Anna Gát: What to Read this Weekend #10
The F word (Freud), the K word (Kant), gamer spies, brutalism, broke Millennials, Rupert Murdoch, The Tale of Genji, sex differences, Gwyneth Paltrow's odd biz, sustainability in the city, and more
Hello from Portugal, everybody! After four months of nonstop toil (can’t lift my arms!), whilst running a company as a solo founder, I am finally here, overlooking the Tagus river from my window, waiting to maaaybe go on a little break next week. I am turning this place into the European salon centre of Interintellect, and I can’t wait to welcome you all at some point, here or in New York. So it’s five weeks here now, then back to the East Coast — lots to do! (There’s also some book writing looming on the horizon, but that’s for another email.)
What else? I’m reading the much-re-hyped Heartburn and… I’m kind of hating it, and in parallel low-key worrying this is somehow me betraying all of women? Anyway. Let’s dive in: what should you read this weekend?
Inside Rupert Murdoch’s Succession Drama
At the age of 91, Murdoch blew up his fourth marriage. Hall was waiting for Murdoch to meet her at their Oxfordshire estate last June when she checked her phone. “Jerry, sadly I’ve decided to call an end to our marriage,” Murdoch’s email began, according to a screenshot I read. “We have certainly had some good times, but I have much to do…My New York lawyer will be contacting yours immediately.”
Hall and Murdoch finalized their divorce two months later. (One of the terms of the settlement was that Hall couldn’t give story ideas to the writers on Succession.)
You know, I always thought my family was crazy… (thanks, Vanity Fair)
Brute pleasures - Let us now praise famous concrete
Concrete has grandeur, too. It has given the world the Hoover Dam, the Pantheon dome, the Pentagon, London Bridge, the statue of Christ the Redeemer in Rio de Janeiro, the Panama Canal.
If you grew up among post-Soviet concrete blocks, brutalism is a strange, aristocratic upgrade that feels simultaneously intimate and familiar, and way out of your league. Here my friend, and Interintellect host, Henry Oliver on the late bloomers of architecture (The Critic)
2023 is when the empires strike back
Americans need to realize that Cold War 2 is fundamentally unlike Cold War 1 or World War 2. Those 20th century contests were ideological battles, where people fought died for communism, fascism, and liberal democracy. But China is not an ideological, proselytizing power; its ideology, basically is just “China”.
Noah Smith, always good at synthesising, simplifying, showing the narrative arc — he and Aaron Sorkin should work together (though they would probably argue a lot). Anybody on this email list can make this happen?
‘The Tale of Genji’ Is More Than 1,000 Years Old. What Explains Its Lasting Appeal?
Ultimately, what made the story so powerful for me was the way Murasaki conveyed the women’s thoughts and feelings. At the time of her writing, many of her readers would have been women. Yet according to literary historians, prominent men of the court also read the tale contemporaneously. In that light, the way she foregrounded women’s emotions — their fear, suffering, disappointment, envy and anxieties — seems almost subversive.
The book that comes up the most at Interintellect salons which I still have not read — if you also haven’t but want to: book club? (Motoko Rich, The New York Times)
How Gamers Eclipsed Spies as an Intelligence Threat
While the trajectory of the documents may seem novel, a closer look reveals that many significant intelligence leaks over the past 15 years have been substantially motivated by online reality. These leaks are not the product of espionage, media investigations, or political activism, but 21st-century digital culture: specifically, by the desire to gain stature among online friends.
The least surprising article that somehow still hadn’t been written up before (Jonathan Askonas and Renée DiResta, Foreign Policy)
Everyday philosophy: Immanuel Kant and racial liberalism
The officer insisted that he should take the pipe out of his mouth, saying: “If I let you do it, I’d have to let everyone do it.” To which Morgenbesser replied, “Who do you think you are, Kant?” The police officer heard something different from the name of the philosopher and took him to the police station, where Morgenbesser managed to argue himself out of being charged by explaining Kant’s Categorical Imperative to him.
All I can say is I learned the same lesson, the hard way (the great Nigel Warburton, The New European)
The cult of Sigmund Freud - The inventor of psychoanalysis attracted failed scientists and sexual opportunists, and built his legacy upon myth and error.
Freud had to invent repression and infant polymorphic sexuality, castration anxiety, penis envy, the Oedipus complex and so forth, to justify his dogma that all dreams express disguised desires and can be decoded by the initiated.
This is not to say that psychoanalysis did not help some patients, and since we know that confident doctors have greater therapeutic success than unconfident ones, belief in the Freudian mythology might well have been beneficial.
LOL (Henry Marsh is great, New Statesman)
“Bullet in the Brain,” by Tobias Wolff (1995)
After striking the cranium, the bullet was moving at nine hundred feet per second, a pathetically sluggish, glacial pace compared with the synaptic lightning that flashed around it.
Eade Bengard recommended this (The New Yorker)
Sex-biased gene regulation varies across human populations as a result of adaptive evolution
Using RNA-Seq data and whole genome sequences from 11 human populations, we investigate variation in sex-biased gene expression across human populations and test whether population-level variation in sex-biased expression may have resulted from adaptive evolution in sex-specific regulatory regions. In tests for differential expression, we find that sex-biased gene expression in humans is highly variable, mostly population-specific, and demonstrates between-population reversals.
Adam Z. Reynolds, Sara D. Niedbalski
I Really Didn’t Want to Go - On the Goop cruise
Many Goop-affiliated “practitioners,” following a blond example, often see themselves as renegades, rebels, or “weirdos,” working outside the mainstream and gazing approvingly at, if not actually existing on, what they like to think of as the cutting edge…
“We are due for a cultural rebrand around crying,” Ellen said, which is “free therapy.”
“I love that,” GP replied, deeply.
A good writer in a good magazine, I’m not sure what happened with this article… It’s still worth reading because of the subject and some of the author’s personal asides, but I had to make a serious effort to dig out her points from the clutter. It’s almost as if it was a Substack post 🤓 (Lauren Oyler, Harper’s)
The unspoken tension in environmentalism
The green movement needs to acknowledge that sometimes, by defending the local environment, it is damaging the global one… It feels greener to live in the countryside, but city dwellers have far lower-carbon lifestyles…
Via Sar Haribhakti (the good Tom Chivers, Semafor)
Eight Women Say the Same Man Raped or Assaulted Them. Now They’re Out for Justice
When it comes to allegations of partner rape, the victim blaming is very often done by the victims themselves... Of course she should have been skeptical when, on their first date on June 8, 2021, he had stared into her eyes and dreamily said things like “It must be really hard being that beautiful every day.
(Alex Morris, Rolling Stone)
Waiting for the fall - Between East and West Berlin, before and after die Wende
In the GDR of the boys’ childhood, even military exercises seem strangely innocent. A chapter entitled “All the Lovely Landmines” has Danny and his friends Mark and Walter take part in a Pioneer Manoeuvre, defusing balloons masquerading as landmines. The manoeuvre is abandoned early: the pull of the field kitchen is too strong.
Hey Nikita, is it cold…? I wish I remembered more about the Berlin Wall — so, so strange to only have second hand memory of something that still to this day defines my life, and with which my existence briefly overlapped. Do you have some historic event or historical period you feel this way about? (Maren Meinhardt, Times Literary Supplement)
Rebelling against time in Cairo
I thought about Benjamin’s call to rebel against wait as I spent most of last year waiting for a Cairene artist who was never on time. I thought about it as I kept repeatedly glancing at doors, longing for that moment of recognition when he would walk in, since I was always the one who arrived first. I waited for him on our first, second, and third date. I waited for him at a bar in Barcelona over the summer. I waited for him at a cafe in his own neighborhood in Cairo to travel to the Red Sea in early fall.
It feels like I’m butchering this article even by just selecting a paragraph. Read the whole thing. What is it about Cairo as a subject that turns writers into great writers? (Amy Fallas, MadaMasr)
The Despair of the Young - ... and the madness of academia
She replied that people now find it impossible to be satisfied with themselves, that no one thinks they are good enough, that girls in particular suffer profoundly over how their bodies look and cannot separate appearances from character.
After her haunting Liberties piece, Mary Gaitskill continues her account of teaching creative writing to the young people of America
A School of Strength and Character
The old “school of strength and character” is gone. The nineteenth-century pattern of life that created it no longer exists. But the features of its social fabric demonstrate what an agentic society with a recognizably modern set of technologies and institutions looks like. This culture was upstream of organizations like the Sanitary Commission, making possible the agentic behaviors of those who founded them. Three features are especially prominent: the aspirational ideal of public brotherhood, a commitment to formality and discipline in self-government, and organizational structures that combined decentralization with hierarchy. These are the same patterns any future culture of high agency self-government will also have to cultivate in themselves and their neighbors.
(Tanner Greer, Palladium)
Baroque, Purple, and Beautiful: In Praise of the Long, Complicated Sentence
Examine a characteristic sentence from the British novelist Zadie Smith’s appropriately named On Beauty. Describing the liturgy of the year’s final season, Smith writes that “This, after all, was the month in which families began tightening and closing and sealing; from Thanksgiving to the New Year, everybody’s world contracted, day by day, into the microcosmic single festive household, each with its own rituals and obsessions, rules and dreams.”
Via dear Anita Leirfall (Ed Simon, Literary Hub)
The Myth of the Broke Millennial
[E]ven the story of the generation’s have-nots is complicated, and hardly Dickensian. The least fortunate members of the Millennial generation seem better protected economically than those of prior generations: Fewer Millennials were in poverty in 2019 than were Boomers and Gen Xers at the same age (in 1987 and 2004, years in which the economy was likewise strong).
Oh no, my ongoing suffering as a Millennial was my whole identity!! (Jean Twenge clears things up, The Atlantic)
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After a bit of a hiatus (see intro why), I’m back to hosting Interintellect salons myself!
One about the beautiful thing called adult friendship, and how to find and keep friends as a grownup
One about life after death and the many theories we humans entertain about it
One about the benefits of insomnia 🦉
One a fireside chat with Bluesky CEO Jay Graber who’s awesome
There’s the MIT social on June 3 (Cambridge, MA) with Sasha Sagan, brilliant daughter of Carl Sagan and Ann Druyan whose book made me cry — I’ll be there!
I’m not hosting this but will be there and you should probably come: our SuperSalon with Phil Klay on the role of comedy and humour in writing about evil things
And keep an eye out for many more good things currently being cooked and coming soon!
Thanks for reading 📚
