Anna Gát: What to Read This Weekend #24
Diaspora and innovation, fascism and self-promotion, music and awe, ugliness and AI, India and patriarchy, builders and timelines — the dead and the drunk, the mysteries of history and of freedom...
Hello from New York City, my friends — and see you on Sunday if you’re coming to our picnic!
Many thoughts this week, many themes, some crises. When you see the traveller, give her the tea, the military blanket, the squeeze of the shoulders.
And in the meantime, let’s read! …. x Anna
How Builders Think
Another assumption of the builder's mindset is the view that exercising one’s agency to build one’s own fully-lived life is a self-sufficient end goal, needing no further justification or permission.
Gena Gorlin; Every
The Political Fragility of Metascience
To survive and succeed, metascience will need to embrace skills quite foreign to its primary research work: the philosophical, the political, and even the aesthetic.
Tim Hwang; Macroscience
Questions of Genius - Encounters with piano virtuoso Evgeny Kissin (1996)
When he was two years and two months old, Genya sat down at the old Bechstein on which his mother taught and picked out with one finger some of the tunes he had been singing. The next day, he did the same again, and on the third day he played with both hands, using all his fingers. As the year progressed, he became more purposeful.
Andrew Solomon
What does "Barbie" get wrong about patriarchy?
Possessive men would just beat Barbies to a pulp.
Alice Evans
The Dead Are Real- Hilary Mantel’s imagination (2012)
There are limits to the writer’s authority. She cannot know her character completely. She has no power to alter his world or postpone his death. But in other ways it is not humble at all: she presumes to know the secrets of the dead and the mechanics of history.
Larissa MacFarquhar; The New Yorker
Questions
how to go to the center of the universe?
what inspires you?
why did the founding fathers decide that the president must be at least 35 year old?
what are you devoted to?
why did the anarchists murder the single most progressive russian emperor (alexander ii) but not his extremely conservative successor?
what are you confused about?
why will you fail?
Alexey Guzey
Musk rushes out new Twitter logo—it’s just an X that someone tweeted at him
The logo rushed out by Musk doesn't seem to be very original. People pointed out that it looks just like a decades-old Unicode character.
Jon Brodkin; Ars Technica
When did people stop being drunk all the time?
For English soldiers, it’s long been accepted to receive 8 pints of beer (4.5 L) as a daily ration…
They did? …. By Lefinder
What My Musical Instruments Have Taught Me
Moving this way, I become aware of the world beyond the small instrument I’m swaddling; I start to play more for others than for myself.
Jaron Laier; The New Yorker
Isaiah Berlin and the promise of freedom
If all that Berlin left behind was the warm beer of liberal gradualism, it would not be much of a legacy…
Having severed liberalism from progress, Berlin went on to cut away its dependence on an optimistic account of human nature.
Michael Ignatieff; Prospect Magazine
The Day Oppenheimer Feared He Might Blow Up the World
To anyone who has read Kurt Vonnegut’s 1963 novel, Cat’s Cradle, the tale of physicists inadvertently destroying the world has a familiar ring to it.
Philip Ball; Nautilus
Richard Feynman and The Connection Machine
Every great man that I have known has had a certain time and place in their life that they use as a reference point; a time when things worked as they were supposed to and great things were accomplished. For Richard, that time was at Los Alamos during the Manhattan Project. Whenever things got "cockeyed," Richard would look back and try to understand how now was different than then.
Danny Hillis; Long Now
'Women Aren't Chimpanzees' - Interview with French Feminist Elisabeth Badinter (2010)
French women have children because it's easier for them to be mothers and still work and do other things. They can leave their children with others, and neither their mother-in-law nor their husband nor their mother will reproach them for doing so in any way. In France, having someone take care of your children is not something that's fundamentally bad. Still, I find it disturbing that women are now being encouraged to adopt another model, ostensibly in the name of science and for the good of the child. It's also an argument against the materialistic, egocentric consumer society. "Let's go back to our roots!" the proponents of this green movement say. "Let's listen to nature! Let's breastfeed! Let's stay home with our children!" And, amazingly enough, many young women find that appealing.
Britta Sandberg; SPIEGEL International
The mysteries of late style
The leaving of works unfinished is frequently a mark of late style. When an admirer enquired of Beethoven why he had not written a third movement to the piano sonata Opus 111, as convention would require, the composer answered brusquely that he had not had time. His impatience is understandable. As anyone who has listened at all closely to that extraordinary masterwork will recognise, a closing movement to it is unthinkable. As Thomas Mann and others have remarked, the sonata, the last that Beethoven would compose, as it stands brings the entire sonata form virtually to an end. The “late” in late style inevitably sounds a funeral bell.
John Banville; New Statesman
What Home Is Isn’t That
The term diaspora relates to, but is distinct from, other words describing the circulation of people around the world: refugee, exile, immigrant, transnational, cosmopolitan, global, minoritarian, and post-colonial. This list of related terms generates a range of moods and modes: exilic suffering, immigrant nostalgia, migrant laboring, and what the scholar Stuart Hall has called “always-postponed ‘arrival.’”
Kimberly Alidio; Poetry Foundation
The Historian Who Lost Her Memory of a Hijacking
In part, she speculates, this was the outcome of living in an era with no counselors, no debriefings, no processing of the trauma, and with more primitive ideas about harm and resilience: a seeming desire among parents, among teachers, to allow the sisters to draw a curtain on the awful experience and move on with their lives, as if the incident could “entirely disappear.” But there was media and academic attention…
Jacob Bacharach; The New Republic
A survey of Berlin's thriving tech scene sheds light on average salaries
Senior Software Engineers average salary of €90,318 and a median €88,000.
Cate Lawrence; Tech EU
What’s Happening in Italy Is Scary, and It’s Spreading
Burying the antifascist legacy of the wartime Resistance matters deeply to the Brothers of Italy, a party rooted in its fascist forefathers’ great defeat in 1945. As prime minister, Ms. Meloni has referred to Italy’s postwar antifascist culture as a repressive ideology, responsible even for the murder of right-wing militants in the political violence of the 1970s. It’s not just history to be rewritten. The postwar Constitution, drawn up by the Resistance-era parties, is also ripe for revision…
David Broder; The New York Times
Finding Awe Amid Everyday Splendor
The lightning-in-a-bottle sensation that had fizzed through me at the viewpoint is the keystone of religious devotion and the wellspring of human curiosity. It’s a feeling that inspires our desire to seek novelty, to see and make art, to gather in celebration, in worship and in grief. According to Keltner’s book, seeking “brief moments of awe is as good for your mind and body as anything you might do.”
Henry Wismayer; Noema
‘A certain danger lurks there’: how the inventor of the first chatbot turned against AI
[Computer scientist Joseph Weizenbaum] liked to say that every person is the product of a particular history. His ideas bear the imprint of his own particular history, which was shaped above all by the atrocities of the 20th century and the demands of his personal demons. Computers came naturally to him. The hard part, he said, was life.
Ben Tarnoff; The Guardian
All through the night: sleep-deprived scientists share their stories
For my drive home, at around 2 p.m., I have another espresso and then drive much slower than usual to reduce the risk of an accident.
Nikki Forrester; Nature
journeys
Seven years ago I had this impossible naivety, the kind of naivety that only comes with youth and manifests most as idiocy: a total willingness to ignore consequences.
Ava Huang
The Right-Wing Avant-Garde in American Fiction
All literary scenes publish mediocrity, American or otherwise, contemporary or historical. For each of Mayakovsky’s inspired lines there was more flat and propagandistic verse, and ten others beside it from various imitators…
J. Arthur Boyle; Verso
The Fifth Wave: The Golden Age of Substack
Like the Ghost of Journalism Past, something like traditional investigative reporting has begun to materialize on Substack.
Martin Gurri; Discourse
Jawaharlal Nehru: Shaped by endless curiosity
Nehru’s opponents saw his liberal opposition to Hindu extremism as an aversion to religion in public life more generally – a mischaracterization that carried political consequences in a deeply religious country. Indeed, each aspect of his character provided fodder to his critics, then as now.
Aditya Narayan Sharma; Times Literary Supplement
Hard things, good people
I've learned to love the beauty in hard things. So much so that I now cultivate experiences that allow me to build my hard things muscle systematically. I embrace doing things that scare me out of my comfort zone like running into the Bay at sunrise to start off every month when old me would've rather been sleeping in, wrapped up in blankets. Actively pursuing challenges allows us to build the resilience we may one day need to draw on for hardships in our lives that we have no control over.
The exhilarating thing about breaking boundaries is the sense of freedom that comes with rewriting my own narrative.
Cissy Hu
On Spaciousness
Edward Singerland's definition from his book titled Trying Not to Try resonates with me:
"People in wu-wei feel as if they are doing nothing, while at the same time, they might be creating a brilliant work of art, smoothly negotiating a complex social situation, or even bringing the entire world into harmonious order. For a person in wu-wei, proper and effective conduct follows as automatically as the body gives in to the seductive rhythm of a song. This state of harmony is both complex and holistic, involving as it does the integration of the body, the emotions, and the mind."
By superb Interintellect host Irene Karthik
A Must-See Matthew Wong Retrospective Reveals New Sides of an Artist Whose Story Is Still Emerging
Wong has been frequently labeled a self-taught painter, the suggestion being that he discovered his Fauvism-inflected palette of royal blues and hot reds virtually overnight, that he had almost no help in devising his curlicuing paths and speckled trees. The label is not quite true, as this exhibition deftly proves.
Alex Greenberger; ARTnews
The Art of Ugliness
The puzzle of why ugliness appeals to us, of why centuries of artists from Ribera to Freud have profited from making a mess of the human body, has posed a problem for the philosophy of art. Kant’s solution was to say that ugly things could in fact be elevated into the realm of beauty through their representation in art, but that there was one variety of ugliness, the “disgusting,” that could not. For Kant, there’s no such thing as a beautiful picture of a disgusting person or object; “it is impossible,” he says, “that it can be regarded as beautiful.”
Zachary Fine; The Point
At least 125 tombs discovered at Roman-era cemetery in Gaza
One of the two sarcophaguses was decorated with images of grapes and the other with dolphins…
Nidal Al-Mughrabi; Reuters
More than Machines?- Jacques Ellul on AI’s real threat to humanity
According to Ellul, we are living in a technological world not only because tech is everywhere but because we are living in a world of technique. By “technique,” Ellul referred broadly to the way we accomplish tasks. In the opening of his 1954 work The Technological Society, Ellul defined “technique” as “the totality of methods rationally arrived at and having absolute efficiency (for a given stage of development) in every field of human activity.”
Nolen Gertz; Commonweal
the tavern and the temple - revelry and contemplation
I have no regrets about all of the time and energy I have devoted to doing what I do on Twitter. I’m glad that I did it, and I would do it all over again. Even if say, Twitter vanished tomorrow, or my account gets suspended – still worth it. It hasn’t even been a ‘sacrifice’ for me, it has been an investment that paid off handsomely. It has allowed me to live my childhood dream much sooner than I initially anticipated: I am now basically a full-time author who gets to write about whatever he likes, whenever he likes.
By my friend Visa Veerasamy
Artist Dora García Considers Alexandra Kollontai and Mexican Feminism
Yet despite the vivid presence of García’s genderqueer and trans youth, and the atmospherics of pro-choice protests and demonstrations against sexual violence, it’s not clear how Kollontai’s particular feminist ideas are resonating in Mexico today…
Liza Featherstone; Jacobin
The Lost Honor of Katharina Blum (1976)
West Germany, 1971: At the height of the scare over the terrorism of the Baader-Meinhof gang, a bank was robbed and a guard killed. The next day, without evidence, the nation's largest newspaper blamed the gang for the crimes. Heinrich Böll, the Nobel-winning novelist, condemned this trial by headline in an article for Der Spiegel -- and became the target of hate mail, anonymous calls and indignant editorials in the newspaper.
Roger Ebert; Chicago Sun Times
Alice Evans Barbie quote. 🔥
thanks for sharing my piece Anna! love that you're doing this, such a great labor of love, I see a few familiar names and I'm eager to get to know the others