Culture, Essays, Social Media

Social Media: Instagram – Is Life Online Real?

YALE REVIEW (March 10, 2025)

Reality is a medium, and I’m thumbing through it. I’m on Instagram, where a video is a “Reel.” I land on an influencer who eats upsetting amounts of food and then runs until he has burned off all the calories. In this video, he eats eleven thousand calories of Taco Bell and then runs eighty-plus miles across thirteen-plus hours, posting a screenshot of his fitness tracker to prove it. He intersperses footage of himself on the toilet, audio included. He has posted dozens of videos using this formula. More than 140,000 people follow him.

What, exactly, is happening to me, my self, and my reality when I scroll on Instagram?

Without Instagram, I never would have seen something like this happen; in fact, it never would have happened at all. It’s a performance conducted by an individual but also the product of billions of human inputs. Our participation on social media as both creators and viewers trains the algorithms that organize their content, and these algorithms shape our tastes in turn. The influencers and the feeds they populate evolve together, recursively.

In the digital, reality, like scroll, becomes more verb than noun.

We are not even two decades into a vast, largely unregulated experiment in human psychology. This blur of experience, a composite of varied partial glimpses, is not something I or any of us evolved to digest. All these people, all these loops. I think of my baby nephew. Even in our one-to-one conversations on FaceTime, we inevitably shape his expectations of the real, setting a baseline for his neuroplastic brain that’s so tremendously different than mine. In the digital, reality, like scroll, becomes more verb than noun. Reality doesn’t merely exist; reality reels. My nephew will never know otherwise.

I’m haunted by that video of the runner. I thumb back up to find it, pop over to his profile. I see that in his more recent videos, he has begun challenging friends and strangers to eat-offs: a new shape for the performance. I’m grossed out and keep watching. I should know better, but I can’t help myself.

Jesse Damiani is a writer, curator, and foresight strategist. He hosts the Urgent Futures podcast and writes the Reality Studies newsletter.

Book Reviews, Essays, Literature, Travel

Literature & Travel: ‘The Light And The Poverty’

LOS ANGELES REVIEW OF BOOKS (LARB):

ONE DAY IN SUMMER, I took in the washing from the balcony of my flat in Central Athens. Wildfires had been raging on the outskirts of the city and I didn’t want my sheets to smell like smoke. All day, I’d been receiving messages from the government urging me to stay inside—messages, too, from visitors in town on their way to or from the islands, friends and friends-of, urging me out for a drink or a meal.

I paused to take in the view: an abandoned lot and a litter of inbred, cross-eyed cats, a street devoid of people, save for tourists and the unhoused, and that gauzy, yellow sky which I have grown to associate with summer in Greece. I went back inside, shut the windows, and returned to work on this essay, which began with a question I posed a few months prior, in the WhatsApp group for Salad Days, a reading series I run with my wife and a Greek writer and translator: “In the last 10 years, have more Greek novels been translated into English, or have there been more novels written by foreigners but set in Greece?”

Over the course of a few hours, we traded titles back and forth, before tallying up the results (dated here by their appearance in English):

Greeks: Amanda Michalopolou’s God’s Wife (2019) and Why I Killed My Best Friend (2014); Christos Chrissopoulos’s The Parthenon Bomber (2017); and Christos Ikonomou’s Good Will Come from the Sea (2019) and Something Will Happen, You’ll See (2016) (short stories but close enough).

Foreigners: Rachel Cusk’s Outline (2014), Katie Kitamura’s A Separation (2017), Cara Hoffman’s Running (2017), Andrew Durbin’s Skyland (2020), Hanna Johansson’s Antiquity (2024).

Partial Credit: Deborah Levy’s August Blue (2023), Megan Nolan’s Acts of Desperation (2021), Emmanuel Carrère’s Yoga (2022), Andrew Lipstein’s Last Resort (2022), all of which are written by foreigners but contain key sections set in Greece.

We were surprised by the results of our admittedly inexhaustive survey: we knew few contemporary Greeks had made it into English, the linguistic coin of the realm (here and in the writing world more generally), but we’d been only dimly aware of quite how many foreigners had made it in into Greece.

There’s some graffiti near my house that reads, “Tourists Enjoy Your Stay in the Cemetery of Europe.” I think the next great Greek novel will be about tourism, the lifeblood of the country, which is making it very sick, about the “ugly human being[s]” who descend every year to watch the country burn. Us, in other words. And when it comes, I hope the world will take notice.

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Dominic Amerena is an Australian writer living in Greece. His debut novel I Want Everything will be published this summer.

Climate Change, Essays, Foreign Affairs, Politics

‘The Coming Age Of Territorial Expansion’

FOREIGN AFFAIRS MAGAZINE (March 4, 2025):

ince the mid-twentieth century, the power dynamics and system of alliances that made up the postwar global order provided a strong check on campaigns to conquer and acquire territory—an otherwise enduring feature of human history. But rather than marking a definitive break from the aggression of the past, this era of relative restraint now seems to have been merely a brief deviation from the historical pattern. From Russia’s invasion of Ukraine to U.S. President Donald Trump’s avowed interest in acquiring Greenland, international land grabs are back on the table. Threats of territorial conquest are once again becoming a central part of geopolitics, driven by a new phase of great-power competition, growing population pressures, shifts in technology, and, perhaps most crucially, a changing climate.

International land grabs are back on the table.

The case of Greenland is emblematic of how climate change may spur a global contest for land. Trump first raised the prospect of the United States incorporating the Danish territory on the eve of his inauguration, and in the weeks since, he has reiterated that wish and refused to rule out the use of force to turn it into reality. Denmark is uninterested in selling Greenland, and the territory’s largely indigenous population is wary of outside powers—a legacy of the island’s brutal history under Danish rule. But that has not discouraged Trump’s overtures or threats. His interest in the territory stems ostensibly from its strategic position as a buffer between the United States and its great-power adversaries. “It has to do with the freedom of the world,” Trump said in January. But as the planet warms, retreating icecaps and thinning sea ice will make Greenland important for other reasons, as its vast tracts of once inhospitable land become newly alluring to outsiders.

Climate change will create problems for some countries and opportunities for others.

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International agreements and alliances, already fraying as great-power competition heats up, will struggle to contain these fights. In a world where might makes right, countries that find themselves seeking new territory may not hesitate to use force to get it. With the most dramatic effects of climate change still to come, the race for land is just getting started.

Michael Albertus is Professor of Political Science at the University of Chicago and the author of Land Power: Who Has It, Who Doesn’t, and How That Determines the Fate of Societies.

Arts & Literature, Design, Essays, History

Art Movements: ‘How Art Deco Shaped 100 Years Of Forward-Thinking Design’

Artnet (February 27, 2025) by Caroline Roux

One hundred years ago, a sprawling international exhibition was staged in Paris. It was intended to dazzle visitors with all that was new in architecture, design, fashion, and jewelry, and to establish France as the unassailable arbiter of taste of the western world. Called “L’Exposition internationale des arts décoratifs,” it ran from April to October 1925, attracted 16 million people, and was a celebration of Modernism and Art Deco design.

It occupied nearly 70 acres of central Paris, on both sides of the river Seine, with 20 countries building bespoke pavilions that celebrated the new progressive style—sleek and geometric—inside and out. Needless to say, around two-thirds of the exhibitors were French.

Art Deco is a design movement that emerged in the 1920s and 1930s, defined by bold geometry, rich colors, and lavish ornamentation. Blending influences from Cubism, Futurism, Bauhaus, and ancient Egyptian, Aztec, and African art, it exudes luxury through sleek symmetry, exotic materials, and jazz-age opulence. Art Deco was modern but not necessarily restrained.

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In the USA, the focus is on art, with a show of Tamara de Lempicka, the doyenne of Art Deco painters, at the Museum of Fine Arts in Houston (9 March to 26 May) and a wide-ranging exhibition at the Nassau County Museum of Art, covering everything from Tiffany lamps to artworks by Fernand Leger and Guy Pene du Bois. There was even a show of Leonard Lauder’s collection of Art Deco Architecture postcards at the Museum of the City of New York. Sorry, but you’ve missed that one.

Caroline Roux writes on contemporary art and design, She is a regular contributor to the Financial Times, World of Interiors and Galerie magazine.

Economics, Essays, Politics

‘Just Another Liberalism’

THE HEDGEHOG REVIEW (March 1, 2025):

If critique could kill, neoliberalism would long be dead. So far, however, neither decades of intellectual opposition from the left and right nor the past decade of populist politics has done more than erode some measure of neoliberalism’s ideological preeminence. Talk from the right of “pro-family” policies, such as tax breaks and subsidies for having children, or moves by the Biden administration to secure domestic manufacturing of critical high-technology goods may hearten neoliberalism’s foes (even as they further blur the ideological map of American politics). Neither, however, offers anything like a consensus to replace the vision that, since the crises of the 1970s, has, with whatever degree of discontent, guided our collective thought and action.

Half a century ago, as the OPEC oil embargo and an unprecedented combination of inflation and unemployment disrupted the shared understanding of economics and politics that had oriented Western elites after World War II, neoliberalism became identified with a range of tactics for restoring economic growth. Understanding what neoliberalism is, and what its relation to liberalism might be, has been a central task for intellectuals ever since. Perhaps the first major thinker to undertake it was the French theorist Michel Foucault. In a series of lectures delivered at the Collège de France, in 1979, and originally intended to account for what he called “The Birth of Biopolitics,” he sidestepped the ostensible topic in favor of a study of the historical roots of neoliberalism and the philosophical essence of liberalism—and the relationship between the two.

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Left with no decent passions at its command, liberalism would be—and perhaps is—a spent force. But even illiberalism seems trapped within the specifically neoliberal anthropology, narrower and meaner than the expansive, polyvalent vision of humanity at the heart of the liberal tradition. And what comes may be still worse. The rational, self-interested individual, however base we consider him, possessed at least a certain coherence. Contemporary technologies of distraction seem to act increasingly on fragmented, disconnected parts of a splintering subject, while contemporary political rhetoric, in its systemic and transparent falsehoods, bypasses the minimal conditions of instrumental reason. If there is a subject of governance after neoliberalism, rather than transcending self-interest, he may be too psychically scattered and disoriented to be considered a self. The alternative to a recovery of the liberal imagination in its true political dimensions (and not merely as the false charms of an aestheticized inner life) may be neither illiberalism nor the neoliberal status quo but a new barbarism.

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Blake Smith is a historian of modern France and a literary translator. He is writing a book on Roland Barthes.

Essays, Ideas, Society

Ideas & Society: ‘The Winter Of Civilization’

AEON MAGAZINE (February 28, 2025):

I came across Byung-Chul Han towards the end of the previous decade, while writing a book about the pleasures and discontents of inactivity. My first researches into our culture of overwork and perpetual stimulation soon turned up Han’s The Burnout Society, first published in German in 2010. Han’s descriptions of neoliberalism’s culture of exhaustion hit me with that rare but unmistakable alloy of gratitude and resentment aroused when someone else’s thinking gives precise and fully formed expression to one’s own fumbling intuitions.

Han’s critique of contemporary life centres on its fetish of transparency; the compulsion to self-exposure driven by social media and fleeting celebrity culture; the reduction of selfhood to a series of positive data-points; and the accompanying hostility to the opacity and strangeness of the human being.

At the heart of Han’s conception of a burnout society (Müdigkeitsgesellschaft) is a new paradigm of domination. The industrial society’s worker internalises the imperative to work harder in the form of superego guilt. Sigmund Freud’s superego, a hostile overseer persecuting us from within, comes into being when the infantile psyche internalises the forbidding parent. In other words, the superego has its origin in figures external to us, so that, when it tells us what to do, it is as though we are hearing an order from someone else. The achievement society of our time, Han argues, runs not on superego guilt but ego-ideal positivity – not from a ‘you must’ but a ‘you can’. The ego-ideal is that image of our own perfection once reflected to our infantile selves by our parents’ adoring gaze. It lives in us not as a persecutory other but as a kind of higher version of oneself, a voice of relentless encouragement to do and be more.

To digitalise a painting is to decompose it, to deprive it of ground

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Josh Cohen is a psychoanalyst in private practice in London. He is professor emeritus of modern literary theory at Goldsmiths University of London. His latest books include Losers (2021) and All the Rage: Why Anger Drives the World (2024).

Arts & Literature, Reviews

‘Rembrandt And Literature’ (Review)

LOS ANGELES REVIEW OF BOOKS (LARB):

ALTHOUGH ONE CAN never get enough of Vermeer or van Gogh, a regrettable consequence of this current age of blockbuster art exhibitions is that more and more great artists are being viewed in isolation from each other. Turning the 18th-century notion of the singular genius into a marketing ploy, museums around the world present their subjects as rebels, outcasts, and troublemakers who operated outside time and space, when all of them were, in fact, closely connected with—and creatively indebted to—their culture and time period.

It is refreshing, then, to stumble upon a show like Impulse Rembrandt: Teacher, Strategist, Bestseller (2024–25) at the Leipzig Museum of Fine Arts in Germany, whose accompanying English-language catalog of critical essays plugs the most revered of the Dutch masters back into the ecosystem that influenced him as much as he influenced it.

Born in Leiden to a well-to-do miller in 1606, Rembrandt in early youth began to draft sketches of the Dutch countryside and portraits of his Protestant mother, who instilled in him a lifelong reverence for Christian mythology. In his teens, he apprenticed first with Jacob Isaacszoon van Swanenburg, a history painter freshly returned from Italy, then with Pieter Lastman, who also taught Jan Lievens. At 22, Rembrandt began taking on students of his own, many of whom, including Ferdinand Bol, Gerard Dou, and Carel Fabritius, became successful painters in their own right. Contrary to popular belief, writes the head of paintings and sculpture at Leipzig Museum, Jan Nicolaisen, in the exhibition catalog, these students—some as young as 14 when they first appeared at Rembrandt’s stately house and studio on Amsterdam’s Jodenbreestraat—didn’t spend their time completing Rembrandt’s masterpieces so much as copying them, adopting his style and sensibilities as their own. Concerned more with light and emotion than idealized forms, and increasingly painting in loose, expressive strokes, Rembrandt has been deservedly called one of the first “modern” painters, his well-documented influence running from his immediate disciples to Paul Cézanne, Pablo Picasso, and Salvador Dalí.

By and large, the development of 17th-century Dutch literature followed the development of 17th-century Dutch painting, Amsterdam’s writers and poets moving away from the dominant, classical style of their French neighbors in much the same way Rembrandt looked beyond the masters of the Italian Renaissance. 

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It is, in light of this conclusion, rather fitting that both academic and literary treatments of Rembrandt have slowly moved beyond the one-sided interpretations of the past, viewing him neither as a nuisance—as the classicists and Victorians did—nor as a Romantic genius, but rather as a man of unresolvable contradiction, a hungry miller’s boy who bit off more than he could chew. Possessed of both innate talent and acquired skill, he was equally sensible to corporeal and aesthetic pleasures, and willing to change and develop in response to both his surroundings and his own better judgment. A best-seller indeed.

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Tim Brinkhof is a Dutch journalist and researcher based in the United States. He studied history and literature at New York University and has written for Vox, Vulture, Slate, Esquire, Jacobin, GQ, New Lines Magazine, and more.

Economics, Essays

Economics: ‘Productivity Is Everything’ (Essay)

FOREIGN AFFAIRS MAGAZINE (February 25, 2025):

For the United States, these are trying times. Americans are overcome with an unshakable sense of economic malaise. The top-line indicators are good: unemployment is low, inflation is declining, and the country remains the richest in the world. Yet in poll after poll, most Americans say they are unhappy with the state of the economy today and its prospects for tomorrow. Only a quarter consider the economy good or excellent. Nearly 80 percent say they are not confident that their children will live better than they do.

In the mid-1970s, U.S. productivity growth collapsed.

Analysts have spent years discussing the country’s particular challenges. They have talked about its aging population, which is widening federal budget deficits as entitlement spending collides with an antipathy to tax increases. They have looked at the growing threat of climate change, which requires an overhaul of the U.S. energy sector. They have noted the widening wealth and income gaps in our changing economy. And they have fretted over foreign autocrats who are menacing U.S. security.

Innovation has driven most of the United States’ productivity growth.

But the public debate too often overlooks a common factor behind all these challenges, one that will shape whether the United States can address them: labor productivity. Commonly measured as the amount of goods and services generated per worker, productivity is the central determinant of a nation’s average standard of living and its overall economic success. Growth over time in productivity is why Americans today can consume more goods and services than their grandparents—even as they work fewer hours. Productivity growth fuels rising wages and profits, which generates more fiscal revenue, allowing Washington to build formidable defense capabilities. And productivity growth bolsters the country’s soft power, demonstrating the strengths of a democratic, market-oriented society.

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MATTHEW J. SLAUGHTER is Paul Danos Dean and Earl C. Daum 1924 Professor of International Business at the Tuck School of Business at Dartmouth College. From 2005 to 2007, he served on the White House Council of Economic Advisers.

DAVID WESSEL is Senior Fellow in Economic Studies at the Brookings Institution and director of its Hutchins Center on Fiscal and Monetary Policy.

Culture, Essays

‘The Commitment To Collaborate’ (Essay)

AEON (February 22, 2025): Every week at the office, you and your fellow employees have meetings to discuss progress on group projects and to divide tasks efficiently. Perhaps in the evening, you go home and cook dinner with your partner. At least once in your life, you might have seen a team of firefighters work together to extinguish a fire at a burning house and rescue those inside. You have probably also witnessed or participated in political demonstrations aimed at bettering the treatment of those in need. These are all examples of human cooperation toward a mutually beneficial end. Some of them seem so commonplace that we rarely think of them as anything special. Yet they are. It is not obvious that any of the other great ape species cooperate in such a way – spontaneously and with individuals they have never before met. Though there has been some evidence of cooperation in other great apes, the interpretation of studies on ape cooperation has also been contested. In the human case, cooperation is unequivocal.

One crafts a spear head, the other crafts a shaft. To do so, they need some means of communicating

The evolution of cooperation has been of interest to biologists, philosophers and anthropologists for centuries. If natural selection favours self-interest, why would we cooperate at an apparent cost to ourselves? You might say that none of these examples is costly; they all benefit the person cooperating as well as the recipient of the cooperation. This is true, but there is still a puzzle to solve. If I can reduce the cost of cooperating by deception – pretending to pull my weight in the group project or in the rescue mission – and still reap the benefits, why would I not do so? This is known as the ‘free-rider’ problem.

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Saira Khan is a research associate in the Department of Philosophy at the University of Bristol in the UK, working on Samir Okasha’s Representing Evolution project.

Book Reviews, Essays, Literature

Book Reviews: ‘Silent Catastrophes – Essays In Austrian Literature’

LONDON REVIEW OF BOOKS (February 21, 2025): Since the deplorably premature death of W G Sebald in a road accident in 2001, Jo Catling, a former colleague of his at the University of East Anglia, has been among the most dedicated keepers of his flame. Her latest tribute to Sebald is a translation in a single volume of his two collections of essays on Austrian literature, Die Beschreibung des Unglücks (‘The Description of Misfortune’) and Unheimliche Heimat (‘Strange Homeland’). Written mostly in the 1980s, these essays preceded the semi-fictional works, culminating in Austerlitz (2001), that made Sebald internationally known. They represent something rare in German but common in English: literary criticism, occupying the space between academic study and journalistic discussion. And they say more, and say it more searchingly, profoundly and pithily, than a cartload of academic monographs.

Sebald rapidly became alienated from the old-fashioned Germanistik he encountered at the University of Freiburg in the early 1960s. The professors, he felt, had culpably failed to reflect on the relations between literature and the recent German past. He found intellectual and ethical stimulus in the thinkers of the Frankfurt School, particularly Theodor Adorno and the idiosyncratic, always marginal genius Walter Benjamin. References to Benjamin and a range of psychologists and sociologists pepper these texts, reinforcing Sebald’s own insights.

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Essays & Reviews - For The Intellectually Curious

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