Two grandmothers with dementia showed up today in pieces that have nothing to do with each other. Anagha Srikanth’s grandmother spoke four languages. By the end, she had forgotten even who was taking care of her and started asking for someone named Tony, whom no one in the family knew and whom she, in her lucid moments, denied ever mentioning. The other shows up in passing in Abílio Almeida’s essay on laughter: she’s the grandmother of a Spanish friend, and she only started laughing after she got sick — “I preferred that version of her,” her granddaughter said. Doctors describe the disease as erasure. In both cases it did the opposite and opened a drawer.
The rest of the day looks at the same problem from a distance: what lasts isn’t necessarily what mattered. At Hohle Fels, the ivory baton survived, not the meters of rope it helped twist. The language Srikanth’s grandmother insisted on reviving was Armenian, but the affection stayed in the Arabic no one was policing, and the piece asks whether Tony stayed there too. John Gray separates technology, which accumulates, from ethics and politics, which come undone. The Zweig book Ted Gioia is rereading is one of those undone things, seen from the inside, in cheap beer and worthless marks. The two science studies pull the other way and find persistence where we assume choice: the temperament that carries a philosopher’s answer to the trolley problem, the twelve hundred variants underneath personality.
connection
The Mother Tongue of All Secrets, Anagha Srikanth in The Sunday Long Read — Zvart was the daughter of Armenian genocide survivors who spoke only Turkish. She and her siblings were sent to Armenian school to recover the language taken from her parents, the same one women taught their children with a finger in the sand during the death marches. In California, she banned English for her grandchildren under threat of red pepper in the mouth, but the affection came in Arabic — habib albi, ruhi, omri — the one language she never told anyone to switch out of. The thesis that sticks: “No one tells you they will forget you so that they can remember someone else.” The stretch I read starts from a name that could belong to anyone, goes back to Kilis, on the border between Turkey and Syria, and stops at the genealogy of languages, without saying who Tony is.
culture
How a Healthy Society Falls Apart, Ted Gioia in The Honest Broker — Gioia calls The World of Yesterday the best twentieth-century account of a healthy society destroying itself step by step. It’s the memoir Zweig sent to his publisher the day before he killed himself in Petrópolis, in 1942. The focus is hyperinflation, first in Austria and then in Germany, and the power is in the absurdity of the details: the newspaper at fifty thousand marks in the morning and a hundred thousand at night, the advance for a year of work that arrived worth the postage on the manuscript. The best scene is the Bavarians crossing the border to drink in Salzburg, because “one article remained free, which could not be confiscated: the beer that one had in the body”. When the krone stabilized and the mark collapsed, the Austrians made the reverse trip through the same station. A note to myself: the man who watched the old Vienna come undone had called Brazil the land of the future a year before he died.
John Gray on why “progress” in politics is an illusion, Jonny Thomson in Big Think — The piece boils a conversation with Gray down to a syllogism: progress is cumulative advance that isn’t undone across generations. Technology accumulates, but ethics and politics come undone with depressing frequency, and so there’s no progress in them. For Gray, the idea of a future better than any past is a modern Western myth, secularized Christianity, which neither Greek tragedy, nor Shakespeare, nor Buddhism assumed. The piece itself admits everything hinges on that definition of progress, and I think the argument is won before it starts: if politics is precisely what can be undone, the conclusion was already built into the yardstick. On Wednesday, Fukuyama went back to 1989. Gray rejects the end of history both in Fukuyama’s sense and in Marx’s.
Why women’s laughter has long been treated as a threat, Abílio Almeida in Psyche — It starts with grandmother Tina, from northern Portugal: widowed early, she raised thirteen children, wore black almost to the end and was never seen laughing. Almeida calls the Catholic-heritage explanation reductive and argues that women’s laughter was policed more than men’s because, in an order where man owed reverence to God and woman owed it to man, laughing suspended the hierarchy. The path runs from Chrysostom, bothered by women laughing during sermons, to late nineteenth-century newspapers reporting women who died from laughing too hard. The mechanism comes from Bergson: “Laughter is, after all, the sound of social rigidity cracking under the pressure of human nature.” A 2019 study cited in the piece shows that making others laugh at work raises men’s status and lowers women’s. The piece moves on to early twentieth-century cinema, where women watched other women laugh on screen without dropping dead.
science
How Different Are Philosophers?, Thomas Nadelhoffer in Daily Nous — The post presents a study published in Philosophical Psychology with 1,254 people, half of them trained in philosophy. Philosophers show more ADHD traits, less visual imagery, more inner speech and more ease manipulating mental representations, and the differences hold when only PhDs are counted. What interests me is the next step: the traits predict answers to thought experiments independently of training, and people who see less in their heads are more utilitarian on the trolley problem and attribute more free will in a deterministic universe. The William James epigraph says temperament “loads the evidence”, and the study tries to measure that. My caveat: the philosophers were recruited from readers of Daily Nous and the Leiter Reports, and the general public came from Prolific.
Your personality may be more genetic than scientists realized, ScienceDaily — A consortium pooled 46 cohorts and found more than 1,200 variants associated with the big five traits. Each variant has a tiny effect, but together they add up, and the pattern holds from a young Dutch adult to an American retiree. Comparisons between relatives suggest the association isn’t explained just by growing up in the same house, and the same variants turn up linked to health, education, income and the habit of being a night owl. The detail that sticks is the loop: variants for openness to experience predict moving to a more cosmopolitan neighborhood, and the neighborhood reinforces openness. It’s a university press release, not the paper.
findings
Metamorphosis: Transformations in the Early Modern Flap Book, The Public Domain Review — An 1816 flap book in which a child turned Adam into Eve, Eve into a mermaid (the woman whose speech leads to ruin, which ties in with the laughter piece) and the rich man into a corpse. On the opening page, a note explains that “Death is not a being but a state”. Many children made their own copy by hand.
Rope, Twine and Thread: Invisible Technologies of the Stone Age, Benjamin Taub in Nautilus — The 35,000-year-old ivory baton from Hohle Fels was a rope-making tool: by feeding cattail fiber through the holes, the team twisted five meters in ten minutes. The rope didn’t survive, and the piece is about that bias in an archaeology told through what lasts. The Wola, in New Guinea, spend 65 to 80 hours twisting thread to make a single bag.
stalled sources
- Eat Your Nuts, 347 days
- First Round Review, 320 days
- Dirt, 302 days
- Gurwinder (The Prism), 258 days
- Literary Hub, 110 days
- web.dev, 107 days
- Out of Office, 80 days
- A List Apart, 74 days
- Anti-Mimetic (Luke Burgis), 59 days
- Off Brand, 51 days
- Philosophy Now, 41 days
- Adjacent Possible (Steven Johnson), 34 days