Draft Four: Easter Eggs (what to read, watch, listen to, and think about)
A list of recommendations to last through the Spring holidays.
This goes out on Orthodox Easter, so I wanted to do something different. Since Monday is a holiday, and another long weekend is coming up May 1, I put together a list of things to read, watch, and listen to. They’ve all made me think recently, and I hope they do the same for you. Think of them as chocolate Easter Eggs to last through the next weekends.
GIVING. Ten years ago I read my first memorable book on work, Adam Grant’s Give and Take. From research and interviews, Grant, an organizational psychologist, made the case that givers – people’s whose primary motivation at work is to make a contribution – take longer to succeed, but do it more sustainably. “Takers are selfish: they aim to be better than others”, Adam writes. “Givers are generous: they strive to bring out the best in others. Matchers try to be fair: they trade favors evenly.” (Here’s the TED version of the idea – in 15 minutes).
In a recent newsletter pondering the anniversary, Adam sketches five chapters he would add to the book today: raising kids, being aware of cultural differences, relationships, how to build giving teams, and tackling the reality that women help more, and why this is implied. (Women shouldering the emotional work, especially in the workplace, is unfair, and leads to what the Nagoski sisters termed “Human Giver Syndrome” in their fantastic book, Burnout – the link takes you to a terrific interview with them.)
PS: I re-took Adam’s quick quiz: I’m 67% a giver, 33% a matcher.
LOVE. This New Yorker story on philosopher Agnes Callard asks complicated questions about who we are to each other in relationships. Callard ended a long-running marriage because she fell in love with a former graduate student, a relationship in which, she says, she glimpsed the capacity for “radical transformation”. She has since married her crush, and her thoughts on love and relationships have become part of her public philosophy. She doesn’t do things as most people do (she and her ex-husband are still very much close), she wrestles with the ethics of what we owe each other (honesty), and she believes there is a such a thing as self-creation, a journey of becoming to which all others – lovers, friends, children – contribute. Of course, we don’t just take from them and ghost-out when it suits us; that would be unethical. Here’s from a fantastic essay she wrote about break-ups:
We don’t simply inflict our lives on others; rather, we learn, over time, to coordinate, to synchronize, to co-deliberate. We grow together, bit by bit, by way of agreement and experience: the result is something too real to be annulled by one party simply deciding to opt out.
SEMICONDUCTORS. OK, not as sexy, but what if chips are the most important asset in modern life? They are in your phone, and in the computer you read this on, but they are also in your appliances, and do the heavy lifting these days as we train AI models (which need tons of computing power). But the most advanced chips are only manufactured in a few places – Taiwan being the main one to mention (yes, it’s part of the reason the US and China are going at it) –, and only by a handful of companies. They have become essential to our lives, but also to modern geopolitics. This conversation Ezra Klein had with historian Chris Miller convinced me.
FAKE NEWS. In December 2020, a nurse in Tennessee volunteered to be the first in her hospital unit to get the COVID vaccine. Soon after, with local TV broadcasting live, she fainted. It wasn’t the vaccine; she often faints when she feels pain. After she came to, she spoke to a reporter to explain. But that didn’t matter. The initial footage started a movement and a viral conspiracy: Tiffany Dover was dead, and the vaccine killed her. (Want to guess how happy the anti-vaccine movement was about this?)
Last year, an NBC reporter who covers misinformation did a fantastic podcast, Tiffany Dover is Dead, which she just updated this week with a final bonus episode. (Tip: Listen to all episodes, in order.) What you’ll hear is slightly surreal: no amount of evidence can convince people invested in this theory that it’s false, and that Tiffany is alive and well. Not even Tiffany herself.
This brings me to my second recommendation. “Fake news” is a term I’ve never liked. I’ve also been skeptical of our collective wishful thinking that fact-checking and pointing out truth will change people’s minds. As a journalist, this is painful to say. But journalism is also a system of world-building. (So are conspiracies). And the struggle here is over more than facts; it’s over our collective future. This is more of less what this amazing PhD paper says:
“[Fake news] has not only become central in debates around lies and falsehoods but also for conflicting visions about what politics, journalism, and liberal democracy fundamentally are and ought to be. Indeed (…) fake news has come to function as a prism through which wider struggles over liberal democracy and human co-habitation have become visible at a time of growing political instability.”
GEMS TO WATCH. I saw a bunch of great documentaries over the past month: Wild Life, All the Beauty and the Bloodshed, Between Revolutions. These will be readily available once they exit the festival circuit, I’m sure. So I want to give an extra shoutout to a couple of smaller ones:
Love is not an Orange can be screened online for 10 lei in One World Romania’s online section (OWR is my favorite local festival). It’s a beautiful film about the migration of Moldovan mothers to Western Europe in the bleak post-communist 1990s, and the videotapes that accompanied the “stuff” they sent back home instead of themselves.
Too Close tells the story of a woman putting her former husband in prison for abusing their young daughter. But the Transylvanian village she lives in doesn’t believe her and resents her for “ruining the peace” of their sleepy abode. On May 16 it’ll screen in all Cinema City locations in Romania – make sure you go see it then if no other screenings pop up before.
A READING LIST. You already saw some ideas above: Give and Take and Burnout. Pair them with Kate Murphy’s ode to listening You’re Not Listening, which is called that because we think we do this well, but we don’t.
For a different take on love, here’s a novel I mentioned a few weeks back: Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, a tale of video games, creativity, and yes, love. (“And what is love, in the end? Except the irrational desire to put evolutionary competitiveness aside in order to ease someone else's journey through life?”)
If for some reason you are into sci-fi, like me, this short beautiful book will soothe you: Sea of Tranquility, by Emily St. John Mandel.
A PLAYLIST. I saw Fred again…’s Tiny Desk concert and went “OMFG!” this week. You should watch it, or just let it play in the background as you relax. After playing and replaying it I felt the need to re-visit Stromae’s Tiny Desk concert, too. (I’ve had Santé on repeat for a while).
A PERSONAL NOTE. Next week, I’ll be in Perugia for the International Journalism Festival. Drop me a note if – for some reason – you make it there (all sessions are free and live online). Yes, next week’s letter is going to be about journalism. In early May I leave for the US, and I’ll be there for over a month. I’ll hit New York, Chicago, Vancouver, Seattle, and San Francisco (in this order). If you happen to be there or know people I should meet, let me know.
Mulțumesc mult pt. Agnes Callard!