Anna Gát: What to Read this Weekend #6
Liberal depression, talking about rape, America's wars, what we don't know about time and personal agency - plus Brando, Proust, microchips, Tyler Cowen's new dog, and other animals...
‘Women Talking’ - The unspeakable indeed
As a feminist and a progressive, she felt like she was supposed to like it but she’d actually had a lot of problems with it; when she’d tried to discuss it with her friends who’d also seen it, they didn’t want to hear her problems with it.
- Mary Gaitskill rages against sloppy representations of human horror (via Sarah Hepola)
Should you hothouse your children or will it make them unhappy?
Bertrand Russell, another homeschool genius who got depression later, says more than once that he had a happy childhood, despite being hit and yelled at. Virginia Woolf had an ambivalent relationship with her father, not a hateful one.
- Henry Oliver is reinventing the genre of biography for us
Waiting for Brando - The epic saga of a disastrous 1961 film production of the Iliad
After our initial meeting, at which I gave him [Mario] Puzo’s script, Milestone and I carried on a month-long correspondence about Homer.
- Reads like something out of Moravia’s Contempt, but it’s real-life (Lapham’s Quarterly)
America Doesn’t Wage War. Government Institutions Do.
I like to keep a tally of incidents involving murderous, amoral, U.S.-trained contractors, operating in places far from where we first used their services.
- Phil Klay on the conscience and grey-zones of American warfare, always poignantly (Politico)
On bell hooks
The only fight I’ve ever got into on Twitter (foolish, I know) came after a colleague proposed that nothing on a reading list which included texts by hooks, Audre Lorde, Barbara Smith and the Combahee River Collective counted as political theory.
- Sophie Smith (via Amia Srinivasan; London Review of Books)
How to Understand the Well-Being Gap between Liberals and Conservatives
Liberals are much more likely to find meaning in their lives through political causes or activism. They tend to follow politics much more closely and participate more in political action. However, following politics closely, and regular engagement on politics, has been shown to adversely affect people’s mental and physiological well-being.
- Musa al-Gharbi’s summary of a sprawling problem (American Affairs)
I Saw the Face of God in a Semiconductor Factory
Like money, silicon chips are both densely material and the engine of nearly all modern abstraction, from laws to concepts to cognition itself. And the power relations and global economy of semiconductor chips can turn as mind-boggling as cryptocurrency markets.
- I am personally a fan of Virginia Heffernan’s prophetic preoccupations with the microchip industry (WIRED)
The new politics of time - How should we spend our hours in the age of burnout?
A recursive, impressionistic discussion of clocks, capitalism and the climate crisis, her book is composed of anecdotes, cut-and-pasted histories and cultural criticism.
- Hettie O’Brien hates Jenny Odell’s thoughtful new book in The New Statesman
The Art of Gig
Meaning-making begins when you take your first courageous decision in your life and then realize just how much agency you have.
- Venkatesh Rao to Jim O’Shaughnessy, taking the Ribbonfarm mindset mainstream
Canine Coaseanism
I would like to signal to the canine that, when I get up from the sofa, he does not need to follow me because there is no chance I will offer him a food treat. It would be better if he would just stay sleeping. And yet this equilibrium is impossible to achieve.
- Tyler Cowen gets a dog (not written by ChatGPT … I think)
The Darkness
America’s simultaneous relative economic decline and absolute moral decline created a vacuum at the top of the world. The world is not a governed place; what order exists is provided only by hegemonic powers.
- Noah Smith at his best
Everyday Philosophy: The ethics of octopus farming
It may prove impossible to raise these wonderful animals without cruelty. If that’s so, we shouldn’t eat their farmed flesh: that would be morally wrong no matter how good it tastes.
- Nigel Warburton makes me stop eating grilled octopus (via Skye Cleary, The New European)
Some notes on talking animals
The reason Alex is notable though – the reason he got an obituary in the Economist – is that he is the only animal who is known to have asked an existential question, when he looked at himself in the mirror and asked, “What colour?”
- Jonn Elledge is an original and you should read him
Conjuring the Music of Proust's Salons
Various models for Vinteuil have been proposed, but the strongest candidate is Gabriel Fauré, to whom Proust once sent an extravagant fan letter: “I know your work well enough to write a three-hundred-page book about it.”
- There’s never not Proust in The New Yorker