Category: The Arts
*Super-Infinite: The Transformations of John Donne*
This new book by Katherine Rundell, now out in the UK but still pending in the United States for September, is one of the very best studies of an individual poet I ever have read. The book’s style is so energetic and so carefully crafted as a whole, it is difficult to excerpt from. What is striking to me is that the blurbs are from super-smart people, and they all are literally accurate (has that ever been the case?). So for instance Claire Tomalin wrote:
Katherine Rundell’s brave and detailed new biography of John Donne is just the book we need…Every page sparkles…
Simon Jenkins wrote:
Rundell has a wonderful touch, light yet profound, which perfectly suits her extraordinary subject…Unmissable.
The great Maggie O’Farrell wrote:
A wonderful, joyous piece of work…with fierce, interrogative intelligence. I just loved it.
All true! Recommended, a sure thing for the year’s best of non-fiction list. You don’t even have to like poetry, as a history book it is first-rate as well.
Against Historic Preservation II
In Manhattan, once famed for its ever-evolving skyline, an astonishing 27 percent of the borough’s lots now fall under the purview of the landmarks commission.
That’s from Jacob Andinder’s What Historic Preservation Is Doing to American Cities in the Atlantic. It’s a pretty good history of the movement for historic preservation focusing (of course) on some of the racist motivations and effects. But it has little to say about what to do about the consequent difficulties of building anything new. Similarly, here’s Binyamin Applebaum in the NYTimes correctly decrying the fact that historic preservation laws mean you can’t put solar panels on the rooftops of many homes in Washington, DC. Applebaum suggests a tiered approach.
I am more radical. All historical preservation laws should be repealed.
It’s one thing to require safety permits but no construction project should require a historic preservation permit. Here are three reasons:
First, it’s often the case that buildings of little historical worth are preserved by rules and regulations that are used as a pretext to slow competitors, maintain monopoly rents, and keep neighborhoods in a kind of aesthetic stasis that benefits a small number of people at the expense of many others.
Second, a confident nation builds so that future people may look back and marvel at their ancestor’s ingenuity and aesthetic vision. A nation in decline looks to the past in a vain attempt to “preserve” what was once great. Preservation is what you do to dead butterflies.
Ironically, if today’s rules for historical preservation had been in place in the past the buildings that some now want to preserve would never have been built at all. The opportunity cost of preservation is future greatness.
Third, repealing historic preservation laws does not mean ending historic preservation. There is a very simple way that truly great buildings can be preserved–they can be bought or their preservation rights paid for. The problem with historic preservation laws is not the goal but the methods. Historic preservation laws attempt to foist the cost of preservation on those who want to build (very much including builders of infrastructure such as the government). Attempting to foist costs on others, however, almost inevitably leads to a system full of lawyers, lobbying and rent seeking–and that leads to high transaction costs and delay. Richard Epstein advocated a compensation system for takings because takings violate ethics and constitutional law. But perhaps an even bigger virtue of a compensation system is that it’s quick. A building worth preserving is worth paying to preserve. A compensation system unites builders and those who want to preserve and thus allows for quick decisions about what will be preserved and what will not.
Successful People are also Happy and Well-Adjusted
It’s perhaps a consequence of the just-world hypothesis that we think beautiful people can’t be smart, wealthy people must have few friends, and people with greatly successful careers must have sacrificed a happy home. There are, of course, many such examples but alas there are also many people who are ugly and dumb, poor and friendless and unsuccessful and dysfunctional. So, is there any correlation? Probably not.
We examined the wrecked-by-success hypothesis. Initially formalized by Sigmund Freud, this hypothesis has become pervasive throughout the humanities, popular press, and modern scientific literature. The hypothesis implies that truly outstanding occupational success often exacts a heavy toll on psychological, interpersonal, and physical well-being. Study 1 tested this hypothesis in three cohorts of 1,826 high-potential, intellectually gifted individuals. Participants with exceptionally successful careers were compared with those of their gender-equivalent intellectual peers with more typical careers on well-known measures of psychological well-being, flourishing, core self-evaluations, and medical maladies. Family relationships, comfort with aging, and life satisfaction were also assessed. Across all three cohorts, those deemed occupationally outstanding individuals were similar to or healthier than their intellectual peers across these metrics. Study 2 served as a constructive replication of Study 1 but used a different high-potential sample: 496 elite science/technology/engineering/mathematics (STEM) doctoral students identified in 1992 and longitudinally tracked for 25 years. Study 2 replicated the findings from Study 1 in all important respects. Both studies found that exceptionally successful careers were not associated with medical frailty, psychological maladjustment, and compromised interpersonal and family relationships; if anything, overall, people with exceptionally successful careers were medically and psychologically better off.
James Joyce, entrepreneur
At the critical elevator pitch, Joyce whetted investors’ appetites with the opening gambit: Dublin, a European city of 350,000, had no cinema and two more cities in the same country, Cork and Belfast, were also without a cinema. (Joyce the hustler bumped up Dublin’s population to 500,000 for effect.) Ireland, with close to a million urban dwellers, was virgin trading soil ripe for far-sighted operators. For a man who was a better spender than saver who would experience money problems throughout his life, the contract Joyce negotiated reveals a canny financial operator, and a true salesman. He convinced the partners to give him 10 per cent of the equity and profits, although he didn’t invest a penny. He was also paid expenses and a wage. Hands were shaken, the deal was done, Joyce was off. The portrait of the artist as a young entrepreneur.
…the mind that wrote Ulysses was also the mind that opened Ireland’s first cinema.
Here is the full FT story. By the way, this being the 100th year of Ulysses, you should read that book if you haven’t already. It is one of the very best books! And it really isn’t that difficult. If you need to, just keep on going, don’t try to figure it all out…
What should I ask Matthew Ball?
I will be doing a Conversation with him, here is some background:
Metaverse, metaverse, metaverse! You hear it everywhere. It’s mainstream, it’s a trendy buzzword, it’s even corporate strategy du jour.
But that wasn’t the case in early 2018. And this is when Matthew Ball, a former head of strategy at Amazon Studios, began writing a series of metaverse-themed essays – long, lucid, influential essays – that are almost uncanny in their prescience.
Matthew is now a venture capitalist as well and he has a forthcoming and already much-discussed book The Metaverse: And How It Will Revolutionize Everything. Here is his home page and here is Matthew on Twitter. So what should I ask him?
The paradox of auction happiness
If you win something at auction, even if you end up paying your full bid, you are typically quite happy, rather than just a smidgen happy.
Then why didn’t you bid more in the first place?
Is your mistake being too happy, or is your mistake having bid too low?
Do you become happy only by winning discrete, decent-sized lumps of happiness, rather than smidgens of happiness? Does that even make sense?
Or is it just the value of winning per se, in which case there might be some other artificial way of manufacturing the same feeling?
Note this all runs a bit counter to winner’s curse arguments, which suggest you should be a smidgen unhappy when you win, not when you lose.
How should we best model this?
*The Baby on the Fire Escape*
An excellent book, full of substance and going well beyond cliche, the author is Julie Phillips and the subtitle is Creativity, Motherhood, and the Mind-Baby Problem. Strikingly unsentimental, it covers women writers who balanced (or didn’t balance) their creative urges with their child-rearing responsibilities. Excerpt:
Grace Hartigan married at nineteen and had her son the same year, 1941. In 1975 she said:
“My son bitterly opposed my painting. He would stay after school and would come in at five o’clock, look at me, and say: “I know, you have been painting again.” When he got to be twelve and his father had remarried, I sent him to California. I have never seen him since. It is a very bitter relationship.”
I especially enjoyed the chapters on Doris Lessing, Ursula Le Guin, and Angela Carter. Will make the year’s “Best Non-Fiction” list.
It isn’t just Putin — Russia vs. Ukraine
From Wikipedia, here is a description of the views of Nobel Laureate Joseph Brodsky on Ukraine:
According to many historians, despite the fact that Brodsky had anti-Soviet views, for which he was eventually forced to leave Soviet Russia and emigrate to the United States, he, with all that, had pronounced Russian-imperial views, which resulted in his rejection of the existence of Ukrainians as a nation separate from Russians. According to Russian literary critic and biographer and friend of Brodsky Lev Losev, Brodsky considered Ukraine “the only cultural space with Great Russia”, and the Polish historian Irena Grudzinska-Gross [pl] in her book “Milosz and Brodsky” (2007) Brodsky firmly believed that Ukraine and has always been “an integral part of Great Russia”. According to Grudzinskaya-Gross, “Brodsky’s Russian patriotism is also evidenced by … the poem “The People” and another poem “On the Independence of Ukraine”, attacking Ukraine from imperial and Great Russian positions.”
In 1985, even before writing the scandalous Ukrainian-phobic poem “On the Independence of Ukraine“, he entered into a debate with the Czech-French poet Milan Kundera, in which he showed his Russian-imperial views.
The most famous public manifestation of Brodsky’s Ukrainophobia was the poem “On the Independence of Ukraine”, written, tentatively, in 1992. In this poem, Brodsky sarcastically described Ukraine’s independence in 1991 and scolded Ukrainian independence fighters for abandoning the Russian language. Brodsky did not publish this poem in any of his lifetime collections, and, until his death in 1996, he managed to read only a few times at various Muscovite and Judeophile meetings in America. In particular, there is documentary evidence that Brodsky read this poem on October 30, 1992 at a solo evening in the hall of the Palo Alto Jewish Center and on February 28, 1994 in front of a group of the Russian diaspora at New York University’s Quincy College. Through this poem, critics saw in Brodsky manifestations of Russian chauvinism and accused him of Anti-Ukrainian sentiment and racism.
These views are deeply rooted in Russian culture and history. Here Brodsky reads the poem in Russian. He is excited. Here is a 2011 Keith Gessen New Yorker piece on the poem. Again, ideas really matter! And not always for the better.
The best fiction in recent times
Here are my picks, in no particular order:
W.G. Sebald, The Emigrants (1992, maybe not recent?).
Elena Ferrante, The Neapolitan quadrology.
Karl Knausgaard, My Struggle, volumes one and two.
Philip Pullman, His Dark Materials.
Michel Houellebecq, Submission.
Min Lee, Pachinko.
Liu Cixin, The Three-Body Problem.
Roberto Bolaño, The Savage Detectives.
And addended:
Haruki Murakami, IQ84.
Vikrram Seth, A Suitable Boy.
Orhan Pamuk, Museum of Innocence.
Neal Stephenson, Cryptonomicon.
David Grossman, To the End of the Land.
David Mitchell, Cloud Atlas.
Jose Saramago, Blindness.
China Mieville, The City and the City.
J.M. Coetzee, Disgrace.
I do not feel that recent times lag far so behind some of the earlier, more classic literary eras. Which books am I forgetting?
My excellent Conversation with Roy Foster
Here is the audio, video, and transcript. Here is part of the episode summary;
Roy joined Tyler to discuss why the Scots got off easier than the Irish under British rule, the truths and misconceptions about Ireland as a policy laboratory for the British government, why spoken Irish faded more rapidly than Welsh, the single question that drove a great flowering of Irish economic thought, how Foster’s Quaker education shaped his view of Irish history, how the Battle of the Somme and the 1916 Easter Rising cemented the rift between the Northeast and the rest of the country, what went wrong with Irish trade policies between the 1920s and 1970s, the power of Irish education, why the re-emergence of The Troubles in the 1960s may not have been as inevitable as many people believe, the cultural effects of Ireland’s pro-Allied neutrality in World War II, how Irish visual art is beginning to be looked at in a similar way to Irish literature, the social and economic changes of the 1970s that began to radically reshape Irish society, the reasons for Ireland’s openness to foreigners, what Irish Americans misunderstand, and more.
Here is an excerpt:
COWEN: If we think of the 19th century, as you know, I think it’s in 1831 that free universal schooling comes to Ireland. Are there ways in which, in the 19th century, Ireland is more modern than Britain?
FOSTER: That’s a very interesting and subtle question.
There is a theory that Ireland is used as a laboratory for British government and that they will apply further afield, in India and the Caribbean, models and lessons that they’ve learned in Ireland, which is sometimes referred to as Britain’s oldest or England’s oldest colony.
I have a slight problem with that, because Ireland is a very special kind of colony, if it’s a colony: it’s a metropolitan colony. The original inhabitants remain, one could say, in a far stronger position than in many of the areas of the British Empire, where they are effectively either enslaved or wiped out. But the point is really that what’s happening in Ireland in the 18th and 19th century is, as I’ve said earlier, a kind of dispossession.
But at the same time, there are elements — and this is true from the Act of Union, which abolishes the old, very elite Irish Parliament in 1800 — there are elements of experimentation in the British government of Ireland which aren’t (I have to say this) entirely malign, and you zero in on education. The attempt that was being made in the early 1830s was to introduce a nondenominational form of primary education for the Irish people.
Ireland being Ireland, it was rapidly denominationalized: the Catholics used it for their purposes and the Protestants used it for their purposes. But the theory of it was that you had to overcome the religious differences, which by the early 19th century seemed to dictate everything that was happening in Ireland.
The great novelist William Thackeray, who was married to an Irish woman, said when he did a tour of Ireland and wrote his Irish Sketch Book, “Where to get at the truth in this country: it is not possible. There are two truths, the Catholic truth and the Protestant truth.” By the early 19th century, this seemed all too true.
Substantive throughout, in my view one of the very best CWTs in some while.
Surrogates
Surrogates is a 2009 science-fiction movie starring Bruce Willis, Radha Mitchell, Rosamund Pike and Ving Rhames. On Rotten Tomatoes it’s rated at a measly 37% (tomatometer) and 38% (audience). When I first saw it I thought it was underrated and a recent re-watch cemented that conclusion.
Surrogates is about a slightly future world in which people predominantly interact with one another through surrogates, i.e. humanoid robots controlled from home. The premise should be familiar today in the Zoom, Metaverse, avatar age in a way it wasn’t in 2009. Surrogates touches on trans issues (your surrogate can be a different gender), the meaning of identity, age, aging and youth, the advantages of surrogates for creating low crime and even eliminating infectious diseases (good prediction!) and the sense of anxiety and fear we feel when interacting in the real world after becoming comfortable with surrogates and the sense of unrealness of interacting with avatars.
The world of surrogates is threatened when for the first time ever a human operator is murdered by “killing” their surrogate. Willis and Mitchell are detectives trying to solve the mystery and track down the killer. The film noir aspect isn’t Chinatown but it follows the formula and follows it well. A luddite cult is involved.
Perhaps one of the reasons Surrogates didn’t do well is that it’s low-budget. At the same time as this world has advanced robotics the cars are purely circa 2009! The surrogates are played by the same actors as the operators with only makeup and hair pieces to indicate the differences but in fact the make-up and surrogate acting is very well done! The contrast between young, perfectly coiffed and flattened surrogate Bruce Willis and the old, bloody, beaten but expressive Bruce Willis is well done. The ending is excellent.
A masterpiece? No. But Surrogates is an underrated gem. It’s available now on HBO.
Do pictures signal less power than words?
This research shows people are perceived as less powerful when they use pictures versus words. This effect was found across picture types (company logos, emojis, and photographs) and use contexts (clothing prints, written messages, and Zoom profiles). Mediation analysis and a mediation-by-moderation design show this happens because picture-use signals a greater desire for social proximity (versus distance) than word-use, and a desire for social proximity is associated with lower power. Finally, we find that people strategically use words (pictures) when aiming to signal more (less) power. We refute alternative explanations including differences in the content of pictures and words, the medium’s perceived appropriateness, the context’s formality, and the target’s age and gender. Our research shows pictures and words are not interchangeable means of representation. Rather, they signal distinct social values with reputational consequences.
That is from new research by Elinor Amit, Shai Danziger, and Pamela K. Smith. Via the excellent Kevin Lewis.
Emergent Ventures winners, eighteenth cohort
Zvi Mowshowitz, TheZvi, New York City, to develop his career as idea generator and public intellectual.
Nadia Eghbal, Miami, to study and write on philanthropy for tech and crypto wealth.
Henry Oliver, London, to write a book on talent and late bloomers. Substack here.
Geffen Avrahan, Bay Area, founder at Skyline Celestial, an earlier winner, omitted from an early list by mistake, apologies Geffen!
Subaita Rahman of Scarborough, Ontario, to enable a one-year visiting student appointment at Church Labs at Harvard University.
Gareth Black, Dublin, to start YIMBY Dublin.
Pradyumna Shyama Prasad, blog and podcast, Singapore. Here is his substack newsletter, here is his podcast about both economics and history.
Ulkar Aghayeva, New York City, Azerbaijani music and bioscience.
Steven Lu, Seattle, to create GenesisFund, a new project for nurturing talent, and general career development.
Ashley Lin, University of Pennsylvania gap year, Center for Effective Altruism, for general career development and to learn talent search in China, India, Russia.
James Lin, McMaster University gap year, from Toronto area, general career development and to support his interests in effective altruism and also biosecurity.
Santiago Tobar Potes, Oxford, from Colombia and DACA in the United States, general career development, interest in public service, law, and foreign policy.
Martin Borch Jensen of Longevity Impetus Grants (a kind of Fast Grants for longevity research), Bay Area and from Denmark, for a new project Talent Bridge, to help talented foreigners reach the US and contribute to longevity R&D.
Jessica Watson Miller, from Sydney now in the Bay Area, to start a non-profit to improve the treatment of mental illness.
Congratulations to you all! We are honored to have you as Emergent Ventures winners.
Claims about taste
Chen et al. show that people’s aesthetic tastes are not arbitrarily different from each other in different sensory modalities but vary primarily along only a single dimension across sights and sounds: how similar a person’s taste is to the average taste. People who have atypical taste for images also tend to have atypical taste for sounds.
Here is the paper, via Michelle Dawson.
Which Russians are getting cancelled?
The Russian filmmaker Kirill Sokolov has spent the past week distraught at the horror unfolding in Ukraine. Half his family is Ukrainian, he said in a telephone interview, and as a child he spent summers there, staying with his grandparents.
His maternal grandmother was still living in Kyiv, he said, “hiding from bombs in a bunker.”
Since Russia’s invasion began, Mr. Sokolov said he had signed two online petitions calling for an end to the war, an act that carries a risk in Russia, where thousands have been arrested for protesting the conflict, and some have reportedly lost their jobs.
Yet despite his antiwar stance, Mr. Sokolov on Monday learned that the Glasgow Film Festival in Scotland had dropped his latest movie, “No Looking Back.”
Here is more from Alex Marshall at the NYT. Remind me again — why is this better than “simple racism”? The Festival noted that the Russian government earlier had funded his film work. Surely that could be grounds for cancelling anyone who went to public school in Russia?