Link Salad, the Map/Territory Edition
Some of what I've been reading
— How Christopher Nolan Learned to Stop Worrying and Love AI - Maria Streshinsky, WIRED, Jun. 20, 2023
“There is a fundamental difference. The scientists dealing with the splitting of the atom kept trying to explain to the government, This is a fact of nature. God has done this. Or the creator or whoever you want it to be. This is Mother Nature. And so, inevitably, it's just knowledge about nature. It's going to happen. There's no hiding it. We don't own it. We didn't create it. They viewed it as that.”
— How MrBeast Became the Willy Wonka of YouTube - Max Read, The New York Times Magazine, Jun. 12, 2023
“Donaldson is explicit that profit is not the goal; expansion is. The effect is a kind of unstoppable flywheel of charity, spectacle and growth — a combination lottery, raffle, game show and telethon, administered by the Willy Wonka of Greenville, N.C. But it can be hard to tell where the momentum comes from and what it’s serving: Is it growth and spectacle for the sake of charity, or charity for the sake of growth and spectacle? In this sense, “1,000 Blind People See for the First Time” is something like the apotheosis of the MrBeast brand, for the way it literalizes the MrBeast system of turning eyeballs into money, money into charity, charity into content and content into more eyeballs. As a joking subtitle at the end of the video puts it: “I wonder if we’ll get 1,000 more views from the people we cured LOL.””
— You Don’t Need To Care About The Stock Market - Rob Larson, Current Affairs, Jun. 21, 2023
“This also means, of course, that they sit out the stock market rallies (stretches of rising stock prices), which recently brought the richest 10 percent to owning a new high of 88.8 percent of outstanding stock, according to the Fed’s most recent Distributional Financial Accounts data. That’s an especially big deal in this neoliberal era of gigantic global corporations (which are often monopolies or at least oligopolies), because profits are so tremendously high. Corporations return money to their stockholders either by increasing the amount of profits paid to them, called dividends, or by buying up their own stock, which tends to increase its price and thus increase shareholder wealth. The business press reports that after pausing these payouts during the uncertainty of the COVID pandemic, companies paid out $20.3 billion in dividends and spent over $500 billion on buybacks in just the first half of 2021 alone. This is where the real wealth of society is located.”
— An Era of Debt Crisis Catastrophe Is Dawning - Mark Malloch-Brown, Foreign Policy, Jun. 21, 2023
“Too often such stories are reported in one of two ways: abstract reports on debt figures, and anecdotal evidence about how the crisis is experienced on the ground. The Open Society Foundation’s report, “The Human Costs of the Failing Global Debt System,” launched on Wednesday online and at the summit in Paris, seeks to link the two. It finds, for example, that GDP in the year following a default is typically 2.5 percent lower than what would be expected otherwise, a gap that grows by an average 1.5 percent annually over the following eight years. By the 10th year, GDP is 14.5 percent smaller and (based on the global average) life expectancy is one year, two months, and 12 days shorter.”
— The Long War Against Slavery - Casey Cep, The New Yorker, Jan. 20, 2020
“Understood as a military struggle, slavery was a conflict staggering in its scale, even just in the Caribbean. Beginning in the seventeenth century, European traders prowled Africa’s Gold Coast looking to exchange guns, textiles, or even a bottle of brandy for able bodies; by the middle of the eighteenth century, slaves constituted ninety per cent of Europe’s trade with Africa. Of the more than ten million Africans who survived the journey across the Atlantic, six hundred thousand went to work in Jamaica, an island roughly the size of Connecticut. By contrast, four hundred thousand were sent to all of North America. (The domestic slave trade was another matter: by the time the Civil War began, there were roughly four million enslaved people living in the United States.)”
— Notes on Losing - Jay Caspian Kang, The New Yorker, Mar. 27, 2023
“Precocious children, in general, are not really my thing. But, watching Austin and Chang, I sometimes found myself on the verge of tears, not from any joy or sadness but from that odd and exceedingly rare feeling that some innate logic of the universe has been exposed—that the normal linearity that we associate with human capabilities, in which we start as novices and improve through practice, grit, and failure, was proved irrelevant. This effect cannot be triggered by children who can shake out a passable Tchaikovsky concerto, or recite a poem by heart. It comes instead when that young person seems to possess a maturity in their performance that should be accessible only through life experience. Joey Alexander, a child-prodigy jazz pianist from Indonesia, played “ ’Round Midnight” at Lincoln Center at the age of ten with the patience and expansive curiosity of someone who had spent decades learning that song. When Alexander performed with adults, they invariably broke into a smile that suggested something more profound than admiration or even wonderment. What Alexander signified, and what Austin meant to Wallace, is the possibility of a painless existence, one in which all the hard-earned lessons of life are actually ingrained, and the path to winning doesn’t require all that losing.”
— James Baldwin in Turkey - Azareen Van der Vliet Oloomi, The Yale Review, Jun. 12, 2023
“The Baldwin who emerged in Turkey was inclusive and integrated. He eschewed the binaries along which he was repeatedly asked to draw the lines of his identity in America, where he could not be Black and queer, or Black and an intellectual, or queer and Christian. In his life, Baldwin defied the reductive dichotomies of American social life, with its fixations on race and sexuality, just as his work rejected singular or easily essentialized views of the self. It could be said that he wrote in order to understand the American problem beyond national terms, recognizing that the American polity and policies have always been global; his time in Istanbul helped him articulate this with greater clarity. The work he produced during his Turkish decade reminds us to view the notion of a national literature with critical distance, and to grapple with the boundary-crossing power and potential of novels. Doing so, as Zaborowska suggests, “helps us to embrace more fully the transnational dimension of mid-twentieth-century black literary culture.””
— Tochi Onyebuchi’s Goliath: A Roundtable - Dan Hartland, A. S. Lewis, Archita Mittra, Abigail Nussbaum, and Jonah Sutton-Morse, Strange Horizons, Jun. 10, 2023
“Ultimately, this feels part and parcel of what the novel is trying to accomplish. I keep thinking back to the opening chapter, where Lincoln and his crew use a miniature black hole to tear down a house, the most fantastical of technologies being used to maintain an unequal social order that offers no hope of change in the future. So I guess the question isn’t “is Goliath science fiction” so much as what is it saying *about* science fiction, and about the people who aren’t included in it.”
— He Was a Revolutionary at the Birth of a Nation. Does Anyone Care? - Alex Traub, The New York Times Magazine, Jun. 15, 2023
“The 1971 Bangladesh Liberation War might seem like an obscure bit of history, but it looms as an immense trauma for many New Yorkers — people like the men in that basement. The war provided their most honored accomplishments and their most terrifying memories.”
Currently reading: The Recognitions - William Gaddis
Currently listening: Feel Nothing - The Plot In You
This is such a delicious tasting menu, thank you so much for sharing it!