Results for “ferrante” 52 found
Thursday assorted links
1. “Work on things that aren’t prestigious.”
2. Patricia Lockwood on Ferrante.
3. How to get cancelled in Iceland, alternatively what not to look for in your supermarket’s PR director.
4. What do jobless men do all day? And the undermotivated apostate.
5. Vitalik on prediction markets, smart contract risk, epistemic humility, and more. Like most Vitalik, it is too good to excerpt.
6. Ezra Klein on work and child allowances (NYT). I agree with some but not all of this, in any case it is already obvious how much Ezra is in the very top tier of NYT columnists after only a few pieces. Every part of it is an actual argument, supported by evidence of some kind or another.
Why will the important thinkers of the future be religious ones?
Tony O’Connor requests I cover this:
A few times you have said that the important thinkers of the future will be the religious ones. It would be interesting to hear more about what led you to this conclusion.
Concretely, I wonder if this would arise because religious populations within liberal polities are expanding over time (due to higher birth rates), or because there could be a shift from the non-religious population into religion. The potential causes of the latter would be interesting to hear about, if that is your belief.
First of all, I was led to the point by example. For instance, Ross Douthat and Peter Thiel are two of the most interesting thinkers as of late and they are both religious and Christian. I am also struck by the enduring influence of Rene Girard. I am never quite sure “how intellectually Jewish” are our leading Jewish intellectuals, but somewhat to be sure. Even if they are atheists, they are usually strongly influenced by Jewish intellectual and theological traditions, which indicates a certain power to those traditions. In fiction, Orson Scott Card is one of the intellectually most influential writers in the last few decades and he is a Mormon. Knausgaard is drenched in the tradition of the Christian confessional memoir, and Ferrante is about as Catholic a writer as you will find, again even if “the real Ferrante” is a skeptic. Houellebecq I don’t even need to get into.
Second, I see that both secular “left progressive” and “libertarian” traditions — both highly secular in their current forms — are not so innovative right now. I don’t intend that as criticism, as you might think they are not innovative because they are already essentially correct. Still, there is lots of recycling going on and their most important thinkers probably lie in the past, not the future. That opens up room for religious thinkers to have more of an impact.
Third, religious thinkers arguably have more degrees of freedom. I don’t mean to hurt anybody’s feelings here, but…how shall I put it? The claims of the religions are not so closely tied to the experimental method and the randomized control trial. (Narrator: “Neither are the secular claims!”) It would be too harsh to say “they can just make stuff up,” but…arguably there are fewer constraints. That might lead to more gross errors and fabrications in the distribution as a whole, but also more creativity in the positive direction. And right now we seem pretty hungry for some breaks in the previous debates, even if not all of those breaks will be for the better.
Fourth, if you live amongst the intelligentsia, being religious is one active form of rebellion. Rebelliousness is grossly correlated with intellectual innovation, again even if the variance of quality increases.
Fifth, I have the general impression that religious idea rise in importance during unstable and chaotic times. Probably the current period is less stable than say 1980-2001 or so, and that will increase the focality of religious ideas, thereby making religious thinkers more important.
Sixth, religious and semi-religious memes are stickier than secular ones. Maybe not on average, but the most influential religions have shown an incredible reach and endurance.
If you are reading a secular thinker, always ask yourself: “what is this person’s implicit theology?” No matter who it is. There are few more useful questions at your disposal.
Favorite books by female authors
Elena Ferrante named her top forty, and I am not sure I approve of the exercise at all. Still, here are my top twenty, in no particular order, fiction only, not counting poetry:
1.Lady Murasaki, Tale of Genji.
2. Emily Brontë, Wuthering Heights.
3. Alice Munro, any and all.
4. Elena Ferrante, the Neapolitan quadrology.
5. Doris Lessing, The Golden Notebook.
6. Octavia Butler, Xenogenesis trilogy.
7. Zora Neale Hurston, Their Eyes Were Watching God.
8. Mary Shelley, Frankenstein.
9. Sigrid Undset, Kristin Lavransdatter.
10. Susanna Clarke, Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell.
11. Virginia Woolf, many.
12. Willa Cather, My Antonia.
13. Harriet Beecher Stowe, Uncle Tom’s Cabin.
14. Jane Austen, Persuasion.
15. Anne Rice, The Witching Hour, and #2 in the vampire series.
16. Anaïs Nin? P.D.James? A general award to the mystery genre?
17. Christa Wolf, Cassandra.
18. Marguerite Yourcenar, Memoirs of Hadrian.
19. Irene Nemirovsky, Suite Francaise.
20. Ursula LeGuin, The Left Hand of Darkness.
Comments: No, I didn’t forget George Eliot, these are “my favorites,” not “the best.” Maybe Edith Wharton would have made #21? Or Byatt’s Possession? The other marginal picks mostly would have come from the Anglosphere. I learned my favorite Latin American writers are all male.
My favorite fiction of 2020
Emily St. John Mandel, The Glass Hotel.
Anne Enright, Actress: A Novel.
Susannah Clarke, Piranesi.
Maggie O’Farrell, Hamnet.
Elena Ferrante, The Lying Life of Adults.
Of those Hamnet was my clear favorite, then the Enright. Here is my non-fiction list, which also explains why the lists have come earlier this year.
What I’ve been reading
1. Stephen Hough, Rough Ideas: Reflections on Music and More. Scattered tidbits, about half of them very interesting, most of the rest at least decently good, mostly for fans of classical music and piano music. Should you develop the habit of warming up? Why don’t they always have a piano in the “green room”? How many recordings should you sample before trying to play a piece? What kinds of relationships do pianists develop with their page turners? That sort of thing. I read the whole thing.
2. Jeremy England, Every Life is on Fire: How Thermodynamics Explains the Origins of Living Things. A fun and readable popular science book on why life may be likely to evolve from inanimate matter: “Living things…make copies of themselves, harvest and consume fuel, and accurately predict the surrounding environment.” Who could be against that?
3. Dov H. Levin, Meddling in the Ballot Box: The Causes and Effects of Partisan Electoral Interventions. “A fifth significant way in which the U.S. aided Adenauer’s reelection was achieved by Dulles publicly threatening, in an American press conference which took place two days before the elections, “disastrous effects” for Germany if Adenauer was not reelected.” A non-partisan, academic work, “This study is the first book-length study of partisan electoral interventions as a discrete, stand-alone phenomenon.” From 1946-2000, there were 81 discrete U.S. interventions in foreign elections, and 36 by the USSR/Russia, noting that outright conquest did not count in that data base.
4. John Kampfner, Why the Germans Do it Better: Notes from a Grown-Up Country (UK Amazon link, not yet in the USA). You should dismiss the title altogether, which is intended to provoke British people. In fact the author spends plenty of time on what is wrong with Germany, ranging from an incoherent foreign policy to the weaknesses of Frankfurt as a financial center. In any case, this is an excellent book trying to lay out and explain recent German politics and economics. It is more conventional wisdom than daring hypothesis, but the conventional wisdom is very often correct and how many people really know the conventional wisdom about Naomi Seibt anyway? Recommended, the best recent look at what is still one of the world’s most important countries.
5. David Carpenter, Henry III: 1207-1258. “No King of England came to the throne in a more desperate situation than Henry III.” The Magna Carta had just been instituted, Henry was just nine years old, and England was ruled by a triumvirate, with a very real chance that the French throne would swallow up England. This is one of those “has a lot of unfamiliar names that are hard to keep track of” books, but don’t blame Carpenter for that. In terms of scholarly contribution it stands amongst the very top books of the year. And yes there was already a Wales back then. They also started building Westminster Abbey under Henry’s reign. Here are some of the origins of state capacity libertarianism, volume II is yet to come.
6. Elena Ferrante, The Lying Life of Adults. The last quarter of the book closes strong, so my final assessment is enthusiastic, even if it isn’t in the exalted league of her Neapolitan quadrology. It will probably be better upon a rereading, which I will do.
Richard Davis requests
Here are some answers, I put his questions — from Request for Requests – in bold:
Melancholy among academics.
We’re a pretty sorry bunch, and many of us don’t have so much professionally to live for, at least not at the relevant margin — it is easy to lose forward momentum and never recover it, given the constraints and incentives in the profession and broader pressures toward conformity. Rates of depression in academia, and especially in graduate school, are fairly high. Many of the core processes are demoralizing rather than inspiring. It is remarkable to me how much other people simply have accepted that is how things ought to be and perhaps they believe matters cannot be that different. I view the high rates of depression in academic life as a “canary in the coal mine” that doesn’t get enough attention as an indicator of bigger, more systemic problems in the entire enterprise. What are you doing with your lifetime sinecure?
Your favorite things Soviet.
Shostakovich. And the Romantic pianists, most of all Richter and Gilels. Constructivist art and ballet up through the late 1920s. The early chess games of Tal. Magnitogorsk. War memorials, most of all in Leningrad. Tarkovsky. I admire the “great” Soviet novels, but I don’t love them, except for Solzhenitsyn, whom I would rather read then Dostoyevsky. Probably the poetry is amazing, but my Russian is too limited to appreciate it.
The optimal number of math PhDs worldwide.
I would think fairly few. I am happy having lots of mathematicians, with independent tests of quality. But is the Ph.D such a great test or marker of quality? Did Euclid have one? Euler? Does it show you will be a great teacher? Maybe we should work toward abolishing the math PhD concept, but out of respect for the profession, not out of hostility toward math.
What historical works of art were anticipated to be great prior to creation, were immediately declared to be great at creation and have continued to be judged great ever since?
Overall it is striking how popular how many of the great revolutionaries have been. Michelangelo was a major figure of renown. Mozart was quite popular, though not fully appreciated. Beethoven was a legend in his time, and every Wagner opera was an event. Goethe ruled his time as a titan. A significant percentage of the very best writers were well known and loved during their careers, though of course there was uncertainty how well they would stand up to the test of time.
The future of Northern New Jersey.
Much like the present, plus defaults on the pension obligations and over time the Indian food may get worse, due to acculturation. The Sopranos will fade into distant memory, I am sorry to say, as will Bruce Springsteen. So many young people already don’t know them or care. I feel lucky to have grown up during the region’s cultural peak.
Who are the greats that still walk among us (other than McCartney)?
The major tech founders and CEOs, Stephan Wolfram, Jasper Johns and Frank Stella and Richard Serra and Gerhardt Richter and Robert Gober, a number of other classic rock stars (Dylan, Brian Wilson, Jagger, Eno, etc.), Philip Glass, Richard D. James, and note most of the greatest classical musicians who have ever lived are alive and playing today (Uchida anyone?), at least once Covid goes away. Many of the major architects. Ferrante and Knausgaard and Alice Munro. Many of the figures who built up East Asia and Singapore. Perelman. Jerry Seinfeld and Larry David. Magnus Carlsen and all sorts of figures in sports. A bunch of other people whom Eric Weinstein would list.
Why
Why not?
What I’ve been reading
1. Ethan Sherwood Strauss, The Victory Machine: The Making and Unmaking of the Warriors Dynasty. On top of everything else this is an excellent book on management, and the random events along the way to making a team (the Warriors once wanted to trade both Curry and Thompson for Chris Paul). Kevin Durant ends up as the fall guy, recommended to those who care.
2. Valerie Hansen, The Year 1000: When Explorers Connected the World — and Globalization Began. Worth reading, my favorite part was the discussion of how Cahokia in Mississippi was connected to the Mayans. And Chichen Itza is probably the world’s best preserved city from the year 1000.
3. Zena Hitz, Lost in Thought: The Hidden Pleasures of an Intellectual Life. “Drawing on inspiring examples, from Socrates and Augustine to Malcolm X and Elena Ferrante, and from films to Hitz’s own experiences as someone who walked away from elite university life in search of greater fulfillment, Lost in Thought is a passionate and timely reminder that a rich life is a life rich in thought.”
4. Alaine Polcz, One Woman in the War: Hungary 1944-1945. I am surprised this book is not better known. I found it deeper and more gripping than many of the more broadly recommended wartime memoirs, such as Viktor Frankl. And more honest about the toll of war on women.
5. Adam Thierer, Evasive Entrepreneurs and the Future of Governance: How Innovation Improves Economies and Governments. A very good libertarian, “permissionless innovation” look at tech.
I have browsed Judith Herrin’s Ravenna: Capital of Empire, Crucible of Europe, and it seems to be the definitive book on the early history of that city (one of my favorite one-day visits in the whole world).
“And what a decade it was”
From Alex X.:
With the decade coming to a close, I would be curious on everyone’s favorite of the decade [gives list of categories]:
Without too much pondering, here is what comes to mind right away:
Film: Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives, or A Touch of Sin. Might Winter Sleep by next? It was probably the best decade ever for foreign movies, the worst decade ever for Hollywood movies (NYT).
Blockbuster/action film: Transformers 4? Big screen only, live or die by CGI!
Album: Kanye West, My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy.
Single: I don’t see an obvious, non-derivative pick here that really stands out. Kendrick Lamar’s “Alright” probably is the mainstream choice, but do I ever go over to the stereo to put it on? Janelle Monae’s “Make Me Feel” is another option, but is it such a big step beyond Prince? Lorde or Beyonce? LCD Soundsystem seems more about the entire album, same for Frank Ocean. Something from Kanye’s Yeezus? To pull a dark horse option out of the hat, how about Gillian Welch, “The Way It Goes“? Or Death Grips “Giving Bad People Good Ideas“? I’ve spent enough time on Twitter that I have to opt for that one.
TV Show: Srugim, Borgen, The Americans.
Single Season: Selections from same, you know which seasons.
Book Fiction: The Ferrante quadrology and Houllebecq’s Submission.
Book Non Fiction: Knausgaard, volumes I and II.
Athlete of the Decade: Stephen Curry or Lebron James.
What are your picks?
My Conversation with Karl Ove Knausgaard
Here is the audio and transcript, this was one of my favorite Conversations. Here is the CWTeam summary:
Knausgård’s literary freedom paves the way for this conversation with Tyler, which starts with a discussion of mimesis and ends with an explanation of why we live in the world of Munch’s The Scream. Along the way there is much more, including what he learned from reading Ingmar Bergman’s workbooks, the worst thing about living in London, how having children increased his productivity, whether he sees himself in a pietistic tradition, thoughts on Bible stories, angels, Knut Hamsun, Elena Ferrante, the best short story (“Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius”), the best poet (Paul Celan), the best movie (Scenes from a Marriage), and what his punctual arrival says about his attachment to bourgeois values.
Here is one excerpt:
KNAUSGÅRD: You have this almost archetypical artist putting his art before his children, before his family, before everything. You have also Doris Lessing who did the same — abandoned her children to move to London to write.
I’ve been kind of confronted with that as a writer, and I think everyone does because writing is so time consuming and so demanding. When I got children, I had this idea that writing was a solitary thing. I could go out to small islands in the sea. I could go to lighthouses, live there, try to write in complete . . . be completely solitary and alone. When I got children, that was an obstruction for my writing, I thought.
But it wasn’t. It was the other way around. I’ve never written as much as I have after I got the children, after I started to write at home, after I kind of established writing in the middle of life. It was crawling with life everywhere. And what happened was that writing became less important. It became less precious. It became more ordinary. It became less religious or less sacred.
It became something ordinary, and that was incredibly important for me because that was eventually where I wanted to go — into the ordinary and mundane, even, and try to connect to what was going on in life. Life isn’t sacred. Life isn’t uplifted. It is ordinary and boring and all the things, we know.
And:
COWEN: So many great Norwegian writers — Ibsen, Sigrid Undset, Knut Hamsun — there’s nationalism in their work. Yet today, liberals tend to think of nationalism as an unspeakable evil of sorts. How do we square this with the evolution of Norwegian writing?
And if one thinks of your own career, arguably it’s your extreme popularity in Norway at first that drove your later fame. What’s the connection of your own work to Norwegian nationalism? Are you the first non-nationalist great Norwegian writer? Is that plausible? Or is there some deeper connection?
KNAUSGÅRD: I think so much writing is done out of a feeling of not belonging. If you read Knut Hamsun, he was a Nazi. I mean, he was a full-blooded Nazi. We have to be honest about that.
COWEN: His best book might be his Nazi book, right? He wrote it when he was what, 90?
KNAUSGÅRD: Yeah.
COWEN: On Overgrown Paths?
KNAUSGÅRD: Yeah.
COWEN: To me, it’s much more interesting than the novels, which are a kind of artifice that hasn’t aged so well.
KNAUSGÅRD: Yeah.
COWEN: But you read On Overgrown Paths, you feel like you’re there. It’s about self-deception.
KNAUSGÅRD: It’s true, it’s a wonderful book. But I think Hamsun’s theme, his subject, is rootlessness. In a very rooted society, in a rural society, in a family-orientated society like Norway has been — a small society — he was a very rootless, very urban writer.
He went to America, and he hated America, but he was America. He had that in him. He was there in the late 19th century, and he wrote a book about it, which is a terrible book, but still, he was there, and he had that modernity in him.
He never wrote about his parents. Never wrote about where he came from. All his characters just appear, and then something happens with them, but there’s no past. I found that incredibly intriguing just because he became the Nazi. He became the farmer. He became the one who sang the song about the growth. What do you call it? Markens Grøde.
COWEN: Growth of the Soil.
And:
COWEN: Arnold Weinstein has a book on Nordic culture, and he argues that the sacrifice of the child is a recurring theme. It’s in Kierkegaard’s Fear and Trembling. It’s in a number of Ibsen plays, Bergman movies. Has that influenced you? Or are you a rejection of that? Are you like Edvard Munch, but with children, and that’s the big difference between you and Munch, the painter?
I told you we ask different questions.
KNAUSGÅRD: Yeah, yeah. You just said different. You didn’t say difficult.
Knausgaard showed up for the taping carrying a package of black bread, which he forgot to take with him when leaving. So for the rest of the day, I enjoyed his black bread…
Thursday assorted links
1. My podcast on Economic Growth, Liberalism, and Philosophy, with Zack Baker of Berkeley.
2. Why Harvard (and David Card) is wrong: “But given that these factors are themselves correlated with race, Mr Card’s argument is statistically rather like saying that once you correct for racial bias, Harvard is not racially biased.”
3. One-day Fight Club for preschoolers, in St. Louis, captured on video.
4. Elena Ferrante and the HBO adaptation (NYT).
5. The new Rubb/Sumner Principles textbook, business orientation, consolidated micro/macro, if I understand correctly.
6. Dwarsliggers (NYT).
Tuesday assorted links
1. “Novels, when they work, use lies to tell the truth. The information marketplace, battling for an audience, tends, more and more, to transform intolerable truths into novelistic, riveting, enjoyable lies.” From Elena Ferrante.
3. Health care cross subsidies.
4. Ancestral characteristics of modern populations.
5. The economics of postcards.
7. Management advice improved firm performance, unless it was being received by an MBA.
*Kolyma Stories*, by Varlam Shalamov
It is difficult to express just how good these Gulag short stories are. I would very literally second the blurb by David Bezmozgis:
“As a record of the Gulag and human nature laid bare, Varlam Shalamov is the equal of Solzhenitsyn and Nadezhda Mandelstam, while the artistry of his stories recalls Chekhov. This is literature of the first rank, to be read as much for pleasure as a caution against the perils of totalitarianism.”
That is not blurb inflation. Note that the book is long (734 pp. of stories), and the reading is slow, mostly because the narratives lack redundant information, not because they are clumsy or awkwardly written. It also takes perhaps a few stories to get into the swing of things and figure out how the fictional yet not fictional universe works here. But the content is entirely gripping, and full of social science. You can buy it here. A second volume from this translator will appear in 2019, completing the series.
An earlier version of the work, with a different translation and less complete, was published in 1995. By the way, here is the author’s Wikipedia page.
Have you ever wondered how the contemporary world would react if a masterpiece were dropped into its midst? If your guess was “with a fair amount of indifference unless it was Elena Ferrante and even then it wouldn’t really change anything except give rise to probably what will be a mediocre television series”…well, you were right. For Shalamov, I don’t yet see an Amazon review.
Here is my earlier post on what Varlam Shalamov learned in the Gulag.
Tuesday assorted links
1. Kling on Jonathan Rauch and the age profile of happiness. Barkley Rosser is more skeptical on Rauch.
2. Interview with Elena Ferrante.
3. Is there a new David Warsh book on Harvard and Russia?
4. Bloomberg podcast with Dan Wang.
5. Ezra Klein interviews me for Vox, and I make several points of relevance to Vox readers/listeners. Recommended. And a Vox article, good, but it leaves out the best stuff I said.
My Conversation with Agnes Callard
She is a philosopher at the University of Chicago, here is the transcript and audio. We covered Plato and Socrates, what Plato is on about at all, the virtues of dialog and refutation, whether immortality would be boring, Elena Ferrante, parents vs. gangsters and Beethoven vs. Mozart, my two Straussian readings of her book, Jordan Peterson, Shakespeare’s Hamlet, the best defense of reading the classics, and the Agnes Callard production function (physics to classics to philosophy), all in suitably informationally dense fashion.
Here is one excerpt:
COWEN: I have a friend who’s interested in longevity research…and he tells me there’s maybe a 10 percent chance that I actually will live forever due to possible scientific advances. I’m skeptical, but let’s just say I were to live forever. How bored would I end up, and how do you think about this question?
CALLARD: [laughs] I think it depends on how good of a person you are.
COWEN: And the good people are more or less bored?
CALLARD: Oh, they’re less bored. One thing is that you’re kind of having to live with yourself for a very long time if you’re immortal, or even just live for a couple thousand years, and a bad self, I think, is hard to live with. By bad, I don’t just mean sort of, let’s say, cruel to people or unjust. I also mean not attuned to things of eternal significance.
I think you can get by in a 100-year life not being too much attuned to things of eternal significance because there’s so much fascinating stuff out there, and one can go from one thing to the next and not get bored. But if we’re talking about eternity, or even thousands of years, you’d better find something to occupy you that is really riveting in the way that I think only eternal things are.
I think that what you’re really asking is something like, “Could I be a god?” And I think, “Well, if you became godlike, you could, and then it would be OK.”
COWEN: Let me give you a hypothesis. You can react to it. That which is cultural, say, listening to music, I would get bored with, even though wonderful music maybe continually will be created. But those activities which are more primeval, more biological — parenting, sex, food, sleep, maybe taking a wonderful shower — that are quite brute, in a way, maybe I would substitute more into those as an immortal? Yes?
CALLARD: I don’t see why you wouldn’t get just as bored of bodily pleasures.
COWEN: You’re programmed for those to be so immediate and riveting, right? You evolve to be maybe an 80-year-old being, or perhaps even a 33-year-old being, so you are riveted on things like reproduction and getting enough sleep. And that stays riveting, even when you’re on this program to live 80,000 years.
CALLARD: I think that at least some of those activities stay riveting for us over the course of our lives because their meaning changes…
And:
COWEN: Let’s turn now to your new book, Aspiration: The Agency of Becoming. There’s a sentence from the book. Let me read it, and maybe you can explain it. “Proleptic reasons allow you to be rational even when you know that your reasons aren’t exactly the right ones.” What’s a proleptic reason?
This was my favorite part, though perhaps few of you will get the joke:
COWEN: On aspiration, what do you think of Jordan Peterson?
CALLARD: I had this odd feeling. He only became known to me quite recently, in the past couple of weeks. I was listening to him talk, and I was thinking he sounds a little bit like Socrates, but not Socrates. I was like, “Who is that? Who is he reminding me of?” And it’s Xenophon’s Socrates.
Here you can buy her just-published book Aspiration: The Agency of Becoming. You cannot follow her on Twitter.
Thursday assorted links
1. What makes the hardest equations in physics so difficult?
2. Privacy in the new Toronto Quayside. And 30 minutes of Jordan Peterson.
3. Arving Panagariya on Indian textiles and job creation.
4. The passport culture that is Swiss (Dutch).
5. Ben Thompson on the economics and also motivations of Facebook.
6. The gender wage premium is higher for exporters. And Elena Ferrante to become columnist for The Guardian.