Anxieties about kids and screen time, train vs. submarine movies, crime-novel recommendations, and other questions

Mailbag 08/25/23

Yassified Trump mugshot

Greetings from Read Max H.Q., and welcome to the latest edition of our mailbag! Every once in a while I solicit questions from subscribers and rifle through my slowly liquefying brain for a vaguely entertaining answer. This edition features questions about parenting anxieties, submarine movies, the threat writing poses to A.I., Ange Postecoglou, and Gwyneth Paltrow.

As is always the case, I got more questions than I can possibly answer in one go. If I didn’t get to your question it might be because I want to save the topic for a future newsletter, or it might be because I just couldn’t come up with a jokey response.

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On with the questions!

I'm really interested in any musings you have about raising kid(s) with tech. Not just like O Noes Screen Time pearl-clutching but like, endless choice in music and streaming services ... what's that doing to their little brains? My son is too young for me to need a porn talk but he just got obsessed with a video of Super Mario Odyssey where it's been hacked so Mario has like huge muscles?? That's basically like porn (as in a heightened version of reality which may leave the viewer disappointed with actual reality??)!!! These are some of my neuroses, what are yours? — M.

While I am sure the situation is disconcerting to you, his parent, and I am wholly sympathetic to your concerns, I think before we can really address the overall question we need to clear the air here and acknowledge that “Mario with huge muscles” is objectively one of the funniest things your son could get obsessed with, and I applaud his inventiveness.

For whatever reason, I don’t worry too much about the “heightened reality” problem of 24/7 on-demand Weird Media. I’m not sure I can articulate why--and insofar as we’re talking about neurosis I’m not sure there’s a rational basis anyway--except to say that I think that learning how to identify (and be disappointed by) The Actual World as opposed to whatever version of the world you believed was waiting for you seems like a basic function of growing up, regardless of whether you’re going on weird stories your friends tell you, or porn, or sitcoms about semi-employed young people who have huge apartments in Manhattan, or images of a bizarrely muscular Mario. I suppose this process becomes more fraught or more intense in the age of YouTube and PornHub but I think the basic skill set for distinguishing between heightened fantasy and complicated reality is the same, and one that parents have a great deal of influence over, if only by saying directly and frequently, “you know, Mario’s muscles are not really that big.” But of course my kid is only two and a half, so everything to him is total fantasy, and it’s possible I will be singing a different tune very soon.

For now my neuroses about kids and tech are activated much more directly by fears about screen-watching as a compulsion, and the way that a phone or a computer can be used as a means of sensation-deadening avoidance or anxiety-management--which is, to be clear, entirely a projection based on my own life as a compulsive and self-loathing phone-checker/media scroller. This seems like a problem that it’s much harder to counter-program against, especially because I personally can’t convincingly or legitimately tell anyone that they should look at their phones less. The best way I could help prevent my kid from becoming a compulsive screen-looker would be by modeling “a person with a healthy relationship to screens,” and, not that I’m not trying, but LOL. So, IDK. How does the Philip Larkin poem end? “Man hands on misery to man/It deepens like a coastal shelf/But don’t worry too much/Because everyone turns out OK in the end.”

P.S. I did my best to find the muscle Mario video referred to in the question and fell short but I did come across this really excellent GameFAQs thread that feels like it should have become a meme at some point:

Submarine movies or train movies? Are there any other modes of conveyance that are even in the running for the most cinematic? Also, should space travel be fundamentally thought of as analagous to seafaring, (with captains, admirals, etc) or is this a hangover from sci-fi driectors and writers who were enamored with boy's own adventure stories about the british navy/the legacy of world war ii, especially in the pacific (looking at you George Lucas). — Matt Zeitlin

I think on the whole, as a general category, submarine movies are better, but if you took, say, the top three in each category and put them head to head? Red October, Das Boot, and Crimson Tide versus Taking of Pelham 123, The Train, and Runaway Train? IDK, that’s really tough for me.

In terms of cinematic transportation overall, the real question is why plane movies are so comparatively mid. Sorry to pull a Bill Simmons on this, but what even are the top three plane movies--Air Force One, Con-Air… Executive Decision? Redeye? (I don’t think Top Gun counts as a plane movie in the same way…) It seems crazy to me that there aren’t more or better Plane Movies. Is the in-flight entertainment market so lucrative that Hollywood is afraid of negatively portraying Big Airline?

To answer your final question, not only should space travel be thought of as analogous to sea travel, all travel should be. Every car trip should have a captain, first mate, surgeon etc.; multi-car households should appoint a fleet admiral. Not only would this be funny it would solve the crisis of masculinity.

I've been thinking a lot about some of the points you've made about AI as it relates to writing and am wondering if there's some unresolved tension in a couple areas. I really liked the point about AI not being so threatening despite the recent breakthroughs because writing and reading are social experiences, but that seems to be a very different angle than how you talked about the TV industry. There, the lens was much more material (tradespeople develop skill and create value through their labor, AI is a fulcrum that capital is trying to use to extract more rent). How do those two pictures mesh for you? Do we need to worry about AI destroying the well-honed craft of writing, or is the buoyancy of human connection going to see us through?

This is a really interesting question--I see the tension you’re pointing to, and I’m not sure I can account for it yet. I like writing this newsletter in part because it means undertaking a continuous practice of what Corey Robin describes as “ordering one’s world, taking the confusion that confronts us and turning it into something intelligible”--which is to say that I tend to start newsletters not with a clear argument but with an instinctive reaction or intuition, and the process of writing is how I backfill an argument through which I can arrive at the intuition with which I started. It also means that there’s very little systematization of thought, and that arguments across different newsletters can rub up against each other in mutually exclusive but possibly constructive ways.

That’s a long preamble/excuse, but I bring it up to say that I think both of these arguments are animated by a sense that many people--writers especially--can be a bit too precious about writing, in a way that prevents us from having a sober view of what it is we do, why it’s valuable, and what kinds of things might threaten it. On the one hand you have preciousness about the figure of “the writer,” and their possible replacement by a machine, which I think fails to see writing and reading as a whole social experience in which “the writer” is not necessarily the most important figure (but also, insofar as the experience is social, not necessarily replaceable either). On the other you have a preciousness about writing itself, a preciousness that insists on writing’s status as something like a transcendent art and not as a product of skilled labor with multiple uses and values in multiple contexts.

I suppose the shorter way to put it would be to say that I don’t worry much about writing’s continued existence as a cultural practice or art form, because I think its value as a cultural practice or art form emerges from social contexts that LLMs can’t reproduce or easily embed themselves into. (And even if they were to embed themselves into that social context it would be on our terms, as social people.) But I do worry about writing as labor, and the way it can be devalued and deskilled in market contexts. (But even in that context I would say that A.I. just represents the latest lever for an overall deskilling that’s been taking place for several decades.)

But, I don’t know, don’t hold me to this, I need to think about it.

What are your thoughts on Gwyneth Paltrow? My often-ridiculed position is that when she retired from acting to pursue consumer fraud, we lost one of our most versatile film actors. When you look at her filmography from the mid-1990s even up through Two Lovers, there are some pretty great movies and a bunch of solid performances that range from light to heavy in a way that a lot of her peers have not quite been able to manage. I think it's a tragedy, personally. Am I way off-base? — Andy, via email

I think Paltrow is unquestionably a great actress, and I’d love to see her in movies, but the truth is that I also really admire her recent work as “batty rich person” and hugely value her consistent presence as an agreeable distraction in the discourse, e.g. during the recent lawsuit against her for crashing into some guy while skiing, or whatever that was about. I agree that it would be much better for society as a whole if she starred in more period dramas and romantic comedies and sold fewer dodgy supplements, but purely in terms of my own entertainment I feel like I’m getting the same return from her current career as I would from more Paltrow films.

What I’d love to know: What’s your take on the latest news around G/O and “Herb” Spanfeller? And what’s next over there? — Chris, via email

I’m shocked to see that a private equity company has been an ineffective steward of a beloved media property! Oh well! Best of luck to all involved!

Off the top of my head: 1.- What do you make of Brandon Sanderson's fiction, if you've read it? He seems to have become the new king of fantasy (a genre I abandoned in favor of Sci Fi and have slowly been getting myself back into), and is unnaturally prolific, but reading his first Mistborn novel, with very low expectations, I'm finding it predictably lackluster (though still much better than I expected) 2.- What do you think are the odds the US will see domestic armed conflict within the next decade? Including everything from full on civil war down to guerilla warfare style insurgence. 3.- If you had to become a single issue voter, what would the issue be?

1. I just can’t get into Sanderson. I think at this point in my life if I’m going to devote a few weeks to an epic multi-book fantasy saga it has to be either uncommonly well-written (like M. John Harrison’s Viriconium series, or Gene Wolfe’s Book of the New Sun, if either of those count as fantasy) or it has to have at least “smart undergrad” levels of political economy (like Song of Ice and Fire or Seth Dickinson’s Baru Cormorant books). Sanderson has neither, really--and to make things worse his books aren’t even awkwardly horny the way guilty-pleasure fantasy epics should be.

2. I think the question here is if ongoing street battles like the kind that seem to simmer in Portland should count as “domestic armed conflict”--I think they probably should, and I guess I expect that kind of action (“stochastic” right-wing terrorism included) to continue for a while. But I have a hard time seeing how or where political violence would expand beyond that.

3. Raising the top marginal tax rate. If I can have two issues it’s raising the top marginal tax rate and expropriating the New York Yankees from Hal Steinbrenner.

What’s the genre boundary between sci-fi and fantasy? You seem to have a preference for sci-fi, but is there fantasy you also enjoy? If so why not?

I’ve always been intrigued by Ted Chiang’s articulation of the boundary, which he describes in this Boing Boing interview:

I think that there does exist an useful distinction to be made between magic and science. One way to look at it is in terms of whether a given phenomenon can be mass-produced. If you posit some impossibility in a story, like turning lead into gold, I think it makes sense to ask how many people in the world of the story are able to do this. Is it just a few people or is it something available to everybody? If it's just a handful of special people who can turn lead into gold, that implies different things than a story in which there are giant factories churning out gold from lead, in which gold is so cheap it can be used for fishing weights or radiation shielding.

In either case there's the same basic phenomenon, but these two
depictions point to different views of the universe. In a story where only a handful of characters are able to turn lead into gold, there's the implication that there's something special about those individuals. The laws of the universe take into account some special property that only certain individuals have. By contrast, if you have a story in which turning lead into gold is an industrial process, something that can be done on a mass scale and can be done cheaply, then you're implying that the laws of the universe apply equally to everybody; they work the same even for machines in unmanned factories. In one case I'd say the phenomenon is magic, while in the other I'd say it's science.

Another way to think about these two depictions is to ask whether the universe of the story recognizes the existence of persons. I think magic is an indication that the universe recognizes certain people as individuals, as having special properties as an individual, whereas a story in which turning lead into gold is an industrial process is describing a completely impersonal universe. That type of impersonal universe is how science views the universe; it's how we currently understand our universe to work. The difference between magic and science is at some level a difference between the universe responding to you in a personal way, and the universe being entirely impersonal.

Obviously there are all kinds of edge cases here--by Ted Chiang’s definition, is Star Wars science fiction or fantasy? Kind of both, right?--which is only natural for drawing genre boundaries like this, but I think it’s a slightly more complicated and productive way to think about the distinction than the more standard definition, which is usually a version of “science fiction is things that are technically possible, fantasy is about things that are strictly impossible.”

Either way I love fantasy--I probably tend to recommend and write more about sci-fi here because I suspect that readers who subscribe to Read Max as a “tech newsletter” are more interested in science fiction, but that’s not necessarily a reflection of my own preferences. My favorite “speculative fiction” novels of the last couple years have been fantasy--Ann Leckie’s The Raven Tower and Susanne Clarke’s Piranesi. (Though now that I think about it, according to Chiang’s definition, Piranesi might be science fiction?)

How 'bout them Spurs?! What do you think of Angeball?

Antonio Conte should be arrested and sent to the Hague.

Ronan Farrow's latest on Musk featured an interesting paragraph about how Musk loves anticapitalist texts/authors like Douglas Adams and Deus Ex (and Musk has previously named his rockets after technocommunist AI characters from Iain M. Banks's The Culture series). Bezos even tried optioning a TV show about the Culture series, but fortunately, it never transpired.

What do you think is going on here with these billionaires who love science fiction that clearly places them as the arch villains?

I wish I had a better answer here than “they are simply not very sophisticated readers” but I think that’s basically it. I suppose you could construct an argument that tech billionaires like Musk and Bezos are sympathetic to Banks’s Culture novels because they’re monopolists at heart (or would-be monopolists, in Musk’s case), and can identify some kind of seemingly related political economy in the Culture’s post-capitalist abundance? I mean, if you squint, what do the Culture’s Minds provide if not universal free Amazon Prime? And Musk certainly seems to think that his own personal business endeavors will bring about the Culture, somehow. But I think that might even give them too much credit--among other things I get the feeling that once you enter a particular stratosphere of wealth a whole social infrastructure organically appears around you basically designed to prevent you from ever having a Mitchell and Webb moment and realizing how fucked up your life is now, including by ensuring that every book you read is interpreted as proving you right.

You and I have similar tastes in crime fiction and I owe you big Thanks for introducing me to David Peace’s Tokyo Trilogy. I had mixed feelings on the Red Riding Quartet so I had never tried it but I think the Occupied Tokyo setting just adds an incredible layer of tension and angst to the circumstances. I seem to have a taste for multigenerational crime epics: Peace, James Ellroy, Jake Arnott. Are there others in this vein you recommend?

No one (even Arnott) quite scratches the David Peace/James Ellroy hyperparanoid, ultra-grimy “I want to give myself a tension headache via prose” itch. But there’s lots of crime writing that has the same kind of temporal sprawl and political consciousness. Don Winslow’s The Power of the Dog and The Cartel, which thinly fictionalize some key chapters of the War on Drugs, are pretty close, if not quite as well-written. (Skip The Border, the final book in the trilogy.) A Brief History of Seven Killings, about the 1976 assassination attempt on Bob Marley, is filed in general fiction sections but is absolutely a sprawling, political, multigenerational crime epic that owes a lot to Ellroy. Another series in this vein I hear good things about (but have not read) is Joe Thomas’s “Sao Paolo Quartet.” Finally, if you want something dark and brutal, with layers upon layers of tension and angst (though not a multigenerational timeline), I highly recommend Derek Raymond’s absolutely brutal Factory series, about a nameless sergeant in the London Met solving horrible murders.