Anna Gát's "Smart Watch": What to Read This Weekend #69
Harari, CS Lewis, Taylor Swift. Tradition, language, religion, alcohol, institutions, snobbism, murder, policing, mankind, status, child-rearing, belief, time to build, India, creativity, hope...
Hey friends,
A lot to read this weekend, so my intro will be brief.
Coming up on Interintellect for you:
ONLINE Finding a Second Chance with Shakespeare and Freud: Join Shakespeare professor Stephen Greenblatt and psychoanalyst and writer Adam Philips, alongside writer Henry Oliver, for a discussion about second chances.
OFFLINE (NYC) Why Foucault Matters – Reading Group with COMPACT’s Sohrab Ahmari and Geoff Shullenberger
ONLINE What Does Spiritual Healing Mean For Our Emotions and Psychology? An Introduction to the Science Behind Ancient Wisdom Applied to Modern Society
ONLINE (Members only) A Return to Self-Compassion because we all need it
ONLINE (Series) Culture, Games, Society: Provocative Conversations with Robin Hanson
ONLINE (Series) Weirdly Brilliant: The Outlier Series with Jason Shen
ONLINE (Series) Judaism Is Psychedelic – With Madison Margolin
AutumLeaves: Grab your -20% discount to join the Interintellect community - enter it at the checkout or just click HERE! - and enjoy more than just our public online events: get access to our community forum, discounts, freebies, and perks, and our wonderful in-person events!
Before we dive into all the readings… A little tableau of Interintellect in the world, our gatherings on three continents — all the ideas, all the conversations, all the friendships.
What a journey! Thank you for reading, conversing, and travelling with us✨
And now: let’s read….
We Are All Fiddlers on the Roof
With tradition, Tevye says [in the book], “Every one of us knows who he is and what God expects him to do.” The musical, however, seems to test this bold proclamation, for it is often very unclear what God expects Tevye to do. When his daughter rejects the match that has been made for her, preferring the poor tailor to the wealthy widowed butcher, Tevye is faced with a decision: abandon tradition or make his daughter miserable. Which must he choose? Can tradition stretch to accommodate the happiness of his daughter?
Joy Marie Clarkson; Plough
The Village Nobody Wants
To build a village, you have to make connections with other people. If your in-laws don’t live super close, you need to build connections with neighbors and friends. And people repeatedly reveal their preferences: they are “too busy” to meet neighbors and friends. They “don’t like people.” They complain about “having” to attend birthday parties for other kids in their child’s class, let alone actually chipping in to help another parent plan a gathering. Almost every time I’ve met up with another mom, it was my idea and I had to do most of the planning. Frequently, they cancel or reschedule at the last minute, often giving no reason other than “things are crazy over here.” To some extent, things are crazy, and part of that is because people are less likely to live near family members who can help them. But these people do have free time, even if they say they don’t. There’s plenty of negative stuff to say about the state of work, but we (and by “we” I mean the parents I know, I can’t speak for every parent in the world) work less, or the same amount, than parents did in decades past. Most of the parents I know work remotely or in a hybrid arrangement, and have full time childcare, whether a nanny or daycare. These people absolutely have the time to build community. It’s not a priority.
Cartoons Hate Her
Forgetting Taylor Swift
People have been forgetting Taylor Swift’s Eras Tour. You spend thousands of dollars on the most important night of your life, and as the days tick down you get more and more excited—only two months until I see Taylor Swift! Only fifty-nine days! Only fifty-eight!—until the magical day itself. You get dressed up in imitation of one of her outfits. You wear a friendship bracelet, because there’s a Taylor Swift song called “You’re On Your Own, Kid” where she mentions friendship bracelets. You write the number thirteen on your hand, because Taylor Swift sometimes writes the number thirteen on her hand. You’re so full of excitement it feels like your heart might burst. And then, suddenly, it’s night, and you’re streaming out of the venue with hundreds of thousands of other fans, and you have no memory of what just happened. You know, intellectually, that you were there for more than four hours as the world’s biggest pop star performed her entire back catalog for you, and you sang along to every song. But you don’t remember it. You can’t conjure the images, or the feelings. You don’t feel anything at all.
Sam Kriss; The Lamp
The Inner Ring
Of all the passions, the passion for the Inner Ring is most skillful in making a man who is not yet a very bad man do very bad things. ... As long as you are governed by that desire you will never get what you want. You are trying to peel an onion: if you succeed there will be nothing left. Until you conquer the fear of being an outsider, an outsider you will remain…
The quest of the Inner Ring will break your hearts unless you break it. But if you break it, a surprising result will follow. If in your working hours you make the work your end, you will presently find yourself all unawares inside the only circle in your profession that really matters. You will be one of the sound craftsmen, and other sound craftsmen will know it. This group of craftsmen will by no means coincide with the Inner Ring or the Important People or the People in the Know
C. S. Lewis
A Reductionist History of Humankind
Since Harari considers natural science to be the final word on reality and all cultures to be “imaginary orders,” it is no surprise that he considers morality, too, to be entirely a fictional invention.
John Sexton; The New Atlantis — Harari is by far the most morally harmful author of our times. How someone’s personal depression (sad) turns into cultural poison (bad).
Can Space-Time Be Saved?
Most of today’s leading theoretical physicists have a shared perspective about what the next revolution in physics will look like. They think reconciling Albert Einstein’s general theory of relativity with quantum mechanics will require transcending the notion of space-time. Einstein’s theory attributes the force of gravity to curves in the space-time fabric, but beneath this fabric they hope to find a quantum theory of gravity expressed in terms of entirely different, more fundamental concepts.
Charlie Wood; Quanta
In Defense of Motivated Belief
But language was not understood, or used, in a primarily literal way until relatively recently in human history. It is not that the literary dominated the literal, but that no practical distinction was made until the rise of the W.E.I.R.D. mind and its methodical, analytical approach that we recognize today as scientific rationality. When a Rudolph Carnap dismisses theology and metaphysics as “mere language games” – and even when more moderate antipositivists assert that statements do not have to be falsifiable to be meaningful – both of these are assertions about the function of language quite at odds with any premodern use of language, beyond particularly literate urbanites. Incanctations with no obvious physical referents, metaphysical shibboleths, are no abberations; they were for most of human history the primary function of language.
Cameron Harwick — I’m pretty sure the first primary functions of language were “pass me the elk bone, Ubuh”, but an interesting read
Cheap ornament and status games
Something similar seems true of literature: tycoons and dukes are surely no more likely than standard middle-class people to read Joyce, and much less likely to do so than, say, university professors or highbrow journalists. In the case of painting and sculpture, the situation is a little more complex. Rich people certainly do buy modernist art today, and some of them did so even in its pioneer phase. But it is still doubtful that the development of modernist painting and sculpture was driven by rich patrons. The traditional story of the modernist artist suffering poverty and ostracism for his art is partly mythical, but not entirely so: most modernists would have been bemused, not to say outraged, by the suggestion that they were following the market. The intelligentsia embraced modernism first, and the rest of the bourgeoisie gradually fell into line over the next generation.
Samuel Hughes; Works In Progress
A Nobel for the big big questions
What’s an “institution”? No one can quite agree on that point. Conceptually, they could include legal arrangements like property rights, political systems like democracy, bureaucratic organizations, etc. Different researchers tend to mean different things when they say “institutions”, though everyone seems to agree that 1) rule of law, and 2) property rights are important examples.
Acemoglu, Johnson and Robinson (whom most people call “AJR”) have a theory that economic development is caused by a country having the right kind of institutions.
Noah Smith
The Death of Yahya Sinwar
If there is any justice, this killing will not be seen as an accomplishment of any kind. It’s yet another murder in a seemingly endless line. Whatever the extent of Sinwar’s crimes, his death does not justify the thousands that were killed to get to him. And who exactly gave him permission to martyr thousands of innocents on the way to his own martyrdom?
John Ganz — Currently on Twitter break because of threats
‘And You a Catholic!’ — Faith beyond the culture wars
Here’s the story as I first heard it—as, perhaps, you’ve heard it as well. Evelyn Waugh, the great stylist, the great humorist, and the less-than-great human being, was appallingly rude at a party. “How can you behave so badly,” the hostess asked, “and you a Catholic!” To which Waugh, who would have been great on social media, shot back, “You have no idea how much nastier I would be if I was not a Catholic. Without supernatural aid I would hardly be a human being.”
Phil Klay; Commonweal
I.B. Singer’s Language of Everyday Life
Singer’s own lifelong identity as a newspaperman informed his thinking about literature, especially his suspicion of the pretentious and the abstract. “No matter how deep a literary work may be, if it bores the reader, it is worthless,” he declared. The job of the novelist isn’t “to analyze or to probe,” but to report something new about the world—“some sort of revelation, a fresh approach, a different mood, a new form.” As he put it in the essay “Who Needs Literature?,” writers “are entertainers in the highest sense of the word. They can only touch those truths which evoke interest, amusement, tension…. In art, a truth which is boring is not true.”
Adam Kirsch; The Nation
Cargo airships are happening
It’s happening. There will soon (soon in the grand scheme of things at least) be thousands of giant airships crossing our oceans, transforming global logistics and connecting economies. Cargo airships are going to be big.
Eli Dourado — I’m a proud investor in Airship
Reevaluating Alcohol: Is Total Sobriety the Healthiest Way?
The study found that even 1-2 drinks per day is associated with lower gray matter and white matter volume in the brain, which indicates reduced cognitive abilities…
To keep stating the obvious, moderation is key, and they knew this then as well as now. But what has been partially forgotten is the acknowledgement of what benefits drinking brings, that it “moistens the soul,” that it brings us “to a more sportive mood” where we can speak and think openly. Wine was key to the philosophical insights produced in ancient Greece.
Maia Adar; Cosimo
Rooms of all our own: On the history of ignoring early women writers
If all this lyrical emotion for kings and children seems conventional, and also problematically feminine, we can turn to Margaret Cavendish for poems that consider atoms, “like workmen, which among themselves agree”, or poems on the theory of a vacuum, or on optical instruments. An oak engages in a dialogue with the man cutting him down, and a castle in ruins discusses its fate with a knight.
Diane Purkiss; The Times Literary Supplement
Five takeaways on the value of space activity 🚀
Attempts to quantify the monetary value of space activity run into immediate problems arising from contestation over what the widely-used term ‘the space economy’ refers to.
Rebecca Lowe
Status (part 3)
And so we carefully paint over it… Despite the squirmy discomforts of our egoic motives, our instinct to deceptively obscure them, our counter-instinct to painstakingly exhume what we’ve obscured, the selfish quest for status is responsible for the best as well as the worst of human achievement.
Natasha Joukovsky
Life in India is a series of bilateral negotiations
Living in a country built off of bilateral negotiations for everything is simultaneously the libertarian dream and an incredibly inefficient way to do most collective things. Ronald Coase told us this in 1960.
“if property rights are well-defined and transaction costs are low, private parties can negotiate solutions to externalities without the need for government intervention”
Rohit Krishnan
An Interview with Joel Towers, The New School’s New President
‘Rebecca Solnit is another source of inspiration. In an essay called “False Hope and Easy Despair” she writes, “Despair demands less of us, it’s more predictable, and in a sad way safer. Authentic hope requires clarity—seeing the troubles in this world—and imagination, seeing what might lie beyond these situations that are perhaps not inevitable and immutable.”’
The New School
Exploring Immersive Entertainment
When I think about the World's Fair and its power to inspire millions, I envision building dozens of wonderful experiences like the "home of tomorrow" at the largest possible scale, creating an unforgettable experience. An experience that will remind every guest of what humanity is capable of and, more importantly, ignite the ambition of every kid who visits to become a scientist, technologist, or entrepreneur — to become a builder of the future.
Cameron Wiese
Moral hazard or not, I now feel the climate situation is bad enough that we should begin scalability work for stratospheric aerosol injection (SAI) immediately.
This is not the same conclusion I would have had even two years ago, but the increase in ocean temperature and extreme climate events indicates a trend that will rapidly get worse unless we are able to take global-scale action within the next 1-5 years, and SAI is the only feasible one.
Yishan Wong
The Gender Divide Is a Class Divide
Fundamentally, the Democratic Party is catering to women because it is catering to the highly educated.
Batya Ungar-Sargon; COMPACT
The Weak Science Behind Psychedelics
The field also draws eccentric types who, rather than conducting research with clinical disinterest, tend to want psychedelics to be accepted by society. “There’s been really this cultlike utopian vision that’s been driving things,” Matthew W. Johnson, himself a prominent psychedelic researcher at Sheppard Pratt, a mental-health hospital in Baltimore, told me.
Olga Khazan; The Atlantic
Britain’s food wars Is Waitrose a cure for the Westminster class?
British cuisine at its best is hearty, simple fare, showcasing the natural bounty of these islands, our waters rich with fish and seafood (much of it exported abroad to more appreciative consumers), our rain-soaked pastures the nursemaid of the free-range meat and rich dairy goods Britain has excelled in for millennia. At its best, British food displays the worth of good ingredients cooked well — and at its worst, of poor ingredients cooked badly.
Aris Roussinos; UnHerd — No comment
The Real Rodney Alcala Story Was More Gruesome Than Woman of the Hour Lets On
As gruesome a portrait as Woman of the Hour might paint of Alcala, the film practically glosses over the most chilling aspect of his backstory: Even before appearing on the dating show, Alcala had already been arrested multiple times, including for murder, and had made the FBI’s Ten Most Wanted list.
Laura Bradley; Vulture
‘Advanced’ construction technology found at 5000-year-old Stone Age site in Denmark
Starting nearly 6,000 years ago, the Funnel Beaker Culture led a switch to agriculture and domestication of animals in Scandinavia, moving away from a hunter-gatherer lifestyle.
Vishwam Sankaran; The Independent
‘Second Act’ Review: Better Late Than Never
But [one of the ancient rabbis] is a bit ambiguous when it comes to one’s creative contributions and worldly success: At what point are those best accomplished? Early on in life? Or are they more likely the product of decades of preparation? In his wide-ranging book, “Second Act,” the writer Henry Oliver explores the potential of those later years for something more than reflective wisdom or the giving of hard-earned advice. It is a celebration of late bloomers, a type he defines simply as those who succeed “when no one expects them to.”
Samuel Arbesman; The Wall Street Journal
From Elon Musk to cop car chases, how a software engineer launched a police AI startup
Earlier this year, Abel founder Daniel Francis was in a car going 135 miles per hour down a highway in Oakland, California. The driver, a police officer, had a gun in his lap. Francis has made a habit of riding shotgun with policemen in the name of research for his company, which creates AI to fill out police reports. Usually, the rides are fairly uneventful. But that day, the officer had pulled over a man to search his car. The man freaked out and pressed the gas pedal, almost hitting someone. Francis and the officer took off chasing him. “I was so excited,” Francis recalled. “I was like, finally, it’s happening! Finally, not just a stolen car call where we go and fill out a report.”
Margaux MacColl; TechCrunch
Critical Creative Genius at the Intersection of Order, Disorder, and Chaos
Creativity doesn’t arise from comfort.
Lane Watson
Is TikTok different in China? Here's what to know
The version of Douyin used by Chinese adults resembles U.S.-based TikTok, except for some propaganda in favor of the Chinese Communist Party and a lack of alternative viewpoints on hot-button topics…
More noticeable differences between TikTok and Douyin arise when the respective apps are looked at through the lens of young users, some experts said. In the U.S., children experience the same version of TikTok as adults, while children in China see a modified version of Douyin that includes more educational content, they said.
Max Zahn, ABC News
Bullshit Is a Choice
There’s another important implication: if you’re looking for a decent cue of someone’s trustworthiness on a topic, try to assess how involuntary their belief seems to be. If they seem like they were dragged kicking and screaming toward the belief—blindsided by the sheer force of reality—then their belief is probably of the regular type, and it’s probably not bullshit. On the other hand, if their belief seems eagerly chosen or all-too-convenient for them, then it’s probably a credence, and it’s probably bullshit.
David Pinsof — A crudely phrased article, but I too tend to trust beliefs and opinions only when they feel examined and show signs of struggle. Your brain shouldn’t just surrender its scepticism for nothing!
500 years ago, China destroyed its world-dominating navy because its political elite was afraid of free trade
Few people in the West realise how economically and technologically advanced China was by the 1400s.
Jim Edwards; The Independent
Red, Hot and Blue: A Defense of Agatha Christie's The Blue train
What a melancholy, autumnal tone there is to this novel, set in part in the sun-drenched Rivera! I cannot help thinking it reflects Christie’s views as she headed for Las Palmas in the Canary Islands with her young daughter at the beginning of 1927 to try and recuperate from what surely had been a 1926 nervous breakdown when she was thirty-six (her notorious disappearance) and get to work on another Poirot novel in the wake of her career triumph with The Murder of Roger Ackroyd.
Curtis Evans; CrimeReads
Zen questioning
Zen questioning is a simple and direct method that helps you uncover your own buddha-nature. It was developed in China from the sixth century onwards, in reaction to the scholastic tradition of the time, which relied heavily on the scriptures. The Zen school wanted to get back to the Buddha’s original message of practicing meditation and realizing awakening in this life…
The practice is very simple. Whether you are walking, standing, sitting or lying down, ask repeatedly 'What is this?’ You are not looking for an intellectual answer so your question should not be an intellectual enquiry. In this moment, you are turning the spotlight onto yourself and your whole experience.
DharmaNet