Interintellect Hosts Wrote: Fiction, Murder, Plato, Gambling, Sartre, India, Brutalism
📖 A selection of recent essays by our salon hosts.
Welcome to our new series celebrating the genius of Interintellect salon hosts.
A hub for fearless, interdisciplinary conversations, Interintellect has been welcoming some of the world’s favorite thinkers as hosts and special guests at our signature salons for the past seven years. If you want to get started on your own hosting journey, set up your first discussion here.
This summer, we are launching a regular digest for the best writing by Interintellect hosts and our ecosystem. Philosophy, science, politics, religion, technology, and the arts: Interintellect’s hosts cover as many important topics in their essays as they do at their salons. We believe that all good writing is conversation, and that lives are changed one conversation at a time.
We hope you will enjoy —
Anna
The direct line: A confession of longing — by Irina Dumitrescu
“My deeper, grander dream is to help make a world where everyone who wants it has this direct line to their own creative power. I like to imagine a reality where people don’t say, ‘I can’t write,’ ‘I can’t really draw,’ ‘I can’t sing.’ A world where they just try, and see what they can do with what arrives.”
Irina’s next salon: With Lea Ypi
Plato’s Cave at The Drive-in Theater — by Erica Robles Anderson
“Whatever the content was, it’s washed away. All that is left is architecture, darkness, and light. Call it the camera’s revenge on narrative.”
Erica’s next salon: Reading Robert Caro’s LBJ
I was a juror on a murder trial — by a. natasha joukovsky
“There was bodycam footage of the victim dying. We had to watch it, multiple times. This was the hardest part of the trial for me.”
Natasha’s next salon: The Art of Adaptation: Literary Fiction in Film
on knowing what the hell you want — by Tara Isabella Burton
“But of course I can’t get out of myself. And I can’t get out of a consciousness of my own particularities, my own affinities, my own irrational loves.”
Tara’s latest salon:
Is Everything a Swap? — by Shreyas Hariharan
“There’s one problem. When you pass a law, you’ve got to imagine your opponent using that law too. And sometimes, that can come back and bite you in the ass.”
Shreyas’s latest salon:
Postcards from the Barbican — by Megan Gafford
“After I finished spending six hours in the Barbican Conservatory working on a long observational study, I picked up some postcards in the giftshop for some little sketches of the various plants I found around the estate. Without all the greenery and flowers, the buildings would feel downright oppressive, so these drawings depict the “secret sauce” that makes many people love the Barbican. I’m glad to be here in the spring, when everything is in full bloom.”
Megan’s next salon: East of Eden book club
You are what you do — by Skye Cleary
“Jean-Paul Sartre once gave a lecture so packed that 30 chairs got broken & 15 people passed out. It became one of the defining arguments of the 20th century for why you are what you do.”
Skye’s next salon: Coming soon!
India Has an Agency Problem — by saguna
“But India has an enormous engine bolted to a wheel someone else has held for two hundred years. What it falls short on is the conviction that its own judgment about what is worth doing is enough, that something can count without a stamp from somewhere else. The “locus of evaluation” never came home.”
Saguna’s next salon: AI and Education series
To the Dragon, He is Not a Saint — by Liv Li
“George rides in on a pristine mount, draws his sword and wounds the beast. Then, and this is the part that the paintings leave out: he does not kill it.”
Liv’s next salon: Simone Weil series