Anna Gát: What to Read This Weekend #18
Humour and evil, Houellebecq and Ernaux, cynics and poets, diversity and fire + Sex and the City, Soviet Olympics, gay Disney + unions, death, Ukraine, Žižek, Grimes, Hume, Thiel, Elizabeth Gilbert...
Hello friends! This was an especially busy week at Interintellect so I don’t have much to report. Only that building a new platform, revamping your bizmodel, and reshuffling your team—and writing a book proposal, and relocating, and not being able to sleep in your own apartment for weeks—at the same time is a truly fun and relaxing experience, and you should by all means try it.
I’m starting to read God, Human, Animal, Machine by Meghan O'Gieblyn.
I got a bit carried away this week, so you’re getting a double dosage of excellent things to read. Please do, share around, and let me know what you think!! x Anna
PS: Some of you asked what “note-taking app” I use to create the digest every week. The answer is: my brain! Enjoy 😁
Cajoling, scolding, scheaming, cleverest of them all,
He'd had the other children in a holy war
Against the infamous grown-ups …— (‘Voltaire at Ferney’, WH Auden)
Happiness research needs a new philosophy - Was John Stuart Mill happy?
Rather than come to a single unified theory of happiness, one that picks a system, or fits neatly into a research question, Mill set out principles that sit together, not perhaps in unbreachable logical order, but true to life. As Nussbaum says: Mill stands out – an adult among the children, an empiricist with experience, a man who painfully attained the kind of self-knowledge that his great teacher lacked, and who turned that self-knowledge into philosophy.
Henry Oliver; Common Reader
Arnold Schwarzenegger and Danny DeVito on Life and Death
DEVITO: You mean that we don’t live forever?
SCHWARZENEGGER: Yeah. That we have to die.
DEVITO: That’s tough, man.
SCHWARZENEGGER: I don’t know what the deal is but in any case, it’s a reality, and it truly pisses me off.
DEVITO: You don’t want to die.
SCHWARZENEGGER: No. What the fuck? What kind of deal is that?
Interview Magazine
Cormac McCarthy's Narrative Wisdom
The act of writing was its own reward for McCarthy. In a long career, he gave few interviews, and rarely explained himself. He didn’t make himself known.
RIP Cormac McCarthy. Ed Caesar; The New Yorker
After the manner of Socrates - Ancient philosophers are civilization’s sharpest critics
The cynics are the punks of the ancient world. We are better off as beggars than as billionaires, they insist. From eating to sex they want us to question every social convention. Look to nature – that’s where the true norms are on display.
Carlos Fraenkel; Times Literary Supplement
Judd Apatow's Afternoon With Mel Brooks
Apatow: Were you funny as a result of being around other funny people or as a result of no one being funny?
Brooks: That’s a good question. I don’t know. I have no idea. I think other people.
The Atlantic
The Dictatorship Problem
Most educated elites dislike dictators, and many assume that in democracies, being pro-dictator is a fringe minority view. But in most countries, a large minority or even a majority of voters see dictatorship ("a strong leader who does not have to bother with parliament and elections") as a good form of government. This makes it possible for many authoritarians to win democratically, especially if they are seen as "the lesser of two evils".
Alyssa Vance; Less Wrong
VIDEO: Interintellect Salon with Phil Klay: Laughing At, With, and Against Evil
Q & A with Bernard Williams / Carrying the torch for truth / Philosopher calculates the moral cost of rejecting the concept (2002)
Q.: There are several funny passages in "Truth and Truthfulness." Do you view humor as an aid to philosophy?
B.W.: The majority of philosophers are totally humorless. That's part of their trouble. The number of serious philosophers who succeed in being funny is very small. Pieces of Plato are very funny. Nietzsche is very funny, Kierkegard also. Hume is probably the funniest philosopher. When contemporary philosophers try to be funny, they end up being facetious.
Kenneth Baker; SFGATE
Adam Smith's Quiet Christianity
Smith wrote famously, in a letter describing the death in 1776 of his dear and notoriously atheistic friend David Hume, that Hume was "dying fast, but with more real cheerfulness and good humor and with more real resignation to the necessary course of things, than any whining Christian ever dyed with pretended resignation to the will of God." Hume postponed publishing until after his death the amiable but skeptical Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion.
Deirdre McCloskey; Reason
‘Pushed into humanity’: can learning about storytelling make better doctors?
That story of the way I deal today with the family of the child with suspected septicaemia, for example, because many years ago I lost a child patient with septicaemia who died despite our best efforts. And I’ve never forgotten her and her family. These stories don’t go away. They stay with you.
Paul Daley; The Guardian
Undue Hate: Why Disagreement Tends to be Overly Disagreeable
The last and not least cause of undue dislike is the skew in the information we observe about the other side, in conjunction with the psychology of how we interpret this information. The prevalence of echo chambers online is debated. But most of us are in echo chambers to some degree — more than we realize — especially offline, where our friends, neighbors, and family are almost entirely like-minded politically. When we do interact with the other side online, we often see them at their worst.
Daniel F Stone; Heterodox Academy
Heterodox vs. mainstream macroeconomics - If you're skeptical of one, you should be skeptical of the other too.
Almost none of these problems are due to nefariousness or stupidity on the part of macroeconomists; the issues are that A) macro data is just very sparse and full of dependencies, and B) a macroeconomy is a very complex thing, so building up a full model of it from micro bits and pieces is extremely hard to do. Of course these problems are only compounded for development theory, since development only happens once in each country.
In other words, macroeconomics is sort of in what Thomas Kuhn might call a “pre-paradigm” phase. Unlike in game theory or tax theory etc., humankind has not found the core of an approach that reliably explains key features of business cycles or growth policy. Heterodoxers go for macro because they’re competing to be the paradigm.
Noah Smith
From Frankfurt to Fox - The Strange Career of Critical Theory
All in all, it is not as clear as it once seemed how the project of critical theory maps onto the practical politics—institutional and insurgent—of our moment. More serious is the looming sense that critical theory is somehow near the center of the crisis of our time
Malloy Owen; Hedgehog Review
Grimes Calls First Official Song Made by AI-Cloning Her Voice a "Masterpiece"
Grimes … has gone the other way and has chosen to embrace the tech instead. "Feel free to use my voice without penalty," she wrote in a tweet last month. "I have no label and no legal bindings. I think it's cool to be fused [with] a machine and I like the idea of open-sourcing all art and killing copyright," she added.
AI generated; Futurism
All those naked Greeks - Men in ancient Greek art exercise, fight battles, pursue lovers and mourn lost friends, all without their pants on. Why?
Should the nudity of the athletic statue lead us to believe that, in ancient Greece, athletes competed totally naked? Should the nudity of the hero be taken as evidence that warriors really went to battle wearing nothing but their armour…?
Scholars struggle to answer these questions with certainty.
Sarah Murray; Aeon
Annie Ernaux’s acts of revenge - The Nobel laureate on abortion, the “shame” of her upbringing and forging a new working-class literature
“We avoid dwelling on the thing that caused the feeling of shame,” she told me, “but writing, in confronting shame, is a means of freeing ourselves from it. In turning it into a literary object you share the feeling with your readers, which carries with it the possibility of affinity, of identification, which are both liberating.”
Ellen Peirson-Hagger; New Statesman
Dana Gioia on Becoming an Information Billionaire (2021)
There’s an assumption in the university that the common reader, the average person is stupid. I hate to say this in public, but the center of human intelligence, the epicenter of human intellectuality, is not the English Department.
As part of [Postwar abstract trends], there was a general bias against narrative. Putting a story in was somehow condescending to a stupid audience but the fact is, humanity needs stories. People lead their individual life as a story. One of the reasons you need lots of stories is that in every life, your story comes to an impasse. You have to, in a sense, revise the narrative of your own life, and what fiction does, what poetry does, what narrative does is give you a wealth of narrative possibilities so you can recognize that no matter how bad your life is right now, that there’s an escape, there’s a rescue, there might even, in the Greek sense, be a deus ex machina, an intervention which saves you. I believe that the suicide epidemic in the United States, the opioid epidemic in the United States, especially among young people, is among people who cannot, in a sense, get control of the stories of their own lives.
What the intellectuals in the United States did was we took poetry away from common people. We took rhyme away, we took narrative away, we took the ballad away, and the common people [through hip hop, etc.] reinvented it.
Tyler Cowen
Life as a Terrorist - Uncovering my FBI file
My motives for writing this story are conventionally American. I value my freedom to be what others may not wish me to be. I am proud to read whichever book I want, from The Satanic Verses to S&M pictorials to the speeches of Saddam Hussein. Although I sometimes write about politics, I do not consider myself political — or is it in fact political to hold some degree of disrespect for whichever fellow citizens have been set in power over me? In this, if Steinbeck is to be believed, I am very American: “Americans almost without exception have a fear and a hatred of any perpetuation of power — political, religious, or bureaucratic.” Yes, like my father, I am proud to be an American, at least sometimes.
This essay is mostly concerned with my FBI file. After a Freedom of Information Act request (the power of which act makes me proud again), an appeal, and a lawsuit, “785 pages were reviewed and 294 pages are being released.”
William T. Vollmann; Harper’s Magazine
Confessions of a Radioactive Mind
Apropos of the ideological appropriation of emancipatory demands, consider Jean-Claude Milner’s claim in a recent essay that what we call “the West” is today a confederation under US hegemony: The United States reigns over us not just economically and militarily, but also intellectually. But here, says Milner, “one has to accept a paradox: The US-American domination in the intellectual domain expresses itself in the discourses of dissent and protest and not in the discourses of order.”
There is a further paradox at work here, however: The US-led West’s mode of ideological discourse—as a protest against now this form of inequality, now that—is self-destructive insofar as it undercuts its own foundation, and is thus unable to present itself as a project for positive global change…
Slavoj Žižek; Compact Magazine
The diversity myth - On multiculturalism as misdirection
How can something be both very silly and very evil at the same time? The answer is that what’s going on is very silly, but the silliness is distracting us from very important things. That’s the nature of the evil.
Peter Thiel; New Criterion
Diversity Really Is Our Strength
What’s going on here is that the US has freer markets than most other advanced countries. It historically has had less government spending as a percentage of GDP, a weaker social safety net, and fewer economic regulations. The US is particularly good on labor law. It’s easy to hire and fire people, and unions have relatively little power.
Richard Hanania
The Labor-Savvy Leader - The time has come for management to start working with—rather than against—organized labor. Here’s how.
Leaders have many choices in responding to organizing—choices that respect workers’ rights and result in a stronger company.
Ironically, the labor organizations likely to be most valuable to business will be the strongest ones. Good partnerships require partners with balanced power. Strong unions cultivate deep relationships with workers and are their legitimate, democratically elected representatives. A labor organization capable of deploying a full range of methods—collaborating, yes, but also building coalitions with customers, community leaders, and investors; seeking a role in corporate governance; and, as a last resort, striking—might be exactly the balance of power that will serve business best in the long run.
Roy E. Bahat, Thomas A. Kochan, Liba Wenig Rubenstein; Harvard Business Review
Lost in the Storm - My 10-year-old daughter thinks she should be dead. When I tried to help her, I saw how deep our national crisis really is.
These people—who we pay to help Ash—are forcing us to do the one thing that we know will hurt her far more than it helps: take her to an overcrowded and underfunded ER, where if she is admitted, she could easily get trapped in a hospital unequipped to help her. If she is transferred, it may very well be to a unit that takes the same liability-based, anti-therapeutic approach as her last hospital experience. Ash still has nightmares about that hospital, and sometimes I find her in her room, holding an artifact from her stay there, weeping, consumed by terrible memories. I have promised her over and over that I will not ever again make a quick decision based on fear…
Jane Ehrenfeld; Slate
“When Feelings Precede Thoughts” - The life and death of Greek athlete, politician, and pacifist Grigoris Lambrakis
Nowadays, it is not unusual to hear old and well-meaning ladies and gentlemen at book launches remind everyone without the slightest doubt or scruple that they fought the good fight and are proud that the country remained “free”. They point to what happened to some countries behind the Iron Curtain when they tried to gain more autonomy from the Soviet Union, such as Poland and Czechoslovakia, as further proof of their good judgment. It is an unbeatable argument.
Yet this thinking entirely glosses over the political abnormality that characterized post-war Greek society for over 30 years, until in fact the end of the dictatorship in 1974.
Evi Gkotzaridis; Rosa Luxemburg Foundation
Moscow 1980: Forty years on
Moscow 1980 was a bitter-sweet experience for many athletes under strong pressure to desist – or even banned – from participating. Although some who forewent the Games managed to maintain their training and participate in the Olympic Games four years later in 1984, others who had trained since Montreal 1976 saw their hopes and dreams of repeating the experience dashed. Still others missed out on what was their only opportunity to go to an edition of the Olympic Games.
Official website of the Olympics
France on Trial: The Case of Marshal Pétain review – a fallen hero in the dock
What is chilling in Jackson’s beautifully researched and meticulous account of the trial is the hopeless mediocrity of almost all people involved in it: from judges and jurors (résistants and parliamentarians) to lawyers prosecutors and witnesses. Everybody seemed animated by petty or self-serving feelings; they were either out of their depth or spineless, but above all most were morally ambivalent. Before it began, De Gaulle had presciently talked of Pétain’s trial as a “lamentable but inevitable” event.
Agnès Poirier; The Guardian
Harry Is a More Interesting Prince Than We Deserved
I think if he could, he would bring it all down — the monarchy, the media, the whole awful dance.
Tanya Gold; The New York Times
Royal Bodies
I had expected to see people pushing themselves into the queen’s path, but the opposite was true. The queen walked through the reception areas at an even pace, hoping to meet someone, and you would see a set of guests, as if swept by the tide, parting before her or welling ahead of her into the next room. They acted as if they feared excruciating embarrassment should they be caught and obliged to converse. The self-possessed became gauche and the eloquent were struck dumb. The guests studied the walls, the floor, they looked everywhere except at Her Majesty.
And then the queen passed close to me and I stared at her.
Hilary Mantel; London Review of Books
Robert Gottlieb, The Art of Editing No. 1 (1994)
The interviewees in this piece were suggested by Gottlieb himself. Their comments and Gottlieb’s responses were combined afterwards—there was no direct conversation. Joseph Heller, Doris Lessing, John le Carré, Cynthia Ozick, Michael Crichton, Chaim Potok, Toni Morrison, Robert Caro, and Mordecai Richler are all authors Gottlieb has edited. Charles McGrath worked with Gottlieb at The New Yorker, where McGrath is deputy editor. Lynn Nesbit is a literary agent who has worked with Gottlieb on a number of books.
RIP Robert Gottlieb. This is by Larissa MacFarquhar; The Paris Review
How Michel Houellebecq diminished himself
The other disaster is much more traumatic he reckons: being tricked, as he claims, by some Dutch art provocateurs, into participating in a porn video and signing away all rights to it, so that it will shortly be available to all online.
David Sexton; New Statesman
Disney’s Queer Track Record: A Troubled History
There’s shockingly little to dissect in how Disney treated its gay characters and gay employees in the company’s earliest years. That’s because Disney maintained the status quo by doing what every other studio did, and largely pretended they didn’t exist for much of the 20th century.
Wilson Chapman; IndieWire
The internet thinks Elizabeth Gilbert’s decision to pause her book was not a good one.
In the video, she announced that she would push back publication of The Snow Forest, a forthcoming February 2024 title from Riverhead Books about a Soviet family who escape into the forest, after an “overwhelming” amount of criticism on Twitter and Goodreads from Ukrainian users.
That was really all the information the internet had.
Janet Manley; Literary Hub
Ukraine’s Winnable War
It makes sense to keep Western intervention indirect and to limit the theater of combat, and those restrictions on the fighting should be maintained or even enforced more strictly, so as to prevent any more attacks on Moscow. But Ukraine’s demonstrated ability to put military aid to good use makes it sensible to relax the restrictions on that front, given how much reward can come from minimal added risk.
Gideon Rose; Foreign Affairs
The Families of Dead Wagner Fighters Speak Out
Over the course of several months, Wagner Group head Yevgeny Prigozhin pulled tens of thousands of prisoners from Russia’s penal colonies, throwing wave after wave of them at Ukrainian positions. Thousands of the convicts appear not to have survived this "meat grinder ," as Prigozhin himself refers to the strategy he adopted in an effort to grind down the Ukrainian military in Bakhmut. Recently, following months of blood spilling, his mercenary army has apparently taken complete control of the destroyed city.
Christina Hebel; SPIEGEL International
The Great Vancouver Fire
On April 6, 1886, Granville became the City of Vancouver. The first city council election was held on May 3, with Malcolm MacLean serving as the new mayor.
The rapid growth of Vancouver unfortunately meant that the Coastal Salish people began to lose the land they had occupied for upwards of 500 years. Prior to them the Musqueam people lived there for at least 2,000 years. Pushed to a reserve, the Indigenous were not allowed to work at the sawmills, causing great hardship for them.
The Canadian Pacific Railway was also granted 6,000 acres of heavily forested land by the government. Loggers and railroad workers quickly got to work clearing out the trees, many of them ancient cedar that stood 330 feet tall. As the trees were cut down, the good parts of the trees were taken to the mill, while pieces of wood chips were left on the ground where they were put into huge mounds as tall as a three-storey building. Those mounds were typically lit on fire…
Craig Baird; Canadian History Ehx
Lab mice go wild: making experiments more natural in order to decode the brain
As neuroscientists continue to hone their naturalistic set-ups using the latest technologies for brain imaging and behaviour tracking, they are finding better, more nuanced ways to use animals to study pain responses and conditions such as Down’s syndrome and autism. Others are rethinking popular theories about aggression and fear. And some are looking for ways in which these methods could enable richer studies of human behaviour…
Kerri Smith; Nature
Airports have changed – for the worse
The essential shape of the airport was determined after the Second World War, when the design of passenger craft settled on the heavy monoplane. Before the war, take-off and landings strips had measured around 2,000 feet and seaplanes had handled long distances. Now runways can be anything up to 16,000-feet long – the length of the Shigatse Peace Airport runway in China.
Bryan Appleyard; Engelsberg Ideas
When Vertigo Melted My Brain - Can medical science truly explain the mysterious, mystical experience triggered by a simple malfunction in my inner ear?
I wondered what would have happened if I’d had this episode a thousand years ago. Would I have been locked into an asylum? Would I have started a religion? I checked out books from writers such as the neurologist Oliver Sacks, who interrogated mystical experiences of the past through a lens of modern medicine: Joan of Arc’s epilepsy and ecstatic auras; the polymath Hildegard von Bingen’s migraine visions; Fyodor Dostoyevsky’s seizures that brought him transcendent joy and injected deeper meaning into his work.
Katy Vine; Texas Monthly
The Highs and Lows of Sex and the City’s Interiors
Of course it is, but it wasn’t always. Candace Bushnell, Carrie’s creator, depicted something rather different in the collection of columns that would later be adapted into SATC, the tv show (Kim Cattrall once said that she threw the book version across the room because she found it so depressing).
In a 1996 piece for the New York Observer, Bushnell wrote that “Carrie,” her alter-ego, had lived in a shabby studio; the previous tenant, an old lady, died inside it. She used a loaned piece of foam for a bed, and owned nothing but a mink coat and a Louis Vuitton suitcase, both of which would eventually get stolen. She was lonely, broke, and cold, but still went out every night, hoping for something glamorous.
Jocelyn Silver; Vogue
Meet the Serial-Killer Whisperer - This woman has the world’s most comprehensive database on what makes serial killers tick (2018)
A central goal of her databases is to allow an investigator to narrow down a list of suspects and to predict where and when a serial killer might strike again. So, for instance, if non-college-educated, middle-aged Latina prostitutes from low-income families begin showing up with slit wrists across Chicago, regressing the relevant variables in the databases against one another would create an accurate characterization of the potential killer. Because serial killers aren’t always in police databases to begin with, the results of Reid’s regressions will rarely identify a single killer. A name and face won’t pop up like in an episode of CSI. Instead, a series of character traits and demographic possibilities of the killer, and potential locations and victim profiles of future killings would show up. From this, investigators can significantly narrow their search and hopefully stop subsequent murders.
Cody Delistraty; GEN/Medium
Is Morality in Decline?
A big collection of archival data, going back all the way to 1949, suggests people believe morality is declining. People are asked questions like, “Do you think morality is declining?” and “Do you think people are less honest today than they were 50 years ago?” in 100 different ways, in dozens of different countries. And over and over again, people say, “Yes, people are less kind than they used to be. No, I’m not just saying that. This isn’t just nostalgia. This really happened.”
Adam Mastroianni; Nautilus
The Universe and the University (2021)
I tried to present a different vision of the good life, one grounded in philosophy rather than science. On what I call the classical view, to think about happiness (what the Greeks called eudaimonia) is first and foremost to think about how we should aspire to live and what sort of person we most wish to become. And there is no way to bring our thought and imagination to bear on this topic without serious and disciplined reflection on the good: more specifically, what human excellence is and what it would take to realize it in one’s own life. To think about human excellence, I argued, is to think about what it is to be a human being—to have what Iris Murdoch calls a “soul-picture,” or a self-knowledge of human nature that determines, to a large extent, the sort of shape we give to our own lives.
Jennifer Frey; The Point
Later Auden - By Edward Mendelson - Demon or Gift (1999)
But the most instructive and rebuking example was the subject of "Voltaire at Ferney," a poet who denied even the existence of the gift. In Auden's cool discursive verse portrait, written a few days or weeks after his elegy for Yeats, Voltaire acknowledges no power but his own; among the enlightened he has "only himself to count upon"; among the murderous and evil, "Only his verses / Perhaps could stop them." But if your goal, like Voltaire's, is to stop the "horrible nurses / Itching to boil their children," you have faint prospects of achieving it by writing verse, especially if you write it in a spirit of rational analytic pride.
Poetry ought to be written, the poem implies in its closing lines, in an unconstraining voice that protests and promises nothing, in an idiom of pure praise beyond mere human powers: "Overhead / The uncomplaining stars composed their lucid song." In a review written around the same time, Auden portrayed Voltaire as a writer who indeed made something happen—not through his poetry, which the review entirely ignored, but through his work in prose and his practical attempt to create at Ferney "a community of which the members would feel happy enough to allow the spirit of democracy to flower."
Book excerpt; The New York Times BOOKS
