Half of what I read today is about what you receive without asking for it. Claudia Cavalcanti’s Suzana never wanted an inheritance or heirs, and she gets a legacy anyway. Thallys Braga carries his mother and Inhoaíba, which he didn’t choose, and he carries Didier Eribon, whom he did choose, though Eribon isn’t cited once in Filho. The PsyArXiv meta-analysis puts a number on this inheritance that is less cruel than I expected: what weighs on a child’s social competence is having two insecure bonds, and one secure bond, with the mother or the father, yields as much as two.
The other half is about license. Stephen King spends a whole essay enchanted with “Chattanooga Choo Choo” and notes, without being bothered, that Penn Station never had the track 29 from the lyrics and that the real train didn’t go through North Carolina. Maria Fernanda Barros, by way of a Gilberto Gil song, says almost the same about Cavalcanti’s novel: to tell a story you have to “tell the truth through lies.” Campbell Scribner writes from inside a practice that doesn’t grant that license. In the Jason Arday case, professors sympathetic to him started treating plagiarism as mere overlapping sentences, and Scribner thinks every defense of that kind pulls the ground out from under the field’s ability to hold anyone accountable. The song never promised a train schedule, which is why King forgives it; an academic paper does promise, and that is what Scribner won’t give up.
culture
Internal Goods, Campbell Scribner, The Point — Scribner works at a school of education, as Arday did, and writes after the case that dominated the news in August and ended with Arday’s death. His thesis is that the death doesn’t change the weight of duties that existed before it, and that if academia wants to sustain bonds and a world of shared values, thinking clearly is the only way. Most of the piece is an inventory of the defenses he considers irresponsible: dismissing the facts because the person who revealed them was Nathan Cofnas, a “race realist”; leaning on an earlier acquittal, by Liverpool John Moores, against the evidence that came later; whataboutism; and hollowing out the very categories of plagiarism and fraud. On whataboutism, one line of his settles it: “Everything matters, so nothing does.” The title is MacIntyre’s concept for the goods that only exist inside a practice, and the excerpt I read gets into After Virtue and ends before the concept shows up.
Filmmaker Andrew Thomas Huang on the beauty of imperfection, Diana Arterian, The Creative Independent — A conversation between friends who met in college: Huang wanted to be a puppeteer at nine, when the Jim Henson Company sent two puppeteers to his school, and two short films that went viral, in 2006 and in 2012, led him to J.J. Abrams and Björk long before he could write a script. What stays is the return to the body: with AI there are more images than ever and nobody trusts them, so he closed his exhibition at LACMA with the first live performance of his life and wore the deer costume himself, because he didn’t have the money to bring over the Thai dancers from the film. “The thing about puppetry is it’s all about hiding and revealing yourself at the same time.” He ties this to growing up shy, queer, and never seeing Asians on screen, and says that on stage the audience watches but gets distracted, which makes the exposure safer. The imperfection in the title doesn’t appear as far as I read.
brazil
A dívida impagável do ‘Filho’, Quatro Cinco Um — It’s the week’s big list of new releases, led by the debut of Thallys Braga, a reporter at piauí, with Filho (Companhia das Letras): the “poor faggot from Inhoaíba” who rises through schooling, poverty, homophobia, the price of leaving, and the difficult relationship with his mother. I haven’t read the book or Paulo Roberto Pires’s column; what the list brings from it is the reading that Braga wouldn’t be the writer he is without Eribon, who doesn’t appear in the pages but is on the cover indirectly, in a blurb by Édouard Louis. Pires calls this intellectual transmission, “distinct from grandstanding or vassalage,” and that’s the part that interests me: a chosen inheritance telling the story of one that wasn’t. The same list includes Ainda não, by Natália Zuccala, a day in the life of a scholarship kid at an elite school who hears his own slang faked in his classmates’ mouths, and Meu nome verdadeiro é Elisabeth, by Adèle Yon, about her great-grandmother lobotomized in the 50s, Monday’s Betsy.
Na vertigem do voo livre, Maria Fernanda Barros, Quatro Cinco Um — A review of Espaço aéreo, by Claudia Cavalcanti. Suzana spends the entire novel in seat 9F, reading a magazine left behind at home about an old plane crash, and through it she takes apart and reassembles the memory of her dead husband, Didier. The narrator is a neighbor who enters her consciousness without explaining why and alternates technical facts about planes and birds with opinion and judgment. The sentence Barros puts at the center is the narrator’s: “For those who never wanted heirs, legacies arrive without asking permission.” What stays from the review is the hesitation at the end: Barros asserts that legacies don’t depend on consent and, right after, admits that believing they don’t determine our actions may be a merciful act on the reader’s part.
science
Configurations of Mother-Child and Father-Child Attachment Relationships as Predictors of Child Social Competence: An Individual Participant Data Meta-Analysis, PsyArXiv — Preprint of a preregistered meta-analysis with individual participant data: 16 studies, 1,585 children, attachment to mother and father observed in the same children, social competence reported by parents, teachers, or observers. Children with two insecure bonds scored below those with one or two secure ones (g = 0.20, a small effect); having two secure bonds added nothing over having one, and it made no difference whether the secure one was with the mother or the father. What holds me is the move: most attachment research has looked at a single relationship, almost always with the mother, and here the mother leaves the center without the father taking her place. And there’s a null result the authors don’t hide: the number of disorganized bonds, one of the most loaded categories in the theory, predicted nothing, which they themselves say raises questions of method and concept.
findings
- Found Wanting: A Reading List on Measurement, Kanya Kanchana, Longreads — a reading list built around a doubt: if measuring changes what is measured, maybe it also changes who measures. It goes through Ken Alder and the hidden error in the expedition that invented the meter, Manvir Singh and his daughter classified as “wasted” on a growth chart, and Elizabeth Svoboda, who carried the gifted-child label into adulthood.
- On the “Chattanooga Choo Choo”, Stephen King, The Paris Review — King, who at ten swore to his mother that Chuck Berry was white so he wouldn’t lose the record, discovered the big bands of the 40s late, on a SiriusXM station. The piece is almost entirely about the rhyme of “version” with “Tennessee excursion,” which for him has the step of a light two-step out to the porch.
stalled sources
Eat Your Nuts (351 days), First Round Review (324), Dirt (306), Gurwinder/The Prism (262), Literary Hub (114), web.dev (111), Out of Office (84), A List Apart (78), Anti-Mimetic (63), Off Brand (55), Philosophy Now (45), Adjacent Possible (38).