Anna Gát: What to Read this Weekend #11
Good art by bad people, coming out of depression, Ryan McGinley's generation, Nietzsche vs Kant, psychoanalyst parents, Jack Nicholson's daughter, brains, butts, sperm robots, Rorty, Rawls, and more
Hi everyone! Greetings from the Lisbon heatwave where I’ve spent the past week doing seemingly endless life/company admin, hiring an excellent new engineer (yay!), prepping for exciting Interintellect salons (with Jennifer Banks, for example; see more about her book Natality below) — and reading Emily St John Mandel’s Station Eleven, which structurally reminds me of Rushdie, Powers, and many other “ensemble cast” novelists, but which I find unique, refined, and deceptively deep in its tone and manner of storytelling.
This Friday, too, I have some delicious recommendations for you. Let’s begin…
In defense of the childless - New books urge us to reconsider how we think about birth and motherhood
[Jennifer Banks] admires Arendt, who saw new life as a reminder of our “supreme capacity,” and reveres Nietzsche, who wondered, in Banks’s words, if we could “love our lives so entirely” that we’d be “willing to be infinitely reborn.” Yet some of the feminist firebrands she extols in later chapters would have rejected these abstractions.
Becca Rothfeld; The Washington Post
What’s Life Like for the Child of a Psychoanalyst?
In recounting her father’s “therapeutic” system, which Alice Wexler refers to throughout the book as “the slap,” she recognizes both the troubling nature of her father’s approach as well as his difficulty in keeping his story straight. Sifting through his research archives, notebooks, and memoir drafts, Alice explains that in one manuscript, Milton described his approach with Nedda as follows: “I slapped her hard, sometimes very hard.”
Alana Pockros; The Nation
It’s Okay to Like Good Art by Bad People
We’re at the point when we could use a little more of the art-for-art’s-sake spirit; could let ourselves luxuriate in sensuality, beauty, and form; should offer more resistance to the pressure to find and deliver socially useful messages. I look back with a certain chagrin at how, as a young critic, I delighted in bucking my high-minded education by hunting down traces of a writer’s mixed motives, bad faith, petty and not so petty obfuscations in his writing. I took hubristic pride in my gotcha criticism and my eagle eye. But what used to feel subversive now feels like an imperative: Either scan the text for signs of immorality or be suspected of reactionary tendencies. You were hoping for aesthetic transport? Back to the consciousness-raising session with you!
Judith Shulevitz; The Atlantic
Every little helps - The advantages of gradual reform over long-term thinking
One response to longtermism, not so much a critique as a partial surrender, is to argue that the best preparation for the long run is to invest in human talent, high-quality institutions and flexible responses today. Those moves may not always look like long-run investments, but perhaps they are.
Tyler Cowen; Times Literary Supplement
No, Mornings Don’t Make You Moral
Early birds aren’t ethically superior. And, to the extent that other research suggests that they are, it may just be that they are luckier: modern society, for the most part, is built around their preferences.
Maria Konnikova; The New Yorker
Why the Brain’s Connections to the Body Are Crisscrossed
What would happen if the two-dimensional planes representing brain and body were folded in opposite directions as mirror images and connected point to point without crossed pathways?
R. Douglas Fields; Quanta
The Contingency of Selfhood
It has often seemed necessary to choose between Kant and Nietzsche, to make up one’s mind – at least to that extent – about the point of being human. But Freud gives us a way of looking at human beings which helps us evade the choice.
Richard Rorty; London Review of Books (1986)
Tessa Gourin, Jack Nicholson’s Estranged Daughter, Has a Lot to Say
“From a very young age, my mother told me not to tell anyone that I have this famous dad,” Gourin tells The Daily Beast. “I knew he was powerful and Daddy Warbucks-level rich, so I kind of equated my life to being like Orphan Annie’s.”
Helen Holmes; The Daily Beast
What Was (and Is) the ‘It’ Girl?
“I’ve always considered it a derogatory term,” says William Norwich, who wrote gossip columns for the New York Daily News and the Post beginning in 1985. Like the label socialite — also verboten — “It” girl can be reductive, demeaning, and, insofar as it has no real male equivalent, sexist. But it may also be that “It” girl is less sexist than gendered, a category created for women by women. Maybe the single biggest change in the colloquial use of the phrase since its origins in the 1920s is its surprising segregation from the male gaze.
Matthew Schneier; New York Magazine
Photographer Ryan McGinley’s Unfiltered Debut Show ‘The Kids Are Alright’ Defined a Generation. 20 Years Later, the Artist Takes a Look Back
I came out in ’98 but was having trouble finding my queer peeps. A friend told me Earsnot was gay. I didn’t believe it, so I skated over to Astor to find him. I sheepishly asked Kunle if he was gay, he hesitated and said who was asking? I told him I was gay and we both freaked out, jumped around, hugged, and had an immediate bond.
Ryan McGinley; Artnet
Our Singular Century - How to connect the dots when they’re spinning out of control
All of us, and especially the younger generations on whom the full burden of the future must inevitably fall, need to develop the lucidity of thought and the steadiness of character required for effective action in a society that staggers and lurches through our chaotic era like a drunk sailor in rough seas on a slick deck.
Walter Russell Mead; Tablet
Bottom-fondling audacity: how did Lavinia Fontana get away with it?
Lavinia Fontana’s nudes were so unprecedented that experts argue about how she even got access to models. For a woman to be an artist in the 1500s was rare, for her to work with naked models unheard of.
Jonathan Jones; The Guardian
Do we really need Rawls?
The difficulty, for those wishing to fight back, is how to avoid seeming like a tepid centrist. To put that another way, how to be a liberal democrat without sounding like a Liberal Democrat?
William Davies; New Statesman
The first babies conceived with a sperm-injecting robot have been born
The main goal of automating IVF, say entrepreneurs, is simple: it’s to make a lot more babies. About 500,000 children are born through IVF globally each year, but most people who need help having kids don’t have access to fertility medicine or can’t pay for it.
“How do we go from half a million babies a year to 30 million?’” wonders David Sable, a former fertility doctor who now runs an investment fund.
Antonio Regalado; MIT Technology Review
Art is eating itself
I am not shocked that the Tate Modern contains modern art. I do not want to limit artistic expression or burn piles of children’s books – in fact, my problem is exactly that artistic expression is excruciatingly limited at the moment.
I am simply observing that certain ‘editorial’ or ‘curatorial’ decisions have been made that reflect on a very particular, comprehensive worldview – a reductive ideology with which we are now over-familiar.
Emma Webb; The Spectator
A few thoughts on depression
I believe that many depressed people are constantly afflicted by the crushing negative feedback of a negative personal narrative. And I've found that the biggest single thing that helps people out of depression is the scrapping of the negative narrative and its replacement with a positive alternative narrative.
Noah Smith
Your Brain Is Shaped Like Nobody Else’s
Researchers ... have been able to spot how anatomical differences in white matter can correlate to how well we regulate our emotions, our ability to make decisions, our skill in recognizing faces, our ability to pay attention and be alert, and, to some extent, our capacity to accurately reflect on our own cognition and experience.
Sofia Quaglia; Nautilus