Anna Gát: What to Read This Weekend #31
Nuns, pagans, addiction, anti-science, stupid historians, how the clitoris got its Hebrew name—Naomis, strangers, lovers, dinners, German grammar, Liszt, Bach, Mozart, Schubert, Virgil, Homer, LLMs...
Hey folks,
Substack is telling me this is hitting the “email length limit” so I’ll just say a quick hello here, before we dive into all the delicious readings of this past week (very delicious)! Some superb Interintellect series starting, come sign up! Writing with AI. Longevity book club. Paradigm shifts and breakthroughs. Creative support group for expats. Self-compassion. And offline in NYC: the economy with Kyla Scanlon. xx Anna
PS: My recent SuperSalon with Erik Hoel on what’s wrong with neuroscience. Watch the video here.
Naomi Klein’s Journey Into the Unnerving World of Naomi Wolf
After years of being mistaken for one another, Klein tried to find out why Wolf went down the conspiracy rabbit hole—and why so many people have followed her…
A doppelgänger is a double, a person who appears so similar to another that they could easily stand in for them, maybe even take over their life … Naomi Wolf does not in fact resemble Naomi Klein in appearance or personality particularly closely, but from the distance of a byline or a Twitter handle, they were, for many readers, similar enough.
Celina Pereira; New Republic
Is Bach the greatest achiever of all time?
Who else might even be a contender for greatest achiever of all time? Shakespeare? Maybe, but Bach seems to beat him for relentlessness and quantity (at a very high quality level). Beethoven would be high on the list, but he doesn’t seem to quite match up to Bach in all of these categories. Homer seems relevant, but we are not even sure who or what he was. Archimedes? Plato or Aristotle? Who else?
Tyler Cowen; Marginal Revolution
Indirect Nostalgia
Q: Is that freedom something you especially value in Bach?
A: Yes, absolutely. The generosity, the spirituality, and the freedom. You can play a Bach fugue in so many different tempi and with so many different characters, and if it’s done well, it’ll be convincing. By the time you get to Mozart, that becomes impossible.
Hartmut Welscher interviews András Schiff; VAN Magazine
Among the Disrupted (2015)
Amid the bacchanal of disruption, let us pause to honor the disrupted. The streets of American cities are haunted by the ghosts of bookstores and record stores, which have been destroyed by the greatest thugs in the history of the culture industry. Writers hover between a decent poverty and an indecent one; they are expected to render the fruits of their labors for little and even for nothing, and all the miracles of electronic dissemination somehow do not suffice for compensation, either of the fiscal or the spiritual kind. Everybody talks frantically about media, a second-order subject if ever there was one, as content disappears into “content.” What does the understanding of media contribute to the understanding of life?
Leon Wieseltier; The New York Times
Silence
The world is too much with us, Wordsworth wrote, but we are also too much with the world, eagerly rushing to join with its noise and energy to avoid ourselves. I feel that way myself sometimes. And then there are days like today. Quiet days. I bathe in silence. I let it wash the world away.
Julie Mosow
Life is Haptic
Life isn’t composed of invisible ideal forms that hover beyond the realm of messy, generative embodiment. Life is haptic. Haptic is defined as “pertaining and constituted by the sense of touch”. It is derived from the Greek word “haptikos” which means to come into contact and to fasten. I like that haptic doesn’t feel slippery. When we come into contact, we “fasten”. It is generative. It “fastens” one touch, one molecule, to another, and creates a chain. This is, in fact, how our bodies were built.
Sophie Strand
Technology Alignment Political Compass
Optimists: “It’s happening! Yay!”
Dystopians: “Oh no! It’ll happen — unless we stop it!”
Deflaters: “It’s not happening. (And who wants it anyway?)”
Strivers: “It won’t happen unless we change something.”
Sarah Constantin
The Eros Monster
Once, before our eighth meeting, I had gotten desperate enough to create a PowerPoint for him about our relationship. One of the slides said, “I cannot go on like this. Please help me.” We sat side by side at a sports bar, facing my laptop. I ordered tea; he ordered nothing. As I clicked through the slides, I noticed that he seemed to be creeping away from me. It reminded me of how, the first time I kissed him—having asked and been granted permission—he stood there paralyzed with fear, trembling, enduring it, waiting for it to be over.
Agnes Callard; Harper’s Magazine
How Emily Wilson Made Homer Modern
Hector is torn. If he stays behind on the walls, he can defend the citadel. But the supreme imperative of the noble warriors on both sides—Achilles, Odysseus, Ajax, Aeneas, Sarpedon, Patroclus, and even foppish Paris—is, as Hector exhorts his fighters, to “be men.” A man is someone who courts death for glory, hoping that his deeds will be immortalized by a poet. (This worked out for all of the above.) Hector tells Andromache, “No one matters more to me than you.” Yet he offers her no comfort…
Judith Thurman; The New Yorker
Demon Mode Activated
The only one that could resist Russian attacks was Starlink, and immediately [Elon Musk] started getting texts from Ukrainian leaders. His savior instincts kick in, and he’s deeply supportive of Ukraine. He sends hundreds of Starlink satellites and pays for free use by Ukraine. Then as the war goes on, there’s one amazing Friday night where he texted me, and I’m at my old high school watching a football game. I go behind the bleachers, and he’s talking about the Ukrainians using Starlink for a sneak submarine drone attack on the Russian fleet in Sevastopol, Crimea. And he says, “How did I get into this war? I just made Starlink so people could watch movies and play games.”
Damon Beres interviews Walter Isaacson; The Atlantic
Turning my Childhood into an AI Chatbot
Today I decided that I would try and turn my unpublished childhood memoir 9 Holidays I wish I had never been on into something that you, my reader could actually talk to. It is probably the most narcissistic thing I could possible do.
Exciting! By my friend Christopher Hogg
Was Philosopher Paul Feyerabend Really Science's "Worst Enemy"?
Just as Kuhn had when I interviewed him, Feyerabend denied that he is anti-science. His insistence that there is no scientific method is pro-science. Science’s only method is “opportunism,” he said.
John Horgan; Scientific American
In The Last Waltz it’s Joni Mitchell who mesmerises
And, of course, after that scene of the guys talking about chasing women, the song Joni sings is “Coyote”. On the surface the lyrics are describing a predatory man – “He pins me in a corner and he won’t take no” – and a player, who’s “got a woman at home/He’s got another woman down the hall/He seems to want me anyway.”
Tracey Thorn, New Statesman
What the Hollywood Actors and Writers Strike Means for Music
The Guild of Music Supervisors has issued public statements standing with the actors and writers in their strikes, but the organization can’t call a similar strike for music supervisors, who are largely freelancers and don’t qualify for employee benefits like health insurance.
Marc Hogan; Pitchfork
Squish Meets Structure: Designing with Language Models
You should treat models as tiny reasoning engines for specific tasks. Don’t try to make some universal text input that claims to do everything. Because it can’t. And you'll just disappoint people by pretending it can.
Maggie Appleton
Fame is the spur - When stars lose their reputations
I doubt that Abelard and Heloïse would be as well known today on the basis of their intellects alone – their notoriety helped. After the discovery of their affair and their secret marriage, [her uncle Fulbert] revenged himself by having Abelard mutilated in a nighttime attack. This much is well known. But even when Abelard recounts his own violent castration, he insists that the greater injury was to his pride and reputation, rather than to his body. He describes the outcry the morning after, how “the whole city” came to look at him.
Irina Dumitrescu; Times Literary Supplement
There Are No Ethical Momfluencers
Even in cases where the children aren’t being horribly abused, there are ethical questions about the nature of the content being created. The damages from seeking social media fame are often subtler than outright abuse, especially when it comes to kids. Once again we need to consider why we consume this content, and whether we as the audience bear any responsibility.
Jeremiah Johnson
Beyond obscenity
The fact that Ulysses was still banned in the US a full decade after its publication struck denizens of the literary world as absurd. Malcolm Cowley, editor of The New Republic, captured the exasperation when he wrote that ‘James Joyce’s position in literature is almost as important as that of Einstein in science. Preventing American authors from reading him is about as stupid as it would be to place an embargo on the theory of relativity.’
Brett Gary; Aeon
Stories are bad for your intelligence — How Historians (and Others) Make Themselves Stupid
It’s one thing for a young and passionate academic to make mistakes; it’s quite another for a series of experienced academics to let her make them.
Ian Leslie
On John Williams’s Novel “Augustus”: A Conversation
To enter into Butcher’s Crossing, Stoner, and Augustus — Augustus especially — is to enter into the architecture of an expert craftsman absolutely unafraid of the confrontation with the direness and deliverance of human living.
Charles J. Shields and William Giraldi; Los Angele Review of Books
Adorable Little Detonators — Our friendship survived bad dates, illness, marriage, fights. Why can’t it survive your baby?
My friend Liz overheard and reminded me that I had once mom-blocked her: She had just had her second child, it was her birthday weekend, and I threw a backyard barbecue with all of our friends and didn’t invite her. “You had just had a C-section,” I said in my defense. “I knew you couldn’t come. I didn’t want to taunt you.”
“I actually had a very easy, very quick vaginal birth,” she corrected me.
Allison P. Davis, New York Magazine
Learning German on your own
In my third year of learning, I took a graduate course in 18th century Bildungsroman - coming-of-age novels - that was entirely in German.
Ulkar Aghayeva
We Are Repaganizing
We should understand Christianity’s impact on morality in much the same way—not as a process of replacement, but rather as a process of blending. The supremely strange thing about Christianity in anthropological terms is that it takes a topsy-turvy attitude toward weakness and strength.
Louise Perry; First Things
Is it time for the Revenge of the Normies?
I do think it’s worth noting that the Revenge of the Normies story may already be underway. The college wage premium has actually shrunk in recent years, as the incomes of the less-educated have outpaced that of degree holders.
Noah Smith
Word of the Day Dagdegan: How Linguists Writhed Over a Nice Hebrew Word for Clitoris
In 1533, the translator Nathan Hameati sat in his room in Rome, quill in hand, peering over a manuscript of Avicenna's Canon of Medicine, the world’s most important medical text at the time. Scratching his forehead, he thought: How should I translate the Arabic word daghdagh into Hebrew?
Elon Gilad; Haaretz
Lisztomania Enters the Twenty-first Century
When I plowed through the Sonata for the first time, I couldn’t get over the strangeness of those juxtaposed scales. It’s as if Liszt sketched out two possible beginnings and then included both of them. The music that ensues—thrusting double-octave gestures, of a fencing-with-the-Devil variety—refuses to resolve the ambiguity, although it does at least pilot us toward the home key of the Sonata, of which there was initially no clue.
Alex Ross; The New Yorker
Taking Back the Night
It is no longer remotely appropriate to pat a young journalist’s bum or compliment her bosom.
Alice Evans
Copenhagen's Far-Reaching Transformation into a "Sponge City"
As the climate warms, Copenhagen is likely to see more torrential rain storms like the one that inundated the city in 2011. Since then, the Danish capital has taken action, redesigning parks and streets to quickly drain away vast amounts of water.
Jan Petter and Charlotte de la Fuente; Spiegel International
Pier Pressure
In those lean years, before they were canonized, Robert Indiana, Ellsworth Kelly, Agnes Martin, James Rosenquist, Lenore Tawney, Jack Youngerman, and Delphine Seyrig all took up residence in this “down downtown,” on a dead-end street on the East River where they nested themselves among fishing ships and sailors, the changing tides and unremitting grime, living at a remove from the New York City art world. Here on “the Slip”—a commercial dock designed for transience and exchange—they lived in cheap and drafty lofts, nurturing intuitions and ideas into radical practices, producing bodies of work that would, in the end, be very much a part of the zeitgeist.
Jennifer Krasinski; Bookforum
An Oral History of Requiem for a Dream
Aronofsky: Pretty much everyone in the cast was not what I was aiming for at the beginning of it. I went to a lot of actors before I settled on this cast. I may have told Ellen, but I think she was fourth or fifth down the list. There were a lot of great actors that said, “No fucking way.” I had offered it to Anne Bancroft. Bancroft was, at this time, coming off playing the Miss Havisham equivalent in Alfonso Cuarón’s 1998 Great Expectations and voicing the Queen in Antz, and I had a beautiful conversation with her, and she told me that it’s the first role she passed on that she had to talk to her shrink about. And I was like, “I guess that’s a compliment.”
Alison Willmore; Vulture
The Value of Communication for Mental Health
Individuals’ inability to make unexpected calls, need to borrow SOS airtime, and to seek digital loans decreased significantly relative to a control group. As a result, the programs led to a significant decrease in mental distress (-9.8%), the likelihood of severe mental distress by -2.3 percentage points (a quarter of the mean prevalence), and domestic violence, with null impact on consumption expenditure.
Francis Annan and Belinda Archibong, via Tyler Cowen; Marginal Revolution
Watch: Michael Cimino’s 1967 United Airlines Commercial (2015)
The Deer Hunter/Heaven’s Gate director Michael Cimino sounds off on the greatness of American Sniper and why Clint Eastwood should be president, writing novels published in France he’s afraid to have published in the US, and much more. It’s a good time to revisit the start of Cimino’s career, when he was a Madison Avenue commercial director, and a very successful one at that. This 1967 ad was part of a $1.7-million United Airlines campaign and it’s very of the period — literally colorful, musically brassy, casually sexist.
Filmmaker Magazine
The end of an era for the Sisters of Charity of New York
After much prayer and contemplation, they made a tough decision that marked the beginning of the Catholic congregation’s end. They will no longer accept new members, and announced in an April 27 statement that they are now on a “path to completion.”
Associated Press
When is Dinner, By State
Do people really eat that much earlier in Pennsylvania and Maine? Is it an age thing? A sunlight thing? I’ll have to look into that more.
Nathan Yau; FlowingData
Good Life (2019)
Between January and August 2017, the music video of the Puerto Rican pop hit Despacito — by Luis Fonsi featuring Daddy Yankee — was viewed three billion times on YouTube. Today the count is up to six and a half billion, an all time record-breaker. While we don’t know how many unique users this means, we can ballpark it around the populations of India and China combined.
I have long been fascinated by the success of this seemingly innocuous internet phenomenon — a crosscultural study opportunity, at scale — and so decided to explore its themes which seem to resonate so strongly with so many people around the world. Humans are most enthralled by art they can deeply identify with — something they would be happy to inhabit. If we can assume that each and every one of us wants a good life then, well, Despacito seems to have it.
(By me!)
Gladstone, Homer and the “wine dark sea”: some notes on the history of colour
The sky, in Homer’s telling, is … like bronze. That’s not the only weird thing about the colour scheme used by the poet. He used the same word, “chloros” – green – for honey, faces and wood. Most famously of all, he describes the sea as “oînops póntos”: literally, “wine-faced”, but translated most frequently as “wine-dark”. Oxen, too, were wine-dark. Oxen, sea, and wine do not, to our less mythic modern eyes, have much in the way of resemblance.
Jonn Elledge
Bonus:
The Infinite Conversation
My nightmare? An AI generated, never-ending debat between Werner Herzog and Slavoj Žižek.