Anna Gát: What to Read This Weekend #45
Teachers & mentors, tears & dreams, campuses & war, 'Infinite Jest' & age gaps - Leonard Bernstein, Heidegger, Lea Ypi, Nick Cave, Larry David, Hyperloop, Sam Altman, Malthus, Zola, Moshfegh & more...
Hello my dear friends! I hope you are all well fed and warm and loved as the Holidays are approaching.
The penultimate 2023 Friday Digest finds me in Lisbon, deep in Interintellect work, as we’re shaping our new platform and working with a new team member, Yan, our chief of staff. We’re learning so much from each other, I feel like we’re exploring new dimensions of what team work can be.
My Lisbon friends gathered tonight in one of my favourite restaurants in town where over good food we discussed London and Portofino, Bangalore and Syria, American hospitality and European nomadism, and innovation, creativity, faith…
This week I finally watched Maestro, and enjoyed it passionately. It is a movie as hectic and manic and beautiful as the artistry of its subject. We know that great talent tends to be incomprehensible, but this film also succeeds at showing how creative world builders beget environments around themselves that are just as labyrinthine, just as unique, just as impenetrable as they are. I feel lucky Maestro came out at a time in my life when I am more familiar with New York City as the place is the driving force and source of conflict of so much of the story. If you love classical music, paradoxical genius, and lifelong longing, this is a must watch for you.
Below is my selection of readings from a busy, cosmopolitan week: lots of classical music, mentorship, and New York City, fittingly — scroll all the way down for extra goodies. Let me know what you think! x Anna
Translation is a very modest miracle, but one of the greatest on Earth.
- Borges
On being the writer in the family
The Polish poet Czesław Miłosz famously wrote that “when a writer is born into a family, the family is finished”.
Julian Barnes; New Statesman
Killing pain kills pleasure: On the value of suffering
Upon reflection it becomes clear that there are many experiences in life that give us pleasure, but which are not themselves purely constructed from pleasure. Furthermore, when you remove the suffering from these experiences, they become mundane, pointless, and unrewarding.
Brock Bastian; The Institute of Arts and Ideas
Teacher Influence and Innovation
Here’s a striking fact: through 2022, one in two Nobel prize winners in physics, chemistry, and medicine also had a Nobel prize winner as their academic advisor. What accounts for this extraordinary transmission rate of scientific excellence?
Matt Clancy; New Things
What I Wish Someone Had Told Me
Fight bullshit and bureaucracy every time you see it and get other people to fight it too. Do not let the org chart get in the way of people working productively together.
Sam Altman
Painting is terribly difficult
For centuries, the Salon had ruled over taste, over what was and wasn’t art, and therefore over most artists’ incomes. There had been the famous Salon des Refusés in 1863, but that experiment in imperial permissiveness was not to be repeated. So the Impressionists, following Courbet’s example, put on their own exhibitions, the first in 1874. They made little money but received a good deal of publicity... At the same time, a younger generation of more imaginative dealers came along, looking for new buyers not just on the home market but abroad, especially in London and New York.
Julian Barnes (again!); London Review of Books
What video games taught me
For so many people, playing games in their youth was a first encounter with questions so big and profound that they didn’t even know how to consider them properly at the time.
Imogen West-Knights; New Statesman
Stephen Keese on coachability
Being coachable or mentorable is one of the most valuable traits of students and adults, whether as a solo practitioner, group leader, or team member.
Tyler Cowen
The Joy of Underperforming
Even in a challenging time … the idea of “seasons” is hopeful, suggesting that there can be periods of your life when you emphasize different things—family, work, hobbies, friendship—and one or two of the other areas can shrink for a while.
Olga Khazan, The Atlantic
The past was worse: reproductive health edition
The Tudor dynasty is perhaps the best example of the historical impact of reproductive problems.
Ruxandra Teslo
The Load-Bearing Relationship
We’ve changed the rules of engagement in relationships—the question of what, in the popular imagination, do we owe to the people in our lives? I think the best way to characterize that shift in the social landscape is towards what I would call the contractual moral framework.
Cat Orman; Palladium
The day my students stopped me in my tracks – and changed how I thought about hope
Hope is the opposite of nihilism. Paradoxically, the worse the world goes, the more hopeful you must remain to be able to continue fighting. Being hopeful is not about guaranteeing the right outcome but preserving the right principle: the principle based on which a moral world makes sense.
Lea Ypi; The Guardian
“Maestro” Is a Leonard Bernstein Bio-Pic as Restless as Its Subject
Strange to say, “Maestro” isn’t really about music. (Nor was “Tár.”) The whole thing may be drenched in music, but Cooper is inspired less by the creative source of the sound than by the emotional destination to which it flows—that is, Felicia.
Anthony Lane; The New Yorker
Faith, Hope, and Carnage: The Terrible Beauty of Grief
“For me, vulnerability is essential to spiritual and creative growth, whereas being invulnerable means being shut down, rigid, small. My experience of creating music and writing songs is finding enormous strength through vulnerability. You’re being open to whatever happens, including failure and shame. There’s certainly a vulnerability to that, and an incredible freedom.”
Nick Cave; Church Life Journal
Waiting for Form: How Robert Frost made poetry modern
Husbandry in New England at the turn of the century was difficult for even experienced and dedicated farmers. For a young poet with a growing family, saddled with the trauma of two dead children—a daughter died at the farm just days after her birth—and always at the mercy of his “daily gloominess,” there was little chance for success: “I was a poor farmer in those days, but rich, too. There was plenty of food, and time. […] Lots of time. I was time-rich.”
Tyler Malone; Poetry Foundation
Nations don't get rich by plundering other nations
We are far richer than our ancestors because we know how to make a lot more stuff than we did then — cars and trains and planes and antibiotics and vaccines and reinforced concrete and electricity and running water and TVs and computers and all the rest. And we know how to make stuff more efficiently.
Noah Smith
New neuroscience research upends traditional theories of early language learning in babies
Contrary to what was previously thought, the researchers found that infants do not process individual speech sounds reliably until they are about seven months old. Even at eleven months, when many babies start to say their first words, the processing of these sounds is still sparse.
Eric W. Dolan; PsyPost
For Archbishop of Canterbury, Heading Anglican Church Is ‘High-Wire Act’
It’s not that the archbishop isn’t high-minded. He reached for his iPad to share a quote from the midcentury American theologian and lawyer, William Stringfellow, about the “moral power of death” triumphing over earthly empires (translation: “don’t kid yourself,” Mr. Welby said.) But he also cheerfully noted that he drives a seven-year-old Volkswagen Golf and confessed to getting a speeding ticket.
Mark Landler; The New York Times
Saved by Infinite Jest
In the surreal aftermath of my suicide attempt and amid the haze of my own processing, my best friend visited me in the hospital with a (soft-bound and thus mental-patient-safe) copy of David Foster Wallace’s Infinite Jest under his arm.
Mala Chatterjee; Aeon
The Age Gappers — They say they’re happy. Why is it so hard to believe them?
The age-gap outrage, in part, represents the culmination of a shift in liberal attitudes.
Lila Shapiro; The Cut
In 2024, the Tension Between Macroculture and Microculture Will Turn into War
I never get asked a single question about Substack from mainstream media people (although they are always asking me to contribute). They obviously believe that they have nothing to learn from the microculture.
Ted Gioia
Zola understood our lust for shopping
It is very hard not to be a moralist about capitalism. Veblen and Galbraith fall into the trap: one can hear the distaste in a phrase like “conspicuous consumption”. And these days, we are so accustomed to the word “capitalism” being followed by moralism that it comes as a shock to encounter Zola, who wants to talk to us about economic growth, about the lust for luxury goods, about the power of advertising and the many guises it can take, about the mannerisms of rich shoppers and the working conditions of the poor people who serve them — and yet doesn’t want to preach to us about any of those things. He wants to show you the splendours and the horrors of something; he wants to help you understand.
Agnes Callard; UnHerd
Martha Argerich speaks to Stephen Kovacevich (Gramophone, November 2008) with Jeremy Nicholas (2012)
“I think one’s character is formed early and then you happen to be a performer later. It’s not your free choice. You don’t know what’s going to happen psychologically and emotionally. Maybe you want to learn and move closer to music and, yes, to what you love – but that doesn’t mean that you enjoy the performing.”
James McCarthy; Gramophone
What Are The Limits of Knowledge?
As long as one question that has never been answered exists and there is an entity that can ask the question, the limits of knowledge have not been reached. I think the very last question would have to be: Can we understand how all the pieces of the jigsaw fit together?
Richard Tod; Philosophy Now
Momentum, Consolidation, and Breakout
More generally, when momentum is on your side, people focus on your strengths and forgive your weaknesses. When the momentum stops, they scrutinize the whole thing. This is true for stocks, funds, people, and even essays.
Packy McCormick
The wanderer stilled — Leaving Europe as a young woman, Martine Batchelor was transformed by an encounter with Buddhist meditation (2012)
But it is not as easy as that: it takes more than just a weekend meditation intensive to attain the way. It requires years and years of sitting on a cushion and asking until you develop a sensation of questioning so powerful that it ‘explodes’, as the tradition says. In Korean Zen, they say that to accomplish this you need to have great faith, great courage and great questioning.
Martine Batchelor; Aeon
The Creative Sweet Spot of Dreaming
Study participants asked to “incubate” a problem in their dreams often come up with a useful solution, and both the frequency and complexity of one’s dream recall have been correlated with higher scores on creativity evaluations.
Kristen French; Nautilus
Always Read the Acknowledgments Page
While [Ottessa Moshfegh] remains a mysterious figure, I can assure you she did not write, edit, design and publish Lapvona without a single helping hand. Yes, every author must put in the hours of work at their desk to complete a project.
Grace Bialecki
Longitudinal Associations Between Parenting and Child Big Five Personality Traits
In general, the observed associations between parenting and child Big Five personality were comparable in magnitude to the association between factors such as SES and birth order, and child personality—that is, small. The small associations between environmental factors and personality suggest that personality development in childhood and adolescence may be driven by multiple factors, each of which makes a small contribution.
Multiple; University of California Press
Why Flying Sucks—And What to Do About It
American air travel is getting worse. We now have fewer flights to fewer places with less competition and higher prices—and with overworked pilots, flight attendants, and employees.
Ganesh Sitaraman; The Free Press
‘Curb Your Enthusiasm’ Ending With Season 12 as Larry David Says ‘I Bid You Farewell’
“As ‘Curb’ comes to an end, I will now have the opportunity to finally shed this ‘Larry David’ persona and become the person God intended me to be – the thoughtful, kind, caring, considerate human being I was until I got derailed by portraying this malignant character,” David said in a statement.
Ethan Shanfeld; Variety
The Hyperloop was always a scam
Sure, some short tubes got built in a few places to try to keep squeezing money out of investors and governments, but the only thing they really achieved was to distract people with fantasies while they could’ve been focused on building something real.
Paris Marx; Disconnect
New Cell Atlases Reveal Untold Variety in the Brain and Beyond
Locating and describing the variety of cells is only the first step. Scientists then have to work out what functions the cells serve and how they fit together.
Yasemin Saplakoglu; Quanta
Can One Episode Ruin A TV Show? A Statistical Analysis
One genuinely terrible episode can, indeed, destroy a series, whether it's a repudiation of that show's legacy or a catalyst for its termination. But what makes fans lose interest in a show so quickly? What narrative disruptions cause instant viewer frustration, and are there patterns to these artistic choices?
Daniel Parris
Sniffing women’s tears reduces aggression in men and alters brain activity, groundbreaking study finds
The results of these experiments suggest that human tears could play a vital role in social interactions, particularly in reducing aggression. This aligns with the concept that emotional crying can be a means of non-verbal communication, significantly impacting the behavior of others, especially in close-range interactions.
Eric W. Dolan; PsyPost
Malthusian intuitions are destroying our politics
The irony is that Malthusian-inspired fear of new housing generates the Malthusian circumstance whereby an influx of new residents results in higher housing costs.
Matt Yglesias
Where to start with: Ottessa Moshfegh
Closer in places to the baroque sensibility of Hilary Mantel or Jeanette Winterson, Moshfegh’s prose sings as time and physical reality collapse inwards.
Rosalind Jana; The Guardian
What Heidegger’s Notebooks Don’t Tell Us
If we read the Notebooks at all, we should do so with modest expectations of what is—and what is not—to be found in them.
Michael Weinman; The Hedgehog Review
The Other Woman (2021)
It is true that marriage is a contractual relationship, but how many marriage vows actually specify sexual exclusivity? I have never yet been to a wedding in which the couple explicitly promised each other not to sleep around; certainly I did not promise this. And yet, when it comes to the many things that are explicitly promised—to love, honor, obey, care for, etc.—people rarely end up insisting on their contractual rights.
Agnes Callard (again!); The Point
Why Antisemitism Sprouted So Quickly on Campus
Common enemy identity politics is arguably the worst way of thinking one could possibly teach to young people in a multi-ethnic democracy such as the United States.
Jonathan Haidt
On Minor Detail — The novel that helped me and my college students talk about the war.
What ensued over the next couple of hours was the opposite of the stories we’ve been hearing about what has been happening on college campuses over the past months.
Daniel Torday; Slate
A brief history of ‘lived experience’ (2021)
The term ‘lived experience’, translated from the German Erlebnis, can be traced back to The Second Sex by the French existentialist Simone de Beauvoir, a seminal work of second-wave feminism. De Beauvoir argued that in order to answer the question ‘what is a woman?’ one had to dig much deeper than mere biological characteristics.
James Innes-Smith; The Spectator
Moving Back Home Isn’t Just a Fallback Plan (2022)
[Rebecca Mead]’s memoir messes with the conventional notion of homecoming as a matter of choosing ease, comfort, and rootedness over adventure, growth, and drive.
Stephanie Hayes; The Atlantic
'Vivat Volker!' - The Hidden Portraits of Volker Hermes (CLICK, it’s wonderful)
“Portrait paintings are the only pictorial testimonies of people until the invention of photography. I find it fascinating to be able to have a look at people from so long ago.”
Nick Cox; Period Portraits
How To Be Good When the World is Evil?
Luther argues that we should consult our conscience, rather than outsource moral questions to experts. But Luther also admits that the self is hardly a reliable source of authority itself; it’s just “less wrong” than others.
Zohar Atkins
Pile them high! — The case against the publishing conglomerates
Dan Sinykin has written a history of American publishing in the free-market era that began with the market liberalizations of the 1980s and the effect of conglomeration – the combination, through purchase and merger, of business entities – on what and how we read. “This is not a tale about a Golden Age ransacked by barbarians”, he says. “This is … a tale of transformation.” … [He] demonstrates, for instance, that autofiction is “the perfect form for conglomerate marketing”. Authors whose subject is their own lives feel – and, crucially, appear – central, which allows conglomerate publishers to “obscure the unsexy conglomerate rationalization” of the publishing process behind the myth of the romantic author.
Tadzio Koelb; Times Literary Supplement
How to support kids to be brave
Our natural impulse as caregivers is to protect children from danger and harm, no matter the cost… To truly grow, our young people need to enter uncertain situations and learn that they have the internal resources to cope with them. We adults need to step back into the wings and let them test their mettle against the world.
Sarah Rose Cavanagh; Psyche
Google DeepMind used a large language model to solve an unsolved math problem
Large language models have a reputation for making things up, not for providing new facts. Google DeepMind’s new tool, called FunSearch, could change that. It shows that they can indeed make discoveries—if they are coaxed just so, and if you throw out the majority of what they come up with.
Will Douglas Heaven; MIT Technology Review
Looking for Alice
As Philip Glass says about his mentor, Nadia Boulanger, “it was like having a brain transplant”.
Henrik Karlsson
Walking in Kuwait-City with Anwar
“As I walked alone, an old lady who was sitting on a bench called me in a way as if she knew me. I trusted her genuine tone and went closer to her. She started shooting casual questions like how am I doing and how things are which got me confused. I truly felt like she knows who I am with her warm grandmother-like tone she was using with me. I wanted to be polite, so I sat next to her to continue the conversation and go with the flow. We had a good conversation for around 20 minutes, I kissed her forehead (it’s a way to show respect towards the elders here), and went on my way.”
Anwar AlKandari; The Flâneurs Project
The original lyrics to ‘Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas’ weren’t very merry at all
[Judy Garland] objected to the lyrics … saying they were too depressing and if she were to sing them, “Margaret will cry, and they’ll think I’m a monster”.
Maddy Shaw Roberts; Classic FM
Asimov’s Empire, Asimov’s Wall
Over the course of many decades, Asimov groped or engaged in other forms of unwanted touching with countless women, often at conventions, but also privately and in the workplace. Within the science fiction community, this is common knowledge, and whenever I bring it up in a room of older fans, the response is usually a series of nods. The number of such incidents is unknown, but it can be plausibly estimated in the hundreds, and thus may match or exceed the long list of books that Asimov wrote.
Alec Nevala-Lee; JSTOR Daily
How Lego builds a new Lego set
Many Lego fans are vocal about their preference for printed parts over stickers, and there’s always annoyance when a set aimed at adults uses any stickers at all. Here, your “Polaroid Land Camera,” “OneStep” or “1000,” and the exposure dial’s white and black EV marks are all sticky labels, not printed tiles.
Sean Hollister; The Verge
Life With Father
On that day, seeing my parents cry for the first time, I felt my world lurch on its foundations. For the next week the grownups still gathered, still smoked and drank—in fact, more than ever—but now it was different. They were distracted and tetchy with us; they stared into space, seeming to be looking at something awful. Maybe being a grown-up wasn’t so much fun after all.
Jamie Bernstein; Town & Country
Tuberculosis
In richer countries, the impact of tuberculosis has been reduced significantly over history, but in poorer parts of our world, it continues to be a major challenge even today: it causes an estimated 1.2 million deaths annually.
Saloni Dattani, Fiona Spooner, Hannah Ritchie and Max Roser; Our World In Data
How science fiction helped write AI’s first rule book
Shortly before the international artificial intelligence summit started at Bletchley Park last month, I went to grab a quick bite at a nearby pub. A man sat down opposite me and pulled out a crumpled paperback. On the cover was Isaac Asimov, one of science fiction’s most famous authors. Surely, this was no coincidence. Asimov was ahead of his time when, during the mid-20th century, he anticipated the powerful role that AI would have on our lives. In his books, he envisaged a series of laws that would ensure robots did not hurt or harm humans, but would obey them.
Věra Jourová; Financial Times
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