison - The rise and fall of arsenic (2013)
Through much of the nineteenth century, a third of all criminal cases of poisoning involved arsenic. One reason for its popularity was simply its availability. All you had to do was go into a chemist’s shop and say that you needed to kill rats. A child could practically obtain arsenic. The going price for half an ounce was tuppence.
Joan Acocella; The New Yorker
I LIVED IT: I Realized My Impostor Syndrome Was Just a Healthy Sense of Humility
I’m just a human who makes mistakes and is sometimes good at my job and sometimes bad?
I feel you, Reductress!
Phoebe Waller-Bridge’s Great ‘Indiana Jones’ Adventure
Q: When you sit down to write, and a little devil pops up on your shoulder, whispering in your ear, saying, “Try this,” what kinds of things does it say?
A: I have naughty hand.
Q: What’s naughty hand?
A: Naughty hand is when I’m writing, and I’ll get pissed off at myself for being boring, then I’ll suddenly start writing something slightly angry. Naughty hand is like, “For [expletive] sake, Phoebe, just sort this out!” Really early on, I would deliver a script to a producer, and they’d go, “This is a bit —” and I’d go: “I know! I hate it! This is what I really want to write!” And I’d have another script: the naughty-hand script. I’d be like, “I meant to do that.” And they’d be like, “This one’s really good!” It was like I had to get the one that I thought people wanted out of my system and then be like: “Suckers! Here’s a much better one!”
David Marchese; The New York Times
Jonah Hill's "boundaries" are, in practice, misogynistic as all hell
Except in rare cases, any man who asks his female partner to forgo working with or befriending men is necessarily asking her to curtail her own career progression. Rather than try to facilitate her success, he’s forcing her forgo it to be with him and thereby implementing a totally unnecessary ultimatum whose only purpose is to alleviate his own insecurity and misplaced anxiety.
Any man who does that, my babies, is kind of a pathetic piece of shit.
Now, can a man be kind of a pathetic piece of shit but not be abusive?
Maybe?
Cathy Reisenwitz
An Interview with W. G. Sebald (1998)
“I think any form of fiction … leaves you always unclear as to how much was invented, how much refers in the text to real people, real incidents in time. The classic case of this I think are in the novels of Thomas Mann, which outraged all those who thought they had been portrayed in them, unkindly. To a certain extent I think this is always there.”
James Wood; Brick
Studying rivers from worlds away
The images taken by NASA’s Cassini spacecraft have shown a curious lack of fan-shaped deltas at the mouths of most of the moon’s rivers, contrary to many rivers on Earth. Could it be that Titan’s rivers don’t carry enough flow or sediment to build deltas?
Jennifer Chu; MIT News
Kidnapped Scholar Elizabeth Tsurkov Deserves America’s Every Effort To Bring Her to Safety - The whereabouts of the Princeton University graduate student kidnapped in Iraq remain unknown
Somewhat ironically, Liz, who some claim was kidnapped for being the “Zionist enemy,” is not a Zionist at all.
New Lines
Sisters in arms - The history of female combatants from ancient times to the present
Forgotten Warriors is ambitious, wide-ranging and learned. However, other historians – notably Julie Wheelwright in Sisters in Arms: Female warriors from antiquity to the new millennium (2020), which is not mentioned – cover almost identical ground. For specialists in the... field there is little new material.
Joanna Bourke; Times Literary Supplement
Publicists, Manifesto Pushers, Propagandists - What Happened to the Avant-Garde?
What’s to blame for the lack of a coherent movement? If the avant-garde is dead, what killed it — and what’s been lost along the way? In politics, nothing seems to surprise us anymore. In art, can we still be shocked? Should we?
The Drift
‘If It Doesn’t Have Psyche, It Can’t Be Art’: Mega-Collector Dakis Joannou Docks His Famous Yacht to Talk About Collecting in a Chaotic Art World
If the raw masculinity was getting a little too much, the scenes inside of the slaughterhouse show were refreshingly post-gender.
Naomi Rea; Artnet
I’m Being Crushed Under the Weight of Keeping Track of All These Celebrities
If there are thousands of famous people, millions of people are celeb-adjacent. And every day I learn about a dumb thing one of them did.
Get out of my head, Magdalene Taylor; VICE