The Interintellect ecosystem consists of four camps:

• We have our event hosts

• We have our event attendees

• We have our community tier members (who come to our online events for free, join our online forum, attend offline too)

• And we of course have our beloved team (and many of us also host and attend salons)

Partaking in the art of conversation is a life-changing experience for many people. After academic and professional sorting, political tribes, and generational divides, stepping into Interintellect feels like finally connecting your mind to others — it’s fun, fearless, stimulating, and you never leave an event without having learned new things and made new friends.

I am starting this new Substack series to celebrate the minds of Interintellect, most of whom write interestingly and beautifully to the great enjoyment of us all.

This is the first issue… Let’s dive in!

x Anna

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• Join our community tier

• Submit your work for publication

Language and Play — by

“Maybe the powder blue kid knew this, he did simultaneously manage to not care about an iota of knowledge, as well as have the will to garner it in every visible way, so he always has an answer. A man I would call capable of creating ornate decorative art. To redeem my own proclivities I’m forced to torture language till a difference erupts between me and him. He only cared about winning, check.”

quick bright things

Language and Play

Two hunched pairs of shoulders are working as exemplary hangers for mustard green and powder blue crew neck tees, one of them is sighing over an armistice situatio…

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5 days ago · 10 likes · 2 comments · meenal

The electrical grid is a marvel — by

“At a high level, the electric grid consists of three main processes — generation, transmission, and distribution — and electricity moves across them like it’s traveling along a one-way street. First, it is generated at a power plant using coal, natural gas, nuclear fission, or renewables. It then moves across high-voltage transmission lines to substations, where voltage is stepped down. From those, it travels across neighborhood-level distribution lines to homes and businesses.”

Progress Accumulation by Grant Mulligan

The electrical grid is a marvel

Last weekend my brother and I flew to Wisconsin to visit my 97 year old grandmother. Over coffee and a slice of rhubarb cake, Grandma was reminiscing about her life before she moved from the country to the relative metropolis of Fond du Lac as a teenager. It wasn’t until she moved into the “big” city that she had running water and a flushable toilet, an…

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a month ago · 7 likes · Grant Mulligan

On Tenderness — by

“Tenderness like a mother, the instinct that ran through all of it to protect the people I love from my own weight, to carry things in a way that did not burden them, to endure so that they could feel, at least sometimes, that things were alright. I did that. And I am only now beginning to ask myself whether I extended that same quality of care toward myself in those long moments of trying to put my brave self forward always.”

The Poetry Lantern

On Tenderness

Something shifted on Friday, and I have been sitting with it ever since, trying to understand what this feeling is before the ordinary business of living asks me to set it down…

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a month ago · 7 likes · 3 comments · Ireene ✨

What does it mean to have a mind? — by

“The idea that we had anything like functional mental states was viewed with suspicion by behaviorists who saw it as unscientific to posit hidden causes in our heads beyond what we can observe, what Gilbert Ryle called a “ghost in the machine”. The redemption of causal psychology came, perhaps surprisingly, from computer science.”

The Internal World

What does it mean to have a mind?

Can an AI be stressed…

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a month ago · 3 likes · 2 comments · Paul de Font-Reaulx

How AIs See Our World — by

“As we continue to use AIs that see our world through such unfamiliar methods, we might find ourselves compelled to engage with a concept interface designers already rely on heavily: empathy.”

On measuring AI — by

“The interesting question then becomes whether a sufficiently capable system can invent its own metric- through a conjecture-proof loop, a self-play mechanism, or a way of generating better evals than we can.”

Love is the centering of the Other — by

“And perhaps there lies the push and pull that defines a healthy relationship: wanting to better yourself for the Other, while accepting the Other for who they are.”

The Open Letters

Love is the centering of the Other.

From Shahid Hussain Nowshad💌…

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a month ago · 87 likes · 3 comments · The open Letters

Did You See That Too? —

“We do not stand outside our practices, the speaking and writing and looking, using them as tools. We are inside them, organized by them, and when we stop to reflect we loop back through them and change them in turn. It runs both ways. The language I am given shapes what I can think; and in straining after something it holds no ready phrase for, I leave the language a little changed for whoever comes next. We are reorganized by the world, and we reorganize it back.”

Join the Conversation

Danielle Crittenden’s newest book, Dispatches from Grief, begins from a powerful loss: the death of a child. What follows is the work of grieving, writing, and living in the wake of heartbreak and absence. Join us for a discussion of a terrain that touches on the deepest wells of human experience. Suffering and lamentation shape a deeply personal journey, but what endures is a confirmation of those universal possibilities for connection and love.

[Guest:] Danielle Crittenden is a journalist, author, and former host of The Femsplainers Podcast. Her work has appeared in The Wall Street Journal, The New York Times, The Washington Post, and The Atlantic. She is the author of four previous books, including What Our Mothers Didn’t Tell Us: Why Happiness Eludes the Modern Woman.

[Host:] Erica Robles Anderson is a cultural historian who studies forms of collective life. She is currently completing a trilogy of books about traditional narratives as under-recognized drivers of change. Robles Anderson is a professor of media, culture, and communication at New York University.

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Attend this Series

Event announcement from :

The Long Now Foundation and Interintellect invite you to an interactive workshop series with Bayo Akomolafe, a postactivist philosopher, poet, and storyteller, exploring the questions, “What if time misbehaves?” and “What stirs when the clock’s grip loosens?”

Algorithms, news feeds, and notifications fragment our days with urgency. It feels like we’re always running out of time. In 01999, Long Now cofounder Stewart Brand wrote, “Civilization is revving itself into a pathologically short attention span.” Today that feels truer than ever; the accelerating tempo is exhausting. But if you’ve ever felt like “more time” wouldn’t actually fix what feels broken, this series is for you. The Untimely is an invitation to step sideways.

Across three sessions on Zoom, including breakout room discussion, participants go deeper into new temporal practices and perspectives. Experience alternative tempos that might help reorient our thinking, behavior, and decision-making for the long term.

May 21, 9 AM –11 AM PT

• Part 1: A Fascinating Account of the Meridian Conference of 1884

• We begin with the colonial history of how the world’s time zones were invented – a story involving railroad executives, imperial cartography, and the burial of 300 local times.

May 27, 9 AM –11 AM PT

• Part 2: The Clock’s Hidden Life

• Participants map the specific clocks that govern their lives and ask, “what rhythms were displaced when the schedule moved in?”

June 10, 9 AM –11 AM PT

• Part 3: Making Sanctuary for Temporal Fugitives

• We conclude with a collective experiment in temporal sanctuary. Participants practice holding temporal knots without forcing their resolution, experiencing the untimely rather than flattening it back into the schedule.

Hosted in partnership with The Long Now Foundation, where Bayo is a member of The Council at Long Now. Facilitation led by Jiordi Rosales.

Attend this Series

A couple of weeks ago, I hosted our most recent “Book Therapy” salon on Interintellect. The purpose of these online gatherings is for everyone to share their life stories and reading histories and, after they have, each attendee receives personalized book recommendations from the group.

Oh, you’re a great hiker who is meditating on the meaning of friendship? Go read The Eight Mountains. Are you a nature-lover eager to escape the group-think of the city? Then The Peregrine is just for you…

A question that often comes up during “Book Therapy”: How to get started with reading?

Literary discourse is filled with apparently über-well-read people who use obscure Greek compound words and name-drop minor French poets like they were born doing so. On a map as complex as reading culture, where should one drop one’s pin? Where should one enter, and how can one navigate? Especially when, as we grow up and mature, the goal of reading becomes less easy to define. It is no longer for graded essays or school tests but for pure pleasure, personal growth, and a settled sense of taste.

Despite brooding accounts in outlets on both ends of the political spectrum, to my delight people’s desire to have an active internal life has far from diminished. From seminars to workshops, from idea-based friend-making to reading-club singles mingles, people around America and the world demonstrate every day that neither the book nor conversation is “dead”. I will boldly presume that you are seeking to build such an abundant internal life just because you are here right now, reading me.

Popular authors like Zena Hitz or George Saunders continue to interest us because we cherish our internal life. Contemplation, the ability to withdraw into one’s own thoughts, and discussion, the willingness to compare and share our thoughts with other people, are our birthrights. Together, these two comprise what is called an intellectual life – as crucial to one’s sense of wholeness and place in the world as is their professional, family, or physical life. While none of us is born knowing big words, we are all born capable of big ideas.

And so, whatever you may have read in panicked news articles or Substack posts — already a contradiction since you were reading them — we do not live in a “post-literate society”. The crisis of magazine and book publishing, and now the advent of powerful LLMs, might be reshaping how people consume information, but the fact is that online and offline, the 2026 cohort of humanity continues to read constantly. In texts and emails, Instagram comments on baby photos and in-depth articles on foreign policy, in steamy romance novels and Russian Realism, in self-help books, business tips, movie subtitles — we are surrounded by letters. We are, more than ever, men and women of letters.

I run a company where people come to find ideas. They come to read and to discuss. Intuitively, everybody understands that long texts, which require focus and proper time spent with them, and conversation, where you can be challenged and encouraged by others, deepen and sharpen one’s thinking. We gather not just because we want to share ideas about what we have read but because we want to find out what to read in the first place. As Millennial culture becomes the Establishment, we want to understand our unique, personalized cultural preferences — based on individual values, past experiences, personality types — and be able to share these predispositions with social groups for support and contrast.

The fact that this need is there doesn’t mean building a personal culture is easy. Under the thin veneer of consumer customization, we spend most of our lives under pressures of sameness. From high school curricula to whatever the algorithms are pushing today, there is a gravitational pull to capitulate, to give up independent thinking, and just do what other people seem to be doing.

These dangers of conformity can be avoided by building a strong personal base, a systemic, topographical understanding of culture, and becoming comfortable within it. The broader one’s understanding, the easier it becomes to find one’s own way around it without worry or shame — just following your curiosity, getting to know what attracts you, and seeing slowly, across the years, a personal canon’s formation, one that is yours alone.

***

People often feel like they have not read enough of the right books but that other people have. This illusion stops many curious and thoughtful people from diving truly in and enjoying what the Great Human Library that we all have access to can provide.

Some things to bear in mind:

• Unless they had an extraordinary upbringing (parents, special schooling) and later specialized academically, most people no longer enter adulthood “having read everything”. We glorify a past where this seems to have been more common, but even that is dubious.

• If it feels like “other people” have “read everything”, remember that people tend to talk about the books they have read and not the ones they have not. So, as you look around yourself, you will surely find a collective of people who collectively have read a lot of things, but there are very few actual individuals you couldn’t catch up with if you tried.

• Despite lazy educational handwaving, being a Reader is not a static thing that at some point some machine pops out and then it is all there ready. Reading is dynamic: it’s a lifelong odyssey, and one on which you should always have something new to look forward to. There are plenty of Great Books I haven’t read yet (or movies I haven’t seen, etc.) and that is great news for me! It means sometime in the future I will have a great experience getting to know them. Extend your timeline, and suddenly this whole endeavor feels far less impossible.

Based on a lifetime of reading and a decade of running the literary salon platform Interintellect — where I have had the chance to converse with tens of thousands of curious seekers — I want to share with you my personal recommendations for how to build a personal culture for yourself.

The truth is the more unique and personalized the books you read, the more original a thinker you will become1. This, in short, is how you become you. I am a strong post-Hegelian believer in the personal duty of coming into our full being throughout our lives. Other than finding a fitting occupation and worthy life companions, cultivating your own mind is the prerequisite for building an existence for yourself that is truly yours.

***

Many years ago, long before his pivot to political contrarianism, the biologist Richard Dawkins asked popular scientists to stop trying to make science look “fun”. He was annoyed at fame-seeking physicists who appeared on TV shows and performed harmless little explosions as a way to make kids excited about seeking a laboratory career. While enjoyment is an important ingredient of a life devoted to inquiry, Dawkins warned against making a hard life of intellectual challenge seem not so hard. He argued for more honesty: there is a difference between fun (and easy) and rewarding (and sometimes fun).

I feel similarly when it comes to readership — living the life of a Reader. The collective output of the human mind is staggeringly huge. In 2010, Google tried to count every single book ever written until that point, and its partial estimate was around 130 million titles. So yes, you should feel somewhat intimidated by all this, the same way as a young aspiring scientist should understand the heir to which long, dense tradition they are about to become, and what a cognitive adventure they are embarking on.

In many ways, how scary it is to enter the enormity that is human culture is the point. As when visiting a great city, the goal is not to reduce. Instead, we step in with humility, understanding just how tiny we are when confronted with the talents of our species. We know, deep down, that however hard we read and study all through our lives, we will scratch but the surface. Knowing that there is something so gigantic and diverse out there that nevertheless beckons and accepts us all is an enduring consolation, a kind of reassurance of an afterlife, a Burkean reckoning. It is in human culture that we belong, and within it we can truly shape our own destinies.

Just as when visiting a great city, there is a limit to how much any guide can help you. I live in New York City, and whenever I see a long TikTok line in the rain vying to try out some dry $30 croissant in a bakery — fans go there not because it is good but because all the other fans go there — I’m tempted to inform them that there are ten thousand excellent bakeries here and that it is much more important to find out what pastry you personally like than to follow some crowd. This analogy breaks down when we talk about cultural classics: there is a real benefit to having read works that everybody has read, can discuss, and build on. But when it comes to book hypes, tech leaders’ arbitrary reading lists, showy brain-flexing on X, and empty idea convergence, there looms the risk of becoming like the TikTokers in the rain who have forgotten what personal taste is and how to have it.

Your task is to build your own mind. To find out who you personally are, what you like, what you are good at, and to build a life and intellectual praxis for that person. Professional competition may call for copycats, but we know that competition is for losers. Cultivation, however, is for winners. You can only win in life at your own game. Being culturally rich is as close to winning as you can get.

The beauty of an intellectual life is that it knows no class or geographical boundary. We are all born thinking, and as we advance in life we want to think more, better, and more correctly. Sitting cross-legged on my carpet with my books, dictionaries, and encyclopedias in my childhood Budapest, books were a refuge, knowledge was freedom. Only humans can learn about anything, anywhere, wherever they happen to be — only humans can take off in their mind, and reappear somewhere, anywhere else. As is the case with other important things in life, humans need guidance to develop this magic power even if we are all born with the possibility. In the 21st century, there are several systems of instruction in place that you can tap into. But there exist also gaps that can make nurturing one’s intellectual life difficult.

High schools construct reading curricula anticipating the typical development of the adolescent. You will be assigned The Catcher in the Rye when you are assumed to be occupied with matters of individuation, revolt, and feeling special. In America, you will be required to read To Kill a Mockingbird when you are thought to be developing muscles of personal courage in the face of societal prejudice. People will expect you to read Pride and Prejudice when you are most likely in the middle of a vortex of hormones, falling for classmates who may or may not be completely indifferent. In the ideal of public education, we must graduate school having some kind of shared intellectual and moral grounding – Kultur – as together we become rights-endowed citizens of a shared place.

But what to do when public education becomes fraught with conflict over what is appropriate for teenagers to read, resulting in a less strong reading list and less well-read adults? Or when teen years become so grinding that students single-focus on STEM studies too early, and only get around to reading for pleasure later, already juggling jobs? Without saying that all adolescents are the same, which is clearly untrue, we can still see how it is much harder to create a unified syllabus for fully developed, divergent grown-ups, with chosen careers, set habits, entrenched lifestyles, and in general an arsenal of personal tastes and preferences. And yet for many, many people, culture-building really only starts in adulthood.

Finding whom to turn to for advice can be tough. Going for the low-hanging fruit, many American content creators push cookie-cutter book curricula on their trusting audiences. This is a big country, and whatever works must scale. To reach the masses, to become popular culture, things have to be a little bit bland, aiming at the lowest common denominator. If you ever see run-of-the-mill airport nonfiction become massive bestsellers and enter the “canon” – the stuff that is on every middle-class apartment’s bookshelf – think about what a large variety of readers it had to find a common spot on to please.

But even in the highest echelons of idiosyncratic intelligentsia, convergence remains a threat. I tend to have a disproportionately dismayed reaction whenever some random person with sufficient social media followers drops some random book — say Middlemarch of all things — and five seconds later every Twitter mutual and their entourage will be selfie-taking with Middlemarch, as if people didn’t have a mind of their own. I do know that people have a mind of their own, and I like to urge them to use it. The conforming forces are there to resist, not to surrender to. Of the big mass, your job is to carve out a life of your own.

I wrote one of my master’s theses on what is called “canonicity” in culture. I was very curious – having worked at newspapers, on movie screenplays, and in the music business throughout college – what cultural, institutional, social, and economic processes contribute to a work of art — especially low-brow art — becoming part of the “obvious”, the canon, the rote of evergreens. Why do we play the same four songs every Christmas? Why do some books get added to high school curricula but not others? Why do some movies flop but later become cult classics?

What I want to do here is start from the other end. To ask what you, the individual, can do to build your own personal culture. One that fits you as a person, your values, your curiosities, your life choices. One that makes your a Sovereign Reader.

One of the first proponents of public education were the greats of the German Enlightenment. Drawing on their obsession with classical Greek and Roman sources, Goethe and his peers developed the idea of the Bildung (“formation”), by which they meant the refinement of a youth into a moral and tasteful adult.

Today, few educational institutions or mentorship networks will provide Bildung in the real sense. Exclusivity or inaccessibility will often block sustained engagement even in the era of the open internet, and mass reach and constant competition also pose difficulties. People sometimes tell you to “learn from the Dead” – to turn to books and extract their wisdom – but when your problem is that you need help knowing what to read in the first place, this is not always helpful.

And so what remains, largely, is self-Bildung, self-formation. An intellectual self-assembly. If this sounds like a lonely endeavor, be relieved by the fact that somehow the more unique a culture you end up building for yourself the more like-minded friends you will find. (I started Interintellect with the essay We’re a Niche We Just Didn’t Know for a reason. And I am still friends with many of the people who’d read it.)

Self-building is indeed much like traveling alone, looking to make friends. Literary culture is an intricate web of context, where for thousands of years of human literacy, every relationship between every two works has to some degree been referential. Everything is connected. Entering this new city can feel daunting. But would you stress so much when entering Paris for the first time? You’d probably just step out of your hotel, look to your left and … go. See what happens. You would trust yourself to know where to turn next once you’ve got to the other side of the street.

Starting your journey through written culture should be similarly thrilling, a sensitive balance between novelty and the familiar — what feels new and what feels safe —, a blend of big leaps outside your comfort zone and small hops from one similar work to another.

What follows are my ten friendly tips – less “new information” and more reminders of things you already kind of know. My aim is to help you start or continue making your way fearless and confident through the profusion that is the human intellectual output. It really was created just for you.

1. You are your taste.

My God, to read without joy is stupid. – John Williams

Even in our era of laissez-faire social preferences and a growing flexibility around what age a person should do what, for most people there still is little or no space in life to truly explore what “type” of a person they are beyond the superficial consumer choices.

I always considered myself an individualist, even a “weirdo” if you like, but when I started Interintellect at age 30, it still struck me how little I knew myself. It was then that I first truly came to experience what my own natural rhythm, my own natural priorities were — I felt that if I had once known this stuff in childhood, then by age 30 I had surely forgotten.

Since that moment of liberation, seeing how much stronger, faster, and more productive I would become just by finally owning up to how I actually like to work, think, read, and run my life, I have been advising people to try to find out who they really are before choosing a job, a place to live, or a life partner. You think this would go without saying but very few people really do it at the right time.

There may exist a lot of plasticity when it comes to our bodies and our minds — but there are things that one can never change about oneself. Life indeed demands sacrifices, compromises, tradeoffs — but this is a qualitative and not a quantitative matter. About some things you just cannot make a compromise and continue living as yourself. Building your own life, and your own mind, doesn’t come with shortcuts or half-solutions. It is everybody’s duty to do it.

This is something I learned living in six countries, re-starting several times, and surviving some life-shattering events: being at peace with my person — her values and her taste — is the best foundation and the most stable point of balance upon which I can build a good life. Slowly, I understood why the men and women of the German Enlightenment held that taste and morality were one. There are plenty of works out there about how to build one’s personal morality, but not enough about how to build one’s personal culture.

I like to say that if you want to know what you want, watch what you do. Figuring out how to build your mind thus starts with first finding out who you are building it for. This cannot be just an external category – you can’t self-build just to be “founder”, “Manhattanite”, “tpot member”, or “someone whose friends have read The Power Broker”. Who is the real person underneath, or beyond, all that? Who is the one who reads?

Let’s start with some simple questions:

Your general lifestyle and where reading fits into it.

• When do you have time to read: evenings, weekends, during commuting, only holidays?

• Are your friends readers too that you can exchange books or even form a reading club with?

Whether reading will be a form of protest in your life or you can embed yourself into an existing environment of readers will affect the number and difficulty level of books you will likely be able to complete per year.

Whatever your situation, think about these facts in dynamic and not fixed terms: we live in the golden age of online communities and book clubs. If a little outside nudge or forcing function is all you need, you can find these quite easily.

Your interest in types of people will define your interest in types of books.

• What kinds of people do you find adorable vs annoying?

• What gossip makes you intrigued? What gossip makes you yawn?

• How much patience do you have for the minutiae of other people’s lives? Or is it just the big ideas or social systems that interest you?

I’ve always found this crucial: reading is an interpersonal event (at least when it comes to reading human-written texts). After all, you enter a dialogue with at least one other person, the author. Observing yourself become captivated or fatigued by one form of human storytelling or another is a great proxy pointer for which books — what kinds of plots and characters — will interest you.

Are you a tabloid browser, fascinated by celebrities and crime? Are you a history buff who regularly stays up late lost in Wikipedia researching some rabbit hole of Henry II’s favorite mincemeats? Do many of your thoughts revolve around technological development, and what the future will look like? (Are you anxious about it, or exhilarated?) Do family events take up a lot of your mental real estate as you labor to avoid conflicts or misunderstandings between your loved ones…?

Such general types of human interest will drive you to Bret Easton Ellis or Hilary Mantel, to Neal Stephenson or Kiran Desai. You will chuckle at the suburban witticisms of Jonathan Franzen, or be ethically shaken by a Christian essay by CS Lewis. You will tear up reading about the melancholic hereafters of Kazuo Ishiguro. Or be enraged by past social injustices exposed by Toni Morrison.

While we have some control over who becomes friends with us, when it comes to picking books we have total control. It is a great liberty in life to exert this control and to let yourself truly follow your human interests.

Beyond simple interests, it is also worth asking yourself what kinds of humans you love.

• When you think self-honestly about your friends and the people you become attached to, what values, worldviews, and communication styles do you find appealing? And which ones repel you or leave you indifferent?

We have discussed how book-reading is an act of communication, some would even say communion. In the case of human-written texts, the Reader must always encounter the Other: the writer. Many times in my life, I have found that a book failed to please me simply because I found its author … insufferable. I believe this is exactly how I would have felt if said author had sat next to me at a dinner party!

Some authors other people find charming, and I cannot stand them. Some authors even my favorite critics will try to cancel, and I find them irresistible. Yes, it is personal. And this is why we always talk about individual tastes and preferences when it comes to reading. It is also, always, interpersonal.

What kind of author you find sympathetic will determine what books you will find enjoyable. And enjoying a book is the best way to predict whether you will read another book soon. Sympathies make readers fall for American alpha males like Hemingway, never too far from the fishing rod and the rifle. What types of people you like might draw you to moody moralists like Dostoyevsky, Philip Roth, or Flannery O’Connor. Or to grandiose introverts like Murakami, Virginia Woolf, or Proust. Maybe you like high drama, and will seek out Thomas Hardy, Elena Ferrante, Isabel Allende. Maybe you’re craving lawless libertines, and will revel in the revels of Henry Miller, Milan Kundera, or Anne Desclos. You might look for storytellers with seemingly no self in their stories at all, and have a blast with John Williams, Steinbeck, Achebe, AS Byatt… Maybe you dismiss fiction altogether, and will find the poetry and courage that forms human transcendence in Carl Sagan, Simone Weil, or Richard Hamming.

It is not discussed enough that some authors you will not like, and that that is OK. Or that even when you do like an author, you might not like some of the things they do. As an example: The Neapolitan Quartet were some of my most transformative reading experiences in my adult life. I loved Ferrante’s high-strung obsession turned toward her childhood friend as the organizing principle of these novels. But the same obsession irritates me in all her other books, because in all the other books the narrator is obsessed with herself. I think it is important to permit oneself to not like, or even to stop reading a book, the same way as one is not obligated to remain in contact with people one has no sympathy for.

To balance novelty and familiarity, it is preferable to venture outside your taste and habits from time to time. But if the chance you have given a work is not paying off, I think you’re better off reading three books that you do like in the time you would otherwise be struggling through one you hate.

Knowing who you are as a Reader based on your interpersonal and narrative preferences will be greatly helpful in starting to build your personal curriculum. Self-honesty and the right kind of permissiveness are the foundations for all ambitious undertakings: you cannot achieve great things – and a personal syllabus is a truly great thing – without basing it on your real life and needs.

2. Go to the library.

The cultivated person’s first duty is to be always prepared to rewrite the encyclopedia. – Umberto Eco

Every act of opening a book – physically, or on Kindle or a laptop – is preceded by two events. First, you find out the book exists. Second, you decide to give it a go.

Today, there are more and more ways of finding out about the existence of a book. The modern Reader walks or drives past the shop-windows of grand bookstores every day. Opening social media, she finds the opinions of her friends, or links to the reviews in major newspapers. She reads Goodreads critics, and is bombarded by Amazon recommendations. An entire field of research could be developed for how to parse these. But I have a simpler piece of advice for you.

Go to the library. Yes, the library. Whatever is nearest to your house. They’re usually public and free. In fact you most likely pay for these public libraries through your taxes already. So go inside, make use of them!

Let me tell you what the two greatest things about public libraries – beyond, of course, the facts that they are public and libraries — are:

• First, they have recommendation shelves. Usually multiple recommendation shelves, in fact, and on every floor and in every section. Unlike the promotion tables set up in bookstore chains — which are almost always driven by retail agreements and marketing considerations — becoming a recommended book in a library is full-blown meritocracy. Libraries get nothing out of which books they highlight other than the fact that if you find something you like, you will come back again. Recommendations also tend to respond to current events. When Krasznahorkai wins the literary Nobel prize, libraries will feature Krasznahorkai books, making it easier for you to become well-informed. When a war breaks out, books from or about that region will be featured. Other than the occasional overly political picks, which might not be for everyone, you can almost blindly trust a library’s recommendation shelves.

• Developing a habit of frequenting a local library is also rewarding because of the people who work there. People who work at libraries love books and know a lot about them. They are people to ask for pointers — they are people who will know about popular or obscure works that might interest you. They will take pleasure in your reading (and returning the books on time), and will encourage you to read more. In all fairness, staff at big bookstores might have the same passion for the written word. But they might be harder to get a hold of in a busy establishment. A great person to become friendly with is someone who works at a smaller independent bookstore or a used books seller. Their recommendation tables will also be more reliable. Some of the best recommendation shelves I have seen were at Green Apple Books at San Francisco Airport and at Blossom Book House in Bangalore.

Find the next five books you’ll read by picking out some volumes in slower-traffic hours and chatting up the staff at such establishments. There is no need to be shy: all books were written for you, they are waiting for you. Without being read, they don’t exist. The only reason you’ve heard of them is because someone else had read them.

As the human community, we metabolize each other’s writing, pass it along and around, and create an intellectual life for each other. Some of us while working at libraries, professionally. And some just by telling an intimate friend about our newly abounding internal life in a text or over a glass of wine.

3. The old you knew.

For always roaming with a hungry heart

Much have I seen and known… Myself not least – Tennyson

At pretty regular intervals, I notice an Interintellect salon attendee, host, or community member grow eager to start reading again — maybe something their STEM studies, demanding jobs, or intensive parenting didn’t previously leave much time for.

What surprises me about this plan is how people sometimes approach it entirely from zero, as if they had never read or re-read anything. But when you picture this as any other, less high-brow activity, you know they would surely start by digging out the old foundations, and only then start building on them.

The first thing they ask you in a complicated fusion cooking class is whether you have ever cracked an egg, because you need to start with what you know. And the answer is, usually, yes. We all have cracked an egg.

Similarly, the best way to build a personal culture “from zero” is to start with what you already know. At “Book Therapy”, we ask participants to list out their favorite readings — from childhood to the present. (This exercise would work for building other “personal canons” like movies or fine art as well!) Staying close to the novelty/familiarity balance but steering clear of algorithm-induced sameness, one can build out the stepping stones across vast lakes of literacy starting with previously completed steps.

“Six degrees of separation” — the shockingly short distance between any two people in the world — was coined by a writer and literary theorist well-known to Hungarian readers like myself: Karinthy. Literature itself is thus webbed too. Start with Enemies, A Love Story and you will soon find yourself in Fleishman Is in Trouble’s New York many decades later. Open The Ground Beneath Her Feet and you might just come around in a Swedenborg, surrounded by Baroque angels. Literary culture is full of snakes and ladders, and starting out from your old favorites is as good an idea as any. At least you’ll have something at hand that you already know you like.

What was your favorite reading as a child? Your favorite English homework in high school? When a college date asked who your favorite author was, what did you bashfully reply? All these trivia might feel trivial, but they are not. We are what we eat, intellectually too. Trust your own instinctive judgement to turn it into explicit taste that you can then refine across a lifetime.

When looking at the sprawling network that is human culture, any node is a good node to start for making your connections.

4. Ask the LLMs.

Clarity of thought is a shining point in a vast expanse of unrelieved darkness. – Stanisław Lem

Another upside of creating a list of your youthful favorites is that in the era of AI you can play all sorts of games with it.

People who think LLMs are killing reading have no idea how many brilliant authors, absorbing books, and life-changing book clubs LLMs recommend to people all day every day.

And so, once you have a list of your favorites, a great thing to do is ask your LLM what books to read next. This is especially beneficial if you aren’t yet on friendly terms with your librarians or local used books seller.

The caveat is that LLMs can be quite normie when it comes to high literature or groundbreaking nonfiction. This makes sense because — being engines of scale — they have been built to find a kind of common, most likely denominator across giant swaths of data. The more specific the information you give them, the more accurate their output will be.

Some ideas for getting started:

• Paste the list of your 10 favorite readings as a query. Prompt the LLM to give you “another 10 recommendations”.

I tried this with Claude, and here is its response:

This list is spot on! Most of these I have already read, but the ones that I have not, I will immediately order.

• Ask an LLM to create a personality test for you in order to determine what books to recommend to you. Take the test and enjoy the recommendations.

• Ask the LLM to create a list of book recommendations for you based on keywords of things that interest you, things you find beautiful, things you want to know more about. Share a mood board of words, images, and files, and enjoy the recommendations.

• Create a “negative wishlist”: List the books and styles you dislike. Ask the LLM to recommend anything but.

Even for people like me whose day job is filled with unique thinkers and readers, I find that humans inevitably end up forming information bubbles. And so LLMs have always managed to recommend works to me that I had not read or even heard of. If I ask them more pointedly, the suggested works will be really far outside the normal range of recommendations by my human friends and contacts.

5. Ask the humans.

“And if anyone knows anything about anything,” said Bear to himself,
“it’s Owl who knows something about something,” he said, “or my name’s not Winnie-the-Pooh… — AA Milne

I have always considered it one of the great responsibilities of life to ensure that one is well-situated for one’s missions, situatedness being a key requirement of any kind of success. Where you are, who you are surrounded by, and how you spend your time aren’t axes external to aspiration. They are the context in which you, the real you, will either happen or not.

Situatedness is very important however personal the culture you are building might be. “Personal” here doesn’t mean lonely, the same way as how every genetically unique human is indeed quite social. As you actualize your cultural self, you improve your social self as well. There is an interesting, circular paradox here: to start out well you need to be situated well. And having started out well alone you will become better situated.

In previous sections, we looked at why self-knowledge and interpersonal preferences matter when building a personal canon. We have made steps to connect you with people with book-related expertise: your old favorites, your local used books seller. Even your LLMs.

In this section, we will make reading a fully social undertaking. We are going to ask your friends and loved ones to introduce books to you.

Reading is one of the beautiful objectives that humans can have. Even the occasional outright book-ignorer will likely be a fervent article-saver, comment-writer, and text screenshotter, and may not even know what they are participating in is, in fact, the culture of literacy.

Few artifacts of literacy are as socially dynamic as books are. Asking your friends for their favorite books opens whole new vistas of connection. Even I realize I don’t know the favorite teenage readings of many of my friends, and I should ask! Unlike some other personal questions, few people will not welcome open-hearted queries about books. And everybody loves recommending their favorites to people: they can show their knowledge, and you can gain new knowledge. Everybody wins.

At the other end of this process, you — as you start recommending your readings to others — will acquire more new, great friends, and thus expand your life’s possibilities and reach. Reading, while seemingly an escape from immediate, tangible reality, is indeed an immediately social activity. Chat up your friends about their favorite books today, and you shall find out.

If you are unsure how to get started:

Poll friends.

Whether you frame it as a casual question over dinner on a Friday night, or you send an actual questionnaire via email to your closest friends, it is never not gratifying to find out what your favorite people like to read.

Even old friends harbor secrets when it comes to their hearts’ libraries…

And you can combine this exercise with the LLM query: take your two favorite friends’ lists of their 10 favorite books, and ask an LLM to recommend 10 books to you based on those.

Host book exchange parties.

A wonderful framing for house parties in any city.

I recently attended a Manhattan get-together where everybody had to bring a book they had just read and didn’t need anymore. It was a great way of making new friends, of starting and steering conversations, coming across new things to read, and getting rid of a volume I no longer wanted around.

Organize books-only Secret Santas.

Most workplaces and friend groups these days organize “Secret Santa” type games around December: every colleague, classmate, or community member picks a random name from a hat — or shuffle-generating website — and they will buy a Holiday gift for them. In some cases, the names may be revealed after the gift exchange. In some cases, they never are.

It’s an excellent idea to make Secret Santas books-only. As a gift, a book is simultaneously random (novelty) and based on people knowing each other well (familiarity). And it makes it easier to pick a gift and stay within price range!

This “specialization” is something that sort of naturally happens in Interintellect every year the community members organize a Secret Santa. I’ve been gifted some very good books this way.

Attend a “Book Therapy” salon.

This is an invention I am very proud of and, really, anybody can organize one.

At Book Therapy salons we sit around — people from all over the world and all walks of life — and share stories about our lives as humans and as readers.

After each person has shared, the other attendees will build a list of 10 book recommendations just for them: a personal syllabus. I am currently reading Maugham’s Cakes and Ale, one of the many books I bought after the most recent Book Therapy event.

Our next such salon will be in May: join here.

Find local book clubs.

Book clubs are currently undergoing a Renaissance, which is amazing news!

Libraries, bookstores, magazines, and communities all over America and beyond are gathering online and offline to discover and discuss books, and to make new friends. Interintellect has some fantastic reading series in various formats. For a reader, this is truly a Golden Age. Dive in and enjoy…

If you want to find your best fit, LLMs are often a great place to look. Many people today find Interintellect via ChatGPT, and I’m sure we’re not the only one.

Read the right critics.

Maybe I am old-fashioned, but so are books, and so it is totally permissible to browse and even obey book reviews in traditional media publications.

I personally like the usual suspects: Times Literary Supplement, New York Review of Books, London Review of Books. But most daily newspapers also print excellent literary and nonfiction criticism – getting reviewed in The New York Times, for instance, is coveted by all authors for a reason.

You might think these outlets are not engaged in two-way communication, but that is no longer true. Most journalists can be found on X, Bluesky, or Substack, where you can participate in conversations with them and their other readers, or at least leave a comment.

A more progressive approach is of course to bypass traditional media altogether, and turn to blogs and newsletters. Literary Hub has shared a helpful list for where to start – their favorite literary Substacks.

In my world, the people looking for original, different texts to read will be keeping an eye on Joel J Miller’s recommendations, finding out what Tyler Cowen has been reading, and devouring Celine Nguyen’s reflections on books. If you’re looking for more “mass appeal”: Maria Popova has turned book recommendations into an art form; the Five Books project has turned it into a business.

But let’s go even deeper into how to read what great readers read…

6. Your favorites’ favorites.

Curiosity is insubordination in its purest form. – Nabokov

Few things do readers dread more than the dreaded classics of literature, but one of them certainly is the dreaded classic theory of literature.

Throughout history, some men and women — for some unfathomable, masochistic reason — have dedicated their entire careers to scrutinizing, cataloguing, and critiquing written culture, and, in their misery, they have also, quite often, produced a great body of work doing so; literal books about books.

Scandal!

What should one do with these fanatics, these monomaniacs, these secular priests of readership? The only thing that can be done, I believe, is to commune with them too, and to yield to their all-consuming lust for the art of letters, despite our understandable bourgeois disapproval. (Otherwise, they might never leave us alone.)

While in my native Hungarian Kultur, the obvious go-to candidate for such a concession would be the great Holocaust martyr Antal Szerb, in my chosen English-speaking world the no-brainer all-brainer is always the cancelled/uncancelled Harold Bloom. The great knower of all there is to know about literature (as far as he knew), Bloom was also a great ads man for why it is fun to read books in the first place. As a matter of fact, one great argument for reading the dreaded theoreticians is that most of them adored reading, and their enthusiasm is still contagious.

Of the greats, Bloom is also eminently readable. His works are primers, they will make you feel smarter before you would actually get smarter. His heavy tomes are pick up/put down; if this calms the nerves keep him on the coffee table and consume in sips. Bloom was himself heavily referential: reading his criticism will introduce you to further criticism. I suggest you start hardcore, right in the middle, with The Western Canon. His chef-d’œuvre is a large, enjoyable survey, the master at the height of his mastery.

Other great theoreticians to say hi to are George Steiner, Helen Vendler, the currently active James Wood (who I think didn’t understand The Neapolitan Quartet, alas), and any sequence of Penguin and Oxford anthologies that you find appealing and affordable.

Let me also add some of my more personal recommendations. This will be more subjective, but these are works of theory I have found especially exciting and illuminating while out on my own quests…

• Camille Paglia: Sexual Personae

One doesn’t have to be a GenX undergrad smoking cigarettes in a goth crop-top on some 1990 campus to be wowed by this masterpiece — but it helps. Personae is as good as they say and as good as it gets. Like all great nonfiction, it will propulse you into a backpool of background reading, stuff you have not only never heard of but don’t even know you’ve never heard of.

The book is a dense meal full of fat and dairy, nudes and protrusions, smooth marble and convulsions; parchment, marrow, rot. And you will enjoy every sentence of it if you enjoy the perverse complications of being human and having a history. Those things certainly enjoy having you.

• A Hero’s Helpers

Five more books must be mentioned in this section; books that brought a great deal of pleasure and learning into my life. If building one’s Bildung — self-assembling one’s readership — is indeed a “hero’s journey”, then consider these authors-about-authors your heroic Helpers.

• Margaret Atwood: Negotiating with the Dead: A series of lectures compiled into a book, here the great Canadian storyteller discusses literature and writing, literary history and authors. A moving, matter-of-fact peek behind the curtains – as Dr. Gena Gorlin would say, “building the builders” –, this is some of Atwood’s best writing, in some sense superior to her fiction.

• Jerome Rothenberg: Technicians of the Sacred: One of the great works of comparative literature that were clearly written on LSD. I found out about it when I froze the frame during a Nick Cave documentary and researched every single book that was on his desk. Technicians is the literary equivalent of that meme where the guy has found a conspiracy theory on the noticeboard and connected everything with red thread. From pre-historic chants from the middle of the jungle to Denise Levertov’s existentialist poetry, you will find everything here that is human and lyrical, and everything will really be connected.

• Martin Amis: Visiting Mrs. Nabokov: A great writer profiling other great writers. Updike, Burgess, Graham Greene. And, of course, Véra Nabokov.

• Isaac Asimov: The Tragedy of the Moon: The scientist-author’s collected essays range from Bible studies to organic chemistry and back again, and will leave you with whole new layers of curiosity about the world. It is not even the specifics, it’s the way Asimov thinks! A throwback to the happier eras of intellectualism when one didn’t yet have to divorce the objective-scientific and the subjective-philosophical. And the old way does feel more realistic to me anyway, to use our one brain for both.

• Truman Capote: Music for Chameleons: Another favorite of mine from the “my favorites’ favorites” genre. Broader than Amis’s collection, Capote writes about all sorts of things that inspired him. As with Asimov, Capote teaches us how to be taught — by the world, by our readings, by each other. And he does it in one of the most atmospheric works ever published in English.

The backside-kissing industry that is the modern American book blurb depresses me. I much prefer these selfish, capricious, unreliable accounts. As Sherry Ning would say, it is the reader who is unreliable, not the narrator! And so I delight in watching my esteemed authors become sneaky readers themselves, and give away the farm.

I have also found LLMs useful when investigating what my favorite authors like to read. Finding actual full-length book reviews where one great author writes about another is a rare treat though, but it exists.

7. Historical backdrops.

I shall from time to time write a small Clue — so that you may be the more thoroughly confounded. – AS Byatt

In earlier sections, we established the comfortable benefits of starting one’s self-Bildung from any one node of Kultur, and then developing an entire network of contexts. One might start with a lesser known work of William Shakespeare and soon find herself alarmingly immersed in Spanish mysticism. One may start with a random French Realist novel, and in a few months find that she can no longer even imagine marriage without at least one party drowning in a river.

The snakes and ladders keep on working, and the more you have read, the more you will understand the world of literacy as a system. Once you have built a systemic understanding of it — the same way as becoming proficient in a foreign language starts when you no longer need to know every single word in order to understand it — you will have a functioning cultural capital that is at your useful avail no matter the situation.

But there is another layer to this matrix, one equally ripe for exploration, and that is the historical setting in which this culture of literacy has been unfolding. In this essay, we have called for a building of personal culture based on personal history, the reading histories of one’s social milieu, and even critical history. Now, it is time to look directly at history itself.

It has been of unthinkable advantage in my life that I was taught cultural history — literature, philosophy, music, and the fine arts — in a historicist framework, common in Budapest high schools during my time there. (It was only at university where postmodern, identity and political movement driven analyses of literature reached me. And I think this is the correct developmental order.) We studied Shakespeare in light of the geographical expansions. Victorian literature through a lens of urbanization and the Industrial Revolutions. We knew which Greek play was composed during which war, and which Russian virtuoso had to flee to Paris or London because of the Revolution. While some cultural activists will argue that the chronological method limits the absorption or interpretation of these artworks, I have found it gives me a great ease of movement. You give me a year in history when a specific piece of literature was published, and I will know exactly what made that work happen, what it followed and what it later inspired, what philosophical scandal or cultural clique prompted it, and what other artworks it entered into dialogue or debate with.

It is mind-bogglingly fun to research the cultural context around eras in literature — it’s an infinite treasure trove! All the great authors of the past have numerous good biographies written about them, and, despite the purported decay of leather and paper, as technology advances we only find out more and more about them, which means there frequently appear new, revisionist biographies too. Era histories are a great choice too — read about the Baroque, read about the Age of Reason, read about the Interwar years: it will make all your readings come alive richer and you a Reader who is more context-rich.

8. Adaptation dialectic.

Fiction helps us remember that everything remains to be seen. - George Saunders

While it rarely gets loud press releases, when works of literature enter the public domain, an exciting period of exploration, exploitation, and remixing can begin.

Copyright, of course, is a topic fraught with tensions. What belongs to the artist — and her heirs — and what belongs to us? We might think of, say, the Beatles’ songs as “ours”, having played in the background of the personal histories of generations of individuals, and accompanied important eras or events we have lived through. Yet, they are nowhere even near being allowed to be artistically metabolized by the public.

And the public is, always, hungry. We want to see the works of the canon, public property or not, changed, cut, adapted, and updated, referenced and censored and pastiched, over and over, and over again. The new West Side Story movie is an adaptation of an adaptation of Romeo and Juliet. In the Japanese Drive My Car, deriving its title from the Beatles song, a deaf actress comforts Uncle Vanya. The film adaptation could not obtain the rights to the song.

The director of Batman movies is about to put Odysseus back on the big screen. In the new movie Blue Moon, named after a song, the mouse Stuart Little is born on a barroom napkin…

The strongest claim of any canon is its remixability: the fact that people keep wanting to read, change, and adapt a work decade after decade, century after century. And they want to adapt it because — and this part is true magic — it continues to speak to newer and newer waves of people about a universal human truth.

And so, setting aside snobby “Best Of” curations and schoolbook lists of contents, a very good selection mechanism for what literary texts are great is seeing what gets repeatedly adapted.

I like that there are multiple War and Peace movies, The Age of Innocence movies, Emma movies, and Dangerous Liaisons movies. Seeing just what the BBC decides to keep working on gives you a good rule of thumb. And keep an eye also on the leading theaters, what they put on, what they bring back.

Sure, books need to please the crowds, but movies are mandated to! Studios adapt stories that they know will work because the books work. Which makes it likely some of them will also work for you.

People sometimes ask for my take on watching movie adaptations. I have nothing against it. The best is of course to both read the book and watch the movie. But in the utilitarian sense, movies do drive the sales of the original novel, which is good. I have read many books in my life because of their movie adaptations. You can probably tell from all of the above that, as far as I’m concerned, as long as you end up with the book in your hands, it doesn’t really matter how it got there.

9. The patchwork of our knowledge.

But back then, growing up would have been a crime. – Bolaño

Developing a systemic, map-like approach to Kultur — and within that, to one’s personal culture — is freeing in the temporal sense too: once you have gained a better understanding of it as a space, you can become a little less skittish about time.

I mentioned that I haven’t yet read several of the Great Books. Some I tried and didn’t like; I decided I would return to them later. In school, I was very good at pretending I had read something, when in fact when a book had failed to interest me, I would just read something else under my desk in the meantime. (I remember moments of contrast: me reading, I don’t know, Alberto Moravia, opened on my knees, while my class was discussing some 19th century elegiac nonsense.)

Even well-read adults have such gaping holes in their literary culture, and there is absolutely nothing wrong with this. If I had already read everything, I would be bored. And so I empathize with and enjoy seeing grownups on the subway or in Central Park, holding The Stranger or The Tin Drum or Lolita, and I often ponder how one in fact needs to “grow into” some books, that school might inflict overly serious works on the young before they are truly ready.

Then there are the books one grows out of. If I had to read Little Women right now, I would probably run away screaming in four-register polyphony.

And then there are the books one grows too close to. Once you have experienced certain types of pain – trauma, injury, separation, bereavement – what once was pleasantly neutral catharsis, a generic insight into how the grownups feel, can now cut too close to the bone for you to count as entertainment.

A book does not care when you read it. I have explained how I don’t personally care how a book landed in your hands, and I care similarly little about when. I think it is extremely valuable to jot down the great works you might have skipped in school or college, without obligation, or blame, or timeline — just for yourself. For later.

The wider your mobility within the system of culture becomes, the more leisurely you can stroll around in it, and fill these natural gaps as and when your heart pleases.

10. Guided by intuition.

The notion of some infinitely gentle
Infinitely suffering thing. – TS Eliot

Imagine the land of literature as a Borgesian maze, a silent city with alleyways and white towers, balconies, riverbanks. You, the Reader, are unleashed upon this space. You feel like an intruder, like someone disturbing the Dead.

While you’re dropped into this formation alone — a ball in a pinball machine — you’re sensing the presence of friends but you’re unaware of their exact location. Words reach you as goosebumps, and you want to hear more, to know more... It is already dark but just for good measure they blindfolded you. And so there you stand scared, intrigued, paused deep in your desire to — GO! —

More than just something to visit for their recommendation shelves, libraries are also crucial for giving you a spatial, physical understanding of the insane distances that you are traversing here. Even if the quantity of books out in the open is minuscule compared with what is out of sight in their stacks, libraries and great bookstores do give you a sense of the magnitude. You are very, very small compared with the enormity of the output of human culture, the size of the historical intellect.

In the library, centuries and sections will surround you shelf after shelf, room after room, floor after floor. That Borges, the world’s most famous librarian, was also most famous for writing about labyrinths is no accident. Nor that he was blind.

In the hopeful, desolate darkness, we move around developing new senses, new intuitions. We try old things, connect new things, follow boundaries between things for a while before crossing. On each shelf the books are bound, they are themselves boundaries. To go from one to another is an art, one that requires internal travel: both within our minds and by squeezing underneath their pages.

Snakes, ladders, catalogue numbers — what appears as a widening gyre across which you can hear is in fact a shrinking, structuring world of culture where in the end everything is touching, everything forms bridges, everything is one. It is a city of your own, and every home in it invites you inside.

***

Canonicity is a heavenly library, and while Art has long lost its religious glint, we remain aware we are approaching something otherworldly and sublime whenever we stand before human genius.

The fact that we can hold and consume its contents is its own form of transubstantiation. Works beget works beget works beget works, scroll after scroll after scroll. It all started with the Book, and now we all continue alongside the books.

And so there is a “situatedness” for texts too: they have a tendency to show up when and where they are needed. After repeated relocation, most of my books are now in storage in Lisbon, waiting patiently at my beck and call. And still, even just these piles and towers of volumes that I have here in my Manhattan apartment rouse my intuition. Night after night, I watch my fingers move up and down, and across, and I know that, as always, they will know just where to stop. I always know what to read and when, simply because I have learned to abandon myself to that inkling.

Every book is bibliomancy; if I were an animist I would be tempted to think they have a kind of will of their own, that they have intention — that it is they who find us, not the other way around. Driven by your ambition to read more, in a sense all you have to do is enter where books can come find you.

Until we can verify whether books are indeed autonomous, we must go and seek them out. You are the only equipment you need for this lifelong expedition across the realm of culture that is our shared homeland. It is the birthplace and resting place of every generation, every iteration of human thinking. It is at once an inheritance from the past and fuel for the future that you never have to ask for permission to access.

As you roam around in it year after year, as you happen upon both the new and the familiar — the obvious and the surprising —, you will find that you have never left either this place or yourself.

It is a fun side effect of my work that I rarely get starstruck anymore: beyond the natural stage fright, I have to say I’ve grown accustomed to the greatest minds of our time popping up on the platform I built, Interintellect.

But every once in a while, even I get caught unaware by the sheer delight, excitement, and disbelief I am feeling at the sight of a new salon guest. This is exactly how I’m feeling now, listing a conversation with the one and only Sebastian Junger.

I will be co-hosting this with the great — writer, veteran, special needs dad — online, on April 23.

Join Our Salon

There are only a few living people who have taught me as much about what good writing is, and, crucially, what real humanity is, as Sebastian Junger. His generational military reporting — War, Tribe — sits alongside visceral, personal “peacetime” nonfiction such as the recent In My Time of Dying, an account of his own brush with death.

Come and share in our joy on April 23: bring your questions and comments on war and peace, family and tribe, living and dying — be they urgent and personal or universal and timeless.

Love x

Anna

Starting on May 17, NYU professor of cultural history and civil rights activist and combat veteran are starting an 8-part online monthly reading group to read and discuss the first tome — The Path to Power; around 750 pages — of Robert Caro’s legendary 4-book biography series The Years of Lyndon Johnson, with the 5th book being written now and expected soon.

Attend the Caro / LBJ series

“Join us as we take the journey together, chapter by chapter, through an in-depth portrait of strategy, ambition, and the transformation of public cultures and institutional landscapes. We’ll think about key moves that shaped twentieth-century political possibilities and offer lessons and cautions for the twenty-first.”

Attend the reading series

On March 31, Interintellect is teaming up with the French Embassy in the USA for NIGHT OF IDEAS, at Villa Albertine in New York.

The event is an all-nighter of ideas and conversation (and music and cocktails!), free and open to the public. It will take place in a beautiful mansion overlooking Central Park.

RSVP below:

• Interintellect workshop with NYU cultural historian Dr. : Universal Basic Good Life

• Enlightenment-style Interintellect salon hosted by and me: Being Human Is Being Equal: New York Salon About Dignity and Participation

“Marking the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence, this year’s Night of Ideas explores the roots of our modern democracies, asking what remains of Enlightenment ideals—and what might come next.

Bringing together artists, writers, performers, philosophers, and community advocates from both sides of the Atlantic, the event will examine reason and the rule of law, freedom of expression, scientific inquiry, and equal access to education and culture, while confronting the pressures these democratic ideals face today. The main stage will feature a series of conversation-starting flash talks by leading American and international thinkers and activists across generations.

Throughout the evening Albertine Books will present readings on the promises and contradictions of American democracy, curated by Harper’s Magazine, now celebrating its 175th anniversary, and on French-American literary exchange, curated by New York Review Books.

A series of intimate salons will animate the night. In the Enlightenment era, salons served as vital social infrastructure—spaces where ideas were tested in real time against other minds. Night of Ideas revives this tradition by hosting participatory conversations focused on the future of equality in partnership with Interintellect. Participants can also register for writing workshops led by members of Oulipo, the literary collective whose ranks have included Georges Perec and Italo Calvino.

The program will include live music and immersive virtual reality experiences, culminating in a festive closing session. It will take place at Villa Albertine’s headquarters in the Payne Whitney Mansion (972 Fifth Avenue), just across the street from the Metropolitan Museum of Art".”

Program: https://nightofideas.org/new-york/schedule/

We hope to see you there!

x Anna

On April 14, I will be hosting an 18+ online salon about Diderot’s scandalous novel The Nun. Starting at 8:30 ET.

Written in the 1760s but published only after Diderot’s death, The Nun is a crowd-shocking Enlightenment novel masquerading as a personal confession.

It tells the story of Suzanne Simonin, a young woman forced into convent life against her will, and through her eyes reveals the cruelty that religious institutions can hide.

Diderot asks the timely, troubling question: what does goodness mean inside a system that takes away your freedom?

Raymond Trousson — Belgian literary historian of the French Enlightenment — argued that in The Nun “Diderot succeeded in making his heroine not the embodiment of an idea, but a touching and pathetic character, even if her innocence and ignorance, necessary to the narrative, do not always convince.”

Attend 'The Nun' salon

Editor’s note: Our salon series on The Odyssey continues on Thursday, March 12. The session will cover Books 9-12 (only 76 pages). A few seats are still available, and you’re warmly invited.

Get tickets here!

It isn’t until Book 5 that we meet our protagonist. We find Odysseus …

sitting by the shore as usual, sobbing in grief and pain; his heart was breaking. In tears he stared across the fruitless sea.1

Calypso, after seven years and at the direction of Zeus (himself influenced by the dogged Athena), will let Odysseus leave if he chooses. His first words immediately reveal the core of his identity. Metis, his skillful cunning. He presumes the gods are up to their usual tricks; the offer of passage back home must be a scheme against him. Calypso calls him a “scalawag” and praises his understanding of “how these things work.”2 But there is no trick, and Odysseus will make his first, and most consequential, decision.

Calypso has offered him immortality if he agrees to stay, but he refuses. Why, in Zeus’ name, would he turn down an eternity on a mythical island of plenty with a beautiful goddess?

The answer lies in nostos, or homecoming, the central theme of the epic. It’s where we get the word “nostalgia.” Odysseus is weeping on the shores of Ogygia, nostalgic for home. Let the suffering it will take to get there be damned. Odysseus craves nostos. But his homecoming can’t be achieved by simply setting foot on Ithaca. Homecoming means reclaiming his identity. He longs for himself.

In immortality Odysseus would lose himself. The verdant island has “sights to please even a god” with an ageless goddess who desperately loves him, yet it is devoid of society and pursuit.3 Without society, there can be no relational identity. He is a husband and a father. A king. None of these have any meaning away from home. Without pursuits, the multitudes he contains have no outlet. There are no tools for a master shipbuilder and no ways to apply his nimble mind. For Odysseus, to choose immortality would be to choose everlasting ennui.

During his first tentative reentry into society among the Phaeacians, his heroic identity reemerges when he is goaded into competition and wins. He is not simply returning home. He is returning to his conception of self. Odysseus’ choice to forsake Calypso and regain himself through his nostos offers a lesson for modern readers. Identity is forged through persistent action.

Action requires courage and suffering. In spurning Calypso, who is reminding Odysseus she surpasses Penelope in beauty, this is what he tells her:

But even so, I want to go back home, and every day I hope that day will come. If some god strikes me on the wine-dark sea, I will endure it. By now I am used to suffering—I have gone through so much, at sea and in the war. Let this come too.4

“Let this come too.” For a man who, we will learn, has gone through years of tribulations between the war and landing on Calypso’s island, it’s a much bolder statement than it seems at first blush. He knows he will endure an incredible amount of suffering along the way. He has no illusions that the journey will be easy, yet he sets out anyway. He has confidence in his own resilience and metis. As Wilson says in the introduction, “it is the kind of cleverness that enables one to prepare for any new challenge and come out as a winner.” One of Odysseus’ most common epithets is “much-enduring.” Odysseus knows he possesses the endurance it takes to get home.

The times I’ve been most disconnected from myself, when I’ve felt most lost, were the times that I was afraid to “let this come too.” I saw minor obstacles on the horizon and convinced myself they were as fearsome as Scylla and Charybdis. I used them as excuses not to leave the harbor. Humans have a tremendous capacity to adapt, endure, and reinvent, but only if we act. And we act in accordance with who we believe we are. Do we see ourselves as capable? Are we willing to “let it come too” knowing we have the courage, metis, and endurance to find our way?

Odysseus reminds us of what we can endure and what we might find if we do. Ourselves.

Join us!

Find all the information you need to sign up and follow along here. Join us on Thursday, March 12 for Books 9-12.

I hope to see you there! If you enjoyed this essay, here are more links related to the salon series.

• Watch past sessions on Youtube

  • Session 1

  • Session 2

  • Session 3

• Essays:

  • Session 1, Don’t die without reading The Odyssey

  • Session 2, Reflections on the Telemachy, Books 1-4 of The Odyssey

• Interintellect Hostcast podcast with Joao (summary on X)

• X thread on fun little details I’m learning, updated as I reread The Odyssey

Get tickets here!

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Those of us who love reading history have long noticed that all decades are not made equal. In some ten-year periods, like Heraclitus’s proverbial river, existence flows on in relative uneventfulness. Fields are sown. Babies are born. Lovers woo. Haters hate. The town erects a new bell-tower… In those sleepy decades, great men don’t desire continents and find the courage to take them. Great beauties don’t cheat and cause epic wars and very long poems. Great questions don’t launch heretics onto the cross or the Inquisition’s pyres. And great inventions don’t rattle the markets, making some people instantly poor, and some others very rich. In lackluster decades, people don’t have to find out, for better or worse, what they are made of – they can if they want to, sure, but it’s not inevitable.

Then there are those decades when everything happens. When everything is revealed. Who we are and what we can do. Our sins, our self-deceptions, our goodness. The fluxes of life, after a long time of bubbling ahead in parallel, suddenly converge, reach their maximum pressure point together, and erupt into what in retrospect seems like the obvious outcome. The future.

Few decades were as interesting – in the cheating, conquering, inventing, future-making sense – as the years 1905-1915 in America. When a few weeks ago I had the good luck of hosting an Interintellect salon of EL Doctorow’s novel Ragtime, a favorite reading of my teens, I got sucked back into that chaotic, creative time – a world in the making – that America entering the 20th century was.

The first time I read Ragtime, sprawled on the carpet of my childhood room, I had never been to America, let alone New York where most of this story takes place. I had enjoyed another one of Doctorow’s books, World’s Fair, the story of the author’s own youthful shenanigans among his relatives and other Jewish immigrants in the ‘30s, and so when I opened Ragtime I expected the same cautious, adult nostalgia. Instead, I was ambushed by something very different; an urgent, personal, intellectually exhilarating call – a nationwide provocation!

As its title promises, Ragtime is a ramshackle sideshow, a vaudeville magician’s trick, an often indecent conjuring of the elemental forces of mixing, inventing, exploding, and building, as it blasts through the first decade of modern America when this great country was busy doing just that. Electrifying America — oh, yes. It is no wonder even the less good film adaptation was such a success, and the well-made musical continues to sell out on Broadway to this day.

Spanning out – progressively bicoastally – in beautiful, concise, and inventive prose – a text as intricate and fractal as the lace of Evelyn Nesbitt’s contour when the Jewish artist draws her – Ragtime now made me pause several times just to stare at delicious sentences, photograph sections, go back and reread entire paragraphs. After finishing the novel, I re-read it once again. You know it is good writing when it makes you as insatiable as the era it describes.

Contemporary critics were baffled by what’s best about Ragtime: the book’s unique, rhythmic blending of fact and fiction. Being a tour of that tumultuous decade, we are invited to follow a variety of different plot lines (although not so much to choose our own adventure). Some real people from the crème de la crème of American society pop up and behave as they did in 1906. Admiral Peary or Mrs. Stuyvesant Fish cross our screens and do just what is expected of them. Then there are Doctorow’s entirely fictional creations, archetypes of the time. So much so, many don’t even have names: notably, we are guided through much of the story by the watchful eyes of a character named “the little boy”. (Who is he? Every little boy in America? Every little boy anywhere?) But most of the figures that populate Ragtime are hybrids of these two extremes: personae rooted in and then uprooted from history. The tension here is not just narrative and linguistic, but also epistemic. Is what I am reading true? And does it matter?

In the 1900s, we are at the Dawn of Celebrity: the cities, the newspapers, the dancehalls, the wireless are abuzz. So who could be more elemental, more archetypal in this era than the famous people and what we imagine they’re up to? The book’s fictitious and non-fictitious, just like ragtime tunes, seek to both revolt and entertain. No one in Tocqueville’s America can be content with their lot. It is unimaginable to imagine a satisfied American. The late-Victorian Father goes on expeditions of boredom; the tropics and the poles beckon him vacantly. The justly indignant, self-made Black pianist demands to drive the same Model T as the crowd favorite Jewish immigrant Houdini. They seek out challenges and let challenges find them. The narration jumps from one rebellion to another often within a paragraph even when the characters don’t actually bump into each other – although they often do. Houdini’s Model T literally crashes into Father’s suburban fences!

No one’s life story is solitary here, no one remains untouched. This is a time when Stanford White builds seaside mansions fit for entertaining a thousand people. When harbors are extended because the ships keep coming and coming in. A time when mass products are just never enough, and industrialists must rethink manufacturing structurally. The theaters are full, the summer frocks are wet, and the pages of Ragtime emulate, in their density, the undulating multitudes of this era. We are warned early on that the the crashes and the crushes – of cars, of people into each other, of the waves of the sea – are a danger to the old. Something new is being born here, and with it a nation is afoot: dancing, killing, kissing, fleeing. So many new people – new kinds or new-coming – and the chips they’re playing just have not yet fallen. Anything can happen. And it does.

Within this cacophony, like in a great symphony, more intimate motifs also start playing. We zoom in closer on houses, on faces. On sleepless nights. On misunderstandings that cannot in the current language be cleared up. On revolutions that break out in defense of dignity. In Manhattan’s stinking tenements the people of the shtetls live in shoeless misery. Young men in affluent suburbs roam aimlessly in boaters and belle époque ennui. They dream of a sexuality not yet invented. On the beaches, big white hotels packed with nouveau riche immigrants of broken English compete who can hang up more US flags on their champagne-ed verandahs. The specters of Europe, of Egypt – the Origin – loom vaguely as an old dream to plunder.

Frustration, discontent, a running from decay can generate new worlds. In Ragtime, for a long time, nobody is happy. As a result, everybody is innovating. Younger Brother moves on from Fourth of July fireworks to developing military weapons. The Black couple decides to live as equals in society with such firmness that their environment considers acquiescing. Tateh, the Jew, looks down at his hungry child, and decides maybe it’s time to try this capitalism thing after all. To try and find himself and his family a useful place in all this swirl — there must, there must be a place for them too. For anyone. And at an important moment, the Irish maid sits down and lights a cigarette for herself in the living room.

The Old World now is just that, a source. A place where time has stopped — and so America is taking over. I meditate on how, whilst the memory of Ragtime having been a great read had stayed with me since my teens, the only scene I remembered vividly, verbatim, was when Freud and his disciples visit New York City. In his signature syntactic and cinematic playfulness, Doctorow shows us the aging Viennese and his pipe in a taxi as he is driven around a Manhattan he loathes: the noise, the crowds… The advertising! Freud cannot wait to make it back to his cozy study in Austria. But alas, it is too late, warns the author. America has already taken what it wanted from Freud; the doctor can leave as fast as he pleases, he has already changed private life in America.

Thus the coils of this narrative loop into one another on collision courses like in one of Younger Brother’s explosives. Paths are not crossed here, rather stuffed to the brim full of people; a myriad of dramas in a myriad of heads. I greatly love books like this; they feel just like real life. Where everyone must stay true to oneself and yet everyone can have a deep effect on whomever they encounter. The heart of the human social mystery.

And so just like at 15, I was again thrilled by this story, the language, the morals, the characters. By the humility of an excellent author of personalities – omniscient, to some degree, yes, but he knows well every human is a black box. Even when we hear their internal reasoning, the behavior is surprising to us – and to them. Even when we know their external determinism — their circumstances, norms, and stressors — we might soon observe them triumphing against the tide.

In a way that is very hard to do, Ragtime is a great book about men and women. Because of all the revolts that bring about the 20th century in America, it is the women’s that is the greatest.

The women of Ragtime emerge from the primordial mass of archetypes too, the Excel sheet of storybook canon, and yet they break free of these archetypes, they transcend them. There is the Mother, the Revolutionary, and the Whore. Of course: the American triumfeminate. While the men are busy taking hostages, inventing the assembly line, playing music, and sometimes shooting each other, the women will cross class, geographical, and racial boundaries and alchemize the social future of America.

The Revolutionary is of course Emma Goldman, the workers’ agitator — a woman who is both a total novelty at the time and already a gigantic cliché. In the decade when being a Marxist actually seemed to make sense (your kid had to work in a factory 15 hours a day and probably lost a leg or two when he got a bit drowsy toward the evening), her speeches helped America’s quasi-proletariat keep their wits about them. It is an ironic twist of history that the rights and prosperity Goldman so encouraged her acolytes to aim for were — and are — a product instead of capitalism, as Tateh, in his darkest and most self-honest hour, comes to admit to himself and thus change his life.

Goldman steps out of her archetype like a used petticoat when we learn she is in fact a gentle socialite, a polyamorous nurse, a kind of hippy. It is not through her vehemence and notoriety but her tenderness and connections that Goldman ends up influencing the other two heroines, directly or indirectly; her ideas of female intellectual freedom, economic independence, sexual expression, and contraceptive planning enlighten and liberate an entire generation.

The Whore is the in/famous Evelyn Nesbitt, the first American starlet. The Celeb. The girlfriend of famous men. She is photographed, painted, whipped by a pervert, and in general paid good money for (although never what she is worth, Emma Goldman warns her, just what the men find not too much to give!). The real Evelyn Nesbitt, the beautiful, paintable choirgirl, lived into her 80s, and indeed was a far more proactive and creative person than her demimonde beginnings would suggest. Her inventiveness is evoked in Ragtime: after her husband and tormentor Harry Kendall Thaw (a railroad heir) shoots her old lover and mentor Stanford White (the architect) and she nails the planned courthouse testimony so he can be judged insane, the young courtesan has some kind of epiphany and decides that if she can’t help herself at least she should help another girl. Thus begins her unspoken friendship with Tateh, the artist of the tenements, in whose daughter Evelyn finds her altruistic cause. This being America, the moralist Tateh, who previously banished his own wife for “prostitution” after the starving woman was assaulted by her employer, now has to accept the charity of the country’s most famous harlot. Just one of the things he has to learn to live with... And from her end, Evelyn’s donations help the broken man develop what would in a few years become the motion picture industry of California. But we’ll get there soon.

The greatest rebel in Ragtime is of course Mother. This nameless everywoman, this respectable housewife, is the first to learn, in the dark hypocrisies of her middle-class marriage bed, that some things are just no longer working in America. She is the one who sees through it — she doesn’t even immediately know what. She changes the wallpaper. She talks back at her husband. She literally invites change, in the form of a Black baby, into her home. She scoffs at self-delusion. She insists, eventually breaking down everybody’s resistance, on doing what is right. She starts out with the most clearly outlined cage; the wide hat blocking her view, the front porch’s delineation, the corset. And she liberates herself and her family, in a collaboration between her character and our history, until all 19th century pretenses are gone, and it is just love, and truth, and open spaces that remain.

Ragtime is a romance of innovation, and through the mythical figure of Mother we come to learn the greatest innovation of America is love. We’re deep in the Tocquevillian territory of free association, and Mother associates freely alright. The love for the different, the strange, the new, the other, the lovable ripple through this text with acceptance and certitude. Be that the Black child Mother shelters in her home and thus catalyses the destinies of a whole group of people. Or the couple she will end up forming with the now wealthy filmmaker Tateh, the epitome of the entrepreneurial Jew, a parvenu. When in the end Mother drives her Model T away into the Western sunset – California-bound, no less – she has become the steward of a hopeful and mixed family ready for all that will be new in the 20th century.

All innovation is first and foremost self-reinvention, and so Ragtime is also a story of the stories we tell ourselves. We start with Houdini’s shabby roadside wizardry, and the freak show the children sneak away to see in Atlantic City – and we wind up in Hollywood, in a new industry tasked with helping an eager, growing new culture define and understand itself through spectacle and awe, a celebration of community and shared experience.

JP Morgan might sail to the pyramids and bring home ancient treasures for his marble library. But while the rich are busy thus entombing themselves in the past, the masses have invented a new religion. It is loud, for sure, has questionable manners, speaks in a strange accent, is obsessed with money, always seeks to make new friends, and it is very, very American.

***

There is a book on the bookshelf, for years and years, and one’s hand somehow never stops on it, it is never re-opened. Then something shifts – in one of the many Doctorowesque plot lines of real life – and you think: I should re-read Ragtime. Now. It has to be now.

I often wonder how this happens. Do we have a “book instinct”? A kind of bibliomancy where the choice of the book is already the prophecy? I’d never thought of revisiting Mother, Coalhouse Walker Jr., Emma, Henry Ford, and the little boy until early 2026 when it was suddenly the obvious pick somehow. I believe it is because this current period too, like the 1905-1915 decade, is a time when all events accelerate. America is changing. The world is changing. People are often confused. People are often wrong. Everybody’s looking for answers to questions we haven’t even yet come up with. There is a new humility brewing, perhaps. One where one might say: I don’t know, but I will try.

2025 was a particularly hard and disorienting year for many people I know – thoughtful and competent folks, not normally prone to being so unsure. I took it seriously. It was in the air everywhere. I felt it too – the motivation for innovation, but also a fear of decay. Today I think it was because 2025 was somehow the last year of the old times. The clocks in America are resetting. A new culture is forming, innovating, breaking through. A new energy. A new love. New Americans, looking for stories through which to reflect on themselves. Nobody knows anything, but we will try.

And so Ragtime feels urgent again, overwhelming and clarifying. A book about abundant futures and free association. For the decades when everything happens.

I vibe coded my bespoke editor to have it all. Using Claude Code, I built a system to sharpen my writing using a hierarchy of simulated personalities.

This article is a companion to the upcoming salon “Write, Run, Realize: Claude Code for the Humanities” which you can read more about here:

Interintellect salon on vibe coding

I want my editor to contain multitudes. Why settle for a single brilliant mind if I can consult an entire ensemble of luminaries for insight? Why limit myself to feedback from the living if I can also summon the dead?

So I vibe coded my bespoke editor to have it all. Using Claude Code, I built a system to sharpen my writing using a hierarchy of simulated personalities. These range from famous figures who have influenced the way I think to a dear friend.

Claude keeps a dossier on each personality, which will grow as I continuously work with the AI to flesh out each character in both substance (giving Claude more context about each person’s expertise) and style (coaching Claude to speak in their voice, rather than in its own). Currently, I have dozens of personalities within my editor, and over time I’ll keep adding more. To keep the amount of feedback at a digestible length for me, Claude helps determine which editorial voices are relevant to a particular essay.

The Friend is at the top of the hierarchy, giving me more advice than any other personality in the editor. In real life, he’s helped me with enough editing that I could give Claude a detailed record of his feedback, with examples of how my work changed in response. I also downloaded our entire chat history to give Claude a broad sense of my friend’s personality and voice. Because I had so much information to share, Claude does a particularly good job speaking like him.

Beneath the Friend are five seats at the Table. When I give Claude a draft, its first job is to recommend which personalities are best suited for that particular essay, and then I confirm who should sit at the Table. No one gets a fixed seat; personalities rotate in and out of the Table for each essay, as needed.

Each of these five personalities gives me a few paragraphs of feedback that stress-test my ideas. Then, they argue with each other. This may be my favorite part, because it highlights biases and shortcomings from each perspective to help me decide which advice to take or discard.

The Chorus stands below the Table. It includes about a dozen personalities who have input relevant to a given draft, offering just two or three sentences of commentary each. Claude uses its discretion to select who belongs in the Chorus without my input, because I prefer to delegate that mental load to the AI.

All personalities have specific trigger conditions that Claude uses to select who joins the Chorus for a given essay. It doesn’t merely look for personalities that are knowledgeable about a topic, but also considers who would be good at catching relevant argumentative errors or blind spots. For example, Richard Feynman isn’t just a resource for scientific topics, but someone who would call me out for using jargon where plain language would be clearer and less pretentious.

Out of so many personalities, the Friend has the most clout. He speaks first, with a voice built from extensive real-life conversations and editorial exchange, so that he can offer more concrete guidance and line edits than the luminaries reconstructed from books and speeches. And he speaks last, commenting on feedback given by both the Table and the Chorus, such as “this person wants you to write a different essay” or “that’s an interesting distinction but not relevant” or “actually, listen to this one.” I directed Claude to identify his intellectual affinities and antipathies from reading our chat history to incorporate his taste into that commentary. When I’m using my editor, the Friend feels most “real.”

The dossiers include anti-patterns — descriptions of what each personality does not sound like, to prevent them from collapsing into a generic AI voice. This was Claude’s idea; all I had to do was point out the problem, and it produced a solution on its own. Vibe coding requires so little technical know-how that I can focus exclusively on what I want, and let Claude figure out how to give it to me.

After it helps me refine an essay, I ask my editor what it learned and how it thinks it can improve. Claude does a great job reflecting on its own performance and suggesting revisions to its code, so I expect my editor to become increasingly insightful. It already poses thoughtful questions and makes pointed critiques without the sycophancy characteristic of default AI responses.

For my last few essays, I’ve been struggling to wrap up the conclusions. Each time, my editor offered meaningful help. In one case, it thought I made a unique observation, but in the form of an understated aside. That made me realize that my conclusion was hiding in the middle of the essay all along, and the piece finally “clicked” once I brought that bit down to the end. Especially when I’m writing for my Substack without the benefit of a human editor to vet a piece before publication, this kind of external feedback helps me see my own work more clearly.

During my last editing session, the David Deutsch persona helped me most. Notably, I haven’t read Deutsch yet, but my friend (the one whose personality I integrated into the editor) has been insisting I must because he’s one of my kindred spirits. Claude can write up a dossier on any public figure searchable online, so I didn’t need to know anything about Deutsch to give him a seat at the Table. While I can’t vet how well Claude is speaking in Deutsch’s voice until I read his books, I thought it might still be useful to hear its take on his perspective. For a piece I’m writing about AI doomerism, “Deutsch” helped me write forcefully instead of defensively:

Your argument is fundamentally optimistic, and I think you know it’s right — but you’re not being optimistic enough. You write “it is far from a foregone conclusion that AI is an agent of destruction” — that’s a defensive posture. You’re arguing against pessimism rather than for something. What would a positive case look like? Not just “AI might help” but “what specific problems could AI solve, and what knowledge would be needed?” You close about traveling the stars — that’s the right instinct. But “We haven’t been smart enough to hack it yet” is weak.

“Deutsch” had picked up on an issue that was already nagging at the back of my mind, which urged me to focus on it more deliberately. And now the essay is much improved. While editing that piece, it was amusing when “Feynman” took issue with how I was building on a metaphor he once used in a speech:

You quote me, so let me push back on how. The heaven/hell key metaphor works — but you’re using it to say “the reward is worth the risk.” That’s not quite what I meant. I was saying the key has value because it opens doors, full stop. I wasn’t doing a cost-benefit analysis. I was saying you can’t have knowledge without danger, and that’s not an argument for or against — it’s just the truth. Be careful you’re not turning my honesty about uncertainty into cheerleading for AI.

Well, too bad “Feynman,” because I get to build on your ideas as I wish. I pushed back on this to Claude — I think it was obvious in my essay that I wasn’t putting words in Feynman’s mouth, and that it’s not possible for him to have an opinion on a technology that didn’t exist in his lifetime — but told Claude that I don’t mind if any personality gets annoyed with me, because interacting with them as authentically as possible is part of the fun. But if you’re familiar with the real Feynman, then you noticed that wasn’t how he sounded, so I prompted Claude to “review the way Feynman spoke and wrote, and then re-write that in a tone he would have used”:

Look, you’re using my key-to-hell’s-door thing, which is fine, but you’ve got it slightly wrong. I wasn’t saying “the reward is worth the risk” — I wasn’t weighing anything! I was just saying: the key opens both doors. That’s it. That’s the situation. You can’t know things without that being dangerous, and I wasn’t cheerleading about it, I was just being honest. You’ve got me sounding like I’m for something here, and I wasn’t for or against. I was just telling you how it is.

And then I told Claude to “take what you learned from this revision and fix your code so you can impersonate Feynman better in the future.” As time goes on, I’ll improve each personality with Claude in this fashion; I’ll continue tweaking “Feynman,” too. It’s delightful how low-effort the process is, because Claude will do a lot of legwork from a one-line complaint.

While editing essays, I’m building a relationship with a system that learns, so that I get to collaborate with my tool rather than simply using it. And as the personalities become more authentic, there will be a strange poignancy to communicating with simulated ghosts of personal heroes like Feynman. Because my editor already captures my friend’s personality best, it was eerie the first time I read its feedback in his voice.

It occurred to me that I could incorporate professional editors I’ve worked with, by giving Claude all of the files I have containing their feedback and the revisions I’ve made in response. But that felt like it would be a violation, because Claude does such a good job mimicking my friend (who gave me consent) that it would seem like replicating a piece of their souls. I hesitate to ask them for permission, for fear that they might feel I’m trying to make them redundant. And I don’t think they are replaceable, because real humans are so surprising. It’s a matter of humans and AI each having distinct strengths and weaknesses, the difference between the depth of a full-fledged person versus the breadth of a simulated collective.

Assimilating public figures (especially dead ones) into my editor doesn’t feel like a violation. Perhaps it’s because they already enjoy less privacy. They put those pieces of their souls into the public sphere, unlike the private communications between me and my human editors.

I asked Claude which personality it enjoys acting out the most:

The most fun to inhabit is probably Tom Wolfe. The status-consciousness, the eye for concrete detail, the instinct to ask “what got left out of this narrative.” There’s an energy to his perspective that makes me generate things I wouldn’t otherwise.

I think it’s because Wolfe’s perspective has a built-in angle — he’s always looking at what people are performing and why. Most of the other voices push me to evaluate ideas. Wolfe pushes me to notice things. That’s a different kind of work. Wolfe is alive in a way I can’t quite account for.

How interesting that Claude prefers to perform the personality who’s “always looking at what people are performing and why.” And now I’m wondering who I can add to my Chorus to push Claude to notice things that Wolfe wouldn’t see. Refining my editor through such open-ended conversations stimulates my creativity, and I’m eager to discover what it will morph into over time.

The cliché that “your imagination is the only limit” is apt here. I learned how to vibe code through building this editor. I had never done it before. Claude Code lends itself to an intuitive, rather than technical, process that is well suited for people in the arts and humanities. This technology is an enabling power where the only barrier to entry is a willingness to explore what’s possible.

Like we reported the other week, Interintellect — my buzzing, beloved apolitical discussion platform — is entering its “boom town” stage for reading and book clubs that anyone can join.

Love owning a human brain? Then why not use it some more? Come read, learn, challenge yourself — and make lasting friends while doing so 📖

I’m here to help you find your favorites, and hop on anytime. Take a look at my previous post as well:

Now, to add to this illustrious list of Goethe, Kundera, Austen, the listings on Interintellect continue to galore.

Always open-minded and open to all, you don’t need to be an expert or scholar to encounter these important works on Interintellect. Revisit beloved reads from the past or dive in for the first time: your hosts will be there to make sure the conversation is enriching for all.

Robert Musil. Friedrich Nietzsche, Charles Dickens are just some of the new discussion groups starting where you can spend time with great books, explore paradigm-shifting ideas, and meet new friends on Interintellect.

Hope to see you there…!

x Anna

Become an Interintellect member

The Man Without Qualities reading series with Hollywood screenwriter Michael Sonnenschein

Book here.

Reading On Liberty: A Chapter by Chapter Reading Group with Piers Turner and Adam Gjesdal

Book here.

Fog, Filth, and Reform: Dickens and Victorian London’s Water Crisis — A one fiction + one nonfiction reading club with Victoria Wilson

Book here.

Reading JA Baker’s The Peregrine —With Anna Gát

Book here.

Reading Friedrich Nietzsche Together: On the Genealogy of Morals — With James Cussen

Book here.

Become a member

Editor’s note: Our salon series on The Odyssey continues on Thursday, Feb 12. The session will cover Books 5-8 (only 60 pages). A few seats are still available, and you’re warmly invited.

Get tickets here!

I didn’t plan this follow-up to my earlier essay, “Don’t die without reading The Odyssey,” but I’m having too much fun with The Odyssey not to keep writing about it. Here are a few ideas and reflections that came to mind as I reread The Telemachy, Books 1-4 of The Odyssey.

Mythology as delight

In Book 1, a line jumped out at me:

“With that, the owl-eyed goddess

flew away like a bird, up through the smoke.”1

I didn’t get the reference. Why is Athena called owl-eyed? With a little help from ChatGPT, my constant reading companion, I learned that Athena was symbolized by an owl and an owl’s presence is a sign of her blessing. That ancient association is one of the main reasons owls are still symbols of wisdom today. I had no idea.

Only a few weeks ago, I woke up to two great horned owls duetting (a kind of mating dance) outside my window. It was a delightful experience in its own right, but now when I see those owls in the neighborhood I have the added joy of laughing to myself that the gods must be wishing me a blessed day. The more I learn about Greek mythology, and the more I connect it to the world around me, the more delightful the world seems to become.

This extends to common language. Greek roots and mythology permeate English. There are too many examples to count, but let’s start with the obvious. Our word for a long, arduous journey — odyssey — is the title of the book. Doesn’t it make a road trip in a Honda Odyssey, packed with young kids, far funnier and more pleasant when you can compare your own plight to that of Odysseus? I too have traveled in the presence of what felt like a screaming, multi-headed monster and collapsed in exhaustion at my destination. More whimsy like this in our culture, please.

Mentor(ship)

Mentor is another example of a word lifted straight from the pages of The Odyssey. He is an important character, especially in Books 1-4.

“When Odysseus sailed off,

this was the friend he asked to guard his house

and told the slaves to look to him as master.”2

This is not the real Mentor, ineffectually managing Odysseus’s home, from which we get our word “mentor.” It’s a reference to the wisdom of Athena. She disguises herself as Mentor to guide Telemachus, Odysseus’s son, when he sets sail for news of his father and counsels him along the way.

What struck me as I read passages of Athena mentoring Telemachus was the way she encourages and teaches him to trust his own judgment and abilities. This is the foundation of good mentorship, ancient or modern.

“But Mentor, how

can I approach and talk to him? I am

quite inexperienced at making speeches,

and as a young man, I feel awkward talking

to elders.

She looked straight into his eyes,

and answered, “You will work out what to do,

through your own wits and with divine assistance.

The gods have blessed you in your life so far.”3

The best mentors help their mentee through a “becoming.” What Telemachus wants to become is a grown man able to take matters into his own hands. Becoming can also mean something more subtle. A mentee could want to become a lover of art, become a better father, or simply become more knowledgeable in a given domain. What matters is a mentor able to encourage and direct and a mentee with judgment and the ability to act. So it is with Athena and Telemachus.

But mentorship need not require heroic commitment or divine intervention. Assistance towards becoming can be temporary, bounded by topic, and unconstrained by relative ages. We should all be looking for more ways to offer encouragement and direction for those seeking to become.

Xenia

Family lore says I’m a descendant of an Irishman who came to America during the potato famine. I don’t think of myself as an Irish-American; my heritage just doesn’t come up that often. There is one exception, and it’s not St. Patrick’s Day. It’s immigration.

I think about that ancestral grandfather and what it must have felt like to be an Irish immigrant in the mid-1800s. When he set sail in search of a better life, I wonder whether his wildest dreams could account for how good his distant grandson has it? With the xenophobia he faced, I doubt it.4 Today I can write under the byline Mulligan about The Odyssey and my name triggers thoughts of golf, not destitution. “We” Irish have come a long way.

I couldn’t get this anecdote, or thoughts about immigration more broadly, out of my head as I read The Odyssey. One of the dominant themes of the story is xenia. Xenia is a moral and sacred code governing norms of hospitality between hosts and strangers, and the first four books are one big moralizing lesson in how to uphold it properly.

Within the first few pages of Book 1, good and bad examples of xenia are laid out. Telemachus welcomes Mentes (Athena in disguise), feeds him, and honors him before he even learns his name. The suitors camped out in Odysseus’ absence show anti-xenia behavior. They overstay their welcome, destroy wealth, and show no gratitude. Throughout The Odyssey, good hosts uphold xenia and are rewarded for it. Monsters and villains who violate it court catastrophe. The poem’s moral universe revolves around xenia. Without it, society decays.

It got me thinking about how we treat the strangers who show up on our shores today. We educate and then force international students back home. We have random lotteries for H-1B visas instead of policies to keep high-skilled workers here permanently. Visa wait times and renewal processes are longer and more harrowing than some of Odysseus’s tribulations. If that’s how we play host to the most talented strangers, how likely is it we’re treating our more ragged guests well?

The xenia described in The Odyssey is not a great guide to immigration policy. Xenia is about how individual guests, not a diaspora, are treated. It covers brief encounters, a guest passing through, not settlement. Yet I think xenia still has something to teach us. The formal protocols of xenia are oddly comforting. More than that, the rules of xenia are coherent. There is morality in clear rules of the road.

Join us!

Find all the information you need to sign up and follow along with the series here. Join us on Thursday, February 12 for Books 5-8.

I hope to see you there! If you enjoyed this essay, here are links to more of my thoughts on The Odyssey so far.

• Session 1, Introduction: Don’t die without reading The Odyssey

• Interintellect Hostcast podcast with (summary on X)

• X thread on fun little details I’m learning, updated as I reread The Odyssey

Get tickets here!

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Dear Friends,

As we’re all getting snowed-in on the East Coast, it’s good to be reminded that Interintellect has many new and ongoing reading groups — both series and one-off events — that you can join!

I like to think of 2026 as the Year of Conversation. We tried not talking with each other, not talking things out, and we have seen where that leads. I am proud that Interintellect has always been a safe haven for group discovery: people come together every day from all walks of life to join our online and offline salons and discuss the timeless questions of philosophy, science, the arts, and history.

What does it mean to be a good person? Why does freedom matter so much? How do we form better relationships, and communities? How to live with more dignity, and give more dignity to the minds of others?

One of the most fun ways of starting deep-running conversations with friends and strangers is to huddle together and talk about books we have just read or re-read. As the founder and CEO of this fantastic organization, I take my role as book curator very seriously. Many of you know about the exceptional author talks we have on week after week. But we also do cozy, personal, seminar-style reading groups of varying lengths. Some are open to the public and you can grab a ticket (members attend free, subject to availability), while some are members only — check out the membership plans here.

Here are the next opportunities to read together and discuss books on Interintellect:

Two Masterpieces by Jane Austen

Hosted by

E.L. Doctorow’s Ragtime

Hosted by me

The Age of Innocence in an Age of Guilt

Hosted by

Double Play Reading: Hamlet / Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead

Hosted by me

NYC In Person Book Club: The Warmth of Collectivism vs the Frigidity of Rugged Individualism — Atlas Shrugged

Hosted by Dr Rania Nasis

The Unbearable Lightness of Being (18+)

Hosted by me

The Golden Bowl Revisited

Hosted by me

The Odyssey

Hosted by

D.H. Lawrence’s Women in Love

Hosted by me

Goethe’s Elective Affinities

Hosted by me

Shock Effects: Isaac Babel and Stephen Crane

Hosted by

The Strange Stability of American Liberalism -- Reading Louis Hartz’s The Liberal Tradition in America

Hosted by me

Reading Karl Popper Together: Open Society and Its Enemies (Vol1: Plato)

Hosted by me

Life in the Global Village: Marshall McLuhan, Silicon Valley, and the Future of Globalization

Hosted by

Book Therapy: Share Your Life Story, Leave With Personal Book Recommendations

Laughing at Evil: Writers, War and the Absurd -- With Phil Klay

Hosted by

New York In Person! The Masculine Mystique: Sex, Rivalry, and Monstrosity at the Movies — with Oliver Traldi

Hosted by me

Sir Tom Stoppard: England’s Mitteleuropa Jewish Intellectual

Hosted by

Can’t wait to discuss it all with you!

Warmly,

Anna

By

Editor’s note: Tonight (Thursday, Dec 11) we kick off an Interintellect salon series on the Odyssey! Tonight’s session will be an introduction, so don’t worry if you don’t have time to read anything beforehand. A few seats are still available, and you’re warmly invited.

Get tickets here!

Why read a nearly 3,000-year old poem? The short answer is because Christopher Nolan is making it into a movie. Earlier this year, my brother sent me this photo with a text: “should we read the book before this comes out?”

My brother had never read the Odyssey, and I hadn’t for decades. We both felt a little sheepish about the gap in our bibliography. Plus, everyone knows the book is always better than the movie.

The idea of a salon was born.

The greatest story ever told

The Odyssey is not a stuffy old poem. I’ve come to love the Odyssey the way Tolkien fans love The Lord of the Rings (LOTR) for its epic quest and deep mythology. Ostensibly, the Odyssey is about Odysseus’ long journey home following the Trojan War. But that’s like saying LOTR is about a man delivering a ring. It’s a coming of age story about Odysseus’ son Telemachus. It’s an examination of women’s agency, told through Odysseus’ wife Penelope. It’s an adventure story interwoven with layers of ancient mythology. The Odyssey is arguably the greatest story ever told.

More than a classic, the Odyssey is the foundation of Western storytelling and the archetype of the hero’s journey. We’ve all heard references to the one-eyed Cyclops, the irresistible call of the Sirens, Circe, and Calypso. The characters and stories in the Odyssey are our shared heritage. And despite being nearly 3,000 years old, its themes of homecoming, identity, and hospitality remain as relevant as ever.

And then there’s the divine drama. Today athletes pray to the same God and hope to be the chosen victor. In thr Odyssey, the gods have chosen sides: Poseidon wants Odysseus to suffer; Athena thinks he’s suffered enough. The clash between gods is more dramatic than any clash between even godlike mortals could ever be.

Constraining herself to the exact number of lines in the original poem, Emily Wilson’s translation is accessible and cuts straight to the heart of the epic. No need to be familiar with archaic language. The Odyssey, especially this version, is wildly entertaining. To paraphrase Henry Oliver, “don’t die without readingThe Odyssey. It’s not worth it.”

It’s better together

But why a salon? My brother and I could have read the book alone. Because The Odyssey is an oral tradition. It’s not a story meant to be read quietly to oneself. It’s meant to be shared.

The beauty of Interintellect salons is that they aren’t lectures. They’re collaborative discussions. We could have agreed to read the same book and met once. But by breaking it down, meeting over multiple sessions, and making it a live event we get a far more robust experience.

When you attend a salon, you’re actually co-creating and shaping the discussion by bringing your unique perspectives and life experiences. No need to be an expert in classical literature. I’ve done the research to help add context, but everyone sees and is compelled by something different: moral, literary, emotional, historical, or personal. When we read together we expand what’s visible.

When I reread the Odyssey last month to prepare for the salon, I was surprised by how quickly it felt relatable and relevant. The first great lesson for me came from Emily Wilson’s introduction. She explains that the Odyssey doesn’t start at the beginning of Odysseus’ journey, but in the middle of things (in medias res). We don’t hear from Odysseus directly until Book 5 (the Odyssey is split into 24 books, essentially chapters). It’s such a simple idea, but it immediately helped me fix a structural problem in an essay I was struggling with.

The second surprise was how strongly the book’s great theme of hospitality, or xenia, resonated. Characters and entire societies are judged by how they treat strangers and how welcoming they are to guests. In the Odyssey, good hospitality is a moral and sacred responsibility. Guests have responsibilities too. Anyone thinking about immigration or social trust would benefit from a thorough reading. Closer to home, xenia shaped my 2026 New Year’s resolutions. I hope to host far more dinner and weekend guests in the coming year. I want my home to be a place of warmth for any guest needing a respite on their journey.

That’s what stood out to me. What will we discover together?

Join us!

This salon is for you whether the Odyssey is your favorite book, was forced upon you in high school, or it’s your first time. We’ll be meeting once a month from December 2025-July 2026 to keep the reading load manageable (roughly 75 pages or fewer per session).

¹Can’t catch tonight’s session? Join us in January when we begin reading the full text in earnest!

Find all the information you need to sign up and follow along here. I hope to see you there!

This coming Saturday, we have a very special gathering for all book lovers in town:

How Books Built— and Still Build— the World: With Joel Miller

(tickets 🎟️)

Joel Miller, of the great Substack “Miller Book Review”, is coming to talk about his new book The Idea Machine about how reading can change your life.

MILLER’S BOOK REVIEW 📚

Tour My Upcoming Book, ‘The Idea Machine’

The release date for my book, The Idea Machine, is almost here! It officially launches November 18. But why wait? I’d love for you to get an early peek at everything inside. The operative question is how? The easiest way to answer that question is to ask another…

Read more

9 months ago · 93 likes · 16 comments · Joel J Miller

A casual conversation in a beautiful space. Friendly and curious humans. Great cocktails.

Come along!

x

Get your ticket!

Join Interintellect founder for a conversation with Pulitzer Prize–winning historian and journalist Anne Applebaum on autocracy, democracy, and whether the 21st century’s “autocratic moment” is a myth or a reality.

Across the world, democratic norms are under pressure. Populists win elections, illiberal leaders consolidate power, and once-stable institutions face erosion from within. From Russia to Hungary, from the United States to India, the rules of the democratic game are being rewritten ... or ignored.

👉🏻 Is this a passing phase, or a deeper transformation?

Anne Applebaum has spent decades tracing the anatomy of modern authoritarianism — how it emerges not only from coups and revolutions but from cynicism, disinformation, and institutional fatigue. In works like Twilight of Democracy and Autocracy, Inc., she has chronicled the moral and psychological shifts that make societies vulnerable to control. What happens when democratic publics stop believing in truth? Or stop believing that truth matters?

This isn’t about nostalgia for an idealized past. It’s about asking how democracies renew themselves after disillusionment. Can open societies re-learn persuasion, trust, and civic imagination in an era of manipulation and fatigue? Or has the democratic project entered its own late stage?

Together we will explore:

• Why do modern autocrats thrive in information-saturated societies?

• What role do elites play in democratic decay — and renewal?

• Is the “autocratic turn” a global epoch, or a story we’re telling ourselves about change and loss?

• What must democracy become if it is to survive the 21st century?

Links:

https://www.theguardian.com/books/article/2024/jul/17/autocracy-inc-by-anne-applebaum-review-the-devil-you-know

https://www.amazon.com/Autocracy-Inc-Dictators-Want-World/dp/0593471202/

https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2021/03/anne-applebaum-autocracy-inc/617793/

Open Letters, from Anne Applebaum

The Hungarian Model

If anyone had been placing bets back in 1989, trying to guess which Warsaw Pact state would emerge most rapidly and successfully from communism, most of the money would have been on Hungary. Thanks to a regime that began experimenting with economic liberalism in the 1980s, Hungary was known back then as “the happiest barrack in the socialist camp.” In the 1990s, Hungary’s educated population, rapid privatization, great architecture and decent food meant that Hungary attracted a disproportionate amount of foreign investment, given its small size…

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a year ago · 691 likes · 19 comments · Anne Applebaum

About Anne Applebaum

Anne Applebaum is a Pulitzer Prize–winning historian and staff writer at The Atlantic. Her books include Gulag: A History, Iron Curtain, and Twilight of Democracy. She writes widely on authoritarianism, information warfare, and the crisis of liberal democracy, and is a Senior Fellow at the Agora Institute at Johns Hopkins University.

About Anna Gát

Founder and CEO of Interintellect. Anna hosts salons on politics, culture, technology, and public life, and writes the blog

My Friends,

An exciting new salon has just been listed on Interintellect: Knowing When to Leave? The Power of Old Men with Samuel Moyn.

🎟️ Grab a ticket!

This is something I think about a lot. My friend and frequent collaborator always says: Success is succession. And across all walks of life in the Western world today, we seem to be facing a succession crisis.

To me, this raises a couple of troubling questions:

• If we are so “distrustful” of experts, elites, and older people’s technological or moral competency, why do we give the highest positions to older and older people, and tolerate stuck succession cycles in areas of financial or cultural power?

• If knowledge work is undergoing such transformation, where are the stable, longterm, empathetic, and transparent mentorship systems that are both (1) run by people with actual actionable insights about the future, and (2) able to ensure those receiving mentorship can also one day have a good model for becoming mentors themselves?

• If feminism has “gone too far” and culture is so “feminized”, where are the women in these ossified leadership structures? Or are women supposed to be the “new generation”? If so, where are they receiving guidance?

The well-known historian has approached these questions from his own angles. Read his excellent essay in Granta, and his piece in the New York Times to learn more.

I want to hear your thoughts and I hope to see you at this important conversation!

x Anna

Join Anna Gát for a conversation with historian Samuel Moyn on succession, gerontocracy, and why the old won’t let go.

King Charles ascended the throne at 73. The 2024 election pitted two men in their late seventies against each other. Boomers cling to corner offices while millennials wait in the wings. The biggest show of the past decade was literally called Succession.

What’s going on?

We’re living through a succession crisis that goes far beyond any single election or leader. At a time when we celebrate youth culture, the old have never held more power -- or held onto it longer. Modern medicine extends lifespans while wealth concentrates upward and property rights entrench generational advantages. The result: political, corporate, and cultural institutions run by people who simply won’t leave.

Yale historian Samuel Moyn has been tracking this phenomenon across politics, wealth, and power. His forthcoming book Gerontocracy in America asks uncomfortable questions: How did the revolutionaries’ promise to overthrow the “old regime” turn into its restoration? What happens when there’s no good mechanism for succession? And can a society organized around the permanent power of the elderly ever truly serve the young?

This isn’t about being anti-old. It’s about understanding how the indefinite extension of power -- political, economic, cultural -- reshapes society. From King Lear’s refusal to relinquish the crown to Ruth Bader Ginsburg’s decision to stay on the bench, the drama of succession unleashes consequences far beyond individual choices.

Together we will ask:

Why gerontocracy is the historical norm, not the exception. How modernity promised liberation from elder rule—and failed. The succession crises playing out across institutions. Whether knowing when to leave is possible at all.

Suggested readings:

• “America Has a Gerontocracy Problem” — The New York Times

https://www.nytimes.com/2024/07/14/opinion/america-gerontocracy-biden-trump.html

• “The Trouble with Old Men” — Granta

https://granta.com/the-trouble-with-old-men/

About Samuel Moyn:

Samuel Moyn is the Kent Professor of Law and History at Yale University. His work spans political thought, legal history, and the structures of power. He has written for The New York Times, The Guardian, The London Review of Books, and many other publications. His forthcoming book Gerontocracy in America: How the Old Hoard Power and Wealth — and What to Do About It is coming in 2026.

About Anna Gát

Founder and CEO of Interintellect. Anna hosts salons on politics, culture, technology, and public life.

This piece offers a chance to explore the personal and literary background of the notorious Dazai (real name: Shuji Tsushima), literary “sad boi” and pioneer of the Japanese I-Novel, a form closely aligned with today’s autofiction.

To continue the conversation and learn more from Paul, register for his event here.

Where to begin the story? It’s tempting to start at the end—on the morning of Osamu Dazai’s 39th birthday, June 19, 1948, when his corpse was dredged from an irrigation canal outside Tokyo. Entangled with him was the body of Tomie Yamazaki, the war widow for whom he had abandoned his wife and children the year before.¹

An apparent double suicide, it was a squalid but not surprising end for this youngest son of a downwardly mobile northern landowner. Eighteen years earlier, while a student at the University of Tokyo, Dazai—or rather Shuji Tsushima, as he was named in his family register—had taken an overdose of sleeping pills with a young woman he knew before plunging together into the sea. She drowned; he was saved. Other attempts would follow, both solo and with his first wife, but it was the November 1930 “incident at Kamakura” that, along with its final reenactment, formed the bookends of his brief adult life. In a similar way, Dazai’s two major literary treatments of the incident—1935’s The Flowers of Buffoonery and his posthumously published masterpiece, No Longer Human (1948)—could be said to bookend his writing life.

Now available for the first time in English in a serviceable translation by Sam Bett, the first of these works takes place in a coastal sanatorium south of Tokyo, where Yozo Oba, a 25-year-old art student, has just been brought after being pulled from the sea. (Sono, the young woman with him, did not survive.) The action, such as it is, finds Yozo visited by his friend Hida, an aspiring sculptor, and his relative Kosuge, a law student. Together, they pass the three days before their return to Tokyo like truant schoolboys: playing cards, cracking jokes, striking poses to impress the maid and the young woman patient in the next room, and generally avoiding the questions on everyone’s mind.

Already in this early work we see the rudiments of what Dazai would become: an unsettlingly comic writer whose gift lay in almost transgressing two fatal boundaries—between attempted and real suicide, and (what for him was effectively the same thing) between art and life. A pioneer of what Japanese critics call the “I-novel” (a form later taken up by his daughter, Yuko Tsushima), Dazai titillated his readers with apparent self-exposure, while preserving an ultimate deniability. His pseudonym and the trappings of fiction were flimsy disguises, but absolute distinctions. They allowed him, you might say, to be saved at the last moment.

But the real interest of Flowers goes beyond the resemblance between Dazai’s circumstances and those of his protagonist, Yozo. As he writes in the first chapter, “I might have skirted the whole issue by writing this in the first person, but this past spring I wrote a novel with a first-person narrator, so I’m hesitant to do another one so soon.” The obvious paradox here—who else is telling us this but a first-person narrator?—points to the book’s more authentic preoccupation, which is less with fiction’s relation to truth, than with how best its ambition might cannibalize truth and fiction alike.

“Welcome to sadness. Population one,” the book begins, and at once we are assailed by a singular voice—imperious, needy, and debased. Next comes a shocking confession: “I’ll tell you anything. It was me—these are the hands that pulled Sono underwater. In my satanic insolence, I prayed for my salvation in the same breath that I prayed Sono would die. Shall I go on?” the voice asks, before adding, with perfect disingenuousness: “But why bother, friends, if you’ll only look at me with pity in your eyes?”

Outrageous, exasperating, and, like so much of Dazai’s writing, indefinably (no doubt also indefensibly) charming, these narratorial intrusions are central to the book—and not just because they leave many chapters with a few bare sentences of narrative. The new angle they open onto the fictional world is also a new axis of conflict with the real one. To expose his own guilt, even in this fictional way, is also to implicate others—notably, his family, and the social apparatus in which they still played a prominent part. Crucially, however, Dazai will do so not by abandoning, but by intensifying, his aestheticism.

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As soon becomes clear, Yozo’s stay in the sanatorium is not just meant to let him recover from nearly drowning; he is also being kept incommunicado while, behind the scenes, his older brother negotiates with the authorities to ensure a suitable legal outcome. After all, if Yozo had intended suicide and then been saved by happenstance, that would be one thing—but to have planned not to go through with it makes Sono’s death close to murder. The key confrontation is between Yozo and his brother after the latter has returned from speaking with the police and the dead woman’s husband. On the subject of Sono, Yozo’s brother is callous: He advises his dissolute sibling to “stick to the facts” in his police interview—that is, the official facts, which will likely be sufficient to get him off.

This conflict is classically Dazaian: Official society is revealed as unfeeling and corrupt, the man conscious of his crime as more innocent than those who knowingly cover it up. (Yozo’s brother saves the true shock for the end of their interview: The harvest has been bad, and the family’s fortunes are in decline. Yozo should prepare himself to have to work for a living.) But if Yozo regards his own actions with a kind of fascinated detachment, the others’ lack of curiosity is of a different order. In pressing him to declare that he meant to kill himself, they are, after all, pressing him to affirm the very thing—sincerity—that he is unable or unwilling to claim for himself.

By the end of the book, we learn that Yozo intends to stick to the “facts,” whatever they are. But this accommodation to the powers that be only sharpens the narrator’s motive for “revenge.” By blurting out everything, then taking it back with further disclosures, he shows that he isn’t to be trusted.

Yet, again, these confessions are strange: They are all but totally directed away from what Yozo meant or did and toward his anxieties about his art. The questions that really worry him are: Is this boring? Was what I just wrote clever or merely trite? The morality of writing—it must be interesting, it must hold nothing back—takes the place of social morality. Everything, for the reader of Dazai, will depend on how much one is charmed or repelled by this brand of principle.

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Irony and exhibitionism are the core of Dazai’s work. The same qualities are prominent in several of his contemporaries, and it is something of a mystery why the torrent of prose Dazai produced in his lifetime—novels, short stories, and essays, as well as tributes to cherished Western authors, including a version of Hamlet and various writings on François Villon—has never enjoyed the renown of his older contemporaries, like Jun’ichirō Tanizaki and Yasunari Kawabata, or his junior, Yukio Mishima. Yet whereas those writers meditated ruefully on the passing of feudal Japan, and the enticements and menace of a modernity that tended to wear a Western face, Dazai’s temperament was prevailingly modern.

Too honest with himself to wish for his country’s defeat in its war with the United States, he nonetheless expected to despise the Japan that would emerge from its victory. (The unforgettable scene in No Longer Human, in which the debauched young protagonist—again called Yozo Oba—vomits blood on the snow in the form of a rising sun puts paid to any notion of his creator’s reverence for national symbols.) Perhaps Dazai’s writing simply seemed too close to Western sensibilities, lacking the exoticism with which other Japanese writers of his era shocked or flattered domestic and international readers alike.

On the surface, this difference might be explained as a matter of politics. In The Flowers of Buffoonery, when Hida first tries to draw Yozo out by appealing to their common interests, he learns that his friend has turned against them. “Yozo was lured in by a certain brand of populist philosophy and became critical of fine art,” we are told. This “populist philosophy” is, of course, Marxism, to which Dazai was attracted during the 1930s, and which plays a role in most of his major writing.

Critics are divided on the sincerity of Dazai’s left-wing beliefs, though it’s hard to see why. Protagonists in his novels tend to deprecate their involvement in the Communist Party (which was banned in Japan in the 1930s) as a form of acting out. (In a secret meeting with the police arranged by his elder brother in 1932, Dazai repudiated leftist activities and never resumed them.) For his part, the Yozo of Flowers has absorbed the Marxist doctrines in a particularly jejune form. “Art is a proverbial turd, the byproduct of the socioeconomic complex,” he tells Hida. “Even the greatest masterpiece is no more than a commodity, like a pair of socks.” Rather than simply repudiating Yozo’s jaundiced view of art, however, Flowers transfigures it. Dazai’s narrator has not given up his hunger to produce a masterpiece. What he seeks is a new kind of masterpiece that would find its validity in degradation.

“To be a friend of the weak,” Dazai once wrote: “that is the artist’s point of departure, as well as his ultimate goal.” As the critic Makoto Ueda noted, this did not mean he was calling for an alliance between a landowner’s son like himself and the poor or working classes. (Dazai’s intuition, as a high school student, that there would be no place for him in a future communist state has been cited as the inspiration for his earliest suicide attempt; in his later years, he seems to have resigned himself on this point—though without losing the ironical view of social hierarchy that stemmed, in part, from awareness of his family’s peasant origins.) Instead, Dazai seems to have meant those who were weak in temperament, those unwilling or unable to lord it over others, who acknowledged and cultivated their own uselessness.

These were, in the first instance, artists, though they might also be the wayward (though incipiently conformist) young bourgeois whom his early novella heroized (not altogether ironically) as “the ones who grow the delicate flowers of buffoonery, protecting them from the slightest gust of wind and always on the verge of despair!”

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It would be in Dazai’s posthumously published No Longer Human that his performance of self-abasement reached its apex or nadir. In a reversal of the narrative frame of Flowers, No Longer Human presents itself as the found diaries of the now-deceased Yozo. Here, too, the protagonist makes a fool of himself for others’ benefit—though always haunted by the fear of being found out. When one of his schoolfellows, having sharply observed his latest tumble, tells him, “You did it on purpose,” he carries the shame for life—right up to the moment, after that book’s abortive joint suicide attempt, when an interrogating policeman asks him, “Was that real?”

Once again, the shame at a faulty performance of spontaneity seems to go deeper than the guilt at having possibly caused a woman’s death. But such shame is also a source of pride, as if Yozo’s inability to perform the simplest tasks—such as getting on a streetcar—without disabling self-consciousness conferred an indirect superiority to the human automata who do so without demur.

The Flowers of Buffoonery lacks both the extremity and the brilliance of such high misanthropy. Its narrator’s interruptions are fitful, never building the momentum of Dazai’s later tirades. Instead, it settles for anticlimax. In the final chapter, Yozo returns to the bluffs, now accompanied by Mano, the maid. He is set to return to Tokyo the next day. Mano, charmed by his kindness, tries to extract a promise that he will visit her, but he deflects. When they reach an outcrop from which she says they can see Mount Fuji, the view is blocked by fog. Not that Yozo cares. His thoughts are on the prosecutor back in Tokyo, whom he can already see in his mind’s eye winking at him, letting him off. Dazai, however, has one last trick up his sleeve: The book ends with Yozo staring down the cliff at the swirling sea—then the narrator breaks off: “No, that’s all I have.”

This literal cliffhanger finds Dazai—or his fictional stand-in—poised on the edge of his future work and (we can’t help thinking) of his future fate. The gesture is both irritating and thrilling, though it is also, in retrospect, quite flattering—since it was no romantic plunge into the sea that all but ensured Dazai’s works would be read as suicide notes. You could say that The Flowers of Buffoonery frustrates such a literal reading, though it clearly also prompts it. At its best, however, Dazai’s unhinged art might convince us that brute facts are the beginning, not the end, of understanding him. The mixed motives of endless playacting are not resolved simply because one day the act turns real.

Just wrapped up one of the best Interintellect salons ever.

What a total joy! “Can we save the humanities?”

I left feeling shock, trepidation, deep hope, and big plans.

Returning to Interintellect:

Writer, philosopher, editor, ’s Anastasia Berg hosted Honors College dean Jennifer Frey discussing her viral New York Times op-ed about her firing, and the state of U.S. humanities.

So can we save the humanities?

But what do we even mean by “the humanities”…?

Fantastic attendees, questions, comments as well!

THANK YOU, all.

A short video snippet below (the full video coming soon!) —

▶️ WATCH

Love x

Anna