Anna Gát: What to Read This Weekend #40
🎂 Birthday edition - it's my 40th birthday and my digest's "Week 40"! An accident? I don't think so... Read: religious liberals, forgotten science papers, stereotypes, book clubs, activists and more
Hello friends….! I don’t have f— you money (yet) but I have reached f— you age, it seems 💖 Please celebrate with me by reading the amazing pieces below, my collection for this week, and share, comment, let me know what you think! x Anna
Why Activism Leads to So Much Bad Writing
I don’t believe that creative people should avoid political engagement any more than other citizens, nor can they. In an intensely political time like ours, it’s inevitable that artists will turn to activism, and that politics will inform their work. But they should keep a vigilant watch on the border between the two so that neither does too much damage to the other.
George Packer; The Atlantic
How To Build Neighborhoods
If you’re a young person, you may have 100 connections on social media. How many friends or how many relationships—how many people do you play with on your block and in your neighborhood? Very few…
Seth Kaplan speaks with Ben Klutsey; Discourse
Waking up science’s sleeping beauties
How do we rediscover information the scientific body of knowledge already contains but that is not widely known? Is it possible that, if we could understand sleeping beauties in a more systematic way, we might be able to accelerate scientific progress?
Ulkar Aghayeva; Works in Progress
Classical liberals are increasingly religious
The person being religious is now a predictor of that same person having non-crazy political views. Classical liberalism thus, whether you like it or not, has become an essentially religious movement.
Tyler Cowen
How to Think Politically
In philosophy classes, I learned that to make any argument well, I must discover doubt about my side. This doesn’t mean just knowing the weaknesses in my argument—it means an honest humility that I could be wrong...
Multiple authors; Wayfare
An Economic Theology of Liberalism: In defense of adultism
Since the pyramids or the song lines or the caves, we Homo sapiens have used a store of capital, a standard of value, and a medium of exchange, with which we accumulate and calculate.
Deirdre McCloskey; The Hedgehog Review
Thought in action: Four female philosophers who tried to change the world
The cocaine prescribed by a doctor didn’t help, but Bach’s Brandenburg Concertos and sacred music seemingly did. In the throes of agony Weil said she found “a pure and perfect joy in the ineffable beauty of the song and the words".
Skye Cleary; Times Literary Supplement
The Hypnotized Society
I can recognize, now, when I'm entering hypnosis at various points throughout my day. It's that "zoned out" feeling, where my mind is thinking one thing and my body is doing another.
Nadia Asparouhova
Philosophy needs a Renaissance: Transcending disciplines to shape the future
If, as … Wilfrid Sellars … famously stated, ‘the aim of philosophy, abstractly formulated, is to understand how things in the broadest possible sense of the term hang together in the broadest possible sense of the term’, then philosophy and the natural sciences must at the very least be united in their desire to make sense of the world. Accordingly, progress in either domain must inevitably be of interest to the other.
Louise R. Chapman; Institute of Art and Ideas
Against Netflix
We don’t tell our bright young minds that it’s alright to waste away your days drinking or abusing drugs. Sure, some end up doing so regardless, but the cultural tabu keeps those impulses in check. Why do we tell them it’s alright to waste away your days watching Netflix?
Leopold Aschenbrenner; For Our Posterity
Master and Commander at 20: a miraculous masterpiece of action cinema
Master and Commander is an action movie with a brain. Its thrills are never mindless. Weir’s recreation of life in the close confines of a warship in 1805 is meticulous, fascinating and sometimes, rightly, nausea-inducing. Crowe and Bettany’s interpretation of a friendship between two men matches such artistry precisely. … Much of the film’s lasting appeal springs from that portrayal of male closeness.
Martin Pengelly; The Guardian
Loved, yet lonely
There are many other familiar life experiences that provoke feelings of loneliness, even if the individuals undergoing those experiences have loving friends and family: the student who comes home to his family and friends after a transformative first year at college; the adolescent who returns home to her loving but repressed parents after a sexual awakening at summer camp; the first-generation woman of colour in graduate school who feels cared for but also perpetually ‘in-between’ worlds, misunderstood and not fully seen either by her department members or her family and friends back home; the travel nurse who returns home to her partner and friends after an especially meaningful (or perhaps especially psychologically taxing) work assignment; the man who goes through a difficult breakup with a long-term, live-in partner; the woman who is the first in her group of friends to become a parent; the list goes on.
Kaitlyn Creasy; Aeon
The Economics of Attention
Attention is a pivotal resource in the modern economy and plays an increasingly prominent role in economic analysis. We summarize research on attention from both psychology and economics, placing a particular emphasis on its capacity to explain numerous documented violations of classical economic theory. We also propose promising new directions for future research, including attention-based utility, the recent proliferation of attentional externalities introduced by digital technology, the potential for artificial intelligence to compete with human attention, and the significant role that boredom, curiosity, and other motivational states play in determining how people allocate attention.
George Loewenstein and Zachary Wojtowicz
The Biggest Questions: What is death?
Everyone, of course, does eventually have to die and will someday be beyond saving. But a more exact understanding of the dying process could enable doctors to save some previously healthy people who meet an unexpected early end and whose bodies are still relatively intact. Examples could include people who suffer heart attacks, succumb to a deadly loss of blood, or choke or drown. The fact that many of these people die and stay dead simply reflects “a lack of proper resource allocation, medical knowledge, or sufficient advancement to bring them back,…”
Rachel Nuwer; MIT Technology Review
Real Life
Pasolini was an urban aesthete, conflicted Catholic Marxist, peasant mythologizer and inveterate lech. He was born in Bologna, in 1922, to a Fascist army officer and a schoolteacher. His father’s military postings and sometime imprisonment for gambling debts compelled the family to move frequently. He attended the University of Bologna, writing a thesis on the nineteenth-century poet Giovanni Pascoli. It was there he began to speak openly about his homosexuality.
Dustin Illingworth, New Left Review
Barbra Streisand’s Mother of All Memoirs
“My Name Is Barbra” is, to be precise, nine hundred and ninety-two pages long. Streisand will have not only the last word; she will have the most words, and also the most true ones. “I’ve seen how strongly people are moved by the truth when they recognize it in a performance she writes. “There’s no place for lies in art.”
Rachel Syme; The New Yorker
Ivy League Backlash Draws Money, Students to Upstart University in Texas
People “who have been supporting institutions with significant donations for a long time have been shaken up by the events that are happening on campus, whatever their politics are,” Kanelos, who previously led Annapolis-based liberal arts school St. John's College, said in an interview. “So donors are looking for institutions that I think are trying to find solutions to our political conflicts and complexity.”
Francesca Maglione and Amanda Albright; Bloomberg
Everyone hates the critic: In the social media age, there is no room for negativity – or even insightful critique.
Being a “fan” once meant appreciating someone’s art with a critical eye. In 2023, being a “stan” means an all-consuming, unconditional love for the artist and any project they release, regardless of its quality.
Sarah Manavis; New Statesman
Where Does Religion Come From?
[Ayaan Hirsi Ali’s] essay, not surprisingly, attracted a lot of criticism. Some of it came from Christians disappointed in the ideological and instrumental way that Hirsi Ali framed her conversion, the absence of a clear statement that Christian claims are not merely useful or necessary but true. The rest came from atheists baffled that Hirsi Ali had failed to internalize all the supposedly brilliant atheistic rebuttals to her stated reasons for belief… I have no criticism to offer.
Ross Douthat; The New York Times
George Scialabba’s Prejudice for Progress: Can modernity be defended?
We love geniuses, Trilling says, but they are discouraging. “We feel that if we cannot be as they, we can be nothing. Beside them we are so plain, so hopelessly threadbare.” In the decade-and-a-half that I have been reading Scialabba, I have often envied a piquant turn of phrase, marveled at the economy of a synthesis, wished to be so well-read, to possess his daunting breadth of reference, his ease and unsentimental sincerity; and I have, at times, quailed at the plainness (or else, the needless flamboyance) of my own prose by comparison. But never, not once, has reading Scialabba made me feel discouraged.
Sam Adler-Bell; Commonweal
Ursula Le Guin’s Radical Utopias Still Resonate Today (2021)
The Lathe of Heaven illustrates the importance of thinking about books aesthetically as well as judging them ideologically. As the critic Fredric Jameson has pointed out, the novel might be read as expressing liberal anxiety in the face of revolutionary transformation, but, aesthetically, it is concerned with its own process of production.
Nick Hubble; Jacobin
New research reveals why funny romantic partners are more desirable
The six studies collectively indicate that humor plays a significant role in romantic attraction. Humor is perceived as an indicator of creative problem-solving skills, making individuals with a good sense of humor more appealing as potential partners. This effect holds true across different types of relationships, from first dates to long-term commitments, and it is not dependent on the gender of the individuals involved.
Eric W. Dolan; PsyPost
How to Read the Canon
I offer guidance on reading the canon. Always wanted to read the Great Books? I can tell you how.
Henry Oliver, ChatGPT
How to Weigh the Risks of Social Media: A conversation with the surgeon general
“We’ve got to start now. Kids only have one childhood. A year in the life of a child matters immensely, and we just don’t have time to wait.”
Emily Oster interviews the U.S. Surgeon General, Dr. Vivek Murthy
The Hidden Injuries of Class, by Richard Sennett and Jonathan Cobb (1972)
What is a luxury of the rich in one generation becomes a universal necessity in the next, and finally a publicly-acceded right. We can see this process working with everything from bathtubs to automobiles to college degrees…
Sara Sanborn; Commentary
How did Oxford become so lame?
Generations turn over quickly at Oxford, and the spirit of the age changes with them. It didn’t take me and my contemporaries long to notice that, in the latter half of the 2010s, we had contrived to come up at a time when a detectable atmosphere of lameness hung about the place. This was doubtless true of other universities too, though the combination of Oxford’s fragmented and parochial institutional structure, as well as the high concentration of intelligent weirdos, seemed to amplify its effects there. “Lameness” is admittedly a frustratingly non-specific label, but seems the right kind of impressionistic diagnosis to get some traction on the problem.
John Maier; UnHerd
Offline is the New Online
The offline world will become a place of wonder for the true outsiders and eccentrics to gather. Social media is going fully offline and it’s going to be wild.
Rachel Haywire; Interintellect blog
How this Turing Award–winning researcher became a legendary academic advisor
When you ask Blum about the secrets of good mentorship, he reacts with a sheepish head scratch, attributing his students’ success to their own talents. “Students come up with wonderful ideas, and people don’t realize how wonderful they are. The only thing I can say is that, more than most, I really enjoy the ideas that the students have,” he told me. “I have learned from each of them.”
Sheon Han; MIT Technology Review
Fanny: The Other Mendelssohn review - a tale of two siblings
Poor Fanny died from a stroke in 1847, aged just 41. Footage of Kanneh-Mason’s performance gives us a more upbeat ending, though Hayman’s commentary points out that the voices of many more creative women are still unheard.
Graham Dixon; The Arts Desk
On the Utility of Faith
I’m a parent and caretaker of of a special needs child. The grind that involves is consuming. I write this, not coincidentally, at four in the morning, the time he decided to get up today. I’m up with him because he’s not entirely safe without some supervision. He’s 12. Hence some reflection on the utility of faith... The world needs me to see myself in the care I take of others. The application of my faith reenforces that message.
Sean Patrick Hughes
Kartikeya Batra on Long-Run Effects of Land Redistribution in India
“You are upper caste, so you’ll own land. You own land; therefore, you are in a power position. As I said, there could have been several channels of persistence, but the one that I chose to focus was caste. One other result, which I think is new in this paper, which has not been seen in the two broad strands of literature I’m contributing to, one is land redistribution—maybe it’s a little bit there, but not so much in the Indian context. And second is the literature on historical colonial institutions in India.”
Shruti Rajagopalan; Mercatus Center
‘It never ends’: the book club that spent 28 years reading Finnegans Wake
Woodside dropped out of Fialka’s group for about two decades, but after he retired, he decided to go back. He had sampled other book groups, including a Proust reading group that had pivoted to reading Finnegans Wake, but it was hard to find anyone “who was really delivering a lot of intelligent commentary on the book”.
Lois Beckett; The Guardian
Antisemitic Attitudes Across the Ideological Spectrum
We oversampled young adults because unlike other forms of prejudice that are more common among older people, antisemitism is theorized to be more common among younger people. Contrary to the expectation of horseshoe theory, the data show the epicenter of antisemitic attitudes is young adults on the far right.
Eitan Hersh and Laura Royden
A Movie About the Washington Post’s Lowest Point Is Coming to Netflix
Janet, a movie about disgraced Washington Post journalist Janet Cooke, is in the works, Nellie Andreeva reported for Deadline Thursday. The feature film, for Netflix, will be directed by the bestselling author and former journalist Janet Mock… Cooke left the Post after editors discovered she had fabricated her 1981 Pulitzer Prize-winning story about a young heroin addict in DC.
Andrew Beaujon; Washingtonian
Veterans Day 2023
He was not particularly political or ideological and he wasn't a pacifist, but he couldn't stomach nostalgic or idealized descriptions of combat and war. It was because of him I read novels by soldier authors like James Jones (From Here To Eternity, The Thin Red Line) that explained the horrors and attractions of war and the deep, deep fault lines between politicians and officers and troops. Because of his experiences, I was thus prepared to recognize the phony, gauzy versions of World War II that started getting pumped out in popular culture in the late 1990s under the general rubric of honoring "the greatest generation" as a bizarre and grotesque attempt by baby boomers to co-opt the privations and triumphs of their parents for themselves…
Nick Gillespie on his father
Mere Belief
People insist that they do remember, of course. In a foreword to his fantastically detailed memoir, Speak, Memory, Vladimir Nabokov bemoaned his “amnesic defects,” the “blank spots, blurry areas, domains of dimness.” But in fact he was proud of his recall. When he found himself at odds with a fact-checker at The New Yorker regarding the color of the funnel on a French ocean liner, Nabokov chose to omit the reference rather than admit he’d gotten it wrong.
Sallie Tisdale; Harper's Magazine
Deep Laziness
Do we need instructions on how to feel good? I think it’s worse than that – we barely know what feeling is, or how to feel, and if we managed to know, it would be impossible to communicate anyway. And there’s so much mess. Certain activities seem wholly incompatible with deep laziness, and they are often unavoidable.
Sarah Perry; Ribbonfarm
What I Told My Muslim Students About Gaza
When I was growing up, the intensity of my identification with Muslims in conflict zones like Bosnia and Chechnya was perhaps the consequence of the absence of many actual Muslims in my life. I grew up in New England, my parents having arrived from Pakistan via England just six years before I was born… There were zero other Muslims in my school…
Haroon Moghul; Wisdom of Crowds
Stereotypes might not be as powerful as psychologists assumed
A recent study in the Journal of Experimental Social Psychology put this question to the test by examining the influence of stereotypes on the ‘spontaneous trait inference effect’. It raises interesting questions about the impressions we form of each other every day and whether the stereotypes we endorse about others (whether explicitly or without realising) are as influential as is often assumed… To the researchers’ surprise, only one of the experiments showed that stereotypes had any effect on spontaneous trait inference at all, and even then the effect was small.
Shayla Love; Psyche
In Praise of Idleness
In the past, there was a small leisure class and a larger working class. The leisure class enjoyed advantages for which there was no basis in social justice; this necessarily made it oppressive, limited its sympathies, and caused it to invent theories by which to justify its privileges. These facts greatly diminished its excellence, but in spite of this drawback it contributed nearly the whole of what we call civilization. It cultivated the arts and discovered the sciences; it wrote the books, invented the philosophies, and refined social relations. Even the liberation of the oppressed has usually been inaugurated from above. Without the leisure class, mankind would never have emerged from barbarism.
Bertrand Russell