Anna Gát's "Smart Watch": What to Read This Weekend #68
Livestream from NY, hard work, trauma, writing, infidelity, speaking truth to power, Foucault, Prague, Dwarkesh Patel, space philosophy, Houellebecq, Ukraine, Oppenheimer, Goethe, reality...and more!
Hello friends,
I’m watching Megalopolis today - wish me luck, will report back!
I’ve just started reading the new Olga Tokarczuk, an homage to Thomas Mann’s The Magic Mountain, but a horror story! What can go wrong….?!
For private reflection, I’ve been thinking about work - especially the invisible, private, quiet actions we do every day, outside the limelight, the little things that take up our time, the tasks we take for granted.
Readings of…
To these from birth is Belief forbidden; from these till death is Relief afar.
They are concerned with matters hidden – under the earthline their altars are
The secret fountains to follow up, waters withdrawn to restore to the mouth,
And gather the floods as in a cup, and pour them again at a city’s drouth 🛠️
Carly Simon (lyrics — song and video)
Let all the dreamers wake the nation!… We the great and small Stand on a star And blaze a trail of desire Through the darkening dawn 🌇
She considers a field and buys it; out of her earnings she plants a vineyard... She sees that her trading is profitable 🍇
Rilke (no good official translation in English exists - but I created one with Claude, without the rhyme pattern.)
And if you ask her at midnight, she says With deep simplicity: I am Ruth, the maid 🕊️
On Sunday, we hosted our fourth seasonal Interintellect festival - this time the theme was “Ideas of Power” in an election year.
Julia Sonnevend, John Ganz, and Tara Isabella Burton discussed fame and populism. Musa al-Gharbi, Skye Cleary, and Scott Barry Kaufman the role of universities in educating the elites. Jennifer Frey, Shadi Hamid, and Rebecca Lowe talked about secular vs divine power. We closed with a roundtable with all the panels and attendees. Pure intellectual joy - difficult conversations in a spirit of friendship, in our signature Interintellect style! (Livestream - for now unedited - here)
Some cool newly listed Interintellect events for you:
COMPACT magazine in-person reading group on Foucault’s intellectual legacy on October 23 in Manhattan, with
and - members only - register hereSuperSalon - public and online - hosted by on the great new book Second Chances: Shakespeare and Freud with the authors Stephen Greenblatt and Adam Phillips
In-person casual social in Washington DC hosted by Vidhika Bansal and Gina Hafez — I’ll try to swing by! Book here
My new The Hope Axis podcast with
is now up! Watch and comment:Podcaster star Dwarkesh Patel on how his eponymous podcast started, how his niche interests empower him, what he learned about scene-building and getting one's "lucky break", and how he succeeded at landing Mark Zuckerberg, Tony Blair, or Tyler Cowen as interviewees.
And now, let’s read!
Home Libraries Will Save Civilization
I have previously written about how overstuffed with books and bookcases my family’s home is. In the midst of the (il)literacy crisis unfolding around us, I would like to propose an old-fashioned response: Home libraries will save civilization. Why? Because a home overcrowded with books sets the tone for how its inhabitants spend their time at home. Bored? Read a book. Want something to do for fun? Read a book. Have friends over? Read a book together. Relaxed family night at home? Start a read-aloud.
Nadya Williams; Front Porch Republic
An economic defense of the liberal arts
The intuition is simple: in a modern, highly uncertain world you often don’t know where and in what capacity you will be working in ten or twenty years, so it is crucial to accumulate a set of knowledge and skills that can be used to acquire further knowledge and skills in many different areas. How can a liberal arts education achieve that? First, it does that by introducing students to many different fields, so they do not rely entirely on knowledge related to one field. Second, when done right, it also does that through emphasizing critical thinking.
- FTW
South Korean author Han Kang wins the 2024 Nobel prize in literature
According to Korean news reports, some online bookstores were brought down by an influx of traffic following the announcement, and multiple government hearings were paused as officials cheered the news. In a statement, Korean President Yoon Suk Yeol congratulated Han: “You converted the painful wounds of our modern history into great literature,” he said. “I send my respects to you for elevating the value of Korean literature.”
Ella Creamer; The Guardian
Writing advice is a lie
Here’s the thing. You should ignore this stuff. Almost all of it is wrong. Flat wrong. Plain wrong. Waste-of-time wrong… You won’t ever read the most important thing a writer can know, that grammar is logic.
- 🔥
Timothy Snyder’s liberty bell
Co-opted by political cynics and their rich friends, on the one hand, “freedom” has been squeezed of meaning, becoming a tatty banner in an apparently worldwide battle with no purpose other than to keep on generating fear, outrage and terror in pursuit of power. Yet precisely because of the horrors perpetuated under this banner, there is a new awareness of freedom, even if it is perceived simply, and for many starkly, as an empty seat. Just ask them in Kyiv, Snyder would say; and he does (one of the people he asks is Volodymyr Zelensky).
Lyndsey Stonebridge; The New Statesman
The Disappearance of an Internet Domain
The removal of an entire country or territory from the world map is incredibly rare, so one might ask why the process for deleting a domain is so clearly documented. So automatic. So…final. The answer is simple: history.
Gareth Edwards; Every
Rationality After Oct. 7
The future of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict will be determined by the larger human question of whether wounded people can think clearly. Everything depends upon the possibility of post-traumatic rationality. But can there be such a thing?
Leon Wieseltier; COMPACT
The Texan Doctor and the Disappeared Saudi Princesses
Burdick, a lifelong peacenik with a neat white beard, had moved to Saudi Arabia from Texas in the mid-nineties. He had served for years on the King’s personal medical detail, but had never before encountered Princess Hala. The request to drug her alarmed him—forced sedation was a “violation of my professional ethics,” he said—but he was curious.
Heidi Blake; The New Yorker — I am deeply shocked but apparently this is not an isolated case
Seizing the Means of Knowledge Production
The idea of utilizing administration, etc. for promoting social justice goes back to prominent student activist Rudi Dutschke, who advocated a “long march through the institutions” as the most plausible means for his fellow student activists to realize change: those committed to the cause should entrench themselves as integral parts of the socio-cultural machinery, become expert operators of said machinery (actually do the work, and well), then leverage these instruments in the service of alternative aims. Dutschke’s proposal was celebrated and wholeheartedly endorsed by Marcuse and many others on the ‘new left,’ leading to its popularization.
- ; Heterodox Academy
A well-lived life means wasting some time
You need to dawdle and dream. You need to leave enough empty space in your life to feel and experience, and simply let yourself be you. Hurrying from one thing to the next, in order to make sure your life is full enough is not going to satisfy you but merely craving for more.
Helen de Cruz
Why do we get the wrong leaders?
This political quality is not to be found in the substance of any particular value or conviction or body of knowledge, but rather in an attitude towards how all of these things should be weighed up in the process of decision-making. We call this quality judgement. And once you know that this is what makes for a good politician, you see it, or more precisely you see its absence, everywhere.
James Vitali; Engelsberg Ideas
Soulful Houellebecq
[We] find the reason for admiring Houellebecq’s fiction: For him, theories never do justice to the strangeness of human life. As he told his Paris Review interviewer, “belief in the soul . . . is strangely persistent in me, even though I never stop saying the opposite.”
- ; First Things
The Rise of the Barbarian Right
Given the emphasis on edgy jokes, the dissident right’s voice can blend with that of other groups of online shitposters, all contributing their share of noise to the social-media cacophony.
Boomers Are Losing Narrative Control
Baby boomers have been in the catbird seat since they were teenagers, exerting enormous cultural and social power. As their grip weakens, they are not only losing control of the generations below them, but also of how we think about the time we live in, and about them. Maybe young generations feel off-balance because we are now defining the times but never learned how. Or maybe our unsettled feeling is downstream of boomer disorientation.
Survey Results: Sex, Divorce and Infidelity After Baby
This makes me wonder if arguments over parenting and household contributions are usually a symptom of a larger problem: if you’re in the type of marriage where infidelity and emotional abuse is happening, it stands to reason that this type of person might also be kind of a sucky parent and/or spouse in other ways. On the flip side, is a lack of interest in parenting or contributing to the household a sign that someone is more likely to be emotionally abusive or unfaithful?
Against steelmanning: It's usually not a good idea to try to make arguments look stronger than they really are
Steelmanning can easily turn into strawmanning.
It’s Time for Electronic Music to Turn Its Dreams Into Reality
You could look at all this viral creativity as just another meme. But I think the outpouring of enthusiasm for a made-up genre speaks to a curious nexus of frustration and desire in the air right now, at the midpoint of the 2020s. There’s a nagging feeling that electronic music, for all its former promise, is spinning its wheels. And there’s a yearning for something more—an unspoken wish that things could be more interesting, more daring, more audacious.
Philip Sherburne; Pitchfork
For better, for worse — June brings fewer wedding bells, but Scheherazade offers post-nuptial inspiration
2020 even saw, for the first time, more people divorcing than tying knots. While partly explained by the postponement of many weddings, this was also the consequence of lockdown restrictions causing couples to feel imprisoned within their marriages. Does this imply that marriage is finally heading for extinction? Or could it suggest the opposite – that having always come in and out of fashion, marriage is on the verge of another comeback?
Devorah Baum; Perspective Media
The Man Who Was Not There — What Einstein Is Really Doing in “Oppenheimer”
So what is Einstein doing there? Why did Nolan, screenwriter as well as director, write him into key moments in the story, including the film’s final scene?
Ohad Reiss-Sorokin; The Hedgehog Review
A letter from Prague: the city in timeless harmony
I often wonder about composers: does knowing about their lives matter or impact the way we hear the music?
Hattie Butterworth; Gramophone
When a writer belongs to society now!
Candor — the raw kind — is a luxury afforded to those who owe people nothing, but in actuality, none of us live in a vacuum.
The Economic Way of Thinking in a Pandemic
During the pandemic, economists often found themselves at odds with politicians, physicians, epidemiologists and others. Some politicians, for example, were worried that the pharma companies might engage in profiteering while economists worried that the pharma companies were not nearly profitable enough. Physicians focused on maximizing the health of patients while economists focused on maximizing the health of society–during the pandemic these were not the same and this led to disputes over testing, first doses first and human challenge trials. During the pandemic economists were often accused of not staying in their lane. But what is the economist’s lane?
Alex Tabarrok
Conversations with Goethe by Johann Peter Eckermann
Unfortunately, the book, which was initially published in 1836 and only gradually became popular, concludes with a third part, a kind of long appendix, published in 1847. Here, Eckermann borrows from the diary of a French writer who also visited Goethe, and revisits his own earlier memories of their tête-à-têtes. This section doesn’t have the same force and grace as the first two parts, although Goethe still manages to deliver his fair share of maxims.
David Starkey; California Review of Books
The Giving Tree: Bad Book or Worst Book?
Let's not mince words. Written by a Playboy mansion habitue and composer of "A Boy Named Sue," The Giving Tree is about a female tree that literally gives up every aspect of her existence to please a spoiled, uncaring boy. By the end of the volume, the tree is reduced to a stump where the boy, now an old man, can park his ass. Decades past the Sexual Revolution, it's damn nigh impossible to read The Giving Tree as anything other than sublimated male anxiety over the rising tide of unfettered feminine sexuality and freedom.
Nick Gillespie; Reason
Why painting (still) matters
Writing about the masters is a safe and well-trodden career, but Gayford approaches it with an appealing scepticism. In a chapter entitled “What does a Rothko mean?”, he confronts the Russian-American artist’s insistence on the sublime, spiritual nature of his painting and how important it is that so many people burst into tears in front of his canvases.
Andrew Marr. New Statesman
The Reality Ouroboros
Scientists tend to think about reality in one of two ways. The first perspective involves physically emergent hierarchies (ontologies). The second describes conceptually emergent hierarchies (epistemologies)...
David Krakauer; Nautilus