Anna Gát: What to Read this Weekend #5
Poets at war in Ukraine, elite philanthropy, Susan Sontag, sexless love, Aronofsky's favours, AGI, Viking invaders, depression, liberalism, Hannah Arendt on forgiveness, and more
“They Are Bombing the City. I Am Editing Poems”: Conversations with Ukrainian Writers
Morning: they are bombing the city. Night: I am editing my poems.” Another day: “Morning: bombardments again. For everything, there is time: bombardments, fear, quiet, loved ones, moments of wonder. Reality fragments. - Los Angeles Review of Books
Who Am I Without My Depression?
I thought that, in my case, to take medication would be to admit defeat against an enemy that any fool should be strong enough to take on alone. - Vogue UK
Do Non-profits Drive Social Change?
The most likely answer to the question is that incentives from media and the for-profit sector of the economy combine to elevate the status of non-profits in a particular way, most of all to elevate the status of elites. - Tyler Cowen, Comment
How Relationships Change Over Time
It looks like women, on average, rate their relationships slightly better than men no matter how long the relationship. - Aella
The republic of letters is, in reality, an aristocracy. And "poet" has always been a titre de noblesse . But in the Romantic era, the poet's nobility ceased to be synonymous with superiority as such and acquired an adversary role: the poet as the avatar of freedom. The Romantics invented the writer as hero… - Susan Sontag, The New York Times
When Mary Wollstonecraft Was Duped by Love
She didn’t fall prey to the popular, specious argument that her destiny was to raise children. The short time she worked as a governess, she wrote how her sense of purpose lay in what she did once the children were asleep. - Nautilus
How Iceland is using GPT-4 to preserve its language
“We want to make sure that artificial intelligence will be used not only to help preserve language, culture and history, but also to underpin economic prosperity,” says Jóhanna Vigdís Guðmundsdótti… - Open AI
An Interview with Darren Aronofsky and Sean Gullette of ‘Pi’
“A film made for $60,000, the only way you get it done is with a tremendous amount of favors.” - IndieWire
Fury out of the North: from pagan slavers to Christian kings
The northern pagans' campaigns were the last eruptions of old Europe's ancient instincts, brutal relics of a prehistoric world out of step with the societies that would go on to birth our contemporary age… - Razib Khan
After Liberalism - What does Alasdair MacIntyre want?
We need a politics that does not neglect the necessity of virtue in human life—both in the soul and in the city, as the ancient and medieval philosophers recognized. - Jennifer Frey, Hedgehog Review
How a Second Cold War could have been averted
In the 1990s, two American presidents were so focused on achieving the eastward extension of Article 5 that they did not sufficiently consider the consequences of how they achieved that goal. - Engelsberg Ideas
Without being forgiven, released from the consequences of what we have done, our capacity to act would, as it were, be confined to one single deed from which we could never recover; we would remain the victims of its consequences forever… - Hannah Arendt, Plough Review