Anna Gát: What to Read this Weekend #9
Olga Tokarczuk, Thomas Mann, Philip Roth, abortion, AGI, American IQ, socialist John Stuart Mill — and poetry, queerness, Easter, love, anti-stoicism, Substack, and more...
Hi everyone,
I’m currently knee-deep in packing up my apartment in Brussels (boxes everywhere, books on the floor) as I’m moving my European base to Lisbon then heading off to Boston/Cambridge. Hence my sending this a bit later in the day… Good to see Thomas Mann pop up multiple times below: I’ve just been meditating on how Brussels was my Magic Mountain!
Enjoy these must-read pieces, and let me know what you think:
Why Women Rebel against Pro-Life
Half of humanity bears the physical burdens and risks of continuing the species, and if we’re going to defer to the choices of women on any issue, it should be this one.
By my fellow EV grantee Richard Hanania; every woman I’m in any group chat with anywhere in the world is discussing this piece this week, so many quotables!
Desire in the Cave - We seem to be both wanting and reflection.
If there’s a thread to the professor’s dilemma—the conundrum shared by Mendling, Callard, and Aschenbach—it seems to be an unwillingness to look directly in the face of the possibility that love and thinking could be reconciled without disaster, joined to an insistence that the world-historical severance of wanting and reflection are final, without appeal.
Mary Townsend; Hedgehog Review
What if A.I. Sentience Is a Question of Degree? - A conversation with Nick Bostrom
I’ve been working on this issue of the ethics of digital minds and trying to imagine a world at some point in the future in which there are both digital minds and human minds of all different kinds and levels of sophistication. I’ve been asking: How do they coexist in a harmonious way? It’s quite challenging because there are so many basic assumptions about the human condition that would need to be rethought.
Lauren Jackson, NY Times; HT Agnes Callard
The Mother of the Mother of the Virgin Mary
Peeperkorn dominates Emerentia in The Magic Mountain; by contrast, Saint Emerentia tends to tower over all the other figures in the icons and sculptures that feature her, whether by virtue of standing on an elevation ... or by virtue of her preternaturally great physical size.
Marta Figlerowicz; The Paris Review
The new social - Will this be the return of the meet-cute?
As social apps move offline, physical space will become a priority. MeetUp, for instance, is partnering with Common, a co-living platform for short-term renters. Will these platforms help facilitate community, or further silo users into socialized filter bubbles according to their income and interests (which are driven by income)?
The great Terry Nguyen; Dirt
The Nuclear Non-proliferation Treaty and existential AGI risk
One approach to AI risk is to treat it like nuclear weapons and also their delivery systems. Let the United States get a lead, and then hope the U.S. can (in conjunction with others) enforce “OK enough” norms on the rest of the world.
Another approach to AI risk is to try to enforce a collusive agreement amongst all nations not to proceed with AI development, at least along certain dimensions, or perhaps altogether.
Tyler Cowen; Marginal Revolution
My Wild Weekend at the Philip Roth Festival
In the Q&A portion, an audience member asks a good question: why did Roth hate Bob Dylan? The moderator says, half-joking, “Because Dylan won the Nobel.”
Erin Somers; Esquire
3 reasons not to be a Stoic (but try Nietzsche instead)
This leads us to the passivity problem.
Thank you, Neil Durrant; The Conversation
Twitter’s King Lear - some Notes on hideous rashness
In undermining Substack within its platform, Twitter is also undermining one of its own most popular channels, its ability to aggregate content, and the heart of its very own business model: influential users.
A. Natasha Joukovsky on the Substack debacle — I have just invested in Substack’s crowdfunding round 😈 Always happy to give people FU money…
Truth is real - For a century, the idea of truth has been deflated, becoming terrain from which philosophers fled. They must return – urgently
Questions about what is true are, putting it mildly, no less urgent now than they were in 1900. Truth, that is, has proven as hard to eradicate as it is to elucidate. We keep finding we need the notion, and certainly it does have practical value, even among all the contestation.
Crispin Sartwell; Aeon
Renunciation and Christian Happiness - On the grace of wholeheartedness
I admit to being a bit soft on the Fall of humanity. As I see it, without this moment, without this divide in ourselves, we would not be who and what we are. Without competition and shame, we are too simple to be interesting. Yet the fact remains that shame and doubleness are engines of human evil; they are wounds that must be healed if we are to be happy and good.
Oh my, Zena Hitz is always exceptional, there is no one like her; Commonweal
Liberal Commitments - An interview with Michael Walzer on The Struggle for a Decent Politics.
[T]here is a liberal tradition, a John Stuart Mill-style liberalism, and I do think of myself as standing in that tradition. And it’s also interesting to me that Mill, in some of his writings, tried to produce a liberal socialism.
Timothy Shenk; Dissent
From Queer to Gay to Queer
I am a gay man. Born in 1983 when a mysterious disease was beginning to decimate an earlier generation of gay men against a backdrop of societal indifference, I now live in a country where gay people can marry, serve openly in the military, and are legally protected from discrimination.
James Kirchick; Liberties
American IQ Scores Have Rapidly Dropped, Proving the 'Reverse Flynn Effect'
An increase in focus on STEM education may have allowed other areas, like abstract reasoning, to fall by the wayside.
Tim Newcomb; Popular Mechanics; HT Noah Smith
Choose Good Quests
[N]ot all quests are created equal. In the most simple terms possible: a good quest makes the future better than our world today, while a bad quest doesn't improve the world much at all, or even makes it worse.
Trae Stephens and Markie Wagner; Pirate Wires
I’m reading Sasha Sagan’s book, For Small Creatures Such as We
Beautiful memoir and exploration of secular ritual and natural sacredness by Carl Sagan and Ann Druyan’s poetic daughter. I’m prepping for an Interintellect event we will be doing together. Sasha’s new podcast Strange Customs is also great.
Nabeel Qureshi quotes Wallace Stevens and makes my day
I am always utterly amazed that these lines of poetry were written by an insurance company executive in Hartford, Connecticut:
“The greatest poverty is not to live
In a physical world, to feel that one's desire
Is too difficult to tell from despair. Perhaps,
After death, the non-physical people, in paradise,
Itself non-physical, may, by chance, observe
The green corn gleaming and experience
The minor of what we feel. The adventurer
In humanity has not conceived of a race
Completely physical in a physical world.
The green corn gleams and the metaphysicals
Lie sprawling in majors of the August heat,
The rotund emotions, paradise unknown.
This is the thesis scrivened in delight,
The reverberating psalm, the right chorale…”
Happy to be on this list!
Great list of reads! Here's hoping one comes every week.