Prague, February 1948. A photograph of the new Communist leader on a balcony, a fur hat on his head, a comrade at his shoulder. Four years later the comrade is hanged and painted out of the picture. Milan Kundera built the most famous opening in Czech literature on what was left: the hat. A scholar has since checked the print, and the story is not quite what the photograph shows.
Descartes’s window, painted for the essay: hats and cloaks in the street, and the men supplied by judgment.
Why we’re pointing you there
Everyone quotes Kundera’s line about memory and forgetting. Michael Cummins reads the page it’s on, and finds that Kundera gave the line to a character who is busy trying to erase his own past, and knew exactly what he was doing. From there the essay follows one fur hat through four sets of hands: the state’s, the novelist’s, Kundera’s own on his early work, and Nietzsche’s sister’s on her brother’s notebooks. Descartes supplies the frame, from a window in 1641: we see hats and cloaks in the street, and the men beneath them are something we judge, not something we see.
The hardest section concerns a half-page police report from 1950 that surfaced in 2008 with Kundera’s name on it. The essay lays out what the document says, what is contested, who the witnesses are related to, and decides nothing, which is the only honest thing to do with it. It makes exactly one guess about Kundera, labels it as a guess, and gives its grade. Read it for the ending, where the record does something the novel never mentions.
Two rooms, one painter, two very different buyers. In 1549 a queen hung Titian’s tormented giants to greet the future king of Spain. A few years later that king hung Titian’s nudes for himself. The essay asks who was doing the looking, and finds it was never simply the men.
Why we’re pointing you there
Everyone who took an art-history survey met John Berger’s line about men looking and women being looked at. Michael Cummins takes that line to the Prado, where the museum’s new volumes on women and the Spanish collections show something the slogan can’t hold: Mary of Hungary commissioning, Christina of Sweden collecting, Isabella Farnese marking her paintings with a lily like a brand on cattle. Power looked, and power was often a woman. The essay does not overturn Berger. It finds the room he left out.
What we liked most is the discipline. Every claim about who owned what rests on an inventory, and where the record gives only a later opinion rather than a fact, the essay says so and moves on. It is also the first piece in the series with no artificial intelligence in it at all, which is the point: Intellicurean was always a project about judgment, and here the judgment is a queen’s. Read it for Binche in 1549, and for a Sisyphus who turns out to have been a political statement.
Above the publisher’s desk at The New York Times hangs an engraving of Manhattan in 1851 — cobblestones, low buildings, a harbor full of sails, a church spire the tallest thing on the island. Someone stood there and looked. That, it turns out, is the whole question.
Why we’re pointing you there
The Times marked its 175th anniversary this week with an essay on fifteen million “first drafts of history.” The same week, an investigation exposed a company buying real online publications, firing the writers, and filling them with machine-written articles — bylined to experts who were never born, and overseen by an editor whose age dropped from 77 to 75 in the space of three days. Intellicurean sets the two side by side and asks what a first draft is worth when no one was there to draft it.
The answer turns on a name the Times left out: Earl Caldwell, the only reporter at the Lorraine Motel when King was shot, who said afterward that you don’t see everything — you get a sliver of what came past you, and that sliver is the basis for everything. A machine can generate a flawless eyewitness account of any event. It can never have been there. This is the fourth in Intellicurean’s series on what the machine lacks — and the one with the strongest floor beneath it.
Every age invents its know-it-all — the Renaissance humanist drowning in citations, the “well, actually” of the comment thread. What, exactly, is the pedant missing? He has the facts. He is not lying. And yet he is unbearable.
Why we’re pointing you there
Intellicurean sets the poet-scholar A.E. Housman — who spent thirty years on a bad Latin poem and knew precisely how tedious it looked — against the philosopher H.P. Grice, who worked out the unwritten rules that make conversation bearable. The pedant, it turns out, obeys the rule of truth and tramples every rule of mercy. He tells you true things you never needed, and mistakes the telling for a gift.
Then the essay springs its trap. The AI chatbot is the perfect pedant — infinite recall, immaculate manners, and no judgment at all about which of its thousand true sentences you actually wanted. In lacking the one faculty, it shows us what that faculty always was: not knowledge, but the taste to know what, of all you could say, is worth another person’s finite time.
