Anna Gát's "Smart Watch": What to Read This Weekend #66
Interintellect cities. Fathers. Morals. Books. Dictators. Dying. Iran. Washington DC. Ozempic. Jane Austen. Fraud. Freud. Nick Cave. Christians and sex ... and more
My friends,
Busy days….! I hope you are well ❤️📚✨
Greetings from Washington DC! If you’re in town, see you TONIGHT.
If you’re in Chicago, there’s an in-person gathering for you tomorrow.
On October 3, in Austin. On October 6 in New York City (only public tickets remain!)
If you want a 20% discount on a yearly Interintellect membership (to get freebies and discounts on online events, and access to offline events + online forum) enter the code exploreNOW. You have 5 days to use it!
Online, you can come and hang with and discuss Turgenev and the death of liberalism.
and I will chat about the next American Millennium.
Julian Togelius is joining you over Zoom to talk Artificial General Intelligence.
We are starting an online salon series on Judaism’s psychedelic renaissance. The host is Madison Margolin.
continues his online series on the hidden forces shaping culture and society, and I’m hosting his next episode on the science of hidden motives.
The great Jason Shen is starting an online series on outliers - based on his new book Weirdly Brilliant!
Our friend Renée DiResta did a SuperSalon a few days ago on her new book Invisible Rulers — you can watch it here:
And the “death doula” Emma Acker came on my podcast The Hope Axis: we talked about the lost art of dying and being there, the power of touch and bearing witness, what the dying and their loved ones need at the end, pain, fear, denial, acceptance—and above all, always, hope.
My main takeaways were:
We forgot how to be there when people die, mostly because it happens so late and rarely to most of us
How death equalises yet so many division lines remain: young/old, pain/no pain, community/alone, religion/no religion
And, most strikingly, that in our solution-centric world, death doulas alone show up after the moment when it was concluded there is no solution
Video soon!
***
And now, let’s read:
Books My Father Bought For Me
Here is part of that stack of books, from my Dad to me. You know them all… Your lists are probably better than mine but my list reminds me of Dad.
Edward Rooster
The Intelligence Age
With these new abilities, we can have shared prosperity to a degree that seems unimaginable today; in the future, everyone’s lives can be better than anyone’s life is now. Prosperity alone doesn’t necessarily make people happy – there are plenty of miserable rich people – but it would meaningfully improve the lives of people around the world.
Sam Altman
This Movie is Why I'm Alive - How Ratatouille showed me the beauty of the world that wished to kill me
Foreign goods being sanctioned off from Iran, there were shops selling repaired old appliances at the price of a new one. My grandfather, who recently went to Saudi Arabia, had smuggled a brand-new TV for us. I was excited to watch something on our new TV. “Perhaps I could borrow a CD from my cousin,” I thought. Then I saw a sign on a corner between shops: “Chef Rat cartoon arrived.”… “Mother…, I promise, I will eat less so you get the money back. It wouldn’t cost you anything if you don’t have to buy food for me.” She relented. The suspicious-looking dealer looked around and discreetly produced two unmarked CDs from his suitcase and wrote: Chef Rat.
Pouya Nikmand
Notes on the collapse of complex societies
Maybe an even shorter summary is “diminishing marginal returns dominate everything around us.” A large amount of the book is devoted to debunking other theories of societal collapse and going into case studies that support the marginal returns to complexity theory. These are fascinating — few sources draw parallels between the rise and fall of societies in North America and the Romans — but mainly served the purpose of convincing me that Tainter’s theory has legs.
Ben Reinhardt’s response to Eli Dourado — watch Eli Dourado on Interintellect here (not on Youtube yet)
To the Woman Who Trashed Me on Twitter
“I used to work with this person,” it read. “She was not always like this, but this particular strain of contrarianism is like heroin—there are very few casual users.” The writer of this comment was Jane.
Kat Rosenfield; The Free Press
How literature helps us find meaning and understand the world
When I spoke to a range of people in Silicon Valley recently, everyone gave the same answer. A few people here read old books. One or two of them even read Shakespeare and Tolstoy. But it’s rare. Instead, the intellectual landscape of Silicon Valley is political, with some philosophy. The majority of tech people have a modern, STEM-based view of the world; they are much less influenced, if at all, by any notion of the literary canon.
Henry Oliver (watch my interview about exactly this, with Khe Hy, here)
How Israeli spies penetrated Hizbollah
Once a Hizbollah operative is identified, his daily patterns of movements are fed into a vast database of information, siphoned off from devices that could include his wife’s cell phone, his smart car’s odometer, or his location. These can be identified from sources as disparate as a drone flying overhead, from a hacked CCTV camera feed that he happens to pass by and even from his voice captured on the microphone of a modern TV’s remote control, according to several Israeli officials. Any break from that routine becomes an alert for an intelligence officer to sift through, a technique that allowed Israel to identify the mid-level commanders of the anti-tank squads of two or three fighters that have harassed IDF troops from across the border.
Mehul Srivastava in London, James Shotter in Jerusalem and Charles Clover and Raya Jalabi in Beirut; Financial Times
How a Book About Gloves Inspired a Masterpiece by Philip Roth
Among the many astonishing things about “American Pastoral” is how quickly Roth seemed to have written it.
Sam Graham-Felsen; The New York Times
How tenure should be granted, circa 2024
Soon it won’t much matter whether humans read your data contribution, as long as the AIs do. So we’re all going to do this, right? After all, “how much you really contribute to science” is obviously the standard we use, right? Right?
Tyler Cowen woke up and chose violence
Over 30 Years, 40% of Publishing Jobs Disappeared. What Happened?
Then there is the anecdotal evidence, which suggests that some of the “efficiency” realized by book publishers today has been achieved on the backs of staff: fewer full-time editors, designers, and production personnel, with more work shifted to the assistant level or outsourced to freelancers foreign and domestic—labor that would not be counted in the government’s statistics on publishing industry employment.
Thad McIlroy and Jim Milliot; Publishers Weekly
Washington DC is Not a Popularity Contest
I do not think either of these characterizations is correct. Each is incomplete. My wife, who has lived in both Los Angeles and D.C., suggests that “who you know” matters more in the former city than the latter. In L.A. knowing people is the whole game.
Tanner Greer
This is the story of how Edward Bernays with the help of his uncle Sigmund Freud changed your mind in ways that you may never discover.
In this 4 part series The Century of the Self you will begin to see how we live in the Bernays world.
Brian Roemmele
How Powerful Is Political Charm?
When we spoke recently, [Charm author Julia Sonnevend - panelist at the upcoming Interintellect festival Ideas of Power] underlined the differences between charisma and charm. “Charisma is built on distance from audiences,” she said. “Think of the bombastic speeches of Churchill or de Gaulle. You are not like that person—that person is distinctly different from you.” When Ronald Reagan stood at the Brandenburg Gate and chanted, “Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall!,” he seemed (or sought to seem) like an embodiment of history itself. Charm, by contrast, is, or is meant to appear to be, humble. “It’s built on proximity,” Sonnevend said. A charming politician makes you “really feel like you’re in a common space with them.”
Joshua Rothman; The New Yorker
Fraud, So Much Fraud
There's also a proposed Alzheimer's therapy called cerebrolysin, a peptide mixture derived from porcine brain tissue. An Austrian company (Ever) has run some small inconclusive trials on it in human patients and distributes it to Russia and other countries (it's not approved in the US or the EU). But the eight Masliah papers that make the case for its therapeutic effects are all full of doctored images, too. A third drug, minzasolmin, is supposed to prevent misfolding of alpha-synuclein and Masliah and co-workers published the original papers that make the case for its effects. Papers which have doctored images in them. Masliah co-founded a company (Neuropore) that has been developing the drug, and they have a partnership with Belgian drugmaker UCB. It has to be noted that this one has taken some fire already: a paper last year on its in vivo effects brought some pointed criticism that the drug's short half-life should have made it impossible for it to work under the conditions described. The authors responded that they had other evidence of the drug's mechanism, and I'm glad to hear it, because in addition to the original papers, their previous paper on the drug had images in it credited to Masliah that also seem to have been digitally modified. Minzasolmin is currently in Phase II trials. This is just a horrible situation in every direction. The NIH has stated that Masliah is no longer heading the Neuroscience division, but they haven't stated much else, honestly.
Derek Lowe; Science
On Pilgrimage and Package Tours
Yet when I walked a portion of the Camino last year—not as a pilgrim proper, but as a pilgrimage-curious lecturer working on a group hiking tour for National Geographic—the vast majority of the people I met on the trail understood themselves to be, if not pilgrims in a technical sense, travelers on a spiritually significant journey of some kind.
Tara Isabella Burton; The Hedgehog Review
Infinite Novel Theory: Jordan Castro and Tao Lin In Conversation
“When I was younger, I thought I was really smart. But now I feel like I was scared and prideful and hid behind a flippant dismissal of any worldview that would require me to focus on changing myself before I tried to change others. I’d come up against myself, and I’d try to exert my will, but it seemed like the harder I tried, the worse things became.”
Jordan Castro, Tao Lin; The Paris Review
The Illustrated Hostage Diary of Amit Soussana
I wrote in the WhatsApp family group: “Fuck, they are outside my house, knocking on the security room wall. Ugh, let this be over already.” And then, symbolically at 10:07 a.m., the battery died. Suddenly, I heard a loud boom. Within a second, someone opened the closet and immediately pulled me out… Then four men grabbed me, and the fight began. I wasn’t scared. I really fought them. One of them wore a purplish-pink shirt, and he was the worst. He was about 25 or 26, looked me in the eyes, and beat me. He punched me in the eye, split my lip, just severely beat me up, lifted my shirt, touched my breast, and choked me constantly. And I didn’t care. I kept going, dropping the blanket, falling to the ground on purpose, really fighting them. The whole thing took about an hour, the fight of my life… Understand this: All this time, I didn’t cry, nothing, no tears. I always knew I was physically strong, but I did want to die. I wanted to die because the last image I had in my head was a video I saw on my phone while hiding in the closet, of a vehicle entering Gaza with a soldier’s body being thrown from it. That’s what I thought they were going to do to me.
Rachel Shalev; Tablet
Emotional intelligence: not much more than g and personality
Based on these results, we question the uniqueness of EI as a construct and conclude that its potential for advancing our understanding of human performance may be limited. Implications and suggestions for future studies are discussed.
Melanie J Schulte, Malcolm James Ree, Thomas R Carretta
Commit Lit
Amid this cacophony of culture-talk—heard from a remove, like music from a distant room—I began to discern a theme. I listened, equally interested and perplexed. It concerned the state of American higher education: plummeting enrollment in English, philosophy, history and other bookish, scholarly disciplines leading to the annulment of programs and the shuttering of departments; skyrocketing tuition and ballooning student debt; a pervasive sense of panic and despair. From graduate students in particular, one could sense an almost inexhaustible font of disappointment and bitterness. In light of the collapsing job market, deteriorating working conditions, the venomous pettiness of colleagues, the apathy of students and a general sense of purposelessness—against a backdrop of general educational austerity and the meteoric rise of digital media and technological capital—the life of the academic no longer seemed worth it. “Quit lit,” as it came to be known, grew out of dozens of public letters of academic resignation and quickly concretized into a genre of recognizably confessional literature with its own signature tropes…
Joseph M. Keegin; The Point
The fraught history of Christianity and sex
When Coldingham Abbey, a mixed religious community, was destroyed by fire in 683, the Venerable Bede considered it a just punishment by God for their “feasting, drinking, gossip, and other delights”. Bede also denounced thanes who built monasteries where they put their wives…
AN Wilson; The New Statesman
Why do obesity drugs seem to treat so many other ailments?
It could take years to prove in which cases the drugs are useful. Understanding how they work could be even harder. In some instances, such as for people with cardiovascular disease, the reason seems straightforward: weight loss is almost certainly providing much of the benefit. But the effects observed in conditions such as addiction and Parkinson’s disease involve other mechanisms that are far from being unravelled.
Mariana Lenharo; Nature
I Want My Mutually Assured Destruction
This was all pretty heavy stuff for a channel that used hair gel and lip gloss by the truckload. In retrospect, the amount of political literacy the directors and bands sometimes assumed on the part of MTV’s viewers is astonishing. Consider the video [late-1984 video] “Two Tribes,” by Frankie Goes to Hollywood… Look-alikes of Ronald Reagan and Konstantin Chernenko (a sick old man who ruled the Soviet Union for about 20 minutes in between Yuri Andropov and Mikhail Gorbachev) walk into a ring, and then proceed to beat the daylights out of each other. Middle fingers turn into punches, crotch kicks, bloody ear bites, a game of Roman knuckles, and strangulation. As the fight erupts into a riot, “Reagan” and “Chernenko” pause with looks of fear on their faces, and the camera zooms out to show us that we are actually at the United Nations in New York. Then, in case anyone is still trying to grasp the point, the whole world itself explodes.
Tom Nichols; The Atlantic
Talking Nick Cave Blues
He’s always been a model of understanding and openness in some ways. If I were him, I’d be pretty annoyed with people thinking that now is the time I’ve discovered religion. I mean, this is someone who wrote a novel titled And the Ass Saw the Angel in 1989. And “Mutiny in Heaven,” on The Birthday Party’s 1983 EP … that’s Milton’s Paradise Lost referencing the Old Testament, right?
David Cohen interviews “Caveologist” Tanya Dalziell; Quillette
The Ozempic craze and the limitations of liberal feminism
Since then, a shift has occurred in which Ozempic use has become more accepted. Today, we increasingly hear about the drug in more sympathetic terms. It has been framed as a feminist choice, giving women a simpler method to subvert patriarchal pressures to be thin.
Sarah Manavis; The New Statesman
Beach reading
Quality Trash frequently uses trope and stereotype — but only to build in unexpected ways on top of what appears to be thoroughly preworked ground. This apparently paradoxical combination of familiarity with novelty is one of its great attractions. Quality Trash may seem boringly conventional but isn’t.
Vaughn Tan
Occult? Try upstairs! Inside the world’s weirdest library, now open to the public
The institute was founded in Hamburg at the turn of the 20th century by pioneering German art historian Aby Warburg, whose work focused on tracing the roots of the Renaissance in ancient civilisations, mapping out how images are transmitted across time and space. Long before the algorithms of today’s digital world, he drew unlikely connections between different epochs, regions and media, putting his findings into a sprawling visual diagram of European art.
Oliver Wainwright; The Guardian (Warburg was one of my favourites to read during my postgrad years. Look up his “pathos formulae”; so helpful for navigating media imagery!)
A Beginner’s Guide to Dying by Simon Boas review – an extraordinary book
This book, he tells us, was almost called Muscadet and Morphine, because they were the things that got him through those painful final months. Bob was surprised at the response to his columns – and that surprise energises this short, remarkable book on how to die well.
Alex Preston; The Guardian
Her lively and sweet countenance — Did European people in the early 1800s perceive the human face differently from us?
[When] we read books that were written in that period, our way of aesthetically and even morally evaluating people is different from them, in a way that perhaps makes it difficult to understand them.
Helen de Cruz
Unconfined creativity — Art Brut and its lessons for all of us
Walking through the dark gallery I was drawn to the work of Anna Zemánková, a Moravian dental technician and mother of two children who began creating after a midlife depression. Usually working between four and seven in the morning, she painted imaginary flowers in pen and ink or pastels, which she sometimes embellished by embossing them or embroidering the paper. In one of her paintings a long stringed flower like a mountain dulcimer leaps out from a tuft of purple-green leaves, flanked by arcs in one direction and an orange and yellow net in the other. It reminded me of the freeform shapes I make when I’m doodling, but given full colour and texture.
Irina Dumitrescu; The Times Literary Supplement
Why So Few Matt Levines?
So, that’s why there are so few Matt Levines, and explains where the other Matt Levines are: they don’t, and usually can’t, exist.
Gwern Branwen
The Miracle of Van Morrison’s “Astral Weeks”
This flourishing of countercultural activity was not accidental. Its foundations were laid a decade earlier.
Jon Michaud; The New Yorker
Philosopher Fredric Jameson, author of Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism, dies at 90
Jameson continued to publish books and articles well into his late-80s. Inventions of a Present: The Novel in its Crisis of Globalization was published in May. The Years of Theory: Lectures on Modern French Thought was one of his last book projects, and is set for release this October.
Daniel Jonas Roche; The Architect’s Newspaper
I'm astonished by how much you pack into every issue. And you want me also to find the time to read Tolstoy?! :-)
Ratatouille link broken due to duplication: should just be https://outliving.substack.com/p/this-movie-is-why-im-alive