Each month, we comb through dozens of soon-to-be-published books, for ideas and good writing for the Review’s site. Often we’re struck by particular paragraphs or sentences from the galleys that stack up on our desks and spill over onto our shelves. We sometimes share them with each other on Slack, and we thought, for a change, that we might share them with you. Here are some we found this month.
—Sophie Haigney, web editor, and Olivia Kan-Sperling, assistant editor
From William Stixrud and Ned Johnson’s The Seven Principles for Raising a Self-Driven Child: A Workbook (Penguin Life):
Below we’ve listed some research-backed statements about what an accurate model of reality looks like:
…
Money matters, but not nearly as much as we think it does.
…
We’re actually not very good at predicting what will make us happy.
…
If we’re on a bus or plane, we’re happier if we talk to a stranger than if we keep to ourselves.
…
Some of these statements might sound familiar to you. They come from experts who have published books about their research.
From Joyce E. Chaplin’s The Franklin Stove (Farrar, Straus and Giroux), a passage about heating technologies and changing standards for “preferred indoor atmospheres” throughout history:
The new ideal of being warm indoors gradually moved down the social ranks, and the heating systems slowly improved. Among other things, this permitted greater privacy. Someone who could afford it might now keep warm behind a closed door, shielded from anyone who, in another household, might catch them reading banned books, writing bad poems (until they finally wrote a good one), indulging in idleness, conceiving a child—or anything else they might prefer to do in peace and quiet. It was “alone in a stove-heated room” in November 1619 that René Descartes had his foundational philosophical idea: “I think, therefore I am.”
From Helen Garner, How to End a Story: Collected Diaries, 1978–1999 (Pantheon), a retrospective entry:
My father drove at speed along the Great Ocean Road. I hunched in the back seat, expecting to be steamrolled with horror at the sight of the burnt-out landscape, but like all such perverse hopes it was disappointed. Perhaps we were moving too fast. Perhaps I’d already seen too much of it on TV while it was actually happening, or it was too long after the event. Perhaps it had nothing to do with me and I didn’t really care. The thing that did strike me was the apparent deadness of the soil itself between the black, leafless trunks. Like radioactive dust.
From the transcript of a 1976 performance by Barbara T. Smith at CalTech, published in I Am Abandoned (Primary Information), which included a real-time dialogue between AI-pioneer Joseph Weizenbaum’s DOCTOR, a then-cutting-edge chatbot designed to mimic a therapist, and PARRY, a program meant to simulate a paranoid schizophrenic:
[SILENCE]
YOU’RE TRYING TO MAKE ME TALK BY NOT SAYING ANYTHING
DO YOU HAVE SOMETHING TO SAY?
I WENT TO THE TRACK AT BAY MEADOWS A WHILE BACK
I HOPE YOU LOST ALL YOUR MONEY
I HAVE LOST A LOT OF MONEY GAMBLING
HOW CAN YOU AFFORD MY FEE THEN?
GAMBLING HAS BEEN NOTHING BUT TROUBLE FOR ME
[SILENCE]
YOU’RE JUST PLAYING GAMES AGAIN
[SILENCE]
(SHIFTS UNEASILY)
WHY ARE YOU NERVOUS?
WHY NOT?
WOULD YOU LIKE SOME FREE CASH?
I’VE HAD EXPERIENCES WITH CROOKS GAMBLING AT THE TRACK
ARE YOU CALLING ME A CROOK?
(FED UP)
(OFFENDED) GOOD BYEFEAR = 13
ANGER = 10
MISTRUST = 15.271250
