Anna Gát's: What to Read This Weekend #70
Elections, heretics, charmers, frauds, boys vs men. And Girard, Texas, progress studies, libraries, plagiarism, domestic violence, cheesecake, Airbus, essays, free will, the media, and more...
Hey folks,
Lots to read this weekend, so you might not see the full email in your inbox — for the full reading digest open the list in your browser or Substack app.
On Interintellect, some nice new things have been listed. My quick recommendations for you:
ONLINE The Illness of Inequality – A Super Salon with David Lay Williams: hosted by Bronwyn Williams
ONLINE Unseen Genius: People and Plants on the Periphery – A Conversation with Sumana Roy
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
ONLINE (Series) George Saunders Book Club: A Swim in a Pond in the Rain
ONLINE What Does Spiritual Healing Mean For Our Emotions and Psychology? An Introduction to the Science Behind Ancient Wisdom Applied to Modern Society
ONLINE (Series) Judaism Is Psychedelic – With Madison Margolin
OFFLINE gatherings in Toronto and Austin (I’ll also probably be hosting one in NYC on November 6, with Claire Lehmann — more on this soon)
Earlier today, I hosted a wonderful salon with literary critic
and Hollywood screenwriter Michael Sonnenschein on the problems with today’s storytelling in TV, cinema, and novels: we're talking about genre and Mamet, The Sopranos and Mad Men, character growth and Succession, number of seasons and technological change, studios and directing style, and much more. Video soon!
And episode 11 of my podcast The Hope Axis just dropped - WATCH HERE.
Last week the novelist and essayist
joined me to talk about status and attraction, mimesis and uniformity, Girard and Austen, Batuman and Kierkegaard, Tolstoy and main character energy, Natasha's first novel and her new one in the making, the positive side of the imitation game, and how individuals can live freely from it all.
Alright, buckle up, and let’s read…!
Architect of his own downfall: The cold heart of Frank Lloyd Wright
Famously, or notoriously, Wright was a charismatic figure – for if a radically original architect is not a seducer of wealthy clients, how will his work be realized? Like many charismatic figures, Wright was drawn to exploiting his admirers, including women; he paid his employees and acolytes starvation wages, or none at all; at the time of the Spring Green slayings, Wright was in debt to a number of employees and local tradesmen, and breezily indifferent about paying what he owed; the pettiness recounted by his biographers is extraordinary.
Joyce Carol Oates; The Times Literary Supplement
‘The Onion’ Officially Endorses Joe Biden For President
Throughout its venerable 268-year reign, The Onion has always made it a top priority to endorse the correct presidential candidates. From George Washington to Richard Nixon to Donald Trump, this institution’s highly respected editorial board has had its finger on the pulse, and has accurately backed the winner of every single national election in this country’s long and storied history. Now, with our nation at a pivotal crossroads, The Onion‘s editorial board faces its most difficult decision yet. That’s why we have chosen to officially endorse Joseph R. Biden for president of the United States.
Thank you The Onion! If only WaPo had the sense of humour…
Risers and Fallers: What happened to the intellectual giants of the 20th century?
An example of a Faller is John Kenneth Galbraith, who was known for claiming that the American economy had come to be dominated by large corporations. He described them as able to use advertising to ensure demand for their goods. He thought that the leaders of these giants cultivated a myth of entrepreneurship to hide their immense power and quasi-permanent status. In his prime, his books were bestsellers and many educated Americans were familiar with his line of thinking. Today, he is little read, and the business world has experienced considerable disruption. An example of a Riser is Rene Girard, who is known for claiming that we acquire our desires by copying other people. He seems to be better known today than he was in his twentieth-century “prime.” The case that interests me the most is Sigmund Freud…
Arnold Kling — HT Marginal Revolution
The Charisma-vs.-Charm Election
“Charm is a defining feature of contemporary politics, not just in the United States but internationally,” [Julia] Sonnevend told me recently at an event in New York City hosted by the intellectual community Interintellect. “If you analyze politics without considering it, you are missing a core component,” she insisted. “There’s a stronger focus on personality than before. We have to understand how it operates.”
Conor Friedersdorf; The Atlantic - This was a good event!
Consciousness as a Gödel sentence in the language of science
While I can’t claim certainty, science being fundamentally incomplete is at least conceivable to me. It would mean that there are scientific facts that at first look tantalizingly discoverable, but then their true answers remain closed to us for non-trivial reasons. (“Non-trivial” is important here—there are clearly many facts trivially closed for us, like counting every atom in the universe.) Non-trivial scientific incompleteness would be a different beast. It’d be more like some statements within science end in paradox, the scientific equivalent of “This sentence is a lie.”
Scientists usually shy away from meta-scientific questions like that of scientific incompleteness. I understand why! It seems too much like philosophy, which is dangerous (something I was told during my PhD repeatedly). Dark and deep waters. But of course, a very similar question was famously asked in mathematics, and it has a very famous answer in Gödel's theorems (essentially that yes, mathematics is necessarily incomplete). While the “genre” of incompleteness proofs doesn’t affect most working mathematicians, it also isn’t irrelevant—it crops up like an ominous weed.
“The Genius to Glue Them Together”: On René Girard and His Ideas
Deceit, Desire, and the Novel remains practical, lucid, and focused on the novels at hand and what they reveal about human nature. At the heart of the book is our endless imitation of each other. Imitation is inescapable — it’s how we learn, it’s why we don’t eat with our hands, it’s why we communicate beyond grunts. When it comes to metaphysical desire — which Girard describes as desires beyond simple needs and appetites — what we imitate is vital, and why, and can be a symptom of our ontological sickness. While he did not coin the word “mimesis” — Erich Auerbach predates him, along with Aristotle and even Plato — certainly much of its usage in our contemporary culture comes from René Girard.
The “Romantic lie” Girard attempts to dismantle is the myth of personal autonomy, the “authentic self” so dear to thinkers from Rousseau onward. The hero wants something, and it is really “he” who wants it — unaffected by others, as if he were not also a slave to public opinion and the approbation of friends and family. Girard saw an inevitable third in these transactions — the one who modeled the desire, who taught us to have it.
Cynthia L. Haven; Los Angeles Review of Books
25-Year-Old Men Are Adults
I don’t mean to get all Bill Maher on your asses, but like…everyone needs to grow up a little… We are living in the first era in which society has extended men’s adolescence well into their twenties. People will wax poetic about a time in history when twenty-year-old virgin women were sold off to wealthy patriarchs in their forties, but this was never the norm. Throughout history, marriage has been between young women and young men a couple years older. Perhaps young men are a bit less mature than young women, but an age gap of 2-5 years seems to account for this, per the US census…
The curious history of imaginary libraries
Just as potent as the libraries that once existed are the libraries that never did. The imaginary library has never ceased to enthral poets, prelates, politicians and pranksters down the centuries. The Bible might be the very first imaginary library.
Josh Mcloughlin; Engelsberg Ideas
Metascience 101 - EP7: “Science and Political Legitimacy"
Journalist Dylan Matthews leads a conversation with Open Philanthropy CEO Alexander Berger, Professor Tyler Cowen, and IFP Co-CEO Caleb Watney. Together, they explore the relationship between effective, robust scientific institutions and notions of political legitimacy…
Tyler Cowen: I think there's a general problem in science funding, also arts funding, and it's the following. There is a lot of underproduced public goods out there. Basic science is one of them. At the margin, you can always do something with government. If it's small enough, it can be well-controlled and have positive impact. But as it gets larger, Congress or someone else wants to have a say. Then effectiveness is greatly diminished. Over time, bureaucratization sets in, labor costs rise, maybe the states and different senators want their share of the thing, whatever else.
So you have this scarce resource. It's the ability to do things without attracting too much attention. You have to think very carefully how you allocate that. I think a lot of good science policy is knowing when you can do more in an area without attracting too much attention. That's always going to change over time. It won't be a fixed formula. Knowing that we could set up 27 different ARPA-like entities, but in fact, the total amount of money would be so high that Congress would really start interfering with them all, and then we've got to pull back from that. Even though the abstract arguments for doing that might be quite strong. It's a kind of art: figuring out the balance of what you can get away with and keeping enough autonomy so that it still works well.
Antigone’s Law: Who can make the world a better place?
It then falls to women to secure the future and keep human misery out of sight.
Jacqueline Rose; The New York Review
When Do We Have Free Choice?
When we better understand another person’s reasons for believing and acting as they do, we are less likely to think that they are free to change their minds. At least, they aren’t free unless we give them new reasons and information to help them change their mind. And if we realize that they are limited in this way, we are more likely to engage in conversation rather than judgment.
Corey Cusimano; Nautilus
How real should fiction be?
Henry James put it like this: “as the picture is reality, so the novel is history.”
On reading Iris Murdoch's The Sea, The sea and why kids these days can't read
I realized, watching Robin Waldun's video, that I too have lost sight of why great literary novels are worth reading. I once knew it of course, and I read my Hardys and Austens with much pleasure. But over time, they had to make room for more pressing things. If you cannot afford mental space, a certain stretchiness in your day, then out of the window goes our capacity for wonder and discovery (so I argue in my book Wonderstruck). The problem is, you need to read to fully know it. Reading a lot gets you into a virtuous feedback loop where you want to read more.
How Joe Rogan Remade Austin
The city attracts people with a distinct set of political positions that don’t exactly line up with either main party. They might be religious but are equally likely to be “spiritual.” They shoot guns but worry about seed oils. They are relaxed about gay people but often traditional about gender. They dabble with psychedelic drugs but worry about drinking caffeine first thing in the morning.
Helen Lewis; The Atlantic
Notes From The Progress Studies Conference
It feels like the United States, after a fifty-year binge on over-regulation, has woken up, wiped the vomit off its chin, noticed it’s lost half its net worth, and started to consider doing something else. I am equally confused why it took so long and why it’s happening now.
Scott Alexander
Gisèle Pelicot takes stand in French mass rape trial
She told the court in Avignon she wants women who have been raped to know that "it's not for us to have shame - it's for them".
"I want all women who have been raped to say: Madame Pelicot did it, I can too. I don't want them to be ashamed any longer," she said, referring to her request for an open trial and for the videos of the alleged rapes to be shown.
Laura Gozzi; BBC News
The Bleak Genius of Michel Foucault
Not the grand things in history but the seemingly marginal in human affairs interested him most. He wasn’t so much preoccupied with the power differentials and conflicts embedded in the mode and relations of production, as with the production of power in the hidden and embarrassing little corners of ordinary life—in the interplay between, for example, the young boy or girl just discovering masturbation and the Victorian governess charged with interdicting such behavior.
- ; COMPACT
Reading J.D. Vance
In Hillbilly Elegy, Vance is still trying to work it out – what was his mother’s fault? What was America’s? He started writing the memoir while he was a student at Yale Law School, where he studied with Amy Chua, author of Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother (2011), which explores the reason ‘Chinese parents raise such stereotypically successful kids’. His book, which Chua helped him to get published, is a kind of counterpart: why does the American white working class produce so many losers? Particularly dysfunctional, he argues, are his own people – the ‘Scots-Irish hillbillies’ who settled in Eastern Kentucky. He thinks that it wasn’t only his mother who ‘lacked even a modicum of temper control’, but nearly all the adults he grew up around – ‘seeing people insult, scream, and sometimes physically fight was just a part of our life.’
These days Vance refers to his hillbilly brethren as ‘very hardworking people, and they’re very good people’, and he blames Kamala Harris for shipping their jobs to China and Mexico, and illegal immigrants for seizing on what little is left (when not too busy fricasseeing their cats). But in his memoir he argues that perfectly decent jobs are in abundance, but ‘too many young men immune to hard work’ are making ‘good jobs impossible to fill for any length of time’.
Deborah Friedell; London Review of Books
What Does It Mean to Want Kids?
One of the key tensions of modern life is that the Internet concretizes our internal monologue and we get inured to being judged by our digital presences. Because we’re so used to living as this externalization of our inner voice, it can be surprising or even offensive to hit up against the limitations of what we physically are. In the future, everyone will see you exactly as you want to be seen for 15 minutes…
A while back, a friend of mine was reviewing What Are Children For? and asked me why I decided to have a child. I said that for me, it was instinct. When I say I “wanted” kids what I really meant was that I needed them. It felt as natural as being hungry. Like a phantom limb, I longed to hold my baby.
- — Watch Anastasia Berg and Rachel Weisman on Interintellect talking about What Are Children For? — Watch Katherine See on my podcast The Hope Axis
Why Do Some States Protect Women While Others Enable Abuse?
"Come see us after he’s killed you" remains a grimly accurate characterisation of official attitudes.
In 2017, Russian legislators actually decriminalised domestic battery. Half of all married women have been beaten by their husbands, yet many feel fatalistic presuming nothing can mitigate pervasive alcoholism and abuse.
Why human creativity matters in the age of AI
But the poem is also a record of the noble, melancholy soul of Matthew Arnold. It matters as a human artefact, and an appreciation of Arnold’s lines is inextricable from an appreciation of the human personality that created them. Even the reader’s thrill at the poem’s technical virtuosity is inextricable from the human intelligence that conceived it. You could give me a hundred years and I could not write the final lines.
James Marriott; Engelsberg Ideas
Will the China Cycle Come for Airbus and Boeing?
One industry that hasn’t yet gone far through this cycle is large commercial aircraft (i.e: jetliners), which remains dominated by Boeing and Airbus, even within China. But this isn’t for lack of trying. China has been attempting to manufacture its own commercial aircraft since the 1970s, and has been following the China cycle playbook to try and get there. It’s not yet clear if it will succeed. So far China has spent decades and billions of dollars in its attempts to build a successful commercial aircraft.
The Middle-Class Women Who Are Tripping Balls
But Rachel also has another hobby, one that makes her a bit different from the other moms in her Texas suburb—not that she talks about it with them. Once a month or so, after she and her husband put the kids to bed, Rachel texts her in-laws—who live just down the street—to make sure they’re home and available in the event of an emergency. And then, Rachel takes a generous dose of magic mushrooms, or sometimes MDMA, and—there’s really no other way to say this— spends the next several hours tripping balls.
- ; The Free Press
Doctors Agreed Her Baby Would Die 3 Months Before She Was Forced to Give Birth
Deborah Dorbert was five months pregnant in November 2022 when learned that her baby was not going to live. Late in the second trimester of her pregnancy, a scan revealed that his kidneys and lungs were failing to develop; a specialist diagnosed the baby with Potter syndrome, a condition that occurs when there is a lack of amniotic fluid in the uterus. He would not survive more than a few hours past birth, Deborah and her husband, Lee, were told.
Her doctor advised that the safest option for Deborah would be to induce, and end the pregnancy as soon as possible. But because of restrictions that had taken effect in Florida that summer, a week after the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade, that option was not available to her. Instead, Deborah was forced to carry her pregnancy to term: three and half more months, living with the knowledge that her child was going to die.
Tessa Stuart; Rolling Stone
I'm Done Worrying about "Self-Plagiarism"
When I was getting started as a writer, I remember fantasizing about publication as a magical finish-line that would someday free me from the activity of (always, endlessly) writing and rewriting. How wonderful it would be, to officially finish a text and be free (obliged?) to move on to something else. But if publication marks the completion of a piece of writing, it also marks its birth—its entry into the world as an object with material reality. The text starts having its own adventures, and dictating your further fate and movements. In a way, that’s the beginning of the real story, not the end. What if there were formal conventions for how to tell that story—other than tacking on a “foreword to the Xth edition” every few years?
How American-style cheesecake was born in ancient Rome
The ancient Romans feasted on a delicious honey-crusted cheesecake called Savillum, which is believed to be the real ancestor of modern US-style cheesecake. Instead of Philadelphia soft cheese, there was fresh goat milk ricotta straight from the shepherds. It was adored by slaves, aristocrats and soldiers.
Silvia Marchetti; CNN
Does academic writing have to be boring?
Academia and higher education have to be a public good. In order for that to happen, we need to be able to communicate in a way that people are going to hear what we’re saying and receive the message.
Samantha Perfas; The Harvard Gazette
Very attractive and very unattractive men show the highest hostility towards women
Results showed that the strongest link was between right-wing authoritarianism and hostility towards women, both in the form of hostile sexism and misogyny.
Vladimir Hedrih; PsyPost
Can the Media Survive?
All of these media insiders have watched up close as the business that undergirds journalism changed dramatically in the past decade, and almost all of them would agree that it hasn’t, for the most part, been for the better. We wanted to understand not just what this new state of media looks like but what the future of getting reliable news out in the world might actually be…
Some unquestionably powerful figures declined to participate…
Charlotte Klein, Paul Kooiker; New York Magazine
Popular History
Historians like Ramsay and Bancroft—who served in government as Secretary of the Navy under James Polk—have plenty to teach us about the potential conflicts between politics and scholarship. But they were essentially gentleman amateurs (even though Bancroft held a German Ph.D.) who lived in a world defined by very different academic and intellectual institutions. Our current model for serious popular history dates, instead, to the period after World War II, when the rapid expansion of higher education, and of the market for history, produced that golden age of books that we now hold up as paragons of the genre. Writing about this period in his recent book Popularizing the Past, the historian Nick Witham shows how the paperback revolution in publishing, the democratization of culture and the self-examination that accompanied America’s global power after World War II all fostered a cultural environment in which large numbers of Americans looked to serious historical scholarship to help them understand their world…
But Americans did not only feel a strategic imperative to understand other peoples; they also wanted to better understand themselves.
Scott Spillman; The Point
Simple Yet Profound: On the Timelessness of Aesop’s Fables
So the fables—we know of over seven hundred—deliver inconsistent messages. They are a ragbag. From our childhoods, we’re most familiar with animal fables that have a moral attached. But in many fables animals don’t feature at all. We have talking inanimate objects such as walls and bushes, talking parts of the human body, talking humans and gods. And not all the fables are intended to deliver a moral.
Robin Waterfield; Literary Hub
The Essay as Realm
Engineering is a function, but architecture is aesthetic. You’re not just designing for function—you want people to feel a certain way. Churches have high ceilings because they make one feel exalted, smaller and in awe. A visible roof makes a house feel cozier—the roof is a sign of shelter… When I’m writing, I’m trying to be an architect. I’m trying to get the reader to feel the way I do; even when I don’t intend to convince them of something, and most of the time I don’t, writing is a subtly coercive act.
Elisa Gabbert; Gorgia Review
What Do You Do With an Idea?
Almost any 1950s or 1960s idea that’s being brought back to life today benefits from dramatic cost and performance improvements compared to the technology available at the time.
What Can You Learn from Photographing Your Life?
Taking pictures of the same things over and over can emphasize the rhythms of existence. Every evening, on the way home from work, I pass the same red-and-white fire hydrant, which is set into some reedy bushes on a little promontory overlooking a harbor. I often stop to take a picture of it: its red registers as warmer in summer and cooler in winter, and its white adopts the yellow of scorched grass in late summer and fall. People’s faces also change with the seasons…
Joshua Rothman; The New Yorker