Better Living Through Literature

This investigation by Rachel Handler is a depressing look into late-stage capitalism, a deep dive into a single subject, and a source of incredible sentences: “The Chocolate Conspiracy.” (Subhead: “Everyone in my life agreed: It tastes different now. I ventured into the molten belly of our crumbling world to find out why.”)

Some incredible sentences:

It was a classic American story about men and the things they will do to cheat death (betray their fathers) and how, with enough drugs, you could lose the ability to taste or feel things.

Perhaps for Hershey—or anyone—it’s easier to smile and pretend nothing has changed and nothing will change, that we were experiencing endless moments of goodness. That everything was the same balance of chocolate and peanut butter it had always been. I understood and empathized with this reality; it was one I visited whenever I ate a combo THC-CBD gummy and watched Emily in Paris.

Eating [faux chocolate] evoked in me powerful dystopian fantasies. I imagined Sam Altman’s grandson’s buxom AI servant handing it to me to tide me over as I waited on a line thousands of people long, flames licking my face from a nearby data-center fire, to bid on a bed in his Tesla-sponsored underground-bunker pop-up.

This is a longer read but a take I can get behind 100% : Deskilling the body, by Melanie Challenger. Essentially, she argues that modern thinking and tech that encourage us to treat the body as a container for the brain are doing us a disservice, and that our thought processes and very selves are a result of how our bodies move through the world. (Now I want to read an essay about what LIFTING WEIGHTS does for us in this holistic context but I guess I have to write that one myself.)

Some selections:

Once we decide that the mind is the real human and the rest of the body only hardware, it becomes easier to disregard the physical work, including the neurocognitive work of a biological brain, through which we move, find our way, put thoughts into words, and recognise our own needs.

[…] From balance to sensing what is happening inside us, our bodies are continuously perceiving and, crucially, remembering in the flesh. Our thoughts can emerge as much from bodily intelligence and our awareness of the wider world as from abstract symbols on a screen.

[…] I have come to believe that our bodily deskilling is, in many ways, a loss of faith in what it is to be alive. A life of physical effort and friction is not only unavoidable if we want to be as resilient and capable as possible, but it is, in a nontrivial sense, the source of our intelligence.