Anna Gát's: What to Read This Weekend #73
Anna Gát's: What to Read This Weekend #73
Teaching literature, losing to fascism, predicting the future. Auden + Auden. Napoleon, Trump, liberating science... Ferrante, Paul Thomas Anderson, Gwern. Thomas Mann, Vonnegut, Virginia Woolf...
Hey folks,
Extreme amounts of good things to read this weekend — and before we dive in, just a little update for you:
🎟️ Cool new things to sing up for on Interintellect:
Toronto social (Dec 12 | members)
Austin social (Dec 15 | members)
DC social with me (Dec 4 | public)
Surviving the Apocalypse, online salon with Athena Aktipis (Nov 22 | public)
NYC in-person salon with Jerome Copulsky — ‘American Heretics’ (Dec 1 | members)
Online salon with Greg Epstein — ‘Tech Agnostic’ (Dec 4 | public)
Online salon on family and selfcompassion (Nov 26 | public)
George Saunders online book club (continues in Dec | public)
For a big seasonal discount on Interintellect memberships, use the code ‘AutumnLeaves’ at the checkout. (Works for gifting too!)
🎙️ The Hope Axis (episode 12) just DROPPED: The brilliant anonymous blogger joined me to explore dating and attraction, marriage and work, raising children and being in the media - and cleared up a lot of misunderstandings around seduction, trads, fame, monogamy, domination, and disappointments.
Episode 13 will be with the great
! We recorded it just yesterday, and talked about spiritual technology, designing the world based on values, spiritual suffering and healing — and Sam Altman, Peter Thiel, Tamara Winter, Marc Andreessen, Interintellect… And writing, embodiment, McLuhan, Steve Jobs, the Constitution, Adam Curtis, Silicon Valley as a noreligion, and the “God-shaped hole” in society. Coming soon!
Earlier this week, I attended
’s lovely Interintellect social in Manhattan ❤️ Thanks for bringing us together — such a great convo!
And now, let’s read ……
Science is neither red nor blue
Long before the 5 November US presidential election, I had become ever more concerned that science has fallen victim to the same political divisiveness tearing at the seams of American society. This is a tragedy because science is the best—arguably the only—approach humankind has developed to peer into the future, to project the outcomes of various possible decisions using the known laws of the natural world. Since the founding of the National Academy of Sciences (NAS) during the Civil War, the most divisive period in US history, science and the NAS (of which I am the current president) have consistently served the nation, regardless of the political party in power. As the scientific community continues to do so now, it must take a critical look at what responsibility it bears in science becoming politically contentious, and how scientists can rebuild public trust.
Marcia McNutt; Science
Golden Age of Building
Government software - Public safety technology - Manufacture in the USA - Stablecoins 2.0 - LLMs for chip design - Fintech 2.0 - New space companies - AI aided engineering tools - One million jobs 2.0
Y Combinator
How Professors Killed Literature
Three solutions were attempted in an earlier phase of this crisis, all guided by the assumption that students abhor the strange, the ancient, the remote, and like the familiar, the modern, and the close. The first was to replace or supplement books with newer media—film, TV, popular music, computer games, visual art—to which it was assumed that, since our students were native to them (“their capacities are different,” as Claybaugh put it), they would feel more attracted. The second was to reduce the amount of space in the curriculum previously held by the old novelists and poets (from the remote 19th century, for example) in favor of texts produced in very recent times. The third was to use cultural products of other periods and places as a way to discuss moral and political problems of our time.
Reinaldo Laddaga; COMPACT
Seeing Things as They Are
So these are people who literally hate democracy—and if they can get away with it, they’ll extinguish it. They’re influential people, in politics and business and the military bureaucracy, and they’re going to be empowered and emboldened if Trump wins office. It’s disturbing to hear people like that just openly discuss the things they want to do: summary tribunals for Democrats, that sort of thing. I hate Democrats, but I’m sorry, I don’t want to see that sort of thing for people just because you disagree with their politics, you know?
Ken Silverstein and John Michael Colón; The Point
How to Have Grandchildren
If you live far away, your kids will not visit you frequently when they have little ones. I know it seems unfair, but expect it to be unfair, because traveling with a baby (or worse, a toddler) is pretty difficult (yes, I know I said life doesn’t end when you have kids, but travel is temporarily tricky when they’re very little.) Anyway, if you are able, you should visit them. Of course, all of this is stuff you can only do in practice when you already have grandkids, but I’m mostly talking about setting the expectation.
Pedro Almodóvar’s conflict of interests
There has been a greater emphasis – allied to his increased engagement with the devices of melodrama and his growing interest in more reflective, less impulsive modes of behaviour – on the written and spoken word: keyboards, typewriters, letters, notes, manuscripts, speeches, confessions, song lyrics, voiceover and inter-titles. His films have retained a taste for the macabre, the lust for red, but it would be hard to imagine a character in one of his 1980s films ending, as Talk to Her does, with characters promising to “talk one day”. Back then a heart-to-heart was a less likely prospect than a double suicide or a spot of sado-masochism.
Leo Robson; The New Statesman
What President Trump Should Do
It’s also impossible to hire new, better civil servants. Our systems for sourcing are shattered. Take Jack Cable, 17, who won the Department of Defense’s “Hack the Air Force” contest against 600 other contestants by identifying weaknesses in Pentagon software. But when Cable applied for a DoD role, his résumé was graded “not minimally qualified” because the hiring manager didn’t know anything about the coding languages he listed himself proficient in.
Neutrality
It’s time to start thinking again about neutrality. Neutral institutions, neutral information sources. Things that both seem and are impartial, balanced, incorruptible, universal, legitimate, trustworthy, canonical, foundational.
The IDF’s New Recruits — As small but growing numbers of Haredi men enlist in the Israeli military, attitudes in their strictly observant communities start to shift
Anti-draft demonstrations continue to be held in Haredi areas. And last week, Haredi members of Knesset were threatening to withhold their votes for a national budget if a draft-exemption bill isn’t passed.
Hillel Kuttler; Tablet
How the Ivy League Broke America
We want a society run by people who are smart, yes, but who are also wise, perceptive, curious, caring, resilient, and committed to the common good. If we can figure out how to select for people’s motivation to grow and learn across their whole lifespan, then we are sorting people by a quality that is more democratically distributed, a quality that people can control and develop, and we will end up with a fairer and more mobile society.
David Brooks; The Atlantic
Are Ideas Getting Harder to Find Because of the Burden of Knowledge?
Assume invention is the application of knowledge to solve problems (whether in science or technology). As more problems are solved, we require additional knowledge to solve the ones that remain, or to improve on our existing solutions. This wouldn’t be a problem, except for the fact that people die and take their knowledge with them. Meanwhile, babies are (inconveniently) born without any knowledge. So each generation needs to acquire knowledge anew, slowly and arduously, over decades of schooling. But since the knowledge necessary to push the frontier keeps growing, the amount of knowledge each generation must learn gets larger. The lengthening retraining cycle slows down innovation. A variety of suggestive evidence is consistent with this story.
People want competence, seemingly over everything else
People prefer “competent” government over any other adjective, whether it’s “bureaucratic” or “rigid” or “big” or sometimes even “democratic”. Politicians think having the right policy is the answer to most questions. Ban this, regulate that, add a rule here. Whether it’s climate change or tax or entrepreneurship or energy shortage or geopolitical jockeying for status. But policies don’t mean much to anyone without it being implemented. In Berkeley apparently it’s illegal to whistle for a lost canary before 7 am, though I doubt this is being policed rigorously. What people in power hear are policies, what people on the ground see are its implementations.
On The Issues I.-Abortion
Allowing women to better time their pregnancies can lead to the birth of children in whom their parents, particulary their mother, invest more. Hence, one benefit of more liberal abortion laws that it can lead to higher overall investment in the human capital of children.
In the fray: How to teach contemporary literature
Worldwide, more than 100,000 novels are published in English each year. Even the prize-winners run into scores. So the first challenge is which authors to teach – the celebrities, those who sold most? – and the second what to say about them. “Here, if we could recognize it”, wrote Virginia Woolf. contemplating new titles in a bookshop, “lies some poem, or novel, or history which will stand up and speak with other ages about our age when we lie prone and silent…”. But it was “oddly difficult”, she continued, to say “which are the real books and what it is that they are telling us, and which are the stuffed books which will come to pieces when they have lain about for a year or two”.
Tim Parks; The Times Literary Supplement
There’s a Better Way to Talk About Fluoride, Vaccines and Raw Milk
Measles vaccines have decades of safety data and save lives every day. Concern about a possible link to autism has been conclusively debunked in large and reliable data sets. Measles is extremely contagious, and without widespread vaccination, many people — including babies — will be vulnerable to infection, and some will die. The case of raw milk is more complex.
; The New York Times
We must love one another and die: Auden's enduring legacy in times of turmoil
As scholarship tries to determine why a culture has gone mad, why a new generation of psychopathic gods is being worshipped, I turn to poetry. To art. To the knowledge, that of course this is happening, because, yes, those to whom evil is done, do evil in return.
Gwern Branwen - How an Anonymous Researcher Predicted AI's Trajectory
“The most underrated benefit of anonymity is that people don't project onto you as much. They can't slot you into any particular niche or identity and write you off in advance. They have to at least read you a little bit to even begin to dismiss you.”
The US Is a Civic Desert. To Survive, the Democratic Party Needs to Transform Itself.
The Democratic Party was swept up in this civic transition. Today, the party focuses almost exclusively on election campaign sprints optimized … for short-term mobilizing (squeezing donations and volunteer hours out of current members) rather than for long-term organizing (fostering the stewardship, growth, and leadership development of the party’s membership). Instead of funding itself primarily through membership dues, the party offers fancy events for the wealthy and ceaseless, disrespectful texts for the rest of us. Parasocial relationships with celebrities and famous politicians are emphasized over real relationships with fellow neighbors and local chapter leaders.
Pete Davis; The Nation
The Biggest Bias in Higher Education is Not Political or Ideological Per Se
In order to understand biases and exclusion in academe, it’s best to consider who comprises it. Professors, for instance, are overwhelmingly relatively affluent, urban and suburban whites who graduated with terminal degrees from the top programs in their fields. These kinds of folks don’t just dominate academia. They are the primary producers and consumers of most content produced in the “symbolic professions.”
Yes, inflation made the median voter poorer
People do not feel wages, they feel total income. And median growth in total income — post taxes and transfers — was not just historically low: it collapsed and was deeply negative from 2021 onwards. Much of this decline is due to timing of pandemic stimulus and even less the “fault of Biden” than other things.
What Does It Mean That Donald Trump Is a Fascist?
A liberal has to tell a hundred stories, or a thousand. A communist has one story, which might not turn out to be true. A fascist just has to be a storyteller. Because words do not attach to meanings, the stories don’t need to be consistent. They don’t need to accord with external reality. A fascist storyteller just has to find a pulse and hold it. This can proceed through rehearsal, as with Hitler, or by way of trial and error, as with Trump.
Timothy Snyder; The New Yorker
Frank Auerbach, Painter Who Redefined Portraiture, Dies at 93
His paintings from the 1950s and ’60s were so bombarded with paint as to be sculptural, forcing one of his early gallerists to exhibit them flat under the assumption that his materials might slip off the canvas when hung upright.
Alex Greenberger; ARTnews
The Death and Life of Prediction Markets at Google
Even in cases where managers wanted explicit probabilistic forecasts, a prediction market turned out to be a tough sell.
Dan Schwarz; Asterisk
'The Magic Mountain' Saved My Life
I fell under the spell of Hans Castorp’s quest story, as the Everyman hero is transformed by his explorations of time, illness, sciences and séances, politics and religion and music. The climactic chapter, “Snow,” felt as though it were addressed to me. Hans Castorp, lost in a snowstorm, falls asleep and then awakens from a mesmerizing and monstrous dream with an insight toward which the entire story has led him: “For the sake of goodness and love, man shall grant death no dominion over his thoughts.”
George Packer; The Atlantic
AI progress has plateaued at GPT-4 level
The second hypothesis behind the stall is one people discuss all the time: deep learning is limited by the amount of high-quality data (of which human civilization has been thoroughly mined of by the big companies). This creates an “S-curve” that, at best, approximates human intelligence on tasks with lots of data … Of course, there’s still the question of whether or not synthetic data can get around this.
Ridley Scott: Paul Thomas Anderson Re-Wrote 'Napoleon'
Amidst Academy Award-winner Joaquin Phoenix‘s much-publicized exit from Todd Haynes’ NC-17 gay romance, the actor’s history of getting cold feet came under newfound scrutiny. Back in August, The Hollywood Reporter wrote that Phoenix almost left Ridley Scott‘s epic biopic “Napoleon,” but was convinced to stay after Paul Thomas Anderson stepped in to make some rewrites.
Harrison Richlin; IndieWire
Ozempic For Sleep
My lab mate Yuki is also a short sleeper. She is constantly on her feet. She's one of the happiest and highest-energy people I know. She's also one of the few people who are always in the lab. And she's a professional violinist, and she has time to surround herself with wholesome people, and she walks 10 miles a day, and she plays so much badminton to obliterate me in a match. She says: “It feels like I have a cheat code in life.”
Isaak Freeman
Between Mandala and Machine
Kamala Harris was described as a machine politician, as were Clinton and Obama before her. Almost all US politics since the Civil War has been machine politics. The Democratic flavor of city-based machine politics being the kind usually implied, but the underlying mechanistic logic is equally descriptive of how the Republican Party operated until the rise of the Tea Party, and later, Trump…
What will the new societal machine look like? What will its constituent smaller machines — including new political machines look like? Once today’s emerging mandalas — Trumpish trad mandalas as well as communitarian mutualist ones — mature and things start to stagnate, the need for a new machine will start to get acute. A source of impersonal and uncaring stability and individual space. Something that will check the creeping demands for ceaseless public performance of anxious mandala mythologies.
On becoming less left-wing (Part 1)
The point is rather that we should be highly suspicious of people and movements that depict themselves as escaping human nature's self-serving and competitive instincts or propose societal transformations that rely on our collective ability to escape them. And more generally, we should be sceptical of any narrative endorsed by those on the left or right that depicts a political movement’s motivations as rooted in a purely altruistic concern with justice or virtue.
What Does Love Do to Us?
What happens when you fall in love for the first time is the activation of various areas of the limbic system and the neocortex. But we also see deactivations. These deactivations occur mainly in the brain area linked to “mentalizing.” Mentalizing is the ability to tell someone’s intentions, and you need to be good at mentalizing to spot a liar or a cheat. To be able to tell if somebody is lying, you need to be good at understanding what their motivation is. But what happens when you fall in love for the first time is that bit shuts down.
Brian Gallagher; Nautilus
Auden’s Island — The poet in the postwar era
He returns and immerses himself in the intellectual and social life of that island. He writes poems, of course; he teaches for a time, in Scotland and England; in “horrible London,” he becomes a private tutor and, later, gets involved in an endeavor called the Group Theater; he writes verse to accompany documentary films. He seeks collaborative artistic endeavors whenever it’s possible for him to do so, but he grows increasingly discouraged. Writing in a journal in 1939, he commented that just a few years earlier “a part of me at least has been wanting to die.” …
Auden thereafter liked to make jokes about his famous father-in-law, but the jokes had a tendency to mask something more serious: Auden increasingly suspected that, like Thomas Mann, he would have to become an exile from his native country.
Alan Jacobs; The Hedgehog Review
Here’s Why I Decided To Buy ‘InfoWars’
Today we celebrate a new addition to the Global Tetrahedron LLC family of brands. And let me say, I really do see it as a family. Much like family members, our brands are abstract nodes of wealth, interchangeable assets for their patriarch to absorb and discard according to the opaque whims of the market. And just like family members, our brands regard one another with mutual suspicion and malice…
Through it all, InfoWars has shown an unswerving commitment to manufacturing anger and radicalizing the most vulnerable members of society—values that resonate deeply with all of us at Global Tetrahedron…
As for the vitamins and supplements, we are halting their sale immediately. Utilitarian logic dictates that if we can extend even one CEO’s life by 10 minutes, diluting these miracle elixirs for public consumption is an unethical waste. Instead, we plan to collect the entire stock of the InfoWars warehouses into a large vat and boil the contents down into a single candy bar–sized omnivitamin that one executive (I will not name names) may eat in order to increase his power and perhaps become immortal.
The Onion buys InfoWars and then writes a characteristic piece about it!
At the Blackboard - Kurt Vonnegut diagrams the shapes of stories
But there’s a reason we recognize Hamlet as a masterpiece: it’s that Shakespeare told us the truth, and people so rarely tell us the truth in this rise and fall here [indicates blackboard]. The truth is, we know so little about life, we don’t really know what the good news is and what the bad news is.
Kurt Vonnegut; Lapham’s Quarterly - a classic!
The EA case for Trump 2024
While JD Vance has expressed heterodox opinions on a handful of domestic policy issues, from antitrust to labor law, his net effect as VP is likely to be pro-technology. On antitrust, Vance admires Lina Khan but favors an approach based on breaking Big Tech’s network effect through open source and crypto, rather than targeting particular companies with flimsy test cases.
The Beauty of ‘My Brilliant Friend’ Was in the Little Things
Elena is gradually revealed to be spoiled and narcissistic, continually hurting herself and those around her(**) through her fixation on the philandering Nino — which is fueled at least as much by her jealousy of Lila as it is by physical attraction and a stubborn belief that she would be the woman who could change him. Yet My Brilliant Friend keeps finding ways to believe in her.
Alan Sepinwall; Rolling Stone
Stop assuming so much
Cold emailing is another case where assuming too much has costs. Lots has been written about why and how to cold email and getting over the reluctance to do it. Those experienced in a field, empirically, tend to enjoy talking about their work and helping newcomers. They don’t like feeling exploited. The desire to avoid bothering someone with an email is at the core of this, but rather than assume that a thoughtful, well crafted email bothers someone, check it: If you got the email you are about to send, would it bother you? Ask others that get cold emails, do they like to help others? The compiled knowledge of cold-emailers is that cold emailing works and that thoughtful cold emailing is well received, so stop assuming the contrary!
José Ricón
How China’s United Front extends its influence in Hungary
For example, a day before the election, they posted a video made by the ruling Fidesz party that they translated to Chinese. In the video, Viktor Orbán, prime minister of Hungary, talks about how the country will drift into war if his party does not win.
According to experts, the Chinese Communist Party has been actively involved in the creation of several Chinese associations operating in Hungary.
Kamilla Marton; VSquare
Meditations on Machinic Desire
What happened in the story above is that our desires got incrementally virtualized.
Math Is Still Catching Up to the Mysterious Genius of Srinivasa Ramanujan
It became apparent to Hardy and his colleagues that Ramanujan could sense mathematical truths — could access entire worlds — that others simply could not. (Hardy, a mathematical giant in his own right, is said to have quipped that his greatest contribution to mathematics was the discovery of Ramanujan.)
Jordana Cepelewicz; Quanta Magazine
Meaning in Mystery: Why Noir Speaks in a Morally Ambiguous World
Noir was post-Great War, the Progressive Era, the Cold War in smoke and neon.
Adam Hill;
UN to conduct new study of the broad impacts of nuclear war. Not all countries want to know
The new UN study will examine “the physical effects and societal consequences of a nuclear war on a local, regional and planetary scale, including, inter alia, the climatic, environmental and radiological effects, and their impacts on public health, global socioeconomic systems, agriculture and ecosystems, in the days, weeks and decades following a nuclear war.” For Alan Robock, a climatologist at Rutgers University and a leading scientist in the study of the impacts of nuclear war who helped develop the science of nuclear winter since the 1980s, “this will be the most comprehensive study ever on this subject.”
François Diaz-Maurin; Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists
I see some silver linings in this election result
Trump’s win means that this will be his last presidency, which means he’s effectively a lame duck. His shadow won’t loom over his party or the country any more. It’s better to know when the Trump era will end than to have it extend indefinitely into the future…
Tiago Forte
Virginia Woolf’s Mother Haunts Much of Her Writing
It was not until 1909 that Woolf felt able to make her first attempt to free Julia Stephen from the textual mausoleum Leslie Stephen had constructed, and only with the publication of To the Lighthouse could Woolf finally lay her mother’s ghost.
Gillian Gill; Literary Hub
Down, not Done
Cutting myself off, shutting others out—that is what Trump and Vance are counting on. It is also how they win, at least for now. That their victory was so decisive represents a serious challenge for me and the many millions of Americans who see things as I do. For many, and especially for the most vulnerable, things will likely get much worse before they start getting better. But isn’t that the point of faith, and the virtue of hope? Community, justice, fairness, decency—none of these things is impossible. Give us something hard to do.
Griffin Oleynick; Commonweal