Nathan Bick

  I read The Red Tent as a means to study the writing of female characters in novels. It’s a bit of cliche, but one nonetheless true, that many or most of the “great novels” of the canon are written by men and do not focus or execute well on the female characters of their stories, many of whom are limited to instrumental roles or are otherwise incidental to the plot. For example, there is the famous “Bechdel test” that assigns a simple True or False to a story depending on if in the plot there is at least one conversation between two women in which they do not discuss one of the men in the story. If the plot fails this test, it is seen as a non-feminist story with women as instruments or objects rather than genuine subjects. I am not sure if I was able to get past this in the story that I wrote this past summer, so I decided to study further in hopes of improving.  I decided to start at the beginning, so to speak. The thinking of Joseph Campbell on the wisdom embedded in an...

  I first read The Glass Bead Game in my high school years, I believe the sophomore or junior year. This would be 2011-2012, a full decade ago, as of this writing. At that time, I was infatuated with the ideal of abstract intellectualism, scholarship, and academics. I identified with that world, aspired to join it, and drew a kind of arrogance and confidence from the prospect of one day being within it. I looked down on other things and the people that preferred those other things. The copy of the book that I had was under the alternate title Magister Ludi . This exotic, latinate name lended it a mystique, an aura of hidden wisdom, and that played into my aspiration to access such wisdom which other people were either too stupid to reach for or to understand.  The work’s high respect given to academics is matched by that paid to music, another of my high school era interests. Clear to see why I loved this book - it apparently elevated exactly the kinds of things that I liked,...

  I picked up my copy of Mephisto during a vacation to the Pennsylvanian Appalachian Mountains at a small independent bookshop in the little town of Jim Thorpe/Mauch Chunk, which is actually aesthetically an appropriate match - this town has an almost Swiss Alpine appearance, and both this book and its author are unmistakable Germanic in all the important ways. I didn’t seek out this book. Rather, the last name of the author provided an intriguing surprise.  Klaus Mann is a son of the eminent author Thomas Mann, one of my personal favorites, particularly due to the great Buddenbrooks. At the time of my trip to this mountain town, I was in the middle of writing and editing my first novel which heavily referenced Buddenbrooks . From somewhere within me, I had the notion that I could somehow relate to Klaus as a writer - in my mind, his relationship with his father, of which I knew nothing about at the time of my purchase of his book, somehow became connected to my own with my l...

  I’ve been familiar with Ray Kurzweil’s work since I was a child. His book The Age of Spiritual Machines was on the  bookshelves of my childhood home, and its message of technological future optimism was amazing and wondrous for my young imagination. To summarize his work, Kurzweil is an optimistic futurist and transhumanist. He places great faith in the power of exponential growth and improvement in computation, which has been the trend of the last 100 years, and he forecasts the same trend to continue into the future. If that is true, then it doesn’t take too many more doublings to reach a so-called Singularity, a moment beyond which forecasting is useless. The Singularity is a point at which the capabilities of humans and machines together reach a level like that of a god in speed, extent, depth, etc, and we can only guess what they might do. Kurzweil predicts that this will occur around the year 2045. Transhumanism and the Singularity have a very religious or messianic ch...

  I didn’t really get much from Jordan Peterson’s conversation with Lex Fridman. I listened because of JP’s significant reputation. I used to think his unpopularity and controversial public persona weren’t justified since his psychological and therapeutic works and advice always seemed reasonable and helpful - I think he’s helped a lot of people deal with their inner demons.  His political positions have always been more on the conservative side and I’ve never really agreed with them, but over time they’ve become more conservative. I think this is mostly due to societal pressures that come from being a famous ideological/political figure. His views are unsurprisingly aligned with those of his audience, but what’s interesting is how his audience has shifted over time and is now apparently almost wholly conservative. He became famous for refusing to comply with a Canadian law requiring the use of preferred pronouns, a position that threw him into the center of the transgender is...

  I’ve always respected chess and chess players. There’s no doubt that this at least partly comes from chess’s overall cultural association with intelligence. But I do have a personal connection to chess that is likely similar to that of many others - in my childhood, my father enjoyed chess and had a small collection of stylish chassboards that were placed in our house like art pieces. We played together a handful of times but I was never an especially strong player. At a few points in my young adulthood I tried to get better at chess or otherwise was more actively interested in it - I went through a phase of watching chess analysis videos, a phase of doing chess exercises, and so on.  Chess holds particular esteem in the russosphere and in the history of AI and computer science so it is not a surprise that Lex would address the topic in his podcast. I’ve followed Magnus Carlsen since I was in high school - Magnus is a bit older than I am but not that much and he began his st...

  I first encountered Stephen Kotkin and his work in passing with his first appearance on the Lex Fridman podcast. At the time, I didn’t pay much mind, although I do think the video was presented to me in my YouTube subscriptions feed. Later on, I did listen to the conversation which I found very compelling both due to the content and the delivery style of Kotkin. That is the first thing I’ll mention, is that Kotkin has a very distinct New York sarcastic, deadpan, comedic, incisive style in his speaking. He takes meaningful pauses and uses powerful metaphors as a speaker, and at times in his writing his literary voice comes through more strongly than any other author (especially nonfiction) that I can think of.  The first podcast ( Stephen Kotkin: Stalin, Putin, and the Nature of Power | Lex Fridman Podcast #63 ) focused on Stalin, but also on Russian geopolitics now and in the past. Kotkin discussed Stalin, but also Putin and the challenges that face modern Russia, such as br...