A reading list for Volume 1
Some holiday reading from the Caravanserai Editorial Board.
Happy holidays! If you’re in need of some light reading these next few weeks, the Caravanserai Editorial Board has got you covered. Here are some essays we’ve really enjoyed reading and thinking about in conversation with the issues we’ve discussed in Volume 1.
I. Aastha
“Why Does A.I. Write Like … That?” (Sam Kriss, New York Times Magazine)
Sam Kriss puts together a delightful (and concerning) breakdown of what’s become the signature LLM writing style, and it’s really funny: “When I asked it to write a story about a party, which is a traditionally loud environment, it started describing ‘the soft hum of distant conversation,’ the ‘trees outside whispering secrets’ and a ‘quiet gap within the noise.’” The piece made me think about my own voice, how it could be better, how my writing style overlaps that of AI prose, and what I want to do about it. (I remain loyal to em-dashes.) I was also struck by the meaninglessness of LLM prose:
A.I. does still try to work sensory language into its writing, presumably because it correlates with good prose. But without any anchor in the real world, all of its sensory language ends up getting attached to the immaterial . . . This is a cheap literary effect when humans do it, but A.I.s can’t really write any other way. All they can do is pile concepts on top of one another until they collapse.
As “Francis” wrote in Issue 8, LLMs have neither positionality nor purpose behind their textual output, yet we often react to them as if they do—“What is the model’s intention? What level of authority does it have over us? What slurs can it say?” LLMs “[piling] concepts on top of one another” also made me think about meaningless political speech. Like John Brown said in Issue 2, “lip service to affordability can’t be the be all, end all.” What do phrases like, for instance, fighting for the working class, dignity for all, or even saving democracy actually mean without a coherent, material platform behind them?
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“My Year of Rest and Chinesemaxxing.” (Minh Tran, coulda been at the club Substack)
US musicians might be in the midst of an Americana resurgence—as momtattoo described in Issue 3—but Americans on Instagram are busy Being Chinese. “You met me at a very Chinese time in my life. What does this mean exactly?” In an essay about a meme you either can’t escape or have never heard of until now, Minh Tran asks why we can’t stop half-joking about wanting to be from the country our political leaders exoticize and designate a rival and threat. The posts range from plain text on colored backgrounds to remixed historical images of Mao Zedong (recall how Issue 3 explored how evoking nostalgia could shape a hopeful future, not just a dark past). These depictions of life in China—which, Tran writes, would likely be disavowed a decade ago as cultural appropriation—are often simplistic and aesthetic-based. But they reveal an important shift in the US psyche: “In the twilight of the American empire, our Orientalism is not a patronizing one, but an aspirational one.” As the US public’s trust in institutions collapses, Tran writes, these memes offer not only coping humor but the possibility of something better: “We want in on whatever’s going on over there. In place of the desire to conquer exotic lands, we want to get a headstart on assimilating into the ways of our future overlords, and the only way to do so is to get ready to learn Chinese.”
II. Daevan
“What’s a Chinese City actually like?” (Chris Thomas and Stephanie Li, Chinese Cooking Demystified Substack)
Chris Thomas and Stephanie Li run a YouTube channel and Substack that teach hungry web-browsers how to prepare recipes from across China. This typology of the layout and architecture of Chinese cities is not their usual content, but it is instructive for us at Caravanserai.
We—writers and editors—have discussed aesthetics (Issue 3) and transit (Issue 7) in the United States. Increasingly, the implicit comparison in such conversations is China (look no further than Abundance or Breakneck). But our consumption of content about China’s ability to “get sh*t done” only occasionally grapples with the diversity of possible lives in China, and it tends to overlook how different urban aesthetics shape Chinese citizens’ relationships with the state. Thomas and Li go beyond the glitz and glam of Guangzhou or Chongqing to break down how the structure of Chinese urban environments conditions social and civic life. These planning decisions alternately isolate, convene, and disorient the users of urban space. Understanding how and why each outcome occurs, and thinking about the grievances or praise they may produce, is an avenue toward thinking with greater nuance and color about China itself.
Reading this piece on a recent trip to China pushed me to think more generally about the impacts of aesthetics on perceptions of the state: How does urban planning help set citizens’ expectations of the state? And what limits does it set on how they choose to live?
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Syndicated Moksha? (Romila Thapar, Pravada/The Future in the Past)
I’m going to be transparent: This essay by Romila Thapar, originally published in 1985, does not connect directly to any individual issue we’ve released this fall. It’s an incisive analysis of the process by which the religion we now call Hinduism has come to be constituted—both in reaction to external competitors and as a product of internal (for lack of a better word) dissent. The author is perhaps the greatest historian of ancient India. Why should her analysis matter to us, 40 years later and a world away? Thapar’s focus is on illustrating the historical evolution of a system of beliefs that cannot be extricated from its political and social context. Because of its social responsiveness, that system has displayed great flexibility, enduring despite the severe inequalities it encourages. Now, intense and homogenizing political and cultural pressure is being applied to force that flexibility into a specific frame. The loss of accommodation, from Thapar’s perspective, would be both a shame and a political calamity for India. For anyone who believes in a system of thought and belief that can accommodate and adapt to dissent—whether it is liberalism or the notion of a “creedal” America—the parallels make this well worth reading.
III. Advait
“The new technocracy: 2025, the year of neo-Saint-Simonianism.” (Pierre Charbonnier, Le Grand Continent)
(This essay is in French; the quotes I pulled have been translated by Google.)
In what I think is one of the more creative triple book reviews I’ve read this year, French political philosopher Pierre Charbonnier connects the “policy crisis” felt by American elites to the radical political economy of the French “industrialist philosopher” Henri de Saint-Simon. Although Saint-Simon, who wrote in the early 1800s, is not a particularly quoted figure in American economic thought, his understanding of how a government can achieve political legitimacy through economic efficiency strikes right at the heart of the “abundance” and “affordability” debates tearing up American Twitter this past year. Charbonnier uses this lens to review Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson’s Abundance, Dan Wang’s Breakneck, and Palantir CEO Alex Karp’s Technological Republic—and finds them all sharing a similar anxiety:
The range of real political objectives that may lie behind the renewed emphasis on the power of engineers and technicians reveals a fundamental anxiety within stagnant democratic capitalism: have the system of rights and institutional balances celebrated under the name of democracy become mere artifices that poorly conceal the lack of historical direction in our societies? Must we trade a paralyzed democracy for techno-political systems where decisions are informed less by the consent of all than by a futuristic vision of combating scarcity, national security, and imperial dominance? Is technology, ultimately, the answer to the contemporary crisis of legitimacy, and if so, which technologies exactly—AI, green energy, perhaps heavy industry—hold this status as the driving force of history? What does this tell us about democracy?
The three books he’s reviewing all have unsatisfactory answers. Karp’s fascist zero-sum politics envisions a totalizing tradeoff between security or data-driven efficiency (provided by Palantir) on the one hand and litigious, freewheeling liberal democracy on the other. Klein and Thompson over-index on streamlining regulations without positing heuristics for which ones are actually harmful, allowing for the capture of their framework by reactionary projects like DOGE. And Wang’s overview of Chinese political economy suggests that “performance legitimacy” can grow inflexible.
Charbonnier takes the books’ suggestions about the failings of progressive politics seriously, though. He critiques the nostalgia of leftist politics, which, “trapped by its symbolic association with the achievements of the past, it cultivates them in a patrimonial fashion and falls prey to accusations of bureaucratic clientelism” without suggesting a modernizing project. But he maintains that “democracy thrives on efficiency, provided that its real content is defined.”
I can’t help but think of how Fullmetal Communist (Issue 2) sees political rights and democracy as necessary for any affordability politics worth its salt, and of Palindromium’s (Issue 3) creative connection between the Progressive Era and Progress Studies, captured so well by Diego Rivera’s Detroit Industry and Man, Controller of the Universe. Rather than surrender the critique of inefficiency to conservative, declinist projects like Palantir’s, as Emile89 put it so neatly in Issue 4, progressives should seize that terrain and refuse to let go.
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“Joe Wright Won’t Let You Look Away from Mussolini.” (Roxana Hadadi, Vulture)
I really want to watch this show—and this review convinced me. This paragraph in particular suggests that the show’s chaotic, almost frantic cinematography has a method to its madness:
No political promise is too ludicrous if it convinces society’s fringes to throw their weight behind a candidate (ahem), and no violence against dissenters too brutal once it becomes normalized (ahem, ahem). Mussolini, Wright explains, was a rapist and womanizer obsessed with other men’s dick sizes and disinterested in his children, but he understood that the way to rule, at least for a while, was to never ask for permission but simply push the line of acceptability until there’s no path back to what once was. The bored little shrug Mussolini gives as he says, in a resigned deadpan, that “You have to violate what is inviolable … a crossed boundary is no longer a boundary,” is one of Marinelli’s finest physical moments, conveying the casualness with which the dictator threw off standards of decency. Marinelli is intensely, unsettlingly charismatic, so much so that you marvel at his performance while hating basically every single thing his Mussolini says and does.
The political spectacle serves both to hide and to exaggerate the grotesquerie of a fascist takeover. Time to get a MUBI subscription, I guess.
Did Volume 1 spark any connections for you? Leave your reading recommendations in the comments.