Anna Gát: What to Read This Weekend #32
AI girlfriends, banned books, Wikipedia and academia, psychedelic plants—dying and remembering—Kant, Homer, Schiele, Nietzsche, Russell Brand, condescension, attention, art, autocracy, intensity...
Hello friends!
Crazy week. Lots happening. Interintellect is rebuilding its platform which is going well, knock on wood; we’re working with a wonderful new designer as well and learning tons from her. I’ve been reading Erich Maria Remarque and watching The Eternal Daughter, which was lovely.
I hope to see you soon in New York and then in Washington DC!
We have an amazing couple of events coming up. Kevin Kelly is joining an online salon on Interintellect discussing the art of living. The New Yorker’s Larissa MacFarquhar will be hanging out with us on October 21, in Manhattan, talking about how to be good. That event will also feature Skye Cleary, Kyla Scanlon, the poet Grace Bialecki, and a philosophical DJ set!
On November 4, our members can join an excellent offline social together with Liberties Magazine and Luke Burgis’s Novitate Conference. More on this soon. I can’t wait to see you all! x Anna
Nobody who makes a living telling people how to live has any business doing so. — Katherine Dee
In Defense of Voracious Reading
So, why do I read? That depends. Any given day, I might be reading for a particular research project that requires me to gain familiarity with thinkers, authors, and historical events of which I am ignorant. I might be reading an assigned text for a discussion seminar, or a paper to review for an academic journal. I might be reading to prepare for a course I am teaching in the fall. But on many occasions, I am reading simply for the pleasure of the thing.
Philip Bunn; Law & Liberty
An Open Letter to Taylor Swift
That’s the one thing we have most in common. We both love the music. We want to see it flourish—not just for ourselves, but for other, better reasons. We want see it flourish for the good of all musicians. And for the benefit of the fans. And for our communities. And, most of all, for the future. More than anybody, you have the power to make this happen.
Ted Gioia
The Sacrament of Attention
How we allocate our attention defines us even more than our purchases do. People have different amounts of money, so the things we buy don’t reflect values in the same way for everyone. The same purchase might represent a tremendous sacrifice for one person and a mere afterthought to another. But we all have the same widow’s mite of attention to distribute among the many things competing for it: family, friends, education, health, careers, church, politics, great books, lousy books, clickbait headlines, and viral posts about ridiculous people doing ridiculous things for no particular reason. Our limited attention budget forces us to make choices, and those choices both reveal our values and create our characters.
Michael Austin; Wayfare
The curse of the cool girl novelist
Whereas the original silly novels were romances, the new breed come to us in the form of a genre dubbed “sad girl lit” (romances of the self, perhaps), otherwise known as millennial fiction. And in place of the original “lady” author we have the cool girl novelist.
Charlotte Stroud; New Statesman
Samuel Johnson, opsimath - Lazy, depressive, productive, late bloomer
And all of this was done without a degree. He was a prodigious reader, alternating his bouts of depression with astonishing industry. Early in the 1760s he was given a government pension, but he still produced Lives of the Poets. It’s an astonishing record for a man who didn't even have a degree.
Henry Oliver
It’s Time to Engineer the Sky
Many people recoil at the notion of solar geoengineering, or solar radiation management (SRM), as it's often called. The idea that humans should try to fix the atmosphere they've messed up by messing with it some more seems fraught with peril—an act of Faustian arrogance certain to backfire. But as it becomes clear that humans are unlikely to reduce emissions quickly enough to keep global warming below 1.5 degrees Celsius, some scientists say SRM might be less scary than allowing warming to continue unabated. Proposals for cooling the planet are becoming more concrete even as the debate over them grows increasingly rancorous.
Douglas Fox; Scientific American
Faulty Memory Is a Feature, Not a Bug
In “Funes the Memorious,” Borges anticipated what modern neuroscience has evidenced. We make our way through the world precisely because we forget, generalize, and make abstractions. The act of memory is an act of imagination.
Cody Kommers; Nautilus
Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein can illuminate the debate over generative AI
Frankenstein, thankfully, offers much more than a warning about robots. It is a rich and sober account of human error, a testament to life’s mystery, and a dramatic illustration of the redeeming roles of humility and affection. It encourages us to awaken to and love the small piece of reality we inhabit — “To see,” as William Blake put it, “a World in a Grain of Sand.” As the AI revolutionary tide carries us along into what may be a “transhuman” future, it can continue to show us who we are, have been, and might be in an unfolding reality that always surprises and exceeds human designs.
Jennifer Banks, Big Think
Emily Wilson: Pronunciation Guide for the Odyssey
… ae can be pronounced either “ee” or “ay”. I usually say “ee” (as in “CEEzar”), but I realize I am occasionally inconsistent on this one. Do whichever sounds better to you; both conventions are out there, and it won’t make a difference to the meter.
Emily Wilson
Russell Brand’s sexual apocalypse
What a tremendous shock the weekend’s revelations about Russell Brand’s treatment of women must have been to the bosses of Channel 4, the BBC, and any number of newspaper executives. I mean, who would have thought it? Sure, this was the guy who in 2008 left screeching messages on the answerphone of the elderly actor Andrew Sachs, bragging about sex with his granddaughter…
Jenny McCartney; UnHerd
Reciprocal Otherness - Simone de Beauvoir on freedom and difference
Beauvoir teaches us that otherness is not one unified, rigidly defined and bounded concept. Rather, there are many modes of otherness, and not all of them are nefarious. A Wittgensteinian would say that with her first novel, L’Invitée (1943), Beauvoir begins to establish a grammar of otherness.
Toril Moi; The Point
Watching Girls Die Online
When people talk about Instagram accounts that fetishize anorexia, they tend to focus on the anorexic herself. Look at how thin she is, and look at how she’s encouraging others to be sick, they huff, as though one can reasonably attribute malice or even motivation to someone so ill. But it’s the followers who are more culpable, the people who sign up to watch these young women sicken and die right in front of them. For a lot of people, there is something thrilling in watching a woman waste away, maybe because it seems like the ultimate expression of female self-denial, a feminine helplessness, a sexless kind of self-published pornography.
Hadley Freeman; The Free Press
Simulating History with ChatGPT
When history majors encounter LLMs, then, they are already trained to recognize some of the by-now-familiar pitfalls of services like ChatGPT — such as factual inaccuracies — and to address them via skills like fact-checking, analyzing genre and audience, or reading “around” a topic by searching in related sources. Importantly, too, because so many sources are out of copyright and available in multilingual editions on Wikipedia and Wikisource, language models are abundantly trained on historical primary sources in hundreds of different languages.
Benjamin Breen
We’re so much better than condescension
Condescension is not always easy to spot. The more dipped you are in your silo, the harder it is to tell when your judgments jail your curiosity in a sense of superiority. What could I possibly learn from them, you’ll unconsciously wonder, when I’m obviously the better person?
Mónica Guzmán
'To Work is to Live Without Dying' (1996)
We must understand one another or die. And we will never understand one another if we cannot understand the famous dead, those fragments of the past who sit half buried and gesturing to us on memory's contested shores. But Rilke, as a poet, should have the last word…
Lee Siegel; The Atlantic
Nietzsche: your conscience is no saint (2022)
Nietzsche’s project of honesty and suspicion about ourselves is more radical…It is not just that we should ask ourselves why our conscience proclaims this thing to be morally right and that thing to be morally wrong. His bigger question is: why do you adhere to moral values at all?
Christopher Janaway; The Institute of Art and Ideas
Interview: Jean Twenge, psychologist
“In the over-time data, the biggest generational difference in work attitudes is around work-life balance. Millennials and Gen Z see work as less central to their lives than Boomers did at the same age. They are also less likely to say they are willing to work overtime. Gen Z had actually been turning these trends around until 2021, when they suddenly took a plunge -- we'll have to see if that's a blip or part of a longer-term trend. But it did seem to presage the rise of "quiet quitting" in 2022. Millennials and Gen Z are also less likely to say they want to make friends at work -- possibly because they have so many friends on social media.”
Noah Smith
Confessions of a Viral AI Writer
I can imagine a world in which many of the people employed as authors, people like me, limit their use of AI or decline to use it altogether. I can also imagine a world—and maybe we’re already in it—in which a new generation of readers begins using AI to produce the stories they want. If this type of literature satisfies readers, the question of whether it can match human-produced writing might well be judged irrelevant.
Vauhini Vara; WIRED
What Makes Art Meaningful?
When art creates understanding of ourselves, people draw from it personal meaning and make connections to their lives, identify inspiration and personal transformation, realize a need for intellectual humility, and find emotional stimulation.
Zorana Ivcevic Pringle; The Creativity Post
AWAreness during REsuscitation - II: A multi-center study of consciousness and awareness in cardiac arrest
People undergoing CPR may have consciousness despite the absence of visible external signs of consciousness. In this multisite study of 567 in-hospital cardiac arrest with portable electroencephalography monitoring during active CPR, a spectrum of cognitive activity including awareness and recalled experience of death were identified, together with near-normal/physiological EEG activity (delta, theta, alpha, beta rhythms) suggestive of the emergence of consciousness and resumption of a network-level of cognitive activity.
Sam Parnia, Tara Keshavarz Shirazi, Jignesh Patel, Amira Girgis, Deepak Pradhan, Charles D. Deakin; RESUSCIATION
The Masque of Youth: On the obsession surrounding two of UChicago’s most notorious professors: Agnes Callard and Allen Sanderson
Outside of the overcrowded hall, Callard and Sanderson reside in offices that reflect their pedagogical methods. Callard’s office looks like an eight-year-old’s dream room—that is, if the eight-year-old in question also really liked Socrates. Her rainbow color scheme covers books, rugs, wallpaper, a journal (which Callard quickly flips through), and a letter-bead bracelet on her wrist that spells out “SOCRATES” in capital letters. In contrast, Sanderson’s office is slightly more conventional.
Elena Eisenstadt; The Chicago Maroon
We Just Found a Molecule on Another World...and Only Living Organisms Can Produce It
Researchers just announced—via a new paper that has been accepted for publication in The Astrophysical Journal—that they picked up a very interesting chemical signature in the atmosphere of a far-away exoplanet called K2-18 b using the James Webb Space Telescope. The molecule is called dimethyl sulfide, or DMS. On Earth, it’s only produced by living organisms.
Jackie Appel; Popular Mechanics
Wikipedia: A Model for Better Discourse on Campus
As a further consequence of Wikipedia’s open source model, editors are welcomed from all angles of an issue. This is a helpful reminder of the importance of diversity: When many are represented, individual biases are synthesized to produce something resembling objectivity.
Milo J. Clark and Tyler S. Young; The Harvard Crimson
A Marx for All Seasons
“The Marxist tradition is a large and fractious family. Marx was a restless, kaleidoscopic thinker who was forever revising his views, and whose work contains innumerable gaps, ambiguities, and contradictions. This makes him terribly fun to read. It also, I think, makes him more useful. There are infinite Marxes, a Marx for every occasion.”
Ben Tarnoff interviewed by Max Nelson; The New York Review
What Kant can teach us about work
Tucked away in two inconspicuous paragraphs of his book about beauty, the Critique of Judgment (1790), is Immanuel Kant’s definition of work. In a section called ‘On Art in General’, Kant gives a definition of art (Kunst in German) as a subset of our more general capacity for ‘skill’ or ‘craft’ (note that Kant’s definition should not be limited to the fine arts like poetry or painting, which is schöne Künste in German, which he addresses in the following section of the book). In other words, Kant defines art as a particular kind of skilled labour. Kant’s definition of art as skilled labour will direct us to the intrinsic features of work that we ought to include in our conception of good jobs.
Tyler Re; Aeon
We Can't Compete With AI Girlfriends
But it isn’t just unrealistic beauty standards that worry me. What’s even more sinister is the unrealistic emotional standards set by these apps. Eva AI, for example, not only lets you choose the perfect face and body but customise the perfect personality, offering options like “hot, funny, bold”, “shy, modest, considerate” and “smart, strict, rational”.
Freya India
The Physical Process That Powers a New Type of Generative AI
Generative AI models based on diffusion — the process that, for instance, causes milk poured into a cup of coffee to spread uniformly — first emerged in 2015, and the quality of the images they generate has improved significantly since then. That technology powers popular image-producing software such as DALL·E 2 and Midjourney. Now, [Max Tegmark] and his colleagues are learning whether other physics-inspired generative models might work as well as diffusion-based models, or even better.
Steve Nadis; Quanta
What Is Mom Rage, Actually?
The point was to unleash the primal scream of a mother who had regressed—spectacularly, obscenely—into a tantrumming child, not unlike the three-year-old who had spurred her rage in the first place.
Merve Emre; The New Yorker
How Borges and Heisenberg converged on the notion that language both enables and interferes with our grasp of reality
The man who perceives and remembers flawlessly the perception of everything around him is saturated in the immediacy of his memories. The very intensity with which he experiences the world interferes with that experience. For, if it takes an entire day to reconstruct the memory of a day, what has happened to that new day? And is it surprising that a man who experiences the world in such a way feels the need to wall himself off in a dark room to avoid being consumed by the converging floodwaters of memory and sense perception?
William Egginton; Aeon
Coco Chanel was a fashion icon - but she was also a Nazi agent
Exhibition curator [at the Victoria and Albert Museum in London] Oriole Cullen told the Guardian that the new documents made the picture of the darker side of the celebrated designer more "complicated" although it didn't "exonerate" her, adding: "All that we can say is that she was involved with both sides."
Nicole Lampert; The Jewish Chronicle
A New Cosmist Moment
Today, standing on the precipice of a prophesied revolution in materials science, artificial intelligence, and biotechnology, we too are living in a Cosmist moment. Such technologies often come along with apparently visionary ideologies attached. But their utopian promises either fizzle out or get appropriated by the more powerful and established ideological structures they exist within.
Alexander Gelland; Palladium
Sofia Coppola’s Favorite Movies
Legendary Italian filmmaker Michelangelo Antonioni delivers an unconventional portrait of a rocky marriage in the mesmeric “La Notte.” Told over the course a single night in a couple’s lives, the tragic meditation considers the duality of betrayal and indifference through stars Marcello Mastroianni and Jeanne Moreau. Coppola selected the film as one of the best ever made in her 2022 Sight & Sound poll.
Alison Foreman, Wilson Chapman; IndieWire
Are we using psychedelic plants, or are they using us?
Magic mushrooms, peyote and the other psychedelic plants and fungi must have been thrilled when Michael Pollan came their way. The Pollinator! Nothing better than a best-selling writer to spread their spores. The plants want us to sing their praises…
Jules Evans
Democrat or revolutionary? - Salvador Allende reconsidered, fifty years after the military coup
Allende was a complex man. He had a long track record as a democrat and had fought (and graciously lost) three previous presidential elections. He had been an exemplary president of the Senate. But he was also an admirer of Fidel Castro’s dictatorship.
David Gallagher; Times Literary Supplement
Wolf vs Coyote: Was that a huge coyote you saw—or could it have been a wolf?
Both gray wolves and eastern coyotes have upright ears that are typically lighter on the inside and tinged with a darker color. But coyotes’ ears are more pointed and longer relative to their head size, giving them, with their narrower and often reddish snout, more of a fox-like appearance.
Paul Richards; Field & Stream
Rolling Stone co-founder Jann Wenner removed from Rock Hall leadership after controversial comments
Asked why he didn’t interview women or Black musicians, Wenner responded: “It’s not that they’re inarticulate, although, go have a deep conversation with Grace Slick or Janis Joplin. Please, be my guest. You know, Joni (Mitchell) was not a philosopher of rock ’n’ roll. She didn’t, in my mind, meet that test,” he told the Times.
Mark Kennedy; Associated Press
Misophonia: what’s behind the phenomenon that makes certain sounds unbearable?
An obvious example would be a strong reaction to the jingling of a dog collar after being frightened by an aggressive canine. But not all trigger sounds have a simple origin…
Nicola Davis; The Guardian
US Investigators Move to Seize Three Egon Schiele Works from Museums on Claims From Jewish Heirs of Stolen Property
New York prosecutors are arguing the artworks by Schiele from these institutions belong to the three living heirs of Fritz Grünbaum, who was forced to liquidate his assets during his internment at the Dachau concentration camp in Germany.
Karen K. Ho; ARTnews
Antarctic sea-ice at 'mind-blowing' low alarms experts
As more sea-ice disappears, it exposes dark areas of ocean, which absorb sunlight instead of reflecting it, meaning that the heat energy is added into the water, which in turn melts more ice. Scientists call this the ice-albedo effect.
Georgina Rannard, Becky Dale and Erwan Rivault; BBC News
Life Spirit Distillation (2019)
"Personal growth" frames lead to life trajectories that are a combination of two things: half-assed actualization of aspirational selves chosen by less intense versions of yourself based on poor knowledge of your potentialities, and the scars of rejected more intense lives.
Venkatesh Rao; Ribbonfarm
How a Banned Book Helped Me Find My Identity
With books being banned across the country, I worry about the missed opportunities for LGBTQ students, students of color, and other marginalized young people who won’t see themselves in the classroom like I did.
Sarah Chavera Edwards; Teen Vogue
Why Derek Jarman's life was even more influential than his films (2019)
We were more innocent then, for all our daring. The patina of late Seventies/early Eighties London, tarry with cigarettes and the scent of amyl nitrate, was incarnate in Jarman's name, a landscape in itself. From the midnight Thames running below his Bankside studio to Soho's back alleys and eventually Dungeness's bleak strand, Jarman's eclecticism and found narratives predated psychogeography; but he might have invented it.
Philip Hoare; The Independent
