Anna Gát: What to Read this Weekend #7
Peace talks, mating, AI overlords, unsupportive boyfriends, depressed teenagers, Blurred Lines, Moore's law - Katie Farris on cancer, Martin Amis's arrogances, Henri Bergson's massive forehead & more
I’m in Washington DC for a few days so I’ll start this weekend’s reading list with an excerpt from one of the best books I’ve read in the past couple of years. Warning: it’s Washington-related…
The End of the American Century - What the life of Richard Holbrooke tells us about the decay of Pax Americana
The obvious place for a peace conference was Paris or Geneva. Holbrooke didn’t want either. Those sparkling cities had seduced diplomats who spent years talking and talking about Vietnam, eating well and sightseeing, while the killing continued on the other side of the world. Holbrooke wanted the United States to host the conference, and on a military base, where there would be maximum American control, no distractions, and no temptation to linger. He wanted the success to be American… He selected Wright-Patterson Air Force Base, outside Dayton, Ohio… The housing blocks had long, narrow corridors and cramped rooms, with vinyl trim and shabby furniture, like a $49-a-night motel.
- Excerpt from Our Man; George Packer — I devoured this book enjoying the details, depth, and scope (half of the 20th century plus a bit of the 21st!) and how it prompted me to think through my personal memories of the decade-long Yugoslav Wars, next door to which I grew up but about which I’d never really dared to reminisce until then (The Atlantic)
Is True Love Possible? Readers Are Turning to This 1990s Novel for Answers.
Causing active ongoing pleasure in your mate is something people tend to restrict to the sexual realm or getting attractive food on the table on time … but keeping permanent intimate comedy going is more important than any other one thing.
- Marie Solis on the renaissance of Norman Rush’s Mating — I’m reading it now, didn’t expect so much James Joyce in there but otherwise enjoying it, I am yet to find out why everybody’s so into this book (The New York Times)
When I Got Cancer, My Dreams Told Me What My Doctors Could Not
That night I had a dream of soaring above a garden full of light. I woke laughing with delight, but then my laughter turned ironic — who has ecstasy dreams about chemo? Still, I took what felt to me to be the dream’s advice. I started chemotherapy.
- The mighty Katie Farris yet again proves that we need poets to descend into the indescribable and describe it for us (The New York Times)
Good-Enough Friends - On Jason and Mark, and a vanishing teenage experience.
Perhaps the problem is a society that doesn’t offer enough “third spaces,” where kids can be out of the house but not hassled by authorities or salespeople. Or that every kid’s calendar is packed with SAT tutoring or crew practice.
- Dan Kois on teens, screens, and mental health — I keep wondering if social media indeed ruins kids’ lives or if it just gives them a peak behind Maya’s veil too soon—in a way that normally only happens through early grief or exposure to show business—when kids are absolutely not yet ready to face the dread, cruelty, competition, and loneliness that are parts of adult life; I wonder if in a way social media has turned all kids into show biz kids (Slate)
My boyfriend, a writer, broke up with me because I’m a writer
I promised never to publish anything that he was uncomfortable with… I know how it sounds to suggest my boyfriend dumped me because he’s scared I’ll become like Nora Ephron.
- Isabel Kaplan on something I have a lot of personal stories about — it’s never not complicated to outgrow one’s male partner, for all sorts of reasons and none of them good (The Guardian)
Sam Altman: OpenAI CEO on GPT-4, ChatGPT, and the Future of AI
(Video) (Transcript)
The thing that's really amazing about the system is that it, for some definition of reasoning, and we could of course quibble about it and there's plenty for which definitions this wouldn't be accurate. But for some definition it can do some kind of reasoning. And, you know, maybe like the scholars and the experts and like the armchair quarterbacks on Twitter would say, no, it can't. You're misusing the word, you know, whatever, whatever. But I think most people who have used the system would say, okay, it's doing something in this direction. And I think that's remarkable. And the thing that's most exciting and somehow out of ingesting human knowledge, it's coming up with this reasoning capability. However, we're gonna talk about that. Now, in some senses, I think that will be additive to human wisdom.
- Sam Altman on Lex Fridman’s podcast — the minds creating the first superhuman minds are deeply human
“Blurred Lines,” Harbinger of Doom - How Robin Thicke, Pharrell, and T.I.’s cursed megahit predicted everything bad about the past decade in pop culture
Now, 10 years since its March 2013 release, “Blurred Lines” is a poisonous time capsule. In many ways, all of them unfortunate, it could be considered the song of the 2010s. Pick any disheartening pop-cultural trend of the past decade and chances are it applies to “Blurred Lines”…
- Jayson Greene takes stock — I agree that “Blurred Lines” was a turning point for my generation, and hopefully beyond, as in: it showed that there are no “blurred” lines, those are just lines (Pitchfork)
Monsieur Bergson, what a big forehead you have!
Since philosophers’ main activity is to think, and that in the West we tend to associate thinking, as well as consciousness in general, with the brain, it is perhaps not surprising that a philosopher’s skull would draw attention. After all, famous philosophers have been known to flex their foreheads…
- Emily Herring reminds me of what Sebald wrote about the EYES
Gordon Moore, Intel Co-Founder, Dies at 94
In addition to Moore’s seminal role in founding two of the world’s pioneering technology companies, he famously forecast in 1965 that the number of transistors on an integrated circuit would double every year – a prediction that came to be known as Moore’s Law.
- Obituary — if you could choose, would you like a law, a doctrine, a conjecture, or a plan named after you? (Intel)
Nan Goldin’s Happy Ending
You get the sense that she observes with a level of depth other people do not and invites viewers to share her gaze, if only for the duration of a slideshow. “I’m careful not to betray people,” Goldin tells me.
- Kate Dwyer on Nan Goldin — as a writer I have betrayed plenty of people, so this line surprised and hit me, I can do better (New York Magazine)
The Curator of Willem Dafoe’s Movie ‘Inside’ Takes Art on Film to a New Level
A version of Alvaro Urbano’s 2020 sculpture Noches en los Jardines de España embodied the film’s concept of time and served as a contradiction to the idea of organic decay. The sculpture — five realistic navel oranges made out of concrete with three painted to appear severely moldy — also served as a tool Nemo could try to use to escape.
- Ceci n'est pas un orange … Karen K. Ho is always great (ARTnews)
Teenage kicks - In defence of Martin Amis’s The Rachel Papers, fifty years after its publication
Charles is an arrogant, bumptious, wise-cracking smartarse. But he’s also uncertain and fragile and filled with doubt and self-loathing.
- Claire Lowdon’s nuanced revisiting of Amis makes me want to re-read him but then luckily that feeling goes away (Times Literary Supplement)
Great links, thanks Anna.
There’s a book called “This Town” which depicts Holbrooke just a few years before he died. He wanted to be Secretary of State so badly and never quite got there. But he still had his impact in Afghanistan and elsewhere. I see him as an interesting and slightly sad third-tier player in American politics who did a lot, but never quite lived up to his ambitions. Imagine how many Richard Holbrookes there are across US history?