Anna Gát's "Smart Watch": What to Read This Week #63
Power, music, the nature of time. Motherhood, entrepreneurship, influence, Hollywood, and - of course - weirdos...
Hello friends,
This was a busy weekend in New York City. We have a lot of fun things prepared for you…
First of all, if you’re in New York City: SAVE THE DATE! October 6… Tickets coming soon ✨
Some more events: online/offline, series or one off, public or members only…
- on the American Millennium - TICKETS
- on Jane Austen’s Emma - TICKETS
Our friends from the Georgetown University Latin America Leadership Program will lead a fireside on Mario Vargas Llosa’s political thought - TICKETS
Kinderintellect in New York City — a “bring your own baby/child” picnic for the parents in Interintellect - RSVP
An online host training about offline hosting, with me - RSVP
Friend-Finding & Self-Discovery Mingle - TICKETS
My online salon on 90s movies, and what makes them so special - TICKETS
Renée DiResta on her new book Invisible Rulers: The People Who Turn Lies into Reality. - TICKETS
NEW! Hope Axis episode: just uploaded (haven’t had time to do the timestamps yet, but that and the audio version are both incoming!) —
And now, let’s read…
Max Richter on the Music That Made Him
He tends to describe his music as hopeful, though it is the kind of hope that follows crisis—hope for emotional relief, political reconciliation, ecological repair.
Jazz Monroe; Pitchfork
Entrepreneurship changed the way I think
Voting with your feet to ditch the well-worn path and try something bold and risky, something that can only succeed through persistence and luck, creates an internal tension that can only be resolved through the adoption of optimism, at least over the long term. Short term paranoia and pessimism is still warranted – plenty of things are trying to kill your company. The unity of building a thing you believe in appeals strongly to me.
Casey Handmer
The First Nuclear Clock Will Test if Fundamental Constants Change
The thorium nuclear state’s energy is far more sensitive to variations in the fundamental constants than that of any atomic state. But scientists will need to improve the precision of their measurements even further to notice changes more subtle than those already ruled out by conventional atomic clocks… Eventually, though, some old Cold War byproducts could yield the first evidence for deeper, still undiscovered physics that underlies the universe we see. “We call them constants, but why?” Hudson asked. “Nothing is ever that simple when you zoom in and look at it.”
Joseph Howlett; Quanta
How motherhood was weaponised
I recognise this weaponisation, something that mothers often willingly partake in, forming cages “for ourselves and each other out of obligation and expectation, which we call duty or love”.
Megan Gibson; The New Statesman
It is Forbidden to Forbid — Why People Are Going to Make Art With and Without AI
[Beyond] this paragraph I don’t want to concern myself with a text that forbids artists to work in a specific way. The same text has been written by the same people when electric guitars, mobile phone cameras, video games, books, and any other new medium came along. There will always be a gatekeeper. I will instead focus on pushing back against one single line of argumentation in the article: the need for decision making to make art. The need for control. I think this, too, is a far too simplistic and entitled understanding of art. And I can’t have that particular gate kept. I want both, art born out of control and art out of control.
Martin Pichlmair
‘Weird’ Is the New Normal
The most influential social movements of recent decades are symbolic crusades that seek not so much to change the material basis of people’s lives, but to change the way we feel, think, and behave.
Ashley Frawley; Compact
Libraries of matter
Libraries contain books, yes. But they also contain latex rubber, carbon fiber fabrics, and graphene aerogel. And in some materials libraries you can cut, cast, drill, sand, scrape, and sculpt too.
Virginia Postrel; Works In Progress
How networks really work
Social scientists Nicholas Christakis and James H. Fowler have found that while networks do have six degrees of separation, they have only three degrees of influence. Friends influence friends. They also influence friends of friends. And they can influence friends of friends of friends.
Henry Oliver
‘It’s a very tough time in Hollywood’: inside the shrinking world of the TV writers’ room
A screenwriter, who has worked on several high-profile shows and wishes to remain anonymous, tells the Guardian that some of his former co-workers are no longer getting hired. “These are people who are not breaking in – they worked on the same shows that I did right before,” he says in a phone interview. “Now they’re saying, ‘We’re not getting any work. Our agents and managers are saying staffing is tricky out there.’
David Smith; The Guardian
Why Does Horrific Abuse Persist in the Most Gender Equal Countries?
For over nine years, Gisèle Pélicot’s husband invited online strangers to rape her while drugged. Hundreds of men saw these advertisements yet stayed silent and allowed the continued torture.
Alice Evans
The Unfreedom of Liberty
Today the word ‘freedom’ is pronounced with confidence, even nonchalance, as something that requires no definition or characterization. The times where philosophers were inquiring about the true meaning of freedom and trying to seize its elusive nature are long forgotten. Modern Western man has few certainties in his life; yet one of them is that he knows what it means to be a free man. Yet when the average modern man talks about freedom, he’s actually usually talking about liberty.
Arianna Marchetti; Philosophy Now
The Contingency Contingent
“Months of reading and populating spreadsheets turned me spreadsheet-like myself.” … “Who managed the management consultants”?
Leigh Claire La Berge; n + 1
The Constitution Gave Us This Mess
The problem, added Rana, is that the Constitution’s “countermajoritarian checks and constraints are far more extreme than comparable constitutional democracies in a way that inhibits that underlying value of one person, one vote, and makes it very hard for organized majorities to influence policy.” At the same time, continued Rana, the Constitution “limits or delays policy and mobilizes and facilitates rule by particular empowered minorities.”
Luke Pickrell; Jacobin
Lover and hater — The complete works of Baudelaire, the first modern urban poet
In fact, long before he was anointed the modern Parisian poet, Baudelaire was himself all over the map, hardly limited to the Left Bank. Legends had him born in India – this wasn’t the case, but his family did ship him off in that direction around the time he turned twenty, partly to escape his mounting debts in Paris – and even living deep in the American woods. In a biographical note he claimed to have visited Mauritius, La Réunion and Sri Lanka. His travels no doubt contributed to the faraway dreaming with which he opens the prose version of his celebrated “L’Invitation au voyage”
Seth Whidden; Times Literary Supplement
Twelve Months to Fall Back in Love with America
Bearded, greasy, and leaning against my filthy old rucksack out in the sand by the empty highway, I wasn’t the 25-year-old the high school guidance counselor might hold up as a portrait of success… But on that day in Nevada, something in me began to change.
A.M. Hickman; The Free Press