Anna Gát: What to Read This Weekend #35
Israel, Palestine, and other important ideas.
Friends,
Hard to write this digest on a week like this, when everybody’s glued to the news all day and all night; the heartbreaks, the anxieties, the confusions. I’ve been reading Hernan Diaz’s Trust as a distraction — reminds me of a less profound The Blind Assassin but I hear it gets better as it unfolds — and preparing for my coming US trip and our offline with Larissa MacFarquhar and another one with Tara Isabella Burton and Liberties Journal.
A great reading selection for your weekend — if you ever leave the news for enough time to read them — below. For Israel-Palestine readings, scroll all the way down.
My warmest regards to all of you and your loved ones. x Anna
Louise Glück, Nobel prize-winning poet, dies at 80
The Nobel judges praised “her unmistakable poetic voice that with austere beauty makes individual existence universal”. Her poems, often brutally sharp at a page or less, demonstrated her commitment to “the unsaid, to suggestion, to eloquent, deliberate silence”.
Adrian Horton; The Guardian
The Body Artist - Louise Glück’s collected poems (2012)
Glück’s poems in this period are all winter interest, beauty thrown into relief by bleak circumstances. “The poet is supposed to be the person who can’t get enough of words like ‘incarnadine,’ ” Glück writes in her essay “Education and the Poet.” “This was not my experience.”
Dan Chiasson; The New Yorker
Nobel Prize Laureate Katalin Karikó on Her Hungarian Childhood
I climb trees and peer at birds’ nests. I watch hard eggs become naked hatchlings, mouths wide and begging. The hatchlings grow feathers and muscles, leave their nest, begin pecking the ground. I see storks and swallows take flight, then disappear when the weather grows cold. In the spring, they return and start the cycle all over again.
Katalin Karikó; Literary Hub
The Theology of Birds
Being embodied means that my perception of that growing flower is combined with memories of past nature encounters. My experience is not uniquely constructed just from what my senses perceive. It involves my evolutionary history as a body emerging from Earthly processes, including joys or sorrows, reminders of other flowers I might have encountered, and my emotional state from whatever else has happened this day. It is complex, multifaceted, and embedded in both physical and historical realities.
Steven L. Peck; Wayfare
Claudia Goldin: Nobel
In this Substack, I discuss some of her major works:
The Power of the Pill
Marriage Bars
The Quiet Revolution
The U-Shaped Female Labour Force Function in Economic Development
Career and Family
Why Women Won (published this morning!)
Alice Evans
My Delirious Trip to the Heart of Swiftiedom
If you watch the Netflix special that documents the “Reputation” tour, you’ll see there’s a moment when she looks around at the stadium cheering for her. Much has been made about the Taylor Swift Surprise Face, an aw-shucks meme that might have been its own impetus for cancellation in the first place — you’re not allowed to show your surprise at your dominance during your dominance, even if you mean it. But what is the appropriate response to finding out that after your brutal death and your miraculous rebirth, you’re still so, so beloved?
Taffy Brodesser-Akner; The New York Times
How to read Haruki Murakami in English the Japanese way – in four steps
While you await the English translation of The City and Its Uncertain Walls, you can prepare by looking at the closely related novel, Hard-boiled Wonderland and the End of The World.
The Japanese language has several words for the pronoun “I”, and these two novels are told by two narrators using different versions: watashi and boku. Without alternative options for “I”, English translators of such stories are challenged. As a solution, chapters narrated by the watashi character (a kind of cyberpunk, science fiction world) are written in the past tense, whereas boku character’s chapters (a more surreal, virtual fantasy world) are written in the present tense.
Gitte Marianne Hansen; The Conversation
No One is Even Trying - This post is about how little work people do, but it starts with stories of unusually high output
Escaping the bind takes more than hard work. You have to actually go out and generate your own sense of meaning. You have to build, often without a surrounding social structure, a way of creating value on your terms.
Applied Divinity Studies
Everyday Philosophy: How to live forever
Bernard Williams used the plot of a Janáček opera The Makropulos Case to bring out why he thought that too many years of life could and almost certainly would be bad for the individual.
Nigel Warburton; The New European
An Owner's Manual for Breasts
Studies looking at microscopic changes in breast tissue show that after ovulation, estrogen and progesterone stimulate ducts and glands to proliferate. There is also swelling and water retention within the breast tissue leading up to the menstrual period. When estrogen and progesterone drop at the start of the period, breast swelling resolves.
Gillian Goddard; ParentData
The great debate about what made Flanders
Some 15 years after the Danish and Dutch initiatives, the Flemish government decided to create its own Canon van Vlaanderen. It also commissioned the TV series Het Verhaal van Vlaanderen inspired by Danish and Dutch precedents. Something was obviously going on in these small northern European countries.
Derek Blyth; The Brussels Times
This Above All: My Undying Obsession With ‘Hamlet’
In Hawke’s “Hamlet” and Mel Gibson’s visceral, sensually charged 1990 “Hamlet” I first realized how often directors use the female characters as stand-ins for fatalistic, taboo love. (Which is why I also savor gender-crossed Hamlets, whether in the form of the theater pioneer Sarah Bernhardt in 1899 or Ruth Negga in 2020.) Queen Gertrude is either stupid, selfish or promiscuous, blinded by her untamed lust.
Maya Phillips; The New York Times
Age of Invention: How to Steal Technology
The list of British industries and inventions that were worth copying in the 1710s gives us an idea of its lead…
Anton Howes
Beyond Self-Actualisation
I propose that the next level, and the first rung on the ladder of self development is a healthy body. Once you’re no longer starving or fighting for survival, your routines, diet, and exercise are the next logical steps.
Ben Fleming
Political Science Degrees Must End
When most people say “political science degree,” what they internally understand is something like “the degree that teaches you about how government works.” Most students enroll in these programs with the intent to learn about government, but they graduate without a command of the basics. Political science degrees do not, in fact, teach them about government.
Daniel Golliher; Maximum New York
Economic Inequality by Gender
The estimates shown here correspond to differences between average hourly earnings of men and women (expressed as a percentage of average hourly earnings of men), and cover all workers irrespective of whether they work full time or part time.
As we can see: (i) in most countries the gap is positive – women earn less than men; and (ii) there are large differences in the size of this gap across countries.
Our World in Data
Large language models as virtual worlds
Because each individual user experiences only a few instances of the model’s creative powers, it is easy to mistake it for a nonhuman interlocutor or agent with which human agents engage in communication. But there is a reason communication plays such a central role: it is used for training purposes! And there is probably no other way for the model to manifest itself to a human user.
Bruno Maçães
Good Dancing is About Good Communication
Having a transcendental dance and a noteworthy conversation are hard for the same reason. Everyone wants to talk, not listen.
Nicolás Forero
Manufacturing Consensus
Contemplate the costs the decentralization imposes both on your project and to the industry. Vitalik wrote, “small things being centralized is great, extremely large things being centralized is terrifying.” The biggest thing in crypto is the entire industry.
Dryden Brown
Scientists Discover How Gene Mutation Reduces the Need for Sleep
The new study suggests that DEC2 may lower your level of alertness in the evening by binding to and inhibiting MyoD1, a gene that turns on orexin production. Before dawn, DEC2 fades away, allowing MyoD1 to stimulate orexin production to wake you up and keep you alert throughout the day.
[Ying-Hui Fu, PhD] says the mutation seen in human short sleepers weakens DEC2’s ability to put the breaks on MyoD1, leading to more orexin production and causing the short sleepers to stay awake longer.
Dana Smith, Nina Bai; UCSF
The parallels Bob Dylan drew between himself and Fyodor Dostoevsky
Undoubtably, Dylan endured the hardship of media scrutiny as a protest singer and shaking fists at the 1965 Newport Folk Festival, but it’s perhaps difficult to equate his years of unparalleled success and veneration to Dostoevsky’s spent in shackles, disease and delirium. All the same, through the 1960s, Dylan faced criticism for political outcry and grappled with the harsh realities of fame.
Jordan Potter; Far Out
The Great Malformation
The work of the polity that Aristotle regarded as most crucial—the acculturation of successive generations—increasingly occurs as the unplanned aggregate effect of corporate profit-seeking, in a direction that few regard as genuinely good for the next generation. This novel experiment in socialization raises anew the concern that we might prove unable to keep our republic (as Benjamin Franklin put it), or even our humanity.
Talbot Brewer; The Hedgehog Review
Falling Out of Love with Michael Lewis - The complicated demands of business writing
Lewis and everyone in SBF’s life bizarrely infantilizes him. Lewis describes him in the book as a “kid,” a “child,” a “teenager,” and a “baby.” Before he went to jail, his last remaining employees were panicking to make sure he had enough socks (seriously).
Evan Armstrong; Every
Observing Many Researchers Using the Same Data and Hypothesis Reveals a Hidden Universe of Uncertainty
We coordinated 161 researchers in 73 research teams and observed their research decisions as they used the same data to independently test the same prominent social science hypothesis: that greater immigration reduces support for social policies among the public. In this typical case of research based on secondary data, we find that research teams reported widely diverging numerical findings and substantive conclusions despite identical start conditions. Researchers’ expertise, prior beliefs, and expectations barely predicted the wide variation in research outcomes.
PNAS (for authors, click link)
Asebeia? An Outsider's Claim on the Classics
I didn’t set out to be anything resembling a Classicist. I’m a regular guy who loves reading and learning as I fumble my way through life working as a Computing Infrastructure Engineer. It was only after years of reading that it slowly dawned on me that I was naively wandering lost in the Classics.
Tully Williams; Antigone Journal
Radical Energy Abundance
Against this backdrop of ever-cheapening solar, it’s a fun exercise to consider historical, contemporary, and near future changes in the way we get our energy.
Casey Handmer; progressforum.org
Why Dizziness Is Still a Mystery
The experience of dizziness has been documented for thousands of years, and it’s one of the most common complaints that bring people to the doctor. Even children can readily identify it: if you are old enough to play Ring Around the Rosie, you know what it feels like. Yet dizziness, like pain, isn’t something that can be seen directly in an X-ray or an MRI; it must be described by the person who feels it, and terms like “vertigo” and “light-headedness” never seem to capture the entire experience, or how profoundly it can unsettle us. Even doctors break down dizzy spells into a staggering number of mythic-sounding categories, many of which are poorly understood: labyrinthitis, mal de débarquement, benign paroxysmal positional vertigo, Ménière’s disease, vestibular neuritis, vestibular migraine.
Shayla Love; Thew New Yorker
If I Close My Eyes - Then I drift away...
“I believe that, like family ties and work relationships, you don’t get to choose which celebrities are in your life, you simply contend with them because you can’t really escape them.”
Terry Nguyen talks with Ben Fama; Dirt
Unusual applications of spaced repetition memory systems
Something clever or beautiful a writer or artist did: why did it work? What might have made them think of it? What was its effect on you?
Andy Matuschak
What can we learn from those who have a moral change of heart?
Consider also the many former opponents of gay marriage, such as the Republican senator Robert Portman, who changed their minds after a loved one came out. Portman certainly knew about some of the moral arguments for legalising same-sex marriage, but discovering that his own son is gay was crucial to his dramatic reversal. Such personal connections, which cut through the abstraction of political debate, partly explain why social change on marriage equality was so rapid.
Joshua May; Psyche
What makes a medical intervention invasive?
Central to our account is a distinction between two properties: basic invasiveness and threshold invasiveness. We end by assessing what the standard account gets right, and what more needs to be done to complete our schematic account.
Gabriel De Marco, Jannieke Simons, Lisa Forsberg, Thomas Douglas; Journal of Medical Ethics
Character, Vices, and Authority
What we need, then, is a way of thinking about our epistemic activities that can acknowledge its ordinary, everyday character. It should also make clear why some people, at least, do take seriously questions about good and bad thinking, and why everyone should. I want to suggest that we can do this using the concept of an epistemic vice.
Ian James Kidd; The Philosopher
Time doesn’t belong to physics - When Bergson met Einstein
In [Einstein’s] work, time is closely tied to what clocks measure. To Bergson’s dismay, it did not include clock makers, clock users and those events external to the clock that make time meaningful.
Jimena Canales; Alexis Papazoglou; The Institute of Art and Ideas
Nobel Prize winner Katalin Karikó raised a two-time Olympic gold medalist: Here’s her No. 1 piece of parenting advice
Seeing her parents work hard and keep a positive mindset, Karikó says, was more important to Francia’s development than any resources money could buy.
Aditi Shrikant; CNBC
What’s going on in depression to make negative beliefs so sticky?
Based on my clinical work on the treatment of depression, I suggest that many people with depression are trying to protect themselves from future disappointments. More specifically, many of those with depression have had previous experiences – a perceived failure, for instance – in which they saw their negative beliefs as being proven ‘correct’.
Tobias Kube; Psyche
Social information use and social information waste
Social information is immensely valuable. Yet we waste it.
Olivier Morin, Pierre Olivier Jacquet, Krist Vaesen and Alberto Acerbi; The Royal Society
Watching people die is making us more like ancient Rome
Eventually, however, I noticed that beyond the shocking videos there was almost nothing else on my timeline. No substantive news articles about the invasion.
Erik Hoel
‘We’re Going to Die Here’: A firsthand account of tragedy and heroism from the slaughter that left more than 900 Israelis dead
“We run from our bedroom to what we call the safe room. In every house in our community and other communities along the border with Gaza, there is a room that is built of very strong concrete that can withstand a direct hit from a mortar or a rocket. And in most families, that’s where they put the kids to sleep every night. So we run to the safe room where our two daughters are: Galia is three and a half years old; Carmel is one and a half years old.”
Yair Rosenberg talks to Amir Tibon; The Atlantic
The impossibility of a stolen moment as Israeli bombs rain on Gaza
It was so violent and intense, that I often thought it was on our house. I jumped up more than once to run towards where my infant son was sleeping, ready to grab him and run.
Maram Humaid; Al Jazeera
The psychology of hate: Moral concerns differentiate hate from dislike (2021)
Quantitative and qualitative measures revealed that hated attitude objects were more negative than disliked attitude objects and associated with moral beliefs and emotions, even after adjusting for differences in negativity.
Clara Pretus, Jennifer L. Ray, Yael Granot, William A. Cunningham, Jay J. Van Bavel; Smith College
Who Goes Nazi? (1941)
There he sits: he talks awkwardly rather than glibly; he is courteous. He commands a distant and cold respect. But he is a very dangerous man. Were he primitive and brutal he would be a criminal—a murderer. But he is subtle and cruel. He would rise high in a Nazi regime. It would need men just like him—intellectual and ruthless.
Dorothy Thompson; Harper’s Magazine
Gaza, My Lost Home
Almost all of my father’s family is scattered across the globe, like most Palestinians. There are second and third generations being born in the diaspora with no connection to the land anymore. This is not new for the Middle East: Jewish people with roots in every country from Algeria to Yemen have been all but eradicated from their homelands; Egypt has very few people remaining from the hundreds of thousands who once thrived there. Hopefully a few Gazans will remain in Gaza. Maybe someday they’ll be able to live on their homeland without fear.
Yasmine Mohammed; Tablet
The attacks on Israel, and the response
That's a hard thought to shake when watching the videos out of Israel — the concert goers fleeing across an empty expanse, the hostages being paraded through the streets, the people shot in the head at bus stops or in their cars. I went to those parties in the desert, I rubbed shoulders with Israelis and Arabs and Jews and Muslims, I could have easily accepted an invitation to some concert near Sderot and gone without a care, only to be indiscriminately slaughtered. Or, perhaps worse, taken hostage and tortured.
Isaac Saul; Tangle
How the attacks in Israel are changing Threads
Everyone has a different breaking point. Plenty of people found theirs weeks or months earlier. But judging from the conversations on Bluesky and Threads this weekend, X’s lack of usability during the crisis sparked a fresh reckoning with a new set of former diehards.
Casey Newton
‘United Because of This Disaster’: Israelis Rush to Volunteer After Hamas Attacks
Mothers were donating breast milk for orphaned infants. Dozens of florists and events designers are making hundreds of funeral wreaths and bouquets for hospitals instead of bridal bouquets and table arrangements, working out of a refrigerated agricultural warehouse at a cooperative near Israel’s international airport…
Many Israelis are now angry at the government led by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu for being caught so off-guard by, and slow to respond to, the Hamas incursion.
Isabel Kershner; The New York Times
Exodus of the Wrongthinkers from American Universities
Even faculty who don’t consider themselves conservative are feeling uncomfortable amid a campus climate that demands adherence to the new left-leaning dogma.
Francesca Block; The Free Press
Synod Assembly prays for peace in Middle East amid Israel-Hamas war
“Help us, Lord, to commit ourselves to building a fraternal world so that these peoples and those in the same conditions of conflict of instability and violence may find the path of respect for human rights where justice, dialogue and reconciliation are the indispensable tools for building peace.”
Deborah Castellano Lubov; Vatican News