Anna Gát's: What to Read This Weekend #72

Scruton, pogrom, isolation, academia, parenthood, HPV, gender wars, literacy, automation, media consolidation, genes, males, tales and machines -- and much more

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Nov 09, 2024

Hello friends!

Big week behind us, and a big week ahead. This is the start of the end-of-year rush, the finale of 2024, the time of the renewal of promises.

On Interintellect, some gems coming up for you. If reasonable conversations, friendly openness, and ideological diversity remain your thing, come say hi:

The Value of Freedom - a rare public IRL in Washington DC with political philosopher Rebecca Lowe
The Illness of Inequality – With David Lay Williams - online public salon
A lovely IRL meetup in Austin focusing on science and art - members only
Unseen Genius - With Sumana Roy - online public salon
One Day In The Life Of Ivan Denisovichh - online public reading group
Surviving the Apocalypse – With Athena Aktipis - online public salon
Bi-annual hangout for our SuperSupporters - online, hosted by me!
American Heretics: A History of Religious Resistance with Jerome Copulsky - members only, in Manhattan

And for our members, this weekend….

TODAY: I will be hosting a Discord writing session from 11 am ET / 4 pm GMT
TOMORROW: ACLU’s Jessica Apgar — military veteran and writer — will host a Discord fireside to continue our conversation about the elections and the future of politics in America, from 3 pm ET / 8 pm GMT

The great anonymous

Cartoons Hate Her

was just on my podcast The Hope Axis 🎭 The Hope Axis is now on both Spotify and Apple if you’d like to listen. Videos here. RSS feed here. Episode coming soon!

And now, let’s read….

The Left Must Start From Zero

By the same token, we must reject the notion that Harris lost because she is a nonwhite woman. No, Harris lost because Trump stood for politics and political contestation, while she stood for nonpolitics or antipolitics.

Slavoj Žižek; COMPACT

How to never be single

I’m 32 and I’ve never really ever been single. I’ve never been on the apps, or navigated “situationships” and I lived alone for a grand total of ~6 months of my adult life. Occasionally, when talking to friends who are single, or who at least had long stretches of singledom in their 20s, I get the distinct feeling that they think they know something I never will, because I never had to figure out how to “hack life on my own”. That they “know themselves” in a way that I don’t…

Regan Arntz-Gray

The magic of Thomas Mann

‘A man lives not only his personal life, as an individual’, Mann writes, ‘but also, consciously or unconsciously, the life of his epoch and his contemporaries.’

Guy Stagg; Engelsberg Ideas

Francis Fukuyama: what Trump unleashed means for America

Prior to the election, critics including Kamala Harris accused Trump of being a fascist. This was misguided insofar as he was not about to implement a totalitarian regime in the US. Rather, there would be a gradual decay of liberal institutions, much as occurred in Hungary after Viktor Orbán’s return to power in 2010.

Francis Fukuyama; Financial Times

On Quitting Academia

Then, two years ago, things took a turn. A viable application for a big research grant fell at the first hurdle. Two articles I’d spent months on were rejected, one quite quickly, the other after a long ordeal of consideration and resubmission. Some of the assessors, cloaked in anonymity, seemed affronted by what I was trying to say. It was crushing, but also an awakening. They had pecked so viciously because I was an injured hen in the brood. They sensed disingenuousness, ebbing engagement, slippage from relevance, and, behind it all, a loss of faith.

Malcolm Gaskill; London Review of Books

Revenge of the Silent Male Voter

If we take a macro perspective, we see that such young men have never known a culture in which males are not routinely described as “problematic,” “toxic,” or “oppressive”. Going to university, and working at modern companies, they live in a world of Diversity Equity and Inclusion policies—many of which promote an insidious and pervasive form of anti-male discrimination. Yet to talk about it in public invites social ostracism. To criticise DEI is to risk being called a Nazi.

Claire Lehmann; Quillette - Twitter version here

Two Nobel Prize winners want to cancel their own CRISPR patents in Europe

The request to withdraw the pair of European patents, by lawyers for Nobelists Emmanuelle Charpentier and Jennifer Doudna, comes after a damaging August opinion from a European technical appeals board, which ruled that the duo’s earliest patent filing didn’t explain CRISPR well enough for other scientists to use it and doesn’t count as a proper invention.

Antonio Regalado; MIT Tech Review

Updates on the Arc of the Moral Universe

The arc of the moral universe wants you to please wait. Your call is important to it.

Amanda Lehr; McSweeney’s Internet Tendency

How America Embraced Gender War

In the twenty-tens, women gained control over culture, too. A slick, corporatized feminism—the mugs about male tears, the Ruth Bader Ginsburg bobbleheads—occupied the public sphere. Girls were brash and confident and eager to call out bad male behavior; it was no longer O.K. to kiss a girl if she didn’t want you to (even if she was slutty!). All of this made a certain cohort of men lose their grip.

Jia Tolentino; The New Yorker

The Elite College Students Who Can't Read Books

Mike Szkolka, a teacher and an administrator who has spent almost two decades in Boston and New York schools, told me that excerpts have replaced books across grade levels. “There’s no testing skill that can be related to … Can you sit down and read Tolstoy? ” he said. And if a skill is not easily measured, instructors and district leaders have little incentive to teach it. Carol Jago, a literacy expert who crisscrosses the country helping teachers design curricula, says that educators tell her they’ve stopped teaching the novels they’ve long revered, such as My Ántonia and Great Expectations. The pandemic, which scrambled syllabi and moved coursework online, accelerated the shift away from teaching complete works.

Rose Horowitch; The Atlantic

A tale of two machines

The fact is, we have two different pitiless machines operating in tandem. One, the machine Ezra was talking about, was relentlessly focused on the threat of Donald Trump and the need to defeat him. But the other pitiless machine was relentlessly focused on shrinking the ideological tent, making it clear that troublemakers were at risk of being purged.

Matt Yglesias

A language family of one, a land beyond conquest: What a Basque genetic plot twist tells us about prehistoric Europe

Today we know that the Basque language is in fact the only indigenous non-Indo-European language to still survive from antiquity (also-rans Paleo-Sardinian and Etruscan endured until around 500 AD and 100 AD respectively). Its handful of fellow non-Indo-European languages spoken across Europe today are all comparatively recent arrivals: Finnish and Estonian arrived 2,500 years ago, Hungarian 1,000 years ago and Turkish 500 years ago. The Romans encountered the Basques’ ancestors when their legions arrived in northern Spain in the 1st century BC, and it is clear from Basque-like given names that those people spoke a language ancestral to Euskara.

Razib Khan

Last Night’s Pogrom in Amsterdam

In video of other attacks last night, a victim is struck and lays injured on the ground, seemingly unconscious. A father can be seen fleeing with his son. A man jumps into one of Amsterdam’s canals to escape his assailants. In the recording, where he is forced to say “Free Palestine,” his assailants laugh and jeer that he is a “cancer Jew”—a classic slur in Dutch, where both diseases and the Jewish ethnicity are deployed as put-downs.

David de Bruijn; The Free Press

Don’t Worry, Have Babies - The Progressive Ambivalence about Motherhood

Into this debate steps Anastasia Berg and Rachel Wiseman’s What Are Children For?, a well-timed attempt to make just such a case. Berg, an assistant professor of philosophy at the University of California, Irvine, and Wiseman, a writer and managing editor at The Point, sagely counsel at the outset that, although natalism has largely become a preoccupation of the right, “whether or not to have a family is too important to allow it to be a casualty of the culture war.”

Rita Koganzon; The Hedgehog Review

Americans hate inflation more than they hate unemployment

The first reason we should think inflation mattered is that people pretty consistently said it mattered. On Gallup’s long-running “most important problem” survey, inflation consistently ranked as the most important specific economic problem that people mentioned, right behind “economy in general”.

Noah Smith

Interintellect community social in Austin 2 days ago 🥰

What if A.I. Is Actually Good for Hollywood?

A.I. software, though, changes all the accounting. By using every available frame of Hanks’s movie career to capture his facial movements and the look of his skin under countless lighting conditions, physical environments, camera angles and lenses, Metaphysic’s artists can generate a digital Tom Hanks mask with the click of a few keystrokes. And what we see onscreen is just one factor in A.I.’s ascendancy. “It’s the quality, and it’s the speed, and it’s the cost,” Ulbrich said. No six-month production lag, no fortune spent.

Devin Gordon; The New York Times

A History of Book Publishing: How Profits Flow, Why Publishers are Slow to Innovate, and How Authors Get Rich

This is why I chose to self-publish. The closer you get to the means of production, the higher your leverage as an author. But the takeaway from publishing is that [retailers] and distributors always win (for now).

Paul Millerd

Don’t idolise Roger Scruton

Scruton was a liberal in the sense Burke was a liberal: suspicious of unbridled state power, realistic about human nature, idealistic about the value of nature, art and education irrespective of their “social utility”.

Sebastian Milbank; The Critic

This is a repost of my original thread about Trump's election, which has since disappeared…

My test is the following: if stranded in an unknown city, would a Dem elite (typically a professional or bureaucrat from a coastal city, with postgraduate education) prefer to spend the next four hours talking to an American worker with a high school degree from the Midwest? Or would he or she prefer to spend it with a professional with postgraduate education from Mexico, China or Indonesia? Or name your country? I asked this question to colleagues and friends, they all think is the latter --- as do I. Most Dem elites are now alienated from American workers…

What is tragic is that Biden’s agenda had started paying off for workers already (and also proving that it was possible to adopt policies that would help workers and disproving the claim that globalization and inequality were acts of nature that could not be influenced). What is even more tragic is that the Trump-Vance policies are likely going to be for the plutocrats and not for the American workers.

Daron Acemoglu

The sound of blood rushing — Exploring the experimental science of isolation

The sensations that were accidentally produced in these laboratory hide-outs belonged to a family of psychological effects that flourish in social and sensory isolation. From the Desert Fathers to prison inmates, polar explorers to shipwrecked mariners, the phantasmagoria of forlorn imaginings that acted as a proxy for human sustenance were well known. So too the listless confusion into which unending monotony would lead. In 1900, Maurice Small, a fellow at Clark University, went as far as planting a danger sign in the great outdoors: “In the presence of a desert, a prairie, a sea, or the sky; in an absolutely dark cavern, or on the summit of a mountain, a feeling of disproportionateness between the man and what he sees overwhelms consciousness. Paralysis of association results. Retrogression to a half-vegetative state like that of infancy follows”.

Antonio Melechi; The Times Literary Supplement

HPV vaccination: How the world can eliminate cervical cancer

They estimate that 80% to 100% vaccination rates for both boys and girls, with catch-up vaccinations for adults, could prevent nearly 50 million cervical cancer cases by 2100.

Saloni Dattani and Veronika Samborska; Our World in Data

Bridging the Great Stagnation: Why Taking an Extra Decade to Master the Fundamentals Matters

I may be biased, but I firmly believe that a key reason behind the so-called “great stagnation” is that too few people dedicate an extra decade to understand the foundational knowledge of the world in all its complexity.

Dr. Christine Corbett Moran

Schoenberg’s Second String Quartet: a guide to the best recordings

Many listeners will have first encountered this music via the LaSalle Quartet, whose Second Quartet was for long the benchmark in terms of lucidity and unforced pursuit of an emotional equilibrium over all four movements. With hindsight it now feels just a little pale in response…

Richard Whitehouse (no relation); Gramophone UK

David Zaslav says Trump will fuel big media mergers

Warner Bros. Discovery CEO David Zaslav thinks putting Donald Trump back in the White House could offer a friendlier environment for major media mergers. “We have an upcoming new administration,” Zaslav said during an earnings call on Thursday. “It’s too early to tell, but it may offer a pace of change and an opportunity for consolidation that may be quite different.”

Emma Roth; The Verge

Twenty-five facts about The Winter's Tale

#15: Winter’s Tale was written sometime around 1609-1611, when the Blackfriars theatre was newly opened. This theatre relied on candlelight, unlike the Globe, so far more stage effects were possible, such as Hermione’s reawakening, and could be done with suspense.

Dear Henry Oliver

What I learned from 130 hours in a Waymo

Waymos can’t yet recognize their passengers, so I’ll often see my ride drive right past me even though I’ve stationed myself in a great spot for it to pull over. Sometimes it will stop in front of me, but will decide for some invisible reason that it isn’t a safe spot to pull over anymore, and it will take off again, leaving me chasing it down and feeling like a chump. This changes the experience from “I’m living in a magical future with robots doing my bidding” to “Hey loser, your ‘shiny’ new tech hates you”.

Matt Bell

The Art World Reacts to a Second Trump Presidency

Carrie Mae Weems lent imagery from her seminal “Kitchen Table” series for a short film titled Kamala’s Table. Artist Brian Andrew Whiteley even got his viral “Trump Tombstone” sculpture out of retirement.

Tessa Solomon; ARTnews

The ultra-selfish gene

We already interfere with nature to protect humans and wildlife. In 1997 Zanzibar successfully eliminated tsetse flies, which transmit trypanosomiasis (sleeping sickness) to people and animals. Alberta, Canada, has been rat free since the 1950s due to a rigorous ongoing control program. Malaria, as mentioned previously, was eradicated from much of the Western world using the environmentally damaging DDT, which negatively affected wildlife from birds to fish.

Since gene drives allow us to target only the mosquitoes carrying malaria, it is both more effective and more environmentally friendly than other vector control methods like DDT. By eradicating the few species of mosquito known to spread most of malaria, we can rid the world of a horrible disease that kills more than half a million children every single year.

Mathias Kirk Bonde; Works in Progress

On Contempt: I Want to Be Liked

Look, I’m probably uncharitable. I’m probably a bad person. I probably have a dysfunctional relationship with my own art. But I hate poetry because I love it so much—and because maybe I feel like I’m not doing enough, or others aren’t taking things seriously enough.

Randall Mann; Poetry Foundation

Voyager 1 Breaks Its Silence With NASA via a Radio Transmitter Not Used Since 1981

“The S-band signal is too weak to use long term,” Waggoner tells CNN. “So far, the team has not been able to use it to get telemetry (information about the health and status of the spacecraft), let alone science data. But it allows us to at least send commands and make sure the spacecraft is still pointed at Earth.”