Anna Gát: What to Read This Weekend #20
Cancel culture and contraception, language and rituals, Descartes and Barbie, Tolstoy and Zoomers, Nazis and tourists—RIP Julian Sands and National Geographic—Bach, men, math, Paris, nuclear waste...
Hello friends,
Wow, the 20th week! Sending these Friday digests is such great fun for me, by Monday I’m getting impatient to do it again. Thanks for reading (and sharing your thoughts) —
This past week once again was particularly intense. We’ve hired a new general manager at Interintellect and pulled very enjoyable 14-15 hour workdays with her every day. There’s a lot to rethink, rebuild, explore. Will keep you posted as the story develops. Now I’m subsisting on 4 hours of sleep…
A bunch of new books have arrived — I can’t wait to get started!
This was a dark, defeatist week in writing. Many heavy pieces were published. Scroll down for my recommendations for you…
Car Seats As Contraception
“This paper finds car seat laws saved 57 kids in 2017… but also reduced births by 8,000 that year (& 145,000 since 1980!) as families held off having more than two kids as their cars couldn’t hold more seats!”
Jordan Nickerson David H. Solomon, via Ethan Mollick
Stop Firing Your Friends - Just make more of them.
Even the most passionate friendships can ebb with age and distance. In his “divine magnet” letter to Nathaniel Hawthorne, Herman Melville brims with ardor for his friend and, at the time, neighbor. “Whence come you, Hawthorne?” he writes.
Olga Khazan; The Atlantic
Tara Isabella Burton, in ‘Self-Made,’ looks at self-creation from Dürer to Trump
During the 19th century, the idea of the self-made man acquired capitalist overtones — the “virtuous, frugal citizen” supplanted by the entrepreneur, “someone who had figured out how to harness money and bend it to his will.”
Rhoda Feng; Boston Globe
How Review-Bombing Can Tank a Book Before It’s Published
In an era when reaching readers online has become a near-existential problem for publishers, Goodreads has become an essential avenue for building an audience….
But the same features that get users talking about books and authors can also backfire. Reviews can be weaponized, in some cases derailing a book’s publication long before its release.
Alexandra Alter and Elizabeth A. Harris; The New York Times
Cancelled - Amia Srinivasan writes about free speech on campus
No university or student union wants to pay heavy fines or be dragged into court. The prudent course of action is to silence dissent before it happens. No doubt universities will start hiring free speech compliance officers – chosen perhaps from the network of conservative academics who helped draw up the new legislation – who will advise on which forms of speech and protest are now verboten.
Amia Srinivasan; London Review of Books
List of incidents of civil unrest in France
1229: University of Paris strike of 1229, riots at the University of Paris that resulted in a number of student deaths and reforms of the medieval university.
1789–1799: French Revolution…
1910–1911: Champagne Riots, resulted from a series of problems faced by grape growers in the Champagne area of France.
2023: Nahel M. riots, protests after the killing of a teenager by police near Paris.
Wikipedia
In the darkness, a home: Cormac McCarthy’s Catholic center
Despite the adult McCarthy’s apparent outward lack of religion, he structures access to reality within his novels in sacramental ways.
James Watson, Ph.D.; The Catholic World Report
Paris’s Centre Pompidou to Close for Five Years Starting in 2025
Such a costly, expansive shutdown is rare for a museum of the Centre Pompidou’s caliber, although it is not unprecedented.
Alex Greenberger; ARTNews
The Year of the Slim Volume: Short books—like novellas, standalone short stories, and poetry collections—are finally getting their due. What took so long?
“Self-esteem is very important for people when it comes to reading.”
Kate Dwyer; Esquire
What Intense Rituals Signal to Your Brain
“The reason is that, to our brain, they’re marking that moment as momentous, something which will become part of our autobiographical narrative, which means our very sense of who we are as an individual.”
Brian Gallagher; Nautilus
How Math Achieved Transcendence
Roughly 2,000 years after the Greeks first posed the question of squaring the circle, René Descartes applied new algebraic techniques to show in his 1637 treatise La Géométrie that the constructible lengths are precisely those that can be expressed using integers and the operations of addition, subtraction, multiplication, division and the calculation of square roots.
David S. Richeson; Quanta Magazine
Don’t get mad, get equal: putting an end to misogyny in science
It has become apparent to both of us that our career security might be threatened by perceptions of us being overconfident, difficult, assertive and unlikeable. Furthermore, we have observed that women often choose not to speak up about these issues for fear of damaging their careers. Instead of expecting us to bend over backwards to counteract negative perceptions, we ask colleagues of all genders to step up and discredit these biased reactions.
Alison Bentley and Rachael Garrett; Nature
Emily St John Mandel’s Q&A: “I’m the person you want next to you in an emergency”
Q: Are we all doomed?
A: Of course. Life has a mortality rate of 100 per cent.
New Statesman
New York could become the latest state to ban noncompetes
Why it matters: There's new energy around banning or limiting the use of these often-criticized agreements, which prevent people from working for a new employer for a period of time after they leave a job.
Emily Peck; Axios
A union of roads - How driving has brought us together
Once you give people roads and rails, they can see for themselves that other people in other places are perfectly harmless and occasionally interesting. When Jane Austen wrote “if adventures will not befall a young lady in her own village, she must seek them abroad”, England was a nation of carriages and coaches — and therefore of limited prospects to many people. With the proper roads that came with bicycles and then cars, running alongside Victorian steam trains, seeking adventures abroad became far more possible.
Henry Oliver; The Critic
The Case Against Travel
Why might it be bad for a place to be shaped by the people who travel there, voluntarily, for the purpose of experiencing a change? The answer is that such people not only do not know what they are doing but are not even trying to learn. Consider me…
Agnes Callard; The New Yorker
What Is the Philosophy of Madness?
A recent movement in philosophy is forcefully challenging Descartes’ assumption. At present, the movement is so larval, so incipient, that it is impossible to pin down a canon. In fact, the inability to pin down a canon may be rather essential to the philosophy of madness. Nonetheless, a trio of recent texts form a reasonable starting point: Wouter Kusters’ A Philosophy of Madness, Sofia Jeppsson’s “Radical Psychotic Doubt and Epistemology,” and Richard Saville-Smith’s Acute Religious Experiences.
A shared premise of these texts is that madness can be a window onto reality.
Justin Garson; The Philosophers' Magazine
Philosophy in the Shadow of Nazism (2020)
In an age of triumphant physics, did philosophy still need to bother with metaphysics?
By declaring the answer to be no, Wittgenstein set modern thought on a new course.
Adam Kirsch; The New Yorker
This Relationship Advice From Esther Perel Will Forever Change Your Outlook on Intimacy
Throughout history, we've seen masculinity as natural, uncomplicated, a given. But if it was that much of a given, I don't know why masculinity always has to be defined, redefined, and proven.
Zachary Zane with Esther Perel; Men’s Health
The Vatican Releases Its Own AI Ethics Handbook
“The Pope has always had a large view of the world and of humanity, and he believes that technology is a good thing. But as we develop it, it comes time to ask the deeper questions,” Father Brendan told Gizmodo in an interview. “Technology executives from all over Silicon Valley have been coming to me for years and saying, ‘You need to help us, there’s a lot of stuff on the horizon and we aren’t ready.’ The idea was to use the Vatican’s convening power to bring executives from the entire world together.”
Thomas Germain; Gizmodo
Translating Tolstoy While Inciting Revolution
There are more opinions of Garnett’s work than there are horses in “War and Peace” (which she nearly went blind translating).
Jennifer Wilson; The New York Times
Barbie’s Dream House Is Available to Rent on Airbnb, and Yes, It’s in Malibu
“We all have dreams, and Barbie is lucky enough to have a house full of them,” said Ken via press release.
McKinley Franklin; Variety
RIP Julian Sands (1958-2023)
‘The Idol’: How HBO’s Next ‘Euphoria’ Became Twisted ‘Torture Porn’
“What I signed up for was a dark satire of fame and the fame model in the 21st century,” one production member explains. “The things that we subject our talent and stars to, the forces that put people in the spotlight and how that can be manipulated in the post-Trump world.” However, they add, “It went from satire to the thing it was satirizing.”
Cheyenne Roundtree; Rolling Stone
Susan Sontag’s women problem
Where are the needs, the thoughts, the aspirations, the emotions of any of these hundreds of millions of women? They are not here. Only one woman’s work is discussed at length: Leni Riefenstahl, the actress, film-maker and Nazi sympathiser, who Sontag uses as a way into an exhilaratingly provocative series of reflections on femininity’s relationship to fascism.
Anna Leszkiewicz; New Statesman
Revealed: the violent, thuggish world of the young JS Bach
"From the tone of the school reports, it sounds as if the authorities were really worried that the situation had got out of hand. There was something exceptional, certainly in Eisenach." A "villain of the piece", Gardiner discovered, was a form master and church cantor at Ohrdruf, where Bach was a chorister. The teacher was a sadistic disciplinarian meting out "intolerable punishments". He was eventually sacked as "the plague of the school, the scandal of the church and the cancer of the city", but the 12-year-old Bach had endured "unusually close exposure to him", Gardiner said.
Dalya Alberge; The Guardian
Ur-Fascism (1995)
Ionesco once said that “only words count and the rest is mere chattering.” Linguistic habits are frequently important symptoms of underlying feelings.
Umberto Eco; The New York Review of Books
National Geographic reportedly lays off its last staff writers
This news comes amid a series of large layoffs that have shaken the media industry in recent months. In late November, CNN began laying off hundreds of staffers across different areas of the company.
Abené Clayton; The Guardian
The Zoomer Question
The full, impossible humanity of such children comes to us shrouded in a halo of myth. In our age of impotence, the notion of a child commanding a regiment or levying a tax is so fantastic, so perfectly and flippantly opposed to our own frustrations of energy, that one instantly understands the awe with which rougher, toiling generations could imagine a Paul Bunyan scooping out the Finger Lakes with his right hand, or an Alexei Stakhanov mining two hundred tons of coal in a single shift. Even the prospect of a thirteen- or fourteen-year-old teenager hitchhiking alone across the country—something which has doubtless happened many times within the lives of those still living—would, if realized today, likely make for national news.
Isaac Wilks; American Affairs
An Interview with Marc Andreessen about AI and How You Change the World
There’s this endless tension on the media side: if you ask journalists what their mission in life is, they’ll basically usually tell you two things, which is to objectively report the truth number one, and then number two, speak truth to power. Or they sometimes say, “Comfort the afflicted and afflict the comfortable.” There’s an inherent tension between those two poles because are you trying to equally represent all sides or are you trying to specifically take a stand, presumably on behalf of the people against power? I would characterize it as the entire media broadly is trying to navigate its way through that question of goals and then trying to navigate its way through what have been profound changes in technology in the media landscape.
A lot of those changes have been caused by tech.
Ben Thompson
What does it mean to understand how a scientific literature is put together?
Debates between people will not go well when one person has a good understanding of a particular field in this manner, and the other person does not."
Tyler Cowen
Finland's plan to bury spent nuclear fuel for 100,000 years
Final disposal of spent nuclear fuel will start sometime in the next few years. Posiva estimates that it will take 100-120 years before the repository is full. At that point the entire facility will be sealed off, allowing the canisters to lay, hopefully undisturbed, for at least 100,000 years, with their lethal radioactive content isolated from the outside world.
Erika Benke; BBC
Selling the Drama - A eulogy for “humdog,” the poster who led a tech backlash in the days of dial-up
At the time, the essay caused a firestorm among a certain demographic. It was an insult to Silicon Valley hippies, to the then-nascent class of Internet culture reporters (though they weren’t called that then), and to Internet sociologists. And, importantly, it was an insult to the denizens of humdog’s own online village, the WELL, or the Whole Earth ‘Lectronic Link, Stewart Brand’s conferencing system that is today widely called the oldest virtual community…
The conversations that happened online and the people who were having them were products sold by platforms like the WELL, which today still charges a monthly fee, and Internet service providers, which usually charged by the hour. You weren’t really paying to be in a place that was intrinsically special, nor were you paying for the potential of a bond. You were paying for access to the drama and the energy and were charged by the hour for it. The people who were already online were entertainment.
Katherine Dee; The New Atlantis
Art Nouveau’s golden hour: a year-long architecture festival in Brussels
Today, around Brussels, banners on lampposts regularly make the claim, “Capital of Art Nouveau”.
Victoria Woodcock; Financial Times
Liz Phair Predicted the F-ckboy — and Ripped Them to Shreds
Phair figured nobody would ever hear these songs — but that’s why she felt so free to get personal. “I’m singing entirely from the place of the privacy of a bedroom,” Phair says.
Robb Sheffield; Rolling Stone
American wake-up call - Class, money and desperation: a humanities education
In a wonderfully (and, alas, accurately) rendered writing workshop, narrow-mindedness and rigidity pass as sensitivity. For one anomalous character – a somewhat older townie who might be said, at the risk of understatement, to have anger issues – sexual acts are thinly disguised hostility. Indeed, for many of the characters, several of whom have slept with several of the others, sex often arises not from love, or even lust, but from any number of other things, including boredom, confusion, contrariness and – perhaps chiefly – desperation.
That desperation is often economic.
Clifford Thompson; Times Literary Supplement
Casablanca at 75: why we’re still quoting Hollywood’s most quotable film (2017)
Bergman said of the film that “it has a life of its own. There is something mystical about it. It seems to have filled a need, a need that was there before the film, a need that the film filled.” The film’s popularity has only grown, and it seems we still need the spirit of Casablanca. In November 2016, after the terrorist attacks in Paris, thousands shared a clip from Casablanca online. It was the scene in which the patrons of Rick’s café begin singing the Marseillaise in unison to drown out the Nazis.
Pamela Hutchinson; British Film Institute
Night - By Tony Judt (2010)
But then comes the night. … If I allow a stray limb to be mis-placed, or fail to insist on having my midriff carefully aligned with legs and head, I shall suffer the agonies of the damned later in the night. I am then covered, my hands placed outside the blanket to afford me the illusion of mobility but wrapped nonetheless since—like the rest of me—they now suffer from a permanent sensation of cold. I am offered a final scratch on any of a dozen itchy spots from hairline to toe; the Bi-Pap breathing device in my nose is adjusted to a necessarily uncomfortable level of tightness to ensure that it does not slip in the night; my glasses are removed…and there I lie: trussed, myopic, and motionless like a modern-day mummy, alone in my corporeal prison, accompanied for the rest of the night only by my thoughts.
Tony Judt; The New York Review of Books
Decades-long bet on consciousness ends — and it’s philosopher 1, neuroscientist 0
A 25-year science wager has come to an end. In 1998, neuroscientist Christof Koch bet philosopher David Chalmers that the mechanism by which the brain’s neurons produce consciousness would be discovered by 2023. Both scientists agreed publicly on 23 June, at the annual meeting of the Association for the Scientific Study of Consciousness (ASSC) in New York City, that it is an ongoing quest — and declared Chalmers the winner.
Mariana Lenharo; Nature
Read Something Wonderful – A portal to timeless internet writing
An Interintellect members’ fireside coming up with our friend, Matter’s Ben Springwater, on July 19 🌸