Anna Gát: What to Read This Weekend #39
Fathers and mothers, Middle East and vibe-shifts, status and boundaries, intellectuals and Instagram face, Gilmore Girls and free will, civilisation and TikTok — and more...
Hi folks,
I’m back in Europe, just in time for all the rain and the cold…
To my great delight, my US visa got approved, on the first try! From now on I shall always feel “exceptional” 😁
I’m reading Hilary Mantel’s An Experiment In Love this week and a little Girard and Umberto Eco.
Come and join us at some newly listed Interintellect hangouts: Tara Isabella Burton’s fiction writing workshop, or my salon host training!
And from my reading list of the past week, excellent pieces for you below. Enjoy! x Anna
Draft for a Statement of Human Obligation
Obligation is concerned with the needs in this world of the souls and bodies of human beings, whoever they may be. For each need there is a corresponding obligation; for each obligation a corresponding need. There is no other kind of obligation, so far as human affairs are concerned.
Simone Weil; on PBS
We Moderns Are Status-Drunk (2021)
My key hypothesis is this: evolution had humans use their absolute income/wealth to judge their relative status… The assumption that evolution had humans estimate their relative status vis their absolute income/wealth predicts many trends and unique styles of the industrial era, including rising lifespans, lower fertility, falling violence, more school, more effort into art/travel/invention/etc., and much more. We now have a deeper understanding of how and why we modern humans have a different style from ancient humans.
Robin Hanson
Putting out the Middle East fires, a teaspoon at a time
Ten years ago, filming the final episode of The Story of the Jews for the BBC and PBS, I visited the Max Rayne school in Jerusalem, run by the inspirational Hand in Hand Center for Jewish-Arab Education. Jewish and Arab pupils are taught in Arabic and Hebrew and the governing board and teaching staff are drawn from both communities. No one pretended the school was a cultural utopia…
Knowing that the war has now sabotaged that achievement, it’s tempting to throw up one’s hands in despair. But, if anything, the war has only made the need for acts of mutual co-operation embodied by the work of Hand in Hand and EcoPeace more urgent than ever.
Simon Schama; Financial Times
The Age of Instagram Face (2019)
There was something strange, I said, about the racial aspect of Instagram Face—it was as if the algorithmic tendency to flatten everything into a composite of greatest hits had resulted in a beauty ideal that favored white women capable of manufacturing a look of rootless exoticism. “Absolutely,” Smith said. “We’re talking an overly tan skin tone, a South Asian influence with the brows and eye shape, an African-American influence with the lips, a Caucasian influence with the nose, a cheek structure that is predominantly Native American and Middle Eastern.”
Jia Tolentino; The New Yorker
Nerd culture is murdering intellectuals
So dominate has been the nerd’s ascension that it’s only occasionally remarked upon. You don’t notice the water you’re swimming in, and all that. I’ll admit: a nerd-dominated culture has certainly resulted in plenty of cultural boons, like the rise of science fiction or the prominence of science popularizers in the culture…
My point is not that nerdom itself is bad compared to other choices, but that, like any dominate cultural force, it is totalitarian, and even moreso, that it poses a unique problem of capturing a segment of the population that should be caring about things a bit more. . . artistic. Aesthetic. Abstract. And I’m a big enough nerd to admit it.
Erik Hoel
Jürgen Habermas: The important thinker’s rise to the pinnacle of philosophy
In Germany, Habermas is as solid a national icon as the Brandenburg Gate. In 2019, on the occasion of his 90th birthday, a veritable collective tribute to him was organized and surrounded by unusual media hype. Germany is a country that loves its intellectuals, perhaps because they are becoming increasingly rare. The fact that this birthday coincided with the launch of a 1,752-page book in which he reviews the entire history of philosophy of the last 2,500 years … elicits a mixture of admiration and incredulity.
Fernando Vallespín; El País
Liberalism is losing the information war
In the film [Don’t Be a Sucker], a man watching the show — representing the American everyman — meets a Hungarian refugee who warns him about how anti-minority scaremongering was how the Nazis came to power in Germany. Meanwhile, the film’s narrator extols American diversity and the inherent strength of a liberal society. Don’t Be a Sucker remains highly influential to this day, and was widely circulated as a warning against fascism in the aftermath of the Charlottesville demonstrations in 2017… Don’t Be a Sucker, the film that progressive youth were sharing so widely in 2017, was made and promoted by the United States Department of War….
“Via TikTok, Chinese state media pushed divisive information about U.S. politicians ahead of midterm elections.” … [The] government needs to act to limit the ability of the totalitarian powers to push their own messaging to our people.
Noah Smith
Boundary Issues: How boundaries became the rules for mental health—and explain everything
Books, podcasts, articles, social media posts, and talk shows are all sharing the message of boundaries: set them, communicate them, enforce them, respect them…
First, we should talk about where I did not find “boundaries”: most major schools of psychoanalysis…
Critiquing boundaries risks implying you condone abuse, or are blind to power. The language of boundaries is all over the arbitration of abuse: boundaries are a clear and convenient way to assert that your body isn’t simply available to everyone—the protective bubble of law and morality does not yield because someone has power over you…
Boundaries dropped suddenly into popular culture in the early ’90s, amid an efflorescence of self-help… Boundaries are a Band-Aid in a bad world: if you can’t expect people to care for you and treat you well and protect you from violence or scarcity, you can at least protect yourself from their needs.
Lily Scherlis; Parapraxis
Has It Ever Been Harder to Make a Living As An Author?
“Especially after an author sells their first book, we always caution them against quitting their day job, even if it’s a big advance,” said longtime Knopf editor Jenny Jackson…
Kate Dwyer; Esquire
All Classics Are Funny
By abstraction, by reputation, by mediation, readers believe they know War and Peace without ever having to open War and Peace, and one of the main things they know is that it’s a humorless book.
We might call this phenomenon the Jane Austen Effect. Austen’s romances will always be read because of her wit, which is transcendent. Yet most adaptations would have you believe the romance comes first, that hers is a heartfelt oeuvre sprinkled with pithy zingers.
Joel Cuthbertson; The. Bulwark
How Do You Take Revenge for a Dead Child? By Killing Other People’s Children?
Palestinian Bassam Aramin and Israeli Rami Elhanan have each lost a daughter in the Middle East conflict. Instead of succumbing to bitterness, they have joined hands to work for peace.
Jörg Schindler (good name for this!); Spiegel
How Social Media Shapes Economic Perception: tiktok, inflation vs jobs, and discontent
“The question is not why people are gloomy. Duh, high inflation. The question is, why are they so much more gloomy than in the past when inflation was high. It's not new that people care about the level of prices. Look at patterns in the past surveys, that doesn't explain it… Really, truly, people, the economy is not as bad as in the 1970s/early 1980s. We do not have stagflation. We do not have a decade of big increases in the price level. But the news heard now is way worse.”
Kyla Scanlon
The biggest fear of a parent in poverty: Being seen as neglectful
I also worried about those judging eyes because my daughter was considered underweight by standard growth charts, and she wore clothes from the clearance racks at Walmart. It was difficult for me to keep up with her need for new clothes and shoes, gym shoes, boots, and a winter coat. I feared that she would be seen as a “bad kid” or “the poor kid” from a broken home and that she would be treated differently because of that…
Those times that we really struggled — when I went to bed exhausted, cold and hungry — I feared that someone would find out about us living in that awful studio apartment. I was scared they’d find out about the peanut butter sandwiches, or the mold in the walls that made us sick, and come and take my daughter away from me. And so we continued to struggle.
Stephanie Land; The Washington Post
Robert Sapolsky is Wrong
In 1946, Bertrand Russell claimed that a scientific understanding of human physiology would reveal ordinary physical determinism at work in every human choice. To Russell, where there’s determinism, there can’t be any free will. And determinism seems to work the same way in human physiology as it does anywhere else, without little gaps for magic. So Russell saw no room for free will in a deterministic world informed by science. Sapolsky makes basically the same claim, but he illustrates the point with examples of biological mechanisms. None of the particular examples are either necessary or sufficient for the overall argument, as Sapolsky says: “You can’t disprove free will with a ‘scientific result’ from genetics or any other scientific discipline. But put all the scientific results together, from all the relevant scientific disciplines, and there’s no room for free will.”
What exactly does “no room” mean? And what kind of “space” would free will occupy? We are not told.
Stuart Doyle; Quillette
Ethics without humanism: Why our willingness to let animals suffer is pure bigotry
Perhaps this is what is ultimately wrong with the act-utilitarian ethos. The happiness of a great number of sentient beings is a worthy goal, but when human beings get involved in its single-minded pursuit, it leaves little space for their individual happiness.
Simone Gubler; Times Literary Supplement
All My Life, I’ve Watched Violence Fail the Palestinian Cause: After Hamas’s attack, I lost hope. Then I started hearing from Israelis and Palestinians.
I grew up and read more widely, I began to admire peaceful humanists such as Martin Luther King Jr., Gandhi, and Nelson Mandela. They showed me that compassion and humanity can lead to freedom.
All my life, I’ve watched violence fail the Palestinian cause.
John Aziz; The Atlantic
How women were left out of the story of evolution
Maternal milk may have played a key role in the creation of modern society, Bohannon argues. While many historians believe that cities emerged in response to agriculture, which enabled people to produce the surplus food needed to feed an urban population, she counters that the real driver of urban development may have been wet-nursing.
Sophie McBain; New Statesman
Algorithms Hijacked My Generation. I Fear For Gen Alpha.
It often happens slowly. First, they fill their lips. Next, they need to even it out with a nose job. Then botox; then a brow lift; and it goes on.
Then one day they wake up and realize they have rearranged their entire face for Instagram. They don’t recognize their reflection. Or even like it.
Freya India; After Babel
‘In the last four weeks language has deserted me’: Adania Shibli on being shut down
When she was a child, Adania Shibli encountered her first storyteller on her family’s almond and olive farm in Palestine. It was her mother. “When we didn’t have electricity, my mom would gather us around, because we were afraid and we couldn’t read. She would tell us stories until the light came back.” …
In mid-October, she was due to be awarded the LiBeraturpreis, an award for authors from the global south given out by the German literary organisation LitProm, at a ceremony at the Frankfurt book fair. She was abruptly disinvited “in a brief email”, as she puts it, with LitProm citing the war between Israel and Palestine. A letter criticising the postponement of her award was signed by more than 1,500 authors including Nobel prize winners Annie Ernaux, Abdulrazak Gurnah and Olga Tokarczuk.
John Freeman; The Guardian
The Dogs of War: Traveling Route 232 in the days after the Hamas attacks
To someone who’s never experienced such a national mobilization, it is heady in its totalizing omnipresence: Gaza, the war, the hostages, the looming invasion everyone knew was coming, again the hostages, fucking Bibi, the atrocities, the friends and family every Israeli knew who’d been murdered or kidnapped, what unit everyone’s friends were serving in, whether you were able to find body armor, the war again … it was all anyone could think or talk about. It was the only thing that mattered.
Antonio García Martínez; Tablet
On Retreat: A contemplation of the transformative power of retreat to clarify the foggy bends of life.
I come from a life where the priority around focusing on getting it right was misplaced. It dulled out the other nuances required for creating meaningful outcomes. The colours from my past work life creep up during my painting. Each has its context and importance. Today, when I look back, I think, what if I squinted and stepped back to see clearly?
Irene K
On the trajectory of discrimination: A meta-analysis and forecasting survey capturing 44 years of field experiments on gender and hiring decisions
A preregistered meta-analysis, including 244 effect sizes from 85 field audits and 361,645 individual job applications, tested for gender bias in hiring practices in female-stereotypical and gender-balanced as well as male-stereotypical jobs from 1976 to 2020… [B]oth scientists and laypeople overestimated the continuation of bias against female candidates. Instead, selection bias in favor of male over female candidates was eliminated and, if anything, slightly reversed in sign starting in 2009 for mixed-gender and male-stereotypical jobs in our sample. Forecasters further failed to anticipate that discrimination against male candidates for stereotypically female jobs would remain stable across the decades.
Multiple - see link
Why I am now a Christian
The more time I spent with them — people such as Christopher Hitchens and Richard Dawkins — the more confident I felt that I had made the right choice. For the atheists were clever. They were also a great deal of fun.
So, what changed? Why do I call myself a Christian now?
Ayaan Hirsi Ali; UnHerd
How to Predict the Future: "We overestimate our ability to keep secrets"
Some projects are too risky. If the premise is, “If successful, this would be transformative, but in order to be successful I have to violate the following laws of physics,” or, “I have to solve a problem that Nobel laureates haven't managed to solve in the last 50 years,” that's going to be deemed too risky. There’s some Goldilocks zone of appropriate probabilities, probably under 50% and over 5%.
There are then problems that aren't risky enough, that are seen as “not ARPA-hard,” even if those problems, if solved, could be transformative.
Really, just from a policy point of view, what you would love is low-risk, high-reward research.
Santi Ruiz; Statecraft
Why Civilization Is Older Than We Thought (2021)
Historians and social theorists have proposed materialist explanations for the rise of civilization in the Near East—namely, the accumulation of economic surplus. The fertile alluvial soil deposited with the yearly floods by the Tigris and Euphrates provided abundant harvests. Similarly, historians link the reliable flooding of the Nile River to the rise of civilization in Egypt one thousand years later. These river systems, together with modern-day Syria, Lebanon, Israel, Palestine, and Jordan, are sometimes called the Fertile Crescent, so named because the region is thought to be a common cultural and technological area where early agriculture and civilization developed hand-in-hand. Göbekli Tepe lies in this region as well, though it predates evidence of agriculture.
Samo Burja; Palladium
500+ Books Are Mentioned on 'Gilmore Girls' and People Are Reading Them All
If you’re a religious follower of Gilmore Girls and find yourself always flicking it on as soon as the temperatures drop in September, then you know damn well that Rory reads a lot of books. Her bookshelf is teeming with titles, she converted her dresser into a library system, and piles of books are just waiting to be discovered under her bed. She’s always reading books, talking about books, smelling books… But she’s not just reading any book on the shelf. Oh no…Rory reads a vast amount of literature throughout the series, from the pilot to A Year In The Life. And throughout the entire series, you can catch her either reading, holding, referencing, or pointing to different books of hers, adding up to a stunningly long list of 518 books.
Kiersten Hickman; The Everygirl
Is Campus Rage Fueled by Middle Eastern Money?
From 2015–2020, institutions that accepted undisclosed funds from authoritarian donors had, on average, 250 percent more antisemitic incidents than those institutions that did not.
At least 200 American colleges and universities illegally withheld information on approximately $13 billion in undocumented contributions from foreign regimes, many of which are authoritarian.
Campuses that accept undisclosed money are on average ~85 percent more likely to see campaigns “targeting academic scholars for sanction, including campaigns to investigate, censor, demote, suspend, or terminate.
Bari Weiss; The Free Press
Anxiety and Irresponsibility: What Is to Be Done About Literary Moralism? (2022)
This is neither to say that fiction can’t influence reality (it can and does) nor that the choice to embrace historico-political constraints can’t be a marvelous one, but simply that literature’s potential for influence is not derived from a moral purity test—it is derived from aesthetic success. Said another way: novels can only influence the real world if they captivate, and beauty is the necessary and sufficient condition to captivation. Historico-political constraints are optional.
A. Natasha Joukovsky; Literary Hub
A brain injury removed my ability to perceive time. Here's what it's like in a world without it
Whether we’re managing a demanding career, caring for children, or both, most of us have dreamt of not being bound to the metaphorical hourglass through which our day seems to slip. But what we actually want is more time, not the absence of time altogether. Being unaware of the passage of time felt like being trapped in a single chaotic moment that never ends.
Meghan Beaudry; Salon
What Hath Liam Neeson Wrought?
“I think this is part of the Taken phenomenon, from the movie starring Liam Neeson. In that movie his teenage daughter is kidnapped while in Paris with a friend and Neeson goes on a rampage to hunt her down, killing lots of bad guys in the process… This movie scenario might seem like every dad’s worst nightmare, but in many ways it’s actually many dad’s greatest fantasy — the idea of heroically saving your daughter from a brutal life as a sex slave.”
Lenore Skenazy; Free Range Kids
The First Online Writer
I’ve been on a quest to make sense of Justin’s past by surfing through his HTML maze on links.net, which has over 4,794 pages. I’ve read every journal entry of his from 1996. I see him as the forgotten hero of online writers. Since I found his site in 2021, he inspired me to upload unpolished personal logs to my website everyday.
If you write online, you need to know the story of Justin Hall. It’s filled with inspirations and warnings about unfiltered self-expression. It might even encourage you to push the boundaries of what you're willing to share.
Michael Dean