Anna Gát: What to Read this Weekend #12
Parfit, Steely Dan, liberation, irritation, coronation, Fatal Attraction! Aldous Huxley's first trip, the free speech of professors, the wives of the talented... And bribes, censors, reality, and more
Hi everyone! Wow, so much good stuff to read this past week. Can’t wait to hear what you think about this weekend’s collection!
I’m still in Lisbon, desperately hunting for spicy food (I have withdrawal symptoms), while the charming old apartment I’ve rented out for hosting is falling apart in all sorts of ways (I’m currently in a hotel) … And other completely stress-free endeavours like US immigration.
Anyway. I hope you are well. After finishing Station Eleven last week, I’ve also just got through Sea of Tranquility, Emily St John Mandel’s latest novel, which is less great than the 2014 masterpiece of course, but because she’s great she’s great even when she’s not that great if you know what I mean.
Also excited about a bunch of new Interintellect listings: a fireside with Trae Stephens for example, on his new VR reading app (Sol Reader) - this is members only, become a member here. And July 15, I’ll be hosting a public online salon with Taylor Lorenz, on her new book, Extremely Online. Stay tuned! And keep reading…
The fatal attraction of victimising women
The “career woman”, financially autonomous and sexually independent, was a controversial figure in a country consumed by panic over the prospect of ladies working outside of the home. The central concern surrounding the career woman was less that she would eat married men alive than that she would emasculate her own husband by out-earning him — but still, she made people nervous. If men in the Eighties were frightened of encountering a character like Alex Forrest, they had to be even more worried that their wives might look at her — with her successful career, cool New York City loft apartment, and penchant for acrobatic sex — and find her at least a little bit relatable, even aspirational.
Kat Rosenfield; Unherd
Imagine What These Women Could’ve Done if They’d Had Wives
“It’s hard,” she explained. “I once said that I could get very self-pitying. There are some men I know who are teaching and writing who are single fathers. But not many. Most of them have these great devoted wives, some version of Vera Nabokov. Writers all need Vera. She famously taught some of his classes. He would say, ‘My assistant will be teaching the next class,’ and, apparently, when Nabokov gave the lectures, he needed notes. When Vera gave the lectures, no notes.”
Jessica Grose; The New York Times
In praise of irritation
It surely reflects the fugitive pleasures of irritation that there are so many wonderful, chewy words to describe those who are irritable: prickly, testy, cantankerous, crotchety, disputatious, grumbling, peevish, plaintive, irascible, and ornery. Yet, in a culture that equates depth with significance, we tend to be quick to dismiss our irritation (‘It was nothing’).
Will Rees; Aeon
Sex and Privacy - Dispatches from the Liberation Front
Liberated-sex discourse pushes us to expose ourselves fully; to pin down our pleasures; to “specify” ourselves sexually, as French philosopher Michel Foucault put it. It asks us to turn our sexual preferences into a permanent identity, a flag to which we pledge public allegiance, not a shifting array of acts we imagine, watch, and perform.
Lily Meyer; The Hedgehog Review
This biography of a brilliant philosopher reads like a mystery story
“Parfit” is told, in some ways, as a mystery story, an investigation into how its subject became such an alien. The adult Parfit, single-mindedly focused on his thinking about ethics, exhibited a number of strange behaviors, like exercising nude, redirecting everyday conversations to philosophy and editing his photography — his other passion — to improve things (lengthening spires, removing human figures and so on).
As a boy, though, Parfit had been popular, and his interests had been wide-ranging.
Oliver Traldi; Washington Post
Why Journalists Have More Freedom Than Professors
What it takes to get tenure in an atmosphere of ideological uniformity — the social and interpersonal work involved and the deep embedding in a specific university culture — creates extremely powerful incentives not to be reckless in using the freedom and security that you’ve won.
Ross Douthat; The New York Times
How millennials came to unironically love yacht-rock kings Steely Dan
The Steely Dan resurgence happened in part because revivalism is now a thermodynamic law of pop culture, and by the second decade of the 21st century, we’d strip-mined the past so thoroughly that there was nothing left to revive but the previously verboten.
Alex Pappademas; Los Angeles Times
King Charles’s Very Hobbity Coronation
Whenever I write about the British royals, I find myself wondering how a family that owes its position to the illegitimate son of a Norman noble invading Sussex in 1066 can credibly claim to be at the vanguard of social change. The gold coronation coach will trundle through crowds of onlookers squeezed by inflation of up to 80 percent on basic foodstuffs in the past year. Royal visits to the Caribbean are now marked by intense awkwardness over the legacy of slavery and colonialism. And as Meghan Markle discovered sometime between her 2019 Vogue guest-edit and her escape to British Columbia the following year, duchesses are poorly placed to talk about equality.
Helen Lewis; The Atlantic
Happy 70th anniversary of your first trip, Aldous Huxley
Up to that point, psychedelics had been described as ‘hallucinogens’ or as ‘psychotomimetics’ — because scientists … were primarily interested in these drugs’ ability to mimic the effects of psychosis. Aldous, however, took a much more spiritual view of the chemicals, and suggested they needed re-branding. He always had a thing for advertising jingles, and suggested “phanerothyme,” from the Greek words for “to show” and “spirit,” with the jingle: “To make this mundane world sublime, Take half a gram of phanerothyme.”
Jules Evans
The New New Reading Environment
After a long and glorious spell of underpolicing, the modern paywall has attained its final, fortress-defending form. For years the illicit pleasure of an incognito tab often exceeded the actual reading experience. Today’s paywalls, however, are hostile and impenetrable. Might they be sentient too? Every week new websites and browser extensions emerge to tunnel through or scramble over the walls, and every week they are crushed by rocks and catapults.
n+1; via Agnes Callard
When Are We OK with Getting Bribed?
People seem to act more on what they think is common, rather than what they think is acceptable and right.
Brian Gallagher; Nautilus
Brace for Impact - The trouble with the nonprofit newsroom
The best journalism, of course, is often far from impartial. Impassioned, campaigning journalism, sometimes with the help of courageous whistleblowers, has long been central to good reporting. In the old days, the job of the investigative reporter was to unearth difficult truths and then spruce them up for publication. Journalism, according to the old adage, was stuff that someone doesn’t want you to read; everything else was advertising. It was far from perfect, this era of take-no-prisoners muckraking, and in its later years it became complacent, cozy and sometimes corrupt—think of the American reporting that led up to the war on Iraq, or the phone-hacking scandals in the U.S. But it was hard work in the service of story and a mass audience, which paid for it in their millions. And it wasn’t afraid to make powerful enemies at home.
James Harkin; The Point Magazine
Magda Szabó and the Cost of Censorship - The Hungarian writer’s fiction examines how silence—politically enforced or self-imposed—can warp and disfigure a life.
What good is political courage if you’re too much of a coward to speak freely of your love?
Szabó particularly associated these failures of intimacy with artists, those who she thought perceived the world most clearly yet held themselves at a distance from it. Across her novels she symbolized this distance through various boundaries, gates, windows—or closed doors, as in “The Door,” where a locked door in an apartment is a literal manifestation of unspoken intimacy and distance between two women who care deeply for each other. “How irrational, how unpredictable is the attraction between people, how fatal its current,” remarks the writer who narrates that novel.
Charlie Lee; The New Yorker
How Our Reality May Be a Sum of All Possible Realities
The oracular formula is known as the Feynman path integral. As far as physicists can tell, it precisely predicts the behavior of any quantum system — an electron, a light ray or even a black hole. The path integral has racked up so many successes that many physicists believe it to be a direct window into the heart of reality.
“It’s how the world really is,” said Renate Loll, a theoretical physicist at Radboud University in the Netherlands.
Charlie Wood; Quanta
