What today’s texts have in common isn’t a subject, it’s a distance: the one between wanting to change and managing to change. Phillips says ambivalence isn’t a weakness of desire, it’s its form. Impatience moves off the character sheet and onto the emotions sheet, which changes who answers for not knowing how to wait. A priest takes decades to square what they are with where they pray. And people who work with knowledge lost less of their salary than their faith in the craft.
On the other side of the day, three pieces about method that land on the same stubbornness: the path weighs more than the conclusion. Medieval medicine prescribed governing the emotions, a garden and company with the same seriousness it prescribed drugs. Craig Mod spent ten days walking the same London streets and drew no lesson from it. And six mathematicians spent almost a decade proving again a theorem that had been closed since 1976. Esmeraldas is what anchors all of it to the ground down here: moving house as moving class, measured by elevator.
connection
The Paradoxes and Possibilities of Transformation: Adam Phillips on Our Ambivalent Desire for Change, The Marginalian, Maria Popova on On Wanting to Change — the thesis is that changing is a problem of knowledge before it’s a problem of will: to want to improve you have to know in what, and that’s exactly what isn’t known. Phillips goes to the tradition’s two founding conversions, Paul and Augustine, to say they don’t resolve the conflicts they promised to resolve — they only expose them. What stays with me is the argument that describing your own life as progress or as decline is already a way of plotting it: “There is no description of a life without an account of the changes that are possible within it.” The alternative he takes from Winnicott isn’t firmness or consistency (which he throws in the same bucket as addiction and possession), it’s the capacity to be surprised. Popova, glossing Solnit, formulates the blind spot: the self that imagines the after is the self that has to have died for the after to exist.
Impatience is an emotion, not a trait, Psyche · Amy Arthur — Amy Arthur watched Nolan’s The Odyssey, measured themselves against Penelope’s twenty years of waiting and came out losing: a post office queue and nine years until an endometriosis diagnosis go into the same impatience ledger. The turn comes from Kate Sweeny and colleagues, at Riverside: impatience is an emotion, and patience is the process of managing it — not a trait you’re born with. The most interesting finding is that what weighs isn’t how long the wait is, it’s how fair it seems. Reclassifying moves the blame somewhere else, and that’s why the piece doesn’t end in technique.
The longest walk, Psyche, directed by John Haley — didn’t watch it, noting it down. The blurb announces Father Michael Shanahan telling a process that took decades: first recognizing the tension, then telling the family, finally identifying publicly as a gay Catholic priest, including how he dealt, inside prayer, with the Church’s official position that homosexual attraction is an “objective disorder”. Archive footage of his life cut with footage of mass in Chicago.
culture
Why Is Everyone In Tech So Sad?, Longreads · Krista Stevens — what lands here is Longreads’ presentation of Aaron Horwath’s essay in Noēma, and the thesis announced is that the knowledge worker’s crisis isn’t strictly economic, it’s existential: the problem is work-as-performance. Horwath’s bet is on the “messy middle”, the untidy middle ground of human interaction and collaboration, against the alternative of an army of agents. The passage Longreads chooses to highlight says Workism is spectacle and that we owe each other the reminder that this work doesn’t matter that much: “No one has ever died over a spreadsheet.” It stands up next to Phillips: a life narrated as a myth of professional progress is a description, and descriptions operate.
Medieval mental health, Aeon · Katherine Harvey — Harvey says she assumed an alien past on the subject until she stopped reading hagiography and started reading regimens, the healthy-living manuals of the late Middle Ages. In the humoral system, the emotions were one of the six non-naturals, alongside diet, exercise and sleep: controlling what you feel was a medical prescription, not a metaphor, and the inventory of care ran through garden, music and company. What takes apart the idea of a naive era are the cases: Matthew, precentor at Rievaulx in the 13th century, writing that there was no peace in his bones and that the post would kill him; the merchant Francesco Datini dreaming of the house collapsed on the whole family and summing up a life in one line — “Fate has so willed that, from the day of my birth, I should never know a whole happy day.” The image she prefers, and so do I, is the spirit as a drawn bow: strong, but unable to survive continuous tension, so that “quarrels in the house” shorten someone’s years. It fits with the Newton buying palmistry from the 8th: the past wasn’t dumb, it had a different vocabulary.
brazil
Esmeraldas isn’t a Cohab because it has an elevator, ZUM (IMS), with the text “Cidade Prematura”, by Lilia Guerra — the headline carries the whole thesis: the class border runs inside the periphery, and it is the elevator. Guerra moved to the Cohab on the far east side in 1986 and the gripe was not living in a “predinho”, a little apartment block; what the family occupied was an embrião, construction-trade jargon for the unit with the essential rooms, designed for a future expansion that never came — no money for barbed wire, let alone for the two rooms with a concrete slab their mother dreamed of. The hardest part is the economics of improvement: quartz on the wall, a satellite dish, an accordion door picked from a catalogue at the Sunday market, each fashion turning, a season later, into leftovers piled on the dump heap. On the photo side, the same inheritance in another register: the “maid’s room” someone thought made sense in a periphery apartment, with kids crossing the kitchen to get to their own bedroom, and the caption saying Ágatha was studying law in 2018 and today is a partner in a legal consultancy in Taubaté.
Transcript: Carla Madeira and Mariana Salomão Carrara on the 451 MHz podcast, Quatro Cinco Um · Sofia Rego — recorded at A Feira do Livro, with both saying that what draws them is inventing who they aren’t: Carrara calls it an exercise in empathy and brings it close to legal work, where other people’s lives arrive as cases; Madeira says fiction doesn’t test truth, it tests the possibility of the human condition. The strongest argument is in the passage read from Cláudia Vera Feliz Natal: a judge who only reaches his own loneliness by imagining a camera, molding rice into little ducks for himself, because “only a camera and a film director can guarantee that some feeling exists here”. It’s Phillips from the other side of the counter — the self that only exists in its representations, now written as courthouse comedy. The two also complain about the “women’s literature” label people insist on sticking to them.
science
The Four-Color Theorem Gets a Rare New Proof, Quanta · Gregory Barber — Thorup, Thomassen, Kawarabayashi, Mohar and two more colleagues spent almost a decade proving again something that had been proved since Appel and Haken, in 1976, and the result came out in March, with a presentation set for November at FOCS. The new proof is more complicated than the old ones — Gonthier says “it looks like they’ve used electricity liberally” — but it gives back a much more efficient way to color maps and graphs, and it opens up structural properties of planar graphs that could unlock other problems. What makes the piece worth it is the story of the mistake: Kempe announced a solution in 1879 and it stood for eleven years, until Heawood found the flaw in the color-swapping procedure, which is still at the heart of every later proof, with his name on it. Thomassen: “Isn’t it interesting that you make a mistake which is so interesting that it’s named after you?” A theorem can be closed and still be unsatisfying, and the “four-color disease” is exactly the refusal to accept truth without explanation.
findings
- A Few London Strolls, Craig Mod — ten days in a northeast corner of London, mornings reading and writing until cross-eyed, afternoons repeating the same streets; off-leash dogs among the toppled headstones of Abney Park, the Barbican flat as a set out of Brazil, the Shard pulsing on the horizon like the eye of Sauron, and a Swedish Zyn that left him curled up on the floor in a cold sweat. No advice about walking: the walking.
stalled sources
Eat Your Nuts (346 days), First Round Review (319), Dirt (301), Gurwinder (257), Literary Hub (109), web.dev (106), Out of Office (79), A List Apart (73), Anti-Mimetic (58), Off Brand (50), Philosophy Now (40), The Sunday Long Read (37), Adjacent Possible (33).