Anna Gát's "Smart Watch": What to Read This Weekend #65
Cynicism, patriarchy, Sally Rooney, Hitler, hardware, British stagnation, Hilary Mantel as mentor, Aristotle as a leftie, nuclear AI, Twin Peaks, nannies, machos, depression, screenwriting, and more
Hello from the air, friends, en route to Miami… The couple next to me is very violently making out so excuse any typos.
Lot of fun things coming up on Interintellect! Packy McCormick and I will discuss the next American Millennium.
British literary critic Henry Oliver and Hollywood screenwriter Michael Sonnenschein join to lead a salon on whatever happened to good storytelling.
In New York, offline, Jennifer Frey, Musa al-Gharbi, Scott Barry Kaufman, Julia Sonnevend, Shadi Hamid, Tara Isabella Burton, John Ganz, and I will talk about the true nature of power in 2024: religion, education, fame.
I’m also doing a conversation on 90s cinema, an exceptional decade — we’ll explore why.
And videos from
Nadya Williams on cultural Christianity and the early Church
Agnes Callard and Irina Dumitrescu on academia, women, mentors, and whether Eros is an intellectual monster
And my excellent conversation with Musa al-Gharbi on his new book We Have Never Been Woke on my new podcast The Hope Axis
And now, let’s read!
Silicon Valley is an aristocratic culture
[Tanner Greer] emphasizes how broader culture and individual values reinforce each other in DC and Silicon Valley book habits. Tanner argues, rightly as far as I can, see that books “[stake] out the norms, conventions, and ideals that govern the community as a whole” for Silicon Valley, in a way that they do not for Washington DC.” But that doesn’t necessarily mean that Silicon Valley people care more about reading and ideas than their DC counterparts, as he also claims. It sometimes means that they care more about seeming to be well-read, which is a different thing altogether.
The actual difference, as I see it, is not one between the philistines of the Beltway and the bibliophiles of the Valley. It is between a technocratic culture in which the public display of a sound general education is irrelevant and an aristocratic one where it can be a valuable asset.
Henry Farrell — A very important conversation on intellectual osmosis
How to choose what to work on
So you want to advance human progress. And you’re wondering, what should you, personally, do? Say you have talent, ambition, and drive—how do you choose a project or career?
Jason Crawford — I used a similar model for choosing Interintellect (and in general “culture peace”) to work on as the convergence point of my passions, skills, where technology is going, and what the world needs
Ghosting the Patriarchy: Female Empowerment and the Crisis of Masculinity
Young women are increasingly joining progressive universities, earning on par with male peers, and feeling free to pursue hedonistic pleasure. Singledom is no longer shamed or stigmatised. So why tolerate guys who shirk the washing up, send tedious texts, or otherwise fail to please..?
The age of female acquiescence is waning, supplanted by an era of female freedoms… Obviously, a lack of matches has major implications for fertility.
Alice Evans — I remains habitually bewildered by how good and clear and prolific Alice is
Hilary Mantel was my mentor. Here are seven things she taught me about writing – and life
A lot of ink has been spilled over whether creative writers should plan or “pants” their stories. Planners make meticulous notes before attempting a first draft. By contrast, improvisers who write “by the seat of their pants” jump straight in. Both approaches have their problems: overplanning is the equivalent to overthinking and the result is likely to be less organic; whereas “pantsing” can read as disorganised. Both methods can also create opportunities for excellence, through either a cohesive plot or serendipity.
A good third way is to know your ending. Hilary wrote the end of the final Thomas Cromwell instalment, The Mirror and the Light, “well ahead of time”. This is a simple method that creative writers can apply to their own work. Knowing how your story ends will serve as a compass, while leaving you with enough latitude to explore your imaginary world. And a crafted, impactful ending is ultimately more satisfying for the reader, too.
Katie Ward; The Guardian — The dream
Was Marx Woke?
The publication in 1976 of the last major English translation of Capital, by Ben Fowkes, was motivated by the crisis of postwar capitalism and the radical politics of the late 1960s and early ’70s. But by the time it appeared, the Trotskyist economist Ernest Mandel’s declaration in the introduction that “capitalism’s heyday is over” already seemed dated and would seem even more so a few years later, when Thatcher and Reagan were swept into power. The impetus for the latest edition similarly came from the resurgent left of the 2010s, but now that left is scattered and defeated. Nowhere is that clearer than in the many ideological reversals of Kamala Harris, who in 2020 went to remarkable lengths to seek the support of left activists; today, she is going to similar lengths to distance herself from them.
Geoff Shullenberger; Compact — Marx retranslated so now maybe more people will actually read him and not just pretend to have done so
Foundations: Why Britain has stagnated
We explain that it is blocking investments the private sector would like to do – in buildings, railways, roads, and more – that explains decline. Thankfully, that means fixing it, and returning to French and German levels of productivity, or, as in history, higher ones, is quite straightforward. We just need to build.
Ben Southwood, Sam Bowman, and Samuel Hughes — A landmark study: no, it’s not just the vibes
The ultra-selfish gene
We now have the power to genetically modify entire species by inserting certain genes into them with brute force. Doing this to malaria-carrying mosquitoes could allow us to wipe out humanity’s most deadly killer.
Mathias Kirk Bonde; Works in Progress — Exciting!
The Curse of ChatGPT
In the AI space, it’s the core models doing the disrupting, not the startups. Each new release leapfrogs forward, threatening to obsolete entire application layers. AI startups must not only keep pace with competitors but also adapt to an environment where foundational breakthroughs constantly redefine product strategies.
Jeremiah Lowin — Slightly misleading title but a good read
The Impact of PhD Studies on Mental Health—A Longitudinal Population Study
Recent self-reported and cross-sectional survey evidence documents high levels of mental health problems among PhD students… After the fifth year, which represents the average duration of PhD studies in our sample, we observe a notable decrease in the utilization of psychiatric medication.
Sanna Bergvall, Clara Fernström, Eva Ranehill and Anna Sandberg — I wonder what made these 3 women research this in particular
Frontiers
Creating new industries and society-shifting technology paradigms can be dual-purpose, creating abundance on Earth and permissionless frontiers in space. But to subvert the tradeoff between inward improvement and outward striving, we need to reinvent the culture and aesthetics of space and technology more generally. The outlines of it are already visible: something that embraces both abundance and grungy rebellion.
Ben Reinhardt
College Students Not Reading Is an Issue, So Teachers Are Adjusting How Classes Look
Jennifer Frey, a philosophy professor and the dean of the Honors College at the University of Tulsa, says she sees such moves by colleagues as a “tyranny of low expectations.” “It is actually incredibly important that students just read a massive amount,” she tells Teen Vogue. “Reading widely and deeply is incredibly important… in terms of building the skills that are necessary, no matter what you’re going to go on to do.”
Marie-Rose Sheinerman; Teen Vogue — YES!
The Mr. Beast Memo is a Guide to the Gen Z Workforce
There is a lot to learn there. We are already seeing some moves to de-bureaucraticize companies, like Amazon and their bureaucracy inbox.
Kyla Scanlon
Microsoft buying Three Mile Island reactor to power AI
Under the terms of the deal, Microsoft would own 100% of the nuclear energy output for 20 years. Apparently, this is the only way to power CoPilot and other AI tools for millions of individuals while not burning fossil fuels. I'm assuming, since much of Microsoft's AI stack is built on ChatGPT, that OpenAI might be another beneficiary of the deal.
AnandTech
Dead Internet Souls
In the 1800s, before serfdom was abolished in the Russian empire, landowners paid taxes based on how many serfs they had. A census was conducted every few years by government employees traveling across the empire and doing counts; a manual map-reduce of epic proportions. If a person was dead, it would often be years before the government cleared the cache, so to speak, and landowners continued to pay taxes on these dead souls.
Alexandr Pushkin, the greatest living Russian-language author at the time, heard a story about how landowners took advantage of this by buying up dead souls from landowners, and passed this story onto fellow writer, Nikolai Gogol as an idea for a book or play, which resulted in Gogol’s seminal satirical work, “Dead Souls.” Gogol meant dead souls on two levels: both the serfs, and the banality and falsity of Russian landowning society at the time.
The internet today is filled with dead souls.
Vicki Boykis - Beautiful
Intermezzo by Sally Rooney review — her characters just aren’t normal people
For all her dazzling virtues as a psychologist and an observer of emotional life, Rooney’s artistic curiosity is unavoidably limited… Ivan, 22, is a “chess genius” with a degree in theoretical physics. His brother Peter, 32, is a human rights lawyer. (Readers disturbed by a Rooney hero profaning himself with even this virtuous branch of the law will be reassured to know that he “could have been a very fine academic”.) The brothers are dealing with the death of their father, their own difficult relationship and other, more obscure sources of suffering — in Rooney’s novels unhappiness is a mark of personal distinction, like good A-level results.
James Marriott; The Times — Savage and well-deserved review. Visa Veerasamy once explained to me why Murakami is so popular (I didn’t get it): people like “sad horny”. Sally Rooney (to me unreadably pretentious) seems to fit into that category too
The cost of cynicism
“I think it’s important to separate ancient cynicism from modern cynicism. So when I talk about cynicism, I’m not talking about the philosophical school led by Antisthenes and Diogenes but rather about a general theory that people have about humanity. The idea that overall and at our core people are selfish, greedy, and dishonest.”
Sean Illing interviews Jamil Zaki; Vox
Inside the court of Adolf Hitler
[Richard J Evans] starts his brilliant hundred-page biography of Hitler with the sentence: “For the first thirty years of his life, Adolf Hitler was a nobody.” Here lies the utterly compelling paradox.
William Boyd; The New Statesman
The Lost Art of Waiting
As life gets faster, we have become more impatient about everything, including the interactions of daily life.
Christine Rosen; The Free Press
Why Does Editing Work?
Sure, for thousands of years, we’ve been able to close our eyes and imagine different perspectives. A British soldier fighting in the Somme in the early days of film editing could close his eyes as Mauser bullets rattled over his head and imagine he was sitting by his Newcastle fireplace, enjoying a glass of ale. But as soon as he opened his eyes, he would still see the same blood-soaked battlefield stretched before him.
Likewise, someone watching the first performance of Shakespeare’s The Tempest in 1611 could have been so entranced that they momentarily believed they were with Prospero on the enchanted island. But again, what they saw with their eyes would have remained stubbornly, persistently continuous (says Murch: “stage machinery can only move so fast, after all”).
Until film editing arrived at the turn of the 20th century, thousands of years of evolution had kept our visual perception time-bound and earth-bound.
Ed William
How “enlightened selfishness” can lead to a more fulfilling marriage
“I think that love involves something known as sacrifice. It involves unpleasantness. It’s a package deal and part of the package is suffering. It’s true of just about every attachment that you have to another human being — it comes with suffering. But, I guess the reason to stick with it and to continue is the good things that are to be gotten for you. I want to be with someone where they’re getting incredible value out of this relationship.”
Sean Illing interviews Agnes Callard; Vox
The Silent Tension Between Moms and Nannies
Because my personal experience with the mom/nanny dynamic has never been negative, I didn’t see the cover as critical or negative. But one thing I’m learning, per the Internet, is that often these relationships carry all sorts of awkward undertones, sometimes but not always because of race and class.
Cartoons Hate Her — An excellent recent discovery of mine!
Finding the Courage to be Disliked
It’s clear that many of Adler’s ideas are centered around focusing on forward-focused goals, rather than looking deep into the past to find meaning. This belief runs in direct contradiction to the Freudian school of thought, which looks to an individual’s past to define their personality.
Salman Ansari — I know Salman from the Interintellect community and as a public salon host on our platform; do check him out!
Answers to 12 Bad Anti-Free Speech Arguments
The concept of freedom of speech is a bigger, older and more expansive idea than its particular application in the First Amendment, even if we are talking about the US context alone. A belief in the importance of freedom of speech is what inspired the First Amendment; it’s what gave the First Amendment meaning, and what sustains it in the law. But a strong cultural commitment to freedom of speech is what maintains its practice in our institutions—from higher education, to reality TV, to pluralistic democracy itself. Freedom of speech includes small-l liberal values that were once expressed in common American idioms like “to each his own, everyone’s entitled to their opinion” and “it’s a free country.”
Greg Lukianoff; Quillette
Dialectical Matter: Aristotle, Politics, and Utopia
Is Aristotelian philosophy a natural ally of conservatism? Aristotle’s thought was indeed put to work by Thomas Aquinas and came, via the Catholic Church, to undergird the rigid social and political hierarchies that characterized much of medieval Europe and beyond. But was this alliance inevitable? Are cherished conservative principles—like essential social differentiation, natural function and a fixed cosmic order—incontrovertibly supported by Aristotle’s thought? Not according to Marxist theorist Ernst Bloch, who, in the early 20th century, rerouted Aristotle’s reception through medieval Islamic and heretical Christian philosophy, discovering there dynamic and utopian strains of interpretation—or, a “Left” Aristotelianism.
Robbie Howton; The Brooklyn Institute — Looks like a cool course
Everything led to women — Olga Tokarczuk’s subversive homage to The Magic Mountain
The Empusium’s protagonist is a mildly tubercular young Polish man called Mieczysław Wojnicz. The year is 1913; Europe is on the eve of war, as in The Magic Mountain. Professor Sokołowski – one of several real historical figures in this novel – has sent Wojnicz to Görbersdorf for treatment. Like Hans Castorp, Wojnicz is an engineer in training, intellectually out of his depth among the cultured residents of the resort. The reader swiftly feels affection and sympathy for the whimsical young Wojnicz…
Claire Lowdon; The Times Literary Supplement - I feel like Tokarczuk wrote a book specifically for me!
Twin Peaks and the Divine
But as the series goes on, one comes to suspect the sentimentality is not just stylistic. David Lynch is up to something else.
Damir Marusic; Wisdom of Crowds
Born Sleeping
I was at home when I got the call, and rushed to the hospital. But there was nothing to be done except hold each other, and weep, and prepare for the worst day of our lives. Our baby had died, but Katrina was still pregnant, and she would still have to deliver him.
Brian Potter — An absolutely heart-breaking read
My Childhood Toy Poodles
In middle school, when no one was home, I would lay facing Binky as he lay flat on his side on the carpet. “I love you,” I would say, looking into his black eyes while carefully petting him in a limited, measured way. I never said this to anyone else during my childhood.
Tao Lin; The Paris Review
Authority, by Richard Sennett
Sennett turns initially to Hegel. “For all Hegel’s special philosophic concerns and convoluted language”—by which he means to indicate that he is not going to try to understand Hegel—“the nature of the journey he describes suggests . . . how the experience of authority might become less humiliating, more free in everyday life.”
Commentary — I shared this one before but always good to revisit, as is the book itself
Missing Hitch
You are not doing your part. You don’t speak or write clearly enough. You are wrong and do not know it—and it matters. There has been so much to say, and no one to say it in your place.
Sam Harris — Another one revisited (but shared for the first time); a good mantra
Saving the Idea of the University
Even though the students themselves typically have a wider range of views than their teachers, they tend to feel pressured to censor any contrary opinion.
Sian Leah Beilock; The Atlantic
Why Negative Emotions Aren't Any Worse Than Positive Ones
Once we stop thinking about the most extreme examples and we realize that negative emotions have been with us forever, their bad reputation looks overblown. And we might also realize that positive emotions aren’t exactly innocent.
Krista K Thomason; Psychology Today
France: Europe’s crème de la crème
France, despite its position on Europe's furthest Atlantic edge, serves as a cultural and historical bridge between the southern Latin Mediterranean and northern Germanic domains… This central role predates history.
Razib Khan
Seven fun things I did with "Good Work" (and I finally got the book)
With The Pathless Path, I was shocked you can just say “Published by Paul Millerd.” One line item and boom — I’m a publisher. I decided to lean into it a little more and rename it Pathless Publishing. Do I have any plans to publish other people’s book? No plans but you never know.
My friend Paul Millerd has a new book!
The Legacy of Robert Evans, a Vexing Hollywood Legend
“My wife was fucking another guy, and I had no idea,” he told Biskind. “She was looking at me and thinking of Steve McQueen’s cock.” Such perfectly neat deadpanning, but with a trace of humility, too: sometimes even a cocksman realizes that he is also just a schmuck.
Naomi Fry; The New Yorker — I find this article too lenient for someone with Evans’s reputation. Joe Eszterhas writes in Hollywood Animal (a zero filter book mentioned in the above article) about how Sharon Stone was traumatised by Evans after he’d held a girlfriend of hers captive in a cage in his house. Just one of the many stories
"These 'kids online safety' bills need to die"
I had top researcher danah boyd on Power User a couple months ago to talk about kids’ mental health and social media use (turns out the two aren’t as correlated as the media would have you believe!). I’ll also be dropping part two of my YouTube series about the moral panic around kids and technology in the coming weeks.
Taylor Lorenz
Will A.I. Kill Meaningless Jobs?
[David Graeber] developed it into a book that delved deeper on the subject. He suggested that the economist John Maynard Keynes’s dream of a 15-hour workweek had never come to pass because humans have invented millions of jobs so useless that even the people doing them can’t justify their existence. A quarter of the work force in rich countries sees their jobs as potentially pointless, according to a study by the Dutch economists Robert Dur and Max van Lent. If workers find the labor dispiriting, and the work adds nothing to society, what’s the argument for keeping these jobs?
Emma Goldberg; The New York Times