Weekly Picks – February 9, 2025
Credit (left to right): R.Satish Babu / AFP / Getty; Max Mason-Hubers; Pratyush
After quite a break, ‘Weekly Picks’ have returned. As mentioned in my previous post, an explainer on how these are chosen will be posted soon, and linked in subsequent updates for those wanting a peak behind the curtain.
This week’s collection:
- Why children’s books? | London Review of Books
- The Case for Kicking the Stone | Los Angeles Review of Books
- Adrift in a Sea of Bullshit | 3 Quarks Daily
- Civility and/or Social Change? | Public Books
- The doomsday cult’s guide to taking over a country | 1843 Magazine
And some extraordinary photos from on an ongoing festival in India:
- Maha Kumbh Mela: The Largest Gathering in the World | The Atlantic
Introductory excerpts quoted below. For full text (and context) or video, please view the original piece.
“Children have not yet built wide hinterlands: to them, the world is still opaque and full of necessary bewilderment. Those who write for children have the chance to point them towards beauty that they do not yet know exists: towards versions of joy that they have not yet imagined possible.
In being written for those to whom the world is new and strange, for those who are without economic power, and for those who need short, sharp, bold stories, children’s literature can be a form of distillation: of what it means to hope, to fear, to yearn, distilled down and down into a piece of concentrated meaning. But you cannot claim to be a magician and fail to produce the rabbit.
. . .
I do not find writing for children easy: I feel that I fail the vast majority of the time to pin down exactly what I wanted, in tone and pace and truth to the page, and, as I do not enjoy the experience of failing, the experience of writing is sharp-edged. But it is worth it, in part for the rare shock of joy when a joke or a plot line falls into place, like wooden hinges perfectly matched, and so I go on.
The other, larger reason I go on is that I believe in the necessity of offering children versions of wonder. I don’t mean the twee commodified vision of wonder we’re sold – the Instagram post of a mountain lake with an inspirational quote. I mean real wonder: the willed astonishment that the world, in all its dangers and clumsiness, in all its beauties and miracles, demands of us. Active, informed, iron-willed wonder is a skill, not a gift: you have to work at it. And you cannot remain in awe of that which is familiar, so the only way to maintain wonder is to learn: learn, and keep learning.
. . .
It all comes down, I think, to this: a children’s book is not a luxury good. It is fundamental to our culture, to the grown-ups we become, to the society we build. If, as an adult, you become lost, children’s books stand waiting, with their distilled vision of that which can never be lost.”
2. The Case for Kicking the Stone
“Telecommunication in the literal sense—near-instantaneous communication over long distances—is an ancient dream. The German abbot Johannes Trithemius of Sponheim claimed in 1499 that he knew how to convey thoughts over vast distances—“by fire” with the assistance of angels. We shouldn’t scoff. Telecommunication has always been accompanied by notions of what we would now call the supernatural. Sending radio transmissions through the ether excited speculations about telepathy and unseen spirit worlds even among some scientists of the Victorian Age; the first televisions inspired ghost stories, and the internet has its own spooky mythology. “Every new medium,” wrote social theorist John Durham Peters, “is a machine for the production of ghosts.”
Communications technologies have psychic as well as practical and social consequences. Invisible influences arouse age-old fears and failings. The way internet anonymity unleashes the worst in some users has been dubbed the Gyges effect, after the tale told by Plato in The Republic about a shepherd who found a ring of invisibility and used it to become a tyrant. Plato’s point—that no person can be trusted to resist corruption if they cannot be held accountable for their actions—seems more relevant than ever, whether we’re talking of lonely trolls in bedrooms or Elon Musk.
The central issue, Carr implies, is that we have tended to suppose that new technologies for communication are either neutral media for making what was once laborious and expensive cheaper and easier, or positive developments that, by putting us ever more in touch with people and information, lubricate social discourse and make us more rational. This was the message pushed by advocates since the early days of radio, if not earlier: more information, and easier access to it, would lead to greater democratization. It was a nice story, and many tech entrepreneurs probably believed it—but only because they were ignorant of what social and political scientists had long been saying.”
3. Adrift in a Sea of Bullshit
“In the past decade, we have witnessed the fallout from the largely unrestricted spread of bullshit on the internet. People have died or have become seriously ill as result of following bad medical advice that they heard on social media. A recent Healthline study found that, among those who had started a new wellness trend in the past year, 52% of them discovered the trend in question on social media. The same survey found that only 37% of participants viewed their doctor as their most trusted source of medical information. There is a concerning new trend of children self-diagnosing mental disorders, and sometimes even developing symptoms of those disorders that they did not previously exhibit in response to watching the videos. The spread of conspiracy theories on social media has led to people falling deep into rabbit holes, often losing their most valued relationships with friends and family members as a result. People sometimes develop racist, sexist, and xenophobic attitudes toward people they have never met on the basis of internet bullshit. We are staring down the barrel of even fewer restrictions on bullshit in light of Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg’s recent announcement that his platforms would no longer include fact checking of questionable posts. The White House has also announced that it will open press briefings up to “new media”—podcasters, YouTube personalities, and social media influencers who need not have any formal training in journalism or commitment to codes of conduct that govern ethical behavior in the field.
Why should we allow this to happen? Should we continue to allow social media influencers to say whatever they want on their platforms? Should we do something to stop the AI powered bots that serve no purpose but to generate chaos from entering and participating in the marketplace of ideas? Belief formation is a social practice and we have social obligations. Shouldn’t we put into place some guardrails to ensure that the practice is healthy for our communities and our children? The public figures who suggest that we ought not to provide any flags on misinformation or context for out of place content ask the rhetorical question “who are we to say what’s true?”. Such a question suggests that there is no reliable process we can use to discern truth from falsity or good faith discourse from bullshit.”
4. Civility and/or Social Change?
“Demands for mannerliness and propriety are increasingly being replaced by demands that those in conflict just tolerate their disagreements. The civility of politeness, in other words, is being supplanted by what I term an “agree-to-disagree civility.” This emergent civility, I argue, legitimizes reactionary stances and valorizes the status quo.
Such agree-to-disagree civility is on clear display in the seemingly cordial statement issued by all the US Presidential Foundations and Centers in anticipation of the acrimony of the recent election cycle. The leaders of the Obama Foundation, the George W. Bush Presidential Center, and 11 other similar organizations admit that they hold “a wide range of views across a breadth of issues.” Still, they insist that “these views can exist peaceably side by side.” The statement goes on to affirm that “debate and disagreement are central features in a healthy democracy,” and that “civility and respect in political discourse, whether in an election year or otherwise, are essential.” One might be moved, perhaps, to see politicians of different parties standing together against the violent bigotry of the Trump campaign. But look closer. To be sure, the civility of this statement is more productive than repressive, more interested in prompting speech than foreclosing it. Yet while the centers valorize the clash of countervailing perspectives, they’re also conspicuously silent regarding how such disagreements might be resolved. Basically, the Centers’ statement suggests, we should all just agree to disagree.
It’s easy to see the appeal of this agree-to-disagree civility, because the tolerance it calls for is often taken as a transcendentally good ideal. As the political theorist Wendy Brown reminds us, though, there’s reason to look upon tolerance talk with a more ambivalent eye. For Brown, toleration is less a political ideal than a “practice of governmentality,” a body of commentary and rhetoric that sets the terms for political discussions, and not always in salutary ways. “There are,” she notes, “mobilizations of tolerance that do not simply alleviate but rather circulate racism, homophobia, and ethnic hatreds.”
Agree-to-disagree civility, I argue, circulates and sustains such malign paradigms by neutralizing critique and forestalling social change. This civility robs us of our ability to say “x is wrong”: Its principles make racism, homophobia, misogyny, and the like perspectives to be respected, not paradigms to be defeated. Endlessly tolerating divergent outlooks on social inequities is categorically different than working to discern and pursue the most ethical and efficacious modes of redress. In short, this civility allows nothing to happen.”
5. The doomsday cult’s guide to taking over a country
“Over the past decade, Fiji – a tropical nation whose name summons visions of cocktails under verdant palm trees and luxurious oceanside resorts – has become a haven for Grace Road, one of many shadowy Korean cults that have found footholds abroad. Since it arrived in Fiji in 2013, Grace Road has been accused by local and foreign police of forcing its 400-odd followers to work in its businesses, abusing them with violence and sleep deprivation, and kidnapping their family members. The cult has also been accused of corrupting members of Fiji’s former government, which allegedly helped fund Grace Road’s commercial ventures and resisted international warrants to arrest its members.
Most Fijians have turned a blind eye to these allegations. Locals have become enamoured with the products and services offered by Grace Road – and the promise of economic development represented by its businesses, which are as omnipresent on the island as Starbucks is in America. The bizarre, parasitic relationship that has developed between Grace Road and Fiji exemplifies the risks that arise when a small, poor nation chases prosperity by sacrificing some of its sovereignty to mysterious outsiders – in this case, a cult preparing for the world’s end – and the immense difficulty of expelling these groups once they have put down roots.
. . .
In the latter half of the 20th century – as South Koreans grappled with the legacy of Japanese colonial rule (which came to an end with the second world war), the traumatic division of the Korean peninsula, a series of brutal military dictatorships and nuclear threats from their northern neighbour – cults sprouted throughout the country. According to Tark Ji-Il, a professor at Busan Presbyterian University who is an expert on South Korean cults, the country’s social and political troubles were “turning points” that made doomsday messages particularly appealing to people who were desperately seeking stability. Most of the nascent cults had their roots in Christianity, but with an alarming twist: their founders typically claimed to be the modern incarnation of Jesus, demanded obsessive devotion and predicted the imminent end of the world. Today, about a third of South Korea’s population consider themselves Christians; of that number, Tark estimates that around a tenth are members of cults.
In recent decades, cults have played roles in some of the country’s biggest scandals. Tark’s own father, a prominent theologian, was fiercely opposed to them; in 1994, three days after criticising a cult on television, he was stabbed to death in what appeared to be a retaliatory attack. In 2016 South Korea’s president was impeached after it emerged that the family of a shamanistic cult leader (whom many in the country called a “Korean Rasputin”) had edited her speeches, advised her on policy and used government connections to press the country’s largest businesses into donating $69m to cult-controlled charitable foundations. In 2023 a Netflix documentary alleged that leaders of several of South Korea’s largest cults raped and sexually exploited many of their followers.
Some of these groups have established outposts among the Korean diaspora in countries such as America, South Africa, Singapore and Japan. […] But even as Korean cults have become notorious for their eccentricity, their growth abroad has gone relatively unscrutinised. Partly this is due to confusion about who has jurisdiction over them – the governments of the countries where they have outposts or South Korea itself – as well as the difficulties authorities face in gaining the trust of Korean immigrant communities.”