Discussing Christopher Nolans' Odyssey with Daniel Mendelsohn

Having watched Mr. Mendelsohn's "seminar" on Nolan's film, I was surprised he made the very same criticisms, almost verbatim, that Emily Wilson made in her LRB review. Yet Ms. Wilson's review is called "scathing" by The Guardian and causes even Joyce Carol Oates, no less, to run to Nolan's defense. No one bats an eye at Mr. Mendelsohn's pan of the film nor when he himself mentions Ms. Wilson's review and ALSO calls it "scathing"!

So you have two people saying pretty much the same thing in the same way and one is characterized as "scathing" and "a take down" and the other is an even-handed critical assessment. Misogyny is not going away apparently, not for a long, long time.

Every Man for Himself and God Against All by Werner Herzog: Books

I’d rather die than go to an analyst, because it’s my view that something fundamentally wrong happens there. If you harshly light every last corner of a house, the house will be uninhabitable. It’s like that with your soul; if you light it up, shadows and darkness and all, people will become “uninhabitable.” I am convinced that it’s psychoanalysis—along with quite a few other mistakes—that has made the twentieth century so terrible. As far as I’m concerned, the twentieth century, in its entirety, was a mistake.

No One Ever Said It: On the Long History of “Ye Olde” in English

But that’s not to say it has no roots in the past. Once there was a letter called thorn that made a “th” sound. It looked like this: þ. Over the centuries, þ was written increasingly like the letter y with some scribes using them interchangeably. Early printers even substituted y for þ, so the word “þe” (the) ended up looking like “ye.” Eventually þ fell out of use, but people continued using “ye” to abbreviate the word “the” in print during the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries and in handwriting until the nineteenth century. English speakers’ memory of the origin of “ye” faded over time, until people began reading the word anew, pronouncing it wrong, and eventually creating the habit in English of saying “ye” to sound old.

Florence Pugh called John le Carré an “old f*cking fart,” which… inspired him?

The new friendship turned out to be a very good one, at least for Le Carré, who would lament to Pugh a year later that he was suffering from a serious case of writer’s block, to which Pugh replied, “What do you mean your writing days are over? Just keep writing. Keep stretching your brain. Do it.” And it worked.

John le Carré, author of Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy, dies aged 89 | The Guardian

Having spent four decades living in Cornwall, married twice and raising a son, Nicholas, who would write novels himself under the name Nick Harkaway, Le Carré conceeded: “I have been neither a model husband nor a model father, and am not interested in appearing that way.” The consistent love of his life was writing, “scribbling away like a man in hiding at a poky desk”. “Out of the secret world I once knew I have tried to make a theatre for the larger worlds we inhabit,” he wrote. “First comes the imagining, then the search for reality. Then back to the imagining, and to the desk where I’m sitting now.”

Woody Allen Memoir Apropos of Nothing Is Hilarious & Endearing | National Review

Looking ahead to the future (at 84, he says, “My life is almost half over”), Allen figures to continue vexing his many haters. He had difficulty assembling a cast for his latest movie, but it’s now in the can, and even if he couldn’t make movies, he’d write plays. If no one would produce his plays, he’d write books. If no one would publish the books now, he’d write them for later. The image comes to mind of Allen’s Bananas hero Fielding Mellish, representing himself in a treason trial, getting bound and gagged by the judge, but continuing to speak (and reduce a witness to tears). Sorry, you there with the pitchforks and the torches, despite putting him through (Bananas again) a travesty of a mockery of a sham of a mockery of a travesty of two mockeries of a sham, Allen still doesn’t care what you think of him, and he’s going to keep creating till he drops. “If I died right now I couldn’t complain,” he says. “And neither would a lot of other people.”

Forget Nature Versus Nurture. Nature Has Won - Quillette

In Blueprint: How DNA Makes Us Who We Are Robert Plomin makes the case that genetic differences cause most variation in psychological traits – things like personality and cognitive abilities. The way your parents raise you, the schools you attend – they don’t have much effect on those traits. Children are similar to their parents, but that similarity is due to shared genetics, rather than shared family environment.

Obviously the thoughts in your head, the facts you know, are not the same as your great-great-grand-father’s – we learn those things. But how easily you learn those facts, how well you remember them, how optimistic or pessimistic you are – those are largely set by your genes. Almost every psychological trait has significant heritability, even political leanings. To a significant degree, you’re either born a little Liberal or else a little Conservative, to quote Gilbert and Sullivan.

And to the extent that your personality is not set by your genes, it’s apparently influenced by poorly-understood random factors, rather than your upbringing or social circumstances.

The Wind in the Willows Isn't Really a Children's Book | Literary Hub

But for the most part, the book is about a group of well-off, leisured English gentlemen. Even more importantly, the book hardly ever addresses itself to an audience of children: as Humphrey Carpenter put it, “The Wind in the Willows has nothing to do with childhood or children, except that it can be enjoyed by the young.”

David Foster Wallace and the Horror of Neuroscience - The Millions

By the end of the story the strong impression is that Neal’s condition is but a particularly acute version of a basic human predicament. As he puts it, it’s “not as if this is an incredibly rare or obscure type of personality.” In the modern neuroscientific paradigm, Neal’s suspicion that “in reality I actually seemed to have no true inner self” is absolutely correct. There is really nothing outlandish about Neal’s fears; within Oblivion’s neuropessimism, they are simple truisms. We do experience time poorly; language is in many ways a weak tool. The same goes for his fear that he is “unable to love:” from a hard Darwinian viewpoint, we are all unable to love, really—or more accurately, what we think we are doing when we love is actually not loving at all as we understand that word. Neal recognizes this himself: “we are all basically just instruments or expressions of our evolutionary drives, which are themselves the expressions of forces that are infinitely larger and more important than we are.”

Why is pop culture obsessed with battles between good and evil? | Aeon Essays

Good guy/bad guy narratives might not possess any moral sophistication, but they do promote social stability, and they’re useful for getting people to sign up for armies and fight in wars with other nations. Their values feel like morality, and the association with folklore and mythology lends them a patina of legitimacy, but still, they don’t arise from a moral vision. They are rooted instead in a political vision, which is why they don’t help us deliberate, or think more deeply about the meanings of our actions. Like the original Grimm stories, they’re a political tool designed to bind nations together.

It’s no coincidence that good guy/bad guy movies, comic books and games have large, impassioned and volatile fandoms – even the word ‘fandom’ suggests the idea of a nation, or kingdom. What’s more, the moral physics of these stories about superheroes fighting the good fight, or battling to save the world, does not commend genuine empowerment. 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.

Terry Southern - Wikipedia

In April 1983, he was approached to work on a planned sequel to Easy Rider called Biker Heaven. He had little to do with the script, but he was paid about $20,000, which was several times more than he had earned from the original. Around this time Stanley Kubrick requested some sample dialogue for a planned film adaptation of Arthur Schnitzler's book Traumnovelle which was to star Steve Martin, but Southern's bawdy submissions reportedly sabotaged any prospect of further involvement; Kubrick eventually made the film (as Eyes Wide Shut, with Tom Cruise and Nicole Kidman) shortly before his death in 1999.

The Mind Outside My Head | by Tim Parks | NYR Daily | The New York Review of Books

His favorite example is the rainbow. For the rainbow experience to happen we need sunshine, raindrops, and a spectator. It is not that the sun and the raindrops cease to exist if there is no one there to see them. Manzotti is not a Bishop Berkeley. But unless someone is present at a particular point no colored arch can appear. The rainbow is hence a process requiring various elements, one of which happens to be an instrument of sense perception. It doesn’t exist whole and separate in the world nor does it exist as an acquired image in the head separated from what is perceived (the view held by the “internalists” who account for the majority of neuroscientists); rather, consciousness is spread between sunlight, raindrops, and visual cortex, creating a unique, transitory new whole, the rainbow experience. Or again: the viewer doesn’t see the world; he is part of a world process.

How to Be a Stoic - 3:AM Magazine

3AM: What are the most compelling parts of Stoicism?

MP: I can’t speak for others, but I find the fundamental idea that a life worth living is one during which one strives every day to become a better person to be compelling. The Stoics do this by mindfully practicing four cardinal virtues: practical wisdom, the ability to navigate complex situations in the best way available; courage, to do the right thing; temperance, so to always act in proportion to the need of the situation; and justice, treating others with fairness, as fellow human beings.

I also find some of the Stoic techniques to be very useful. For instance, the evening philosophical diary, in which I interrogate myself about the difficult parts of my day, reflecting on what I did right, what I did wrong, and what I could do better the next time around. Or the exercises in mild self-denial, like occasional fasting, or even taking a cold shower. They remind me of just how good my life normally is, when I can count on things like hot water and a nice meal, which are definitely not a given for everyone on the planet. Think of them as exercises in gratitude, but in practice, not just words.

Stephen Wolfram: A New Kind of Science | Online—Table of Contents

Stephen Wolfram: A New Kind of Science | Online—Table of Contents

Why You Should Read Fiction

Contemporary literature is full of broad gaps. The author Margaret Atwood notes that her own writing was influenced by Beatrix Potter, whom she describes as a master of oblique discourse. In The Tale of Mr. Tod, Benjamin Bunny and Peter Rabbit are in pursuit of Tommy Brock, a badger who has captured Benjamin’s children in a bag and is headed home, where he will likely eat them. On the way, the two rabbits pass the house of Cottontail Bunny, and ask if her husband, a black rabbit, is home, presumably to ask for his help in confronting Tommy Brock. In response, Cottontail says nothing about her husband, but simply states, “Tommy Brock had rested twice while she watched him.” As the two rabbits continue their pursuit, Peter says, “He was at home; I saw his black ears peeping out of the hole.” Benjamin replies, “They live too near the rocks to quarrel with their neighbours …”

Atwood writes, “At the age of four, I quickly grasped that Cottontail had lied, but the ‘rocks’ remark took some thought. Finally, I got it: Tommy Brock has a shovel, and those that live in burrows too near the rocks are easy to catch by digging. Long-term craft lesson: no need to spell everything out because the reader is the co-creator of the story and can be depended on to pick up the dropped clues.”

Atwood was undoubtedly a precocious 4-year-old, but there is evidence that average children can pick up such dropped clues, and that this process not only activates mentalizing networks in the brain, but that it hones these skills even more than the explicit labeling of mental states.

Ms. Potter is right up there with Shakespeare AFAIC.

Goodreads | Homo Deus: A Brief History of Tomorrow by Yuval Noah Harari — Reviews, Discussion, Bookclubs, Lists

In the heyday of European imperialism, conquistadors and merchants bought entire islands and countries in exchange for coloured beads. In the twenty-first century our personal data is probably the most valuable resource most humans still have to offer, and we are giving it to the tech giants in exchange for email services and funny cat videos.

Raymond Chandler: A Biography - Tom Hiney ****

However bleak his life could be, Chandler tried never to give up the possibility of happiness, or lose sight of the human comedy in his failure to find it. He felt jinxed in the struggle, but he was resolved to approach the world with something more than pessimism.

Is Consciousness an Illusion? | by Thomas Nagel | The New York Review of Books

You may well ask how consciousness can be an illusion, since every illusion is itself a conscious experience—an appearance that doesn’t correspond to reality. So it cannot appear to me that I am conscious though I am not: as Descartes famously observed, the reality of my own consciousness is the one thing I cannot be deluded about. The way Dennett avoids this apparent contradiction takes us to the heart of his position, which is to deny the authority of the first-person perspective with regard to consciousness and the mind generally.

Nagel starts his review by laying out Dennett's argument, then forgets about it once the word "illusion" is used. Perhaps it would be more correct to say that Dennett says consciousness is an emergent property at the manifest level of reality and does not exist at the scientific level. It is a real thing at the manifest level.

Americans By Heart: Undocumented Latino Students and the Promise of Higher Education.

What was often omitted in this partisan rhetoric was the fact that many who are classified as undocumented or illegal were brought to the United States when they were young, and have grown up, attended high school and lived most of their lives in America. Of the estimated 11.9 million undocumented immigrants in the United States, 9.6 million are from Latin American countries with Mexico accounting for the largest share at seven million (Gonzales, 2009). Sixty percent of undocumented immigrants between the ages of 18 and 24 have completed high school, and nearly half of these high school graduates within this age range have or are enrolled in a college or university.

The case for eliminating sugar. All of it. - Vox

The other point you make is also very important. Clearly there are people who live very long, happy lives eating significant amounts of sugar. Maybe it even makes them healthier, who knows. Anything is possible. I get emails from these people regularly now, often explaining that they are living proof that my theory, as one such [correspondent] put it two days ago, is bullshit. If I’m in a punchy mood, I write them back and say something along the lines of, “My Uncle Max smoked two packs of cigarettes a day, lived to be in his nineties, and died of old age. Does that mean cigarettes don’t cause lung cancer?”

And the same logic holds. The fact that some people clearly tolerate sugar, if not thrive on it, is simply not evidence that those of us who are obese and/or diabetic didn’t get that way because of the sugar we, or our mothers, or our mothers’ mothers consumed.