Spineless Ivies, climate fantasy, Marilyn: Weekend reads for October 12, 2024
Spineless Ivies, climate fantasy, Marilyn: Weekend reads for October 12, 2024
What we've been reading this week
Happy weekend, readers of The Ink!
As we do each weekend, we’ve collected some of the most intriguing writing we’ve read during the week — the pieces that have challenged and inspired us, or have just gotten us thinking — so we can share these great ideas and insights with you.
But first, we want to make sure you got a chance to read our interview with scholar Becca Lewis on how the ways we communicate and collaborate online have been shaped from the very beginning of the commercialization of the internet by the influence of right-wing think tanks and conservative politicians. If you’ve been trying to understand the turn of social media giants to the far right, you won’t want to miss this conversation.
A request for those who haven’t yet joined us: The interviews and essays that we share here take research and editing and much more. We work hard, and we are eager to bring on more writers, more voices. But we need your help to keep this going. Join us today to support the kind of independent media you want to exist.
Readings
Praise and blame at Princeton
When everything becomes antisemitic, nothing is antisemitic, and it makes it much harder to fight antisemitism. At Princeton, I’ve heard directly from those who’ve been targeted, that students who were involved in April’s protest are being called in for questioning to talk about their friends and roommates. One of my colleagues, in the spring, brought his class on Palestine to the encampment. He has since been put on probation by the university. So when I say chilling effect, it’s not just simply that individuals are scared; they’re being interrogated. They’re being punished. [Mother Jones]
From regrets to action
“A lot of the times,” she said, “women just accept what happens to them because that’s the way the world works. And that’s not how it should be like. Why can’t we fight for ourselves? Like, let me speak up.”
And ultimately, those traumatic experiences were so awful that they inspired her to do more research: “Why is Texas Republican all the time? Who are these people and what are they actually supporting? Are they actually doing us good, or are they doing us harm? They’re part of the problem, and how do I get them out?” [The Barbed Wire]
Tolstoy’s voice
Born 196 years ago, Russian novelist Leo Tolstoy’s life (1828–1910) spanned a period of immense social, political, and technological change, paralleled in his own life by his radical shift from hedonistic nobleman to theologian, anarchist, and vegetarian pacifist. Though he did not live to see the Russian Revolution, the novelist did see Tsar Alexander II’s sweeping reforms, including the 1861 Emancipation order that changed the social character of the country. Near the end of his life, Tolstoy saw the coming of new recording technology that would revolutionize the direction of his own life’s work—telling stories. [Open Culture]
Why do people think Republicans are “better for the economy”?
The numbers go up and down, but every Republican seems to start with the presumption that they’d do a good job managing the economy, and every Democrat has to work twice as hard to convince voters that they’d be just as effective at it.
It’s as though your town has two plumbers; Plumber Anderson can be relied on to make competent and timely repairs, while Plumber Jones floods and nearly destroys the home of everyone who hires him, inevitably leading them to call in Plumber Anderson to fix the damage Plumber Jones created. But people keep giving Plumber Jones their business. How can we account for this? [The Cross Section]
When the metric becomes the target
“[T]he newest LLMs might appear impressive and be able to solve some very sophisticated tasks, but they’re unreliable in various aspects,” says study coauthor Lexin Zhou, a research assistant at the Polytechnic University of Valencia in Spain. What’s more, he says, “the trend does not seem to show clear improvements, but the opposite.”
This decrease in reliability is partly due to changes that made more recent models significantly less likely to say that they don’t know an answer, or to give a reply that doesn’t answer the question. Instead, later models are more likely to confidently generate an incorrect answer. [IEEE Spectrum]
What Marilyn can teach us about the women of the right
Men clung to a related fiction: that whatever they were doing to women, no matter how cruel, the women actually liked it. Dworkin writes that the premature death of Marilyn Monroe raised a “haunting question” for the men who’d fantasized about her: “Was it possible, could it be, that she hadn’t liked It all along?” Conspiracy theories swirled that maybe the iconic blonde had been killed by the FBI or CIA, maybe because she’d had an affair with a Kennedy. The thought of an assassination was easier to bear than that Monroe was unhappy, that her smile had been fake the whole time. Dworkin writes, “Her apparent suicide stood at once as accusation and answer: no, Marilyn Monroe, the ideal sexual female, had not liked it.” [Book Riot]
The toxicity of tech bros
What I might colloquially refer to as the “tech bros” and media moguls, a group of powerful, extremely rich, and influential individuals, representing the current winners of the unbridled economic growth game. They can be described as advocates for a toxic brew of fatal short-term capitalist thinking based on ever-increasing consumption, and the worldview of libertarianism (“the political philosophy of puberty”) based upon the immature idea of totally unrestricted freedom. Thrown into that dangerous mix are a lack of critical thought and/or morality, as exemplified by the invocation of “free speech absolutism” to justify the spread of stunning numbers of falsehoods, for example, regarding climate and environment. [BioEssays]
You can’t go home again
The idea of “managed retreat,” or proactively moving away from places sinking beneath the waves or burning and drying up in the greenhouse, is attractive in its logic and empowerment. That sort of move would offer some degree of “agency over the choice, so making it feel like people who are retreating making it feel like this is a choice for them,” one expert on the topic, A.R. Siders of the University of Delaware, has said in the past.
But doing this at scale is an almost incomprehensible absurdity. [Splinter]
No more heroes
Nobody who wrote the movie bothered to say how Palpatine returned. People in the real world are similarly confused. I think his return came from doing what the studios are increasingly doing: listening to the superfans, bringing them more of the exact same they demand (which, once they have it, they hate) trying not to upset them by suggesting that heroism—which they see as their exclusive property—is under attack, a fake threat that justifies any real threat they might bring in retaliation.
Maybe the way Palpatine returned was that he was never gone. [The Reframe]
The right’s war on ideas expands
The authoritarian’s world runs on a script resembling that of a poorly written children’s book: It insists that innate differences between groups are real and inflexible; that ideas and behaviors are essentially good or bad; and that there is a purely righteous way to live, love, govern, work, pray, and build a household. Authoritarianism requires straight-forward narratives, something biology is lousy at generating. And this inability to kowtow to fairy tales is a trait it shares with the responsible study of U.S. history. [Undark]
Following the illiberal thread
A few months after Walter Huss was elected chair of the OR GOP in 1978, former President Gerald Ford anxiously asked his friend Wendall Wyatt, a moderate Republican Congressman from Oregon, if they’d “gotten rid of that nut yet.” If only Ford had lived to see what became of his Republican Party. [Rightlandia]
SpottieOttieDopaliscious
Celebrate the 26th anniversary of Outkast’s Aquemini and the incredible flexibility of America’s greatest art form with drumming phenomenon Kassa Overall, saxophonist Tomoki Sanders, keyboardist Matt Wong, and percussionist Bendji Allonce taking the Atlanta hip-hop classic into unexplored territory.
Your support makes The Ink possible, so if you haven’t joined already, we’d be honored if you’d become a paid subscriber. When you do, you’ll get access each week to our regular posts and our interviews with the most thoughtful people out there — and you’ll be able to join the conversation in our comments section.