1. The Case for Unhappiness
Becca Rothfeld takes Arthur C. Brooks to the woodshed. It was only a matter of time until Brooks, the persistently cheerful advocate of “happiness,” who runs the circuit of podcasts, lectures, and morning show TV, would become the target of a snarky, dismissive review. But Rothfeld’s review of his new book, The Meaning of Your Life, is devastating:
“The Meaning of Your Life” is self-help that dreams it is philosophy. It makes a scattered show of its erudition in the form of drive-by efforts to project philosophical literacy. Only the aggressive carelessness that once enabled Brooks to write a column about how to “enhance your mood” with a playlist inspired by the unremitting pessimist Arthur Schopenhauer could have yielded his tortured misreadings of Ralph Waldo Emerson, Søren Kierkegaard, and Karl Marx. Friedrich Nietzsche once declared, “The discipline of suffering, of great suffering—do you not know that only this discipline has created all enhancements of man so far?”
2. Lights, Camera, Lumber
Nick Morton was a successful Hollywood writer, producer, and show runner. But when LA’s entertainment economy started to dry up, he asked his brother-in-law if he could work on one of his home renovation crews. Morton’s column in Hollywood Reporter is better than most fish-out-of-water screenplays:
My brother-in-law’s team is made up of guys from all over the globe with expertise in carpentry, masonry, painting and electric. They can hurl 90-pound bags of concrete into a truck bed with the same ease I employ to sip a latte. They speak a language of Romex wire and five-and-a-half-inch double-gang plates. I can’t tell the difference between a jackhammer and a skill saw. I stumble around the job site – a minefield of half-built concrete footings and sewer trenches – in my khakis and Gazelles like a burlesque dancer navigating the ruins of the London Blitz.
3. Relationship Capital
Robert Kaplan, Vice Chair of Goldman Sachs, covers a wide range of topics in a podcast with Alpha Exchange, from fiscal stimulus to demographics. He concludes with a perspective about the limitations of AI:
Even in a world where AGI can produce every good and service at near-zero cost, humans will still want things that are irreducibly scarce: other humans’ time and attention. A massage from another human. A meal cooked with love by a person who cares. A conversation with someone who genuinely listens. Live performance. Mentorship. Friendship. Community. Spiritual guidance. Teaching that is responsive to a specific child’s specific needs in real time. These things cannot be AGI-produced without losing the very quality that makes them valuable, because the value is constituted by the human origin.
4. iPad Illiteracy
The Times of London reports that around 500,000 Norwegians, in a population of only 5.6 million, cannot read simple instructions or even a text message. In a study of 65 countries that measured how much children enjoyed reading, Norway ranks last. “We are far, far too rich, so we do stupid things with our money,” said Trine Skei Grande, the former education minister of Norway:
In 2016, the “stupid thing” was to give an iPad to every child when they started school at the age of five. It had no parental controls on it, and the parents who complained were ignored, dismissed as “dinosaurs”. Books disappeared from classrooms. Children stopped reading. Norway is below the international average, and far below Britain, in the Pisa reading scores, compiled by the OECD. Before the iPads were introduced, it was significantly above both of them.
5. Football Speech
KC Conception, a wide receiver from Texas A&M, says he’s “the best receiver in this draft. Period.” In a remarkable personal essay in Players Tribune, he declares that he’s getting attention for a different reason:
By now you’ve probably heard that I stutter. Everyone has. And look, I get it. It’s a good story. I’m not mad at it. And I appreciate the love. But every time I’ve sat down for an interview that’s where we start, and that’s where we end. The stutter. The stutter. The stutter.
KC was drafted by the Cleveland Browns in the first round.
6. Shakespeare, Ranked
Michael Billington, a theater critic for The Guardian, ranks every Shakespeare play. He offers quick, incisive takes on each, and he recognizes great performances on stage and in film. His view of the greatest Shakespearian achievement: the combined plays of Henry IV Parts I and II:
These two plays boast a fugal delicacy in their portrait of English life. Is there anything in English drama to match those Cotswold scenes where Justice Shallow claims: “Death, as the Psalmist saith, is certain to all; all shall die. How a good yoke of bullocks at Stamford fair?” In showing how the old can leap in a second from thoughts of mortality to the mundane, Shakespeare shows not just a faultless ear but a generous compassion that makes these plays the enduring masterpieces they are.
Websites Worth Reading
Google Secret Reference Desk: How to use it
History of Lab Notebooks: Photos from Marie Curie, Isaac Newtown, and more
Zperiod: An interactive periodic table
Feeds We Follow
@TheWatchers: Extreme weather reports
@matthewgburgess: Professor of political polarization
@ihtesham2005: The Persian father of modern math