Anna Gát: What to Read This Weekend #38
Israel, Kenya, poetry, charity, murder, marriage, anger, time, the happiness of animals, translation, young moms, entrepreneurship, Michelangelo, CS Lewis, Ingmar Bergman, Britney Spears, and more!
Hey friends,
Sorry for the uncharacteristic delay: I’ve been travelling around the East Coast and now I’m sitting here catching up on emails and waiting to go to the airport, in Washington DC.
After our Autumn Fiesta in NYC, I went to Connecticut, then back to NYC, then came here and attended Luke Burgis’s new Novitate Conference the afterparty of which Interintellect co-organised. In the meantime, we’ve listed some cool new events, for example a salon with Tyler Cowen, on his new AI-powered book!
This was an intellectually very enriching trip during which I learned about many viewpoints different from mine. Whenever I travel, I try to listen.
And, of course, read. Below is my selection for you….. Enjoy! x Anna
Whitman at war: The poet’s Civil War diaries and his reflections on nature
Whitman documents the war battles and the hospital dramas with riveting immediacy, which allows his observations about human savagery and suffering to take centre stage. “The real war will never get in the books”, he worried. So he wrote a forensic, page-turning account of the conflict’s human toll in a vivid style polished by his experience as a reporter in New York City. More than anything, the description of the war years in Specimen Days is a profound story of human caring.
Diane Mehta; Times Literary Supplement
Britney Spears’s American horror story
In executives’ offices, she was surrounded by men in suits looking at her up and down, on stage, she began to notice growing numbers of older men in the audience, all “leering at me like I was some kind of Lolita fantasy”. At first, the backlash was mild – she was too provocatively dressed, she was “inauthentic”. “I was never quite sure what all these critics thought I was supposed to be doing – a Bob Dylan impression?” she writes. “I was a teenage girl from the South. I signed my name with a heart. I liked looking cute. Why did everyone treat me, even when I was a teenager, like I was dangerous?” Already, the constant exposure was hard to take. “Trying to find ways to protect my heart from criticism and to keep the focus on what was important, I started reading religious books,” Spears writes. “I also started taking Prozac.”
The GREAT Anna Leszkiewicz; New Statesman
The religious despair of Sam Bankman-Fried
This event, when half of Bankman-Fried’s firm walked out, was referred to as “The Schism”—a reference to church history. His diary entries have the ascetic, admonishing tone of a deeply religious person.
Henry Oliver
Conway's Game of Life
Conway's Game of Life, often simply called the "Game of Life," is a cellular automaton devised by the British mathematician John Conway in 1970. It's a zero-player game, which means its evolution is determined by its initial state, with no subsequent input from human players. It's played on a grid of square cells that can be in one of two states: alive or dead (or populated and unpopulated). Every cell interacts with its eight neighbors (horizontally, vertically, or diagonally adjacent). At each step in time, the following transitions occur…
Jim O’Shaughnessy
The Problem of Marital Loneliness (2021)
If Jonathan and Mira’s relationship seems better than Johan and Marianne’s, it must also be acknowledged that Levi sets his couple an easier problem. Bergman suggested that marriage was meant to address a metaphysical need: our connection to reality. Levi, by contrast, sees marriage as a way of navigating one’s place in the economic and social order.
Agnes Callard; The New Yorker
The Extremist's Gambit Helps Explain Why Hamas Attacked Now
Heinous violence meant to force everyone to choose sides has long been the recourse of a radical minority that fears time is not on its side.
The entire article is quotable—always so good to read Tanner Greer; Mosaic
Disengage: Modern life subjects us to all-consuming demands. That’s why we should reflect on what it means to step away from it all
In The Scent of Time: A Philosophical Essay on the Art of Lingering (2009), Byung-Chul Han suggests that our experience of intervals is being ‘destroyed in order to produce total proximity and simultaneity’.
David J Siegel; Aeon
Simone Weil by Susan Sontag (1963)
Perhaps there are certain ages which do not need truth as much as they need a deepening of the sense of reality, a widening of the imagination. I, for one, do not doubt that the sane view of the world is the true one. But is that what is always wanted, truth?
Susan Sontag; New York Review
Harriet Karimi Muriithi on Life in Kenya
COWEN: Do you think being a British colony was good for Kenya or bad for Kenya?
MURIITHI: Not so good. It is an in-between because we all had something to learn. The Christianity mode came along that time. At least we got to learn something from them.
COWEN: They treated people here very badly, yes?
MURIITHI: Yes, they did.
Tyler Cowen
Don’t shy away from reality
In The Birth of Tragedy, Friedrich Nietzsche suggested that the truth about the nature of reality if confronted directly would make life unbearable. Don’t stare into the abyss, as that will destroy you. It’s only by maintaining some illusions that life remains liveable at all. If he is right, the question is, which ones? The last few weeks have made shying away particularly alluring.
Nigel Warburton; The New European
What We Talk About When We Talk About Anne Frank (2011)
“How do we play this non-game?” Mark says. “What do we do?”
“It’s the Righteous Gentile game,” Shoshana says.
“It’s Who Will Hide Me?” I say.
“In the event of a second Holocaust,” Deb says, giving in. “It’s a serious exploration, a thought experiment that we engage in.”
“That you play,” Shoshana says.
“That, in the event of an American Holocaust, we sometimes talk about which of our Christian friends would hide us.”
Nathan Englander; The New Yorker
Suicide Rates Are up for Gen Z Across the Anglosphere, Especially for Girls
The sudden switch from play-based childhood to phone-based childhood is—we believe—the leading candidate for being the major cause of the international collapse of adolescent mental health.
Zach Rausch; After Babel
Are Dogs Happier Than Cats?
"All our available options for making welfare comparisons are imperfect, and we need to make explicit context-specific decisions about which will be best for the task at hand while acknowledging their potential limitations."
Walter Veit Ph.D.; Psychology Today
The egregore passes you by: Is social media making us into a group mind?
For if there were a sort of “complexity drain” going on in people’s personalities, it would probably look a lot like people parroting simplistic political ideologies, becoming more interchangeable in their opinions, becoming more archetypal and self-similar. Obviously this is impossible to quantify—one must use anecdotes, vibes, and our rose-tinted memories of times gone by. Here’s just one such observation: I’ve heard friends on dating apps complain that there are only a few “types” left that they run into again and again, almost as if there is now just a handful of beings, although ones wearing many different faces, who come to sit across from them at coffee shops and bars.
Maybe the reason people seem to be losing their heads on social media is that they are actually losing their heads?
Erik Hoel
The Book No One Read: Why Stanislaw Lem’s futurism deserves attention (2014)
Even now, if Lem is known at all to the vast majority of the English-speaking world, it is chiefly for his authorship of Solaris, a popular 1961 science-fiction novel that spawned two critically acclaimed film adaptations, one by Andrei Tarkovsky and another by Steven Soderbergh. Yet to say the prolific author only wrote science fiction would be foolishly dismissive. That so much of his output can be classified as such is because so many of his intellectual wanderings took him to the outer frontiers of knowledge.
Lee Billings; Nautilus
The Benefits of Being a Young Mom
But every time I peek at the chats and forums, I wonder: Why are moms so anxious? Whatever happened to the time-honored tradition of winging it?
Liz Wolfe; The Free Press
My Left Kidney
Still, my girlfriend ending up begging me not to donate, and I caved. But we broke up in 2019. The next few years were bumpy, but by 2022 my life was in a more stable place and I started thinking about kidneys again. By then I was married. I discussed the risks with my wife and she decided to let me go ahead. So in early November 2022, for the second time, I sent a form to the University of California San Francisco Medical Center saying I wanted to donate a kidney.
Scott Alexander
The Inner Ring (1944)
To a young person, just entering on adult life, the world seems full of “insides,” full of delightful intimacies and confidentialities, and he desires to enter them. But if he follows that desire he will reach no “inside” that is worth reaching. The true road lies in quite another direction.
CS Lewis
Scenes from a lifetime (2005)
Although you can see the film as it stands, it will have more resonance if you remember Bergman's "Scenes from a Marriage" (1973). That film starred Liv Ullmann and Erland Josephson as Marianne and Johan, a couple married 20 years earlier and divorced 10 years earlier, and who meet again in the middle of the night in a cabin in the middle of the woods. Their marriage has failed, their relationship has faded, and yet on this night it is more real than anything else. I wrote in 1973: "They are in middle age now, but in the night still fond and frightened lovers holding on for reassurance."
Roger Ebert
Spatial vs Temporal Externalities
Externalities are usually framed as market failures which can be corrected by government intervention. But in the case of temporal externalities, markets have better incentives than governments do.
Max Tabarrok
How Matt Clifford became Britain’s most powerful tech adviser
A McKinsey consultant with degrees from Cambridge (medieval history) and MIT (computational statistics) Clifford yearned for a change, and a colleague handed him a report McKinsey had just published on the Roundabout recommending investment in nurturing tech founders. Clifford jumped at the opportunity. He had grown up in Bradford — a northern English city scarred by deindustrialization — and taught himself to code because, he said, he “didn't want to work in [fast food chain] Gregg's.”
Gian Volpicelli; POLITICO Europe
Some Notes on Translation and on Madame Bovary (2017)
How many ways, for instance, has even a single phrase (“bouffées d’affadissement”) from Madame Bovary been translated:
gusts of revulsion
a kind of rancid staleness
stale gusts of dreariness
waves of nausea
fumes of nausea
flavorless, sickening gusts
stagnant dreariness
whiffs of sickliness
waves of nauseous disgust
Lydia Davis; The Paris Review
My 12 Favorite Problems: A dozen things that drive my writing, research, thinking & actions
How do I avoid becoming a narrow specialist or a superficial generalist? Is there a third way? If so, how do I get there?
Ted Gioia
Whole Earth Index
Here lies a nearly-complete archive of Whole Earth publications, a series of journals and magazines descended from the Whole Earth Catalog, published by Stewart Brand and the POINT Foundation between 1970 and 2002. They are made available here for scholarship, education, and research purposes.
Whole Earth Index
Transatlantic airplanes are flying at the ‘speed of sound’ right now. Here’s why
“This increase in the temperature gradient is amplifying the speed of the jet stream, which is driven by temperature differences.”
Julia Buckley; CNN
I am the luckiest man in the world
f you are reading this now, then you too have time! Use it wisely, use it unwisely too! But USE it. Be IN it. Be aware that you are part of ALL of it and that the separateness you sometimes feel is an illusion. Just as your heart beats without being told, you are as integral to the Sun that fires and the planets that circle it as your heart is a part of you.
Rob Schneider
Where is the line between life and art? (2021)
n films like Goodbye First Love (2011) and Things to Come (2016), Hansen-Løve showcased her talent for inviting us into the psyche of her characters without ever making them too explicit or simple. She loves to lightly paint traces of the “invisible things,” inviting us to lean in and notice them. Her intimately personal art frequently functions as refractions of her own life. Now, in Bergman Island, she turns that eye on the mysterious, intuitive, and hard-to-describe work of making art.
Alissa Wilkinson; Vox
The Israel-Hamas War Will Reshape Western Politics
The emergence of an “Arab street” inside the West… The recent protests in European capitals, especially, are less an extension of a radicalized progressivism than a straightforward expression of ethnic and religious solidarity with the Palestinians on the part of Middle Eastern immigrants and their descendants. And the tacit alliance between this diaspora and a secular, feminist, gay-affirming Western progressivism — “Islamo-gauchisme” in the French phrase — raises big questions for both progressives and conservative Muslims about who is using whom and how the Western left and Western Islam might ultimately co-evolve.
Ross Douthat; The New York Times
The Tyranny of the Marginal User
Of course, “Marl” isn’t always a person. Marl can also be a state of mind. We’ve all been Marl at one time or another - half consciously scrolling in bed, in line at the airport with the announcements blaring, reflexively opening our phones to distract ourselves from a painful memory. We don’t usually think about Marl, or identify with him. But the structure of the digital economy means most of our digital lives are designed to take advantage of this state. A substantial fraction of the world’s most brilliant, competent, and empathetic people, armed with near-unlimited capital and increasingly god-like computers, spend their lives serving Marl.
Ivan Vendrov
Russia Sentences Artist and Pussy Riot Member Pyotr Verzilov to Over 8 Years in Prison in Absentia
Verzilov, an unofficial member of the Russian protest and performance art group Pussy Riot, is currently living outside of Russia. He left the country in 2020 after police searched his home and the homes of relatives after Verzilov was charged with not informing Russian authorities about his Canadian citizenship.
Karen K. Ho; ARTnews
The Six Proposals Of Charlotte Brontë (2021)
‘Mr Taylor – the little man – has again shewn his parts. Of him I have not yet come to a clear decision: abilities he has for he rules the firm – he keeps 40 young men under strict control by his iron will.’
annebronte.org
Child marriage is still legal in most of the U.S. Here’s why.
“There is some perceived threat to religious freedom,” said Ann Warner, interim CEO and president of the International Center for Research on Women, said of efforts to bar minors from legally marrying. She pushed back against that perception, however. “We are talking about human rights and human rights are not antithetical to religious freedom,” she argued.
Alejandra O’Connell-Domenech; The Hill
Don’t Shut Down Your Anger. Channel It.
In the workplace, you can channel angry energy to achieve performance-related goals. For example, someone who didn’t receive the annual review or promotion they wanted could use that anger to plan out steps to do better next year…
Simone Stolzoff; The New York Times
Medieval Murder Maps
Discover the murders, sudden deaths, sanctuary churches, and prisons of three thriving medieval cities. Click on a pin to read the story based on the original record written down in the rolls of the coroner…
Dr Stephanie Brown; Prof Manuel Eisner
Michelangelo’s secret sketches under church in Florence open to public
Until now, the chamber, which opens to the public on 15 November, was mostly only accessible to art scholars. Visitors will be limited to four at a time to help preserve the space and its relics.
Angela Giuffrida; The Guardian
If You Want to Build, You Have to Believe: The case for faith
I’m not here to evangelize any particular faith—whether it be Christianity or nuclear fission. But even as someone who's not very religious, I know the value of placing your heart on an uncertain future. There have been many moments since I started working for myself when my choices were called into question—when agents told me there wasn’t a market for my book, when I got my first health insurance bill, when I went days without making any progress toward my goals. But it was returning to my faith in myself and in the book’s potential impact that kept me going.
Simone Stolzoff; Every