Ain’t Nothing Like the Real Thing syllabusproject.org

This syllabus explores the concept of fake objects, defined as material replicas of originals that are absent, fictional, immaterial, or otherwise unobtainable. Fake objects are created to satisfy the desire for things that never were. Their worth is not necessarily tied to the rarity of the original or the fidelity of reproduction. Value is found through fakeness, not in spite of it, giving the fake object the potential to be even better than the real thing.

The War on Genius rosselliotbarkan.com

I’ve been mulling, of late, actions and reactions, the trope of the lone genius and the trope of systems. One held very long in the culture before being defenestrated, in academia at least, over the last several decades. The other is now dominant—at least, among those in the know, those who still analyze literature. In a systems conception, the genius of creation is disregarded and dismissed; no lone spark could truly emerge, no individual could labor, by herself, to write the novels, poems, or plays that endure across the ages, or even get remembered a decade after publication. [...] The primary change in publishing, I’d argue, that has come in the new century is the diminishment of risk-taking on the side of literary fiction, the abandonment of the concept of a publishing house propping up and nurturing a young literary career, and the end of a certain trust that was invested in individual editors—Sonny Mehta, Gordon Lish, Gary Fisketjon, and a young Toni Morrison come to mind—to curate lists to their taste.

You don’t have a right to believe whatever you want to aeon.co

Such judgments can imply that believing is a voluntary act. But beliefs are often more like states of mind or attitudes than decisive actions. Some beliefs, such as personal values, are not deliberately chosen; they are ‘inherited’ from parents and ‘acquired’ from peers, acquired inadvertently, inculcated by institutions and authorities, or assumed from hearsay. For this reason, I think, it is not always the coming-to-hold-this-belief that is problematic; it is rather the sustaining of such beliefs, the refusal to disbelieve or discard them that can be voluntary and ethically wrong.

The burden of the humanities newcriterion.com

Why should we study the past? If the state of our present discourse is any indication, the point of doing so is simply to provide us with ever better weapons to use in our present battles. [...] The distinctive task of the humanities, unlike the natural sciences and social sciences, is to grasp human things in human terms, without converting or reducing or translating them into something else—as into physical laws, mechanical systems, biological drives, psychological disorders, social structures, and so on. The humanities attempt to understand the human condition from the inside, as it were, treating the human person as subject as well as object, the agent as well as the acted upon.

Reading Ourselves to Death thenewatlantis.com

If an alien landed on Earth today, it might assume that reading and writing are our species’ main function, second only to sleeping and well ahead of eating and reproducing.

The Life and Death of an Internet Onion the-life-and-death-of-an-internet-onion.com

This website, the-life-and-death-of-an-internet-onion.com, will live from July 26th through August 30th, 2023 — about 5 weeks total, the average lifespan of a non-refrigerated onion.

Toward a Leisure Ethic hedgehogreview.com

How people spend their time is a fundamental mark of civilization, but it is a category that tends to be lost beneath a society’s scientific, technological, military, and material attainments. Rarely do we notice that, temporally speaking, the scope of human freedom is as circumscribed as it ever was—and in some respects, much more so. In the rich societies of the twenty-first century, most people spend their prime years locked in meaningless, unessential, work punctuated by meaningless entertainment. [...] How one fills one’s discretionary time is heavily determined by the mentally and physically depleting effects of work, and by the imminent return to work after some invariably short period of respite. Leisure today exists for work, which means that it is not actually leisure at all. The more appropriate term is recreation, a mere means of recovery—re-creating the body—for the sake of doing more work.

The Case Against Travel newyorker.com

One is forced to conclude that maybe it isn’t so easy to do nothing—and this suggests a solution to the puzzle. Imagine how your life would look if you discovered that you would never again travel. If you aren’t planning a major life change, the prospect looms, terrifyingly, as “More and more of this, and then I die.” Travel splits this expanse of time into the chunk that happens before the trip, and the chunk that happens after it, obscuring from view the certainty of annihilation. And it does so in the cleverest possible way: by giving you a foretaste of it. You don’t like to think about the fact that someday you will do nothing and be nobody. You will only allow yourself to preview this experience when you can disguise it in a narrative about how you are doing many exciting and edifying things: you are experiencing, you are connecting, you are being transformed, and you have the trinkets and photos to prove it. Socrates said that philosophy is a preparation for death. For everyone else, there’s travel.

Hating Everyone Everywhere All At Once At Stanford popehat.substack.com

When it comes to rights, deserve’s got nothing to do with it. [...] Rights protect awful totalitarian people all the time. There are many philosophical reasons for this; one is the recognition that we can’t be trusted to decide who should or shouldn’t get rights, and that arrogating such power to ourselves will inevitably favor the powerful and popular over the powerless and unpopular.

All the nerds are dead samkriss.substack.com

The hipster was an information-sorting algorithm: its job was to always have good taste. The hipster listened to bands you’d never heard of. The hipster drank beers brewed by Paraguayan Jesuits in the 1750s. The hipster thought Tarkovsky was for posers, and the only truly great late-Soviet filmmaker was Ali Khamraev. The hipster bought all his toilet paper from a small-batch paper factory in Abkhazia that included small fragments of tree bark in the pulp. The hipster swam deep into the vastness of human data, and always surfaced with pearls. Through its powers of snobbery and disdain, the hipster could effortlessly filter out what was good. [...] The nerd doesn’t like bad things because of their actual qualities; the nerd likes bad things simply because they’re there. What counts is collecting, itemising, consuming.

The Impotence of Being Clever hedgehogreview.com

In Woody Allen’s films and perhaps most clearly in Seinfeld, Jewish alienation became mainstream. In Seinfeld, alienation from WASP social mores and practices bleeds into an everyday alienation from society itself. George Costanza’s myriad paranoid anxieties about navigating work, romance, and consumerism are relatable (if exaggerated) not just to Jews but to any American urbanite. (As Lenny Bruce put it, “If you live in New York, you’re Jewish.”) The show’s cleverness defangs not anti-Semitism, but a fundamental anxiety of American-style individualism: namely, that we’ve become unmoored from any genuine communal context. The show constantly cuts that anxiety down to size by generating clever jokes out of the mundane dilemmas faced daily by disconnected operators in such a culture, especially around their inability to form and maintain genuine romantic relationships.

The Case Against the Trauma Plot newyorker.com

In “Maus,” Art Spiegelman strives to understand his overbearing father, a Holocaust survivor. “I used to think the war made him that way,” he says. His stepmother, Mala, replies, “Fah! I went through the camp. All our friends went through the camps. Nobody is like him!” Mala won’t cede her knowledge of her husband or of life to the coercive tidiness of the trauma plot. There are other doubting Malas. I start seeing them everywhere, even lurking inside the conventional trauma story with designs of their own, unravelling it from within.

Toleration is an impressive virtue that’s worth reviving psyche.co

To tolerate, as Williams stresses, is to be conflicted. Toleration involves putting up with something that you would rather not be the case.

Strangers on a train wittgenstein.it

Ognuno dei coinvolti era mosso dall’affermazione di sé, dall’intolleranza delle rispettive umiliazioni e frustrazioni, dall’insofferenza per alcuni dei presenti, dall’indisponibilità ad “accettare lezioni“, e ricondurre il modo in cui si stava comportando e le cose che stava dicendo al loro senso originario avrebbe avuto probabilmente bisogno di qualche secondo di elaborazione.

It is obscene chimamanda.com

There are many social-media-savvy people who are choking on sanctimony and lacking in compassion, who can fluidly pontificate on Twitter about kindness but are unable to actually show kindness. People whose social media lives are case studies in emotional aridity. People for whom friendship, and its expectations of loyalty and compassion and support, no longer matter. People who claim to love literature – the messy stories of our humanity – but are also monomaniacally obsessed with whatever is the prevailing ideological orthodoxy. People who demand that you denounce your friends for flimsy reasons in order to remain a member of the chosen puritan class. People who ask you to ‘educate’ yourself while not having actually read any books themselves, while not being able to intelligently defend their own ideological positions, because by ‘educate,’ they actually mean ‘parrot what I say, flatten all nuance, wish away complexity.’ People who do not recognize that what they call a sophisticated take is really a simplistic mix of abstraction and orthodoxy – sophistication in this case being a showing-off of how au fait they are on the current version of ideological orthodoxy.

On the Pleasures of Not Reading theparisreview.org

I have for many years now actively enjoyed not reading Charles Bukowski. I want to say with conviction that Bukowski is not so much a voice from hell as a voice from Hell-Lite™, a kind of flimsy, adolescent imitation of true misanthropy—but I have no evidence to furnish in my case against him. How could I? I’ve never read him. All I know is that I’ve listened to a tepid Modest Mouse song about him; I have spoken to a stranger at a bar who told me she’d “snort his words off the page,” if she could; and I’ve sneered at the cover of Ham on Rye in a Park Slope Barnes and Noble. If you asked me to mount a cogent defense of my antipathy, I’d have to say something pretentious like “I find his role in the culture banal.”

Life-Hacks of the Poor and Aimless thebaffler.com

Obsessive ritualization of self-care comes at the expense of collective engagement, collapsing every social problem into a personal quest for the good life. “Wellness,” they declare, “has become an ideology.” […] It would be nice to believe that all it takes to change your life is to repeat some affirmations and buy a planner, just as it was once comforting for many of us to trust that the hardships of this plane of existence would be rewarded by an eternity of bliss in heaven. There is a reason that the rituals of wellbeing and self-care are followed with the precision of a cult (do this and you will be saved; do this and you will be safe): It is a practice of faith. It’s worth remembering that Marx’s description of religion as the opiate of the masses is often misinterpreted—opium, at the time when Marx was writing, was not just known as an addictive drug, but as a painkiller, a solace when the work of survival became unbearable.

How Japanese People Stay Fit for Life, Without Ever Visiting a Gym kokumura.medium.com

Instead what this shows is that, like how eating healthfully doesn’t need to be eating only salads, healthful exercise doesn’t need to be only working out — the lifestyle fitness you need may just be in a bit more walking

The Four Quadrants of Conformism paulgraham.com

The ones who are aggressively conventional-minded today would have been aggressively conventional-minded then too. In other words, that they'd not only not have fought against slavery, but that they'd have been among its staunchest defenders. I'm biased, I admit, but it seems to me that aggressively conventional-minded people are responsible for a disproportionate amount of the trouble in the world, and that a lot of the customs we've evolved since the Enlightenment have been designed to protect the rest of us from them. In particular, the retirement of the concept of heresy and its replacement by the principle of freely debating all sorts of different ideas, even ones that are currently considered unacceptable, without any punishment for those who try them out to see if they work.

Irony hedgehogreview.com

We are confronted with the uncomfortable reality that we are always showing everyone who and what we are on the basis of what we love. Irony seems to offer an alternative. But if Lear—and Plato—are right, then this moment of distancing should serve as a prelude to deepening my relationship to the world and how I understand myself.

The evolution of reality iai.tv

Hoffman offers what he calls the ‘interface theory’ of perception: the idea that the world as we perceive it is like the user interface of a computer, a simplified representation of what we can do in the world and what might happen as a result.  As in a computer, what is really going on in the world – the quantum fields and so on – is far too complicated for us to understand, and would take far too long to understand even were we capable. Fortunately we don’t have to.

The Bus Ticket Theory of Genius paulgraham.com

What rational person would decide that the way to write great novels was to begin by spending several years creating an imaginary elvish language, like Tolkien, or visiting every household in southwestern Britain, like Trollope? No one, including Tolkien and Trollope.

You're almost definitely more of a Jerk than you think you are lithub.com

Think of the aggressively rumpled scholar who can’t bear the thought that someone would waste her time getting a manicure. Or think of the manicured socialite who can’t see the value of dedicating one’s life to dusty Latin manuscripts. What-ever he’s into, the moralizing jerk exudes a continuous aura of disdain for everything else.

The what and the why of Discard Studies discardstudies.com

Structures, not behaviours, uphold norms and practices of waste and wasting. In sociology and other fields, there is a constant tension between agency–what individuals and groups of people are able and want to do– and structure, the cultural norms and values, institutions, infrastructures, and power relations that constrain and even determine that agency. Because of this, we’ve argued against awareness as an ideal method for creating changes around waste and wasting, instead arguing for changes in infrastructure and other scaled up systems. To help understand this tension, we use concepts of scale and scalar mismatch to argue that waste occurs differently within different structures at different scales, and that action must match up with these scales. For example, if we want to address pollution and waste, then focusing 90% of our activist efforts on household waste that makes up less than 3% of a nation’s waste is not going to be effective. Consumer and citizen behaviour cannot impact 97% of the waste that’s out there

Why is pop culture obsessed with battles between good and evil? aeon.co

Stories about good guys and bad guys that are implicitly moral – in the sense that they invest an individual’s entire social identity in him not changing his mind about a moral issue – perversely end up discouraging any moral deliberation. Instead of anguishing over multidimensional characters in conflict – as we find in The Iliad, or the Mahabharata or Hamlet – such stories rigidly categorise people according to the values they symbolise, flattening all the deliberation and imagination of ethical action into a single thumbs up or thumbs down. Either a person is acceptable for Team Good, or he belongs to Team Evil. [...] The one thing the good guys teach us is that people on the other team aren’t like us. In fact, they’re so bad, and the stakes are so high, that we have to forgive every transgression by our own team in order to win. [...] When we read, watch and tell stories of good guys warring against bad guys, we are essentially persuading ourselves that our opponents would not be fighting us, indeed they would not be on the other team at all, if they had any loyalty or valued human life. In short, we are rehearsing the idea that moral qualities belong to categories of people rather than individuals.

What Do We Do with the Art of Monstrous Men? theparisreview.org

When you’re having a moral feeling, self-congratulation is never far behind. You are setting your emotion in a bed of ethical language, and you are admiring yourself doing it. We are governed by emotion, emotion around which we arrange language. The transmission of our virtue feels extremely important, and weirdly exciting. […] The psychic theater of the public condemnation of monsters can be seen as a kind of elaborate misdirection: nothing to see here. I’m no monster. Meanwhile, hey, you might want to take a closer look at that guy over there.

The History Behind China’s Obsession With Hot Water sixthtone.com

Today, almost every government body, business, and school administrative office in China boasts a hot water dispenser. The nation’s high-speed trains, a source of pride for many Chinese, are all required to have water dispensers capable of providing piping hot water at a moment’s notice. Water bottles may be optional at high-level meetings in China, but a teacup isn’t, and there are often servers tasked with patrolling the room to ensure that nobody goes without hot water. One of the most important standards Chinese people use when judging an organization or facility is whether or not hot water is accessible at all times.

Monocle's View From Nowhere newrepublic.com

The magazine’s globalist chic contrasts sharply with the nationalist movements in the United States and Europe seeking to limit immigration, including visa programs for the skilled workers in tech and finance who might read Monocle. Yet the publication shares with the right a faith in free-market economics; Brûlé himself is less a citizen of the world than a shopper in its gigantic, globalized mall. His magazine, which built its brand by identifying the world’s hippest (and most profitable) trends, feels increasingly out of touch.