{{current_date_full}}
Hi, {{first_name | friend}}!
Welcome back to Insider Pix, where we uncover what entertainment and culture insiders are watching, reaching, and listening to! Next up:
Christopher Beha
Twenty-five years ago, celebrated author (and cradle Catholic) Christopher Beha became a committed atheist, certain that his days of belief were behind him. A youthful brush with mortality soon set Beha on a decades-long quest for meaning, one that ended with the surprising conclusion that for him, faith in a created order in which each human life has a meaningful part offers the most complete and coherent picture of reality.
Beha's new book, Why I Am Not an Atheist, is not a polemic on behalf of belief but a record of his long engagement with the enduring human questions, and a call for readers to take up these questions for themselves.
Christopher's 5 Picks
A 5-star-worthy book you'd recommend to anyone?
My favorite recent book is The Fine Art of Lying, an art-world crime drama by Alexandra Andrews. The novel is smart and witty and thrilling. I've already read it six times, though it just came out this week. If that sounds like a lot, I should add–full disclosure!--that the author is my wife. But you don't have to take my biased opinion on this one: the book was just named this month's Reese's Book Club pick, and the critics are going nuts for it. Required reading.
A hidden gem you wish more people knew about?
Not nearly enough people heard about Greg Jackson's The Dimensions of a Cave when it came out a few years ago. This heady, Conradian technothriller about an elaborate military-built parallel reality is one of the best American novels of the past few decades. (For the record, Greg is not my wife.) I truly believe that books this good eventually find their audience. At some point this one will be rediscovered and people will wonder why it wasn't fully appreciated at the time. That point might as well be now, so get on it!
Best TV show you've watched recently?
I'm a huge fan of Mick Herron's Slough House spy novels. Slow Horses, the Apple TV series based on them, keeps me hooked every season, even though I already know from the books how the story plays out. The show does a wonderful job reproducing the combination of humor and real thrills that makes the books so fun. Gary Oldman has been justifiably praised for his performance as flatulent ringleader Jackson Lamb, but the whole cast is excellent. I'm partial to Christopher Chung, who plays the delusionally over-confident hacker Roddy Ho.
A song or album on repeat lately?
My wife got me a record player for Christmas last year (yes, we do live in Brooklyn), and I returned the favor by getting one of her favorite albums, Jenny Lewis's Joy'All. We've been wearing it out ever since. Lewis feels like she belongs to the age of vinyl. Her songs are seventies-inspired rockers that create a mood, meant to be listened to in chunks and played from speakers, rather than diced up, tossed into your streaming playlist, and run through ear buds. Favorite tracks are “Apples and Oranges,” “Love Feel,” and “Chain of Tears,” but really I recommend playing the whole thing, and playing it loud.
Best movie you've watched recently?
I just watched Edward Yang's Yi-Yi for the first time. If I tell you that Yang was a leading figure of the Taiwanese New Wave, that Yi-Yi is considered by many critics one of the greatest films ever made, that will be enough of a recommendation for some people. But those people have probably already seen the movie. If you're not one of those people, if the words “international arthouse masterpiece” send you running in the opposite direction, I strongly urge you to give this one a chance. Yes, it's a moving and philosophically-rich character. But also, there's murder and betrayal and ghosts and bad karaoke. And it's funny! I can't recommend it highly enough.
Pix: We're in an increasingly polarized world where people struggle to open their minds to dissenting beliefs. What advice do you have for embracing curiosity?
CB: The philosopher Richard Rorty once said that the great intellectual fault of our times is knowingness–a refusal to be surprised, a presumption that whatever comes along can always be fit into our pre-existing theory about the world.
I think the first step in cultivating curiosity is simply embracing the idea that there's always more to be learned by listening to other people and looking carefully at the world. This doesn't mean seeking out new data points to be fed into our ideological algorithm, but seeking out experiences that might radically re-orient us, encounters that won't fit into the containers we've built for them and thus force us to take them as they are in all their messy particularity.
Pix: As a prolific reader of philosophy, what book(s) would you recommend to someone as an entry point?
CB: A series of Plato's dialogues, Apology, Euthyphro, Phaedo, and Crito, tell the story of the trial, conviction, sentencing, and execution of his teacher, Socrates, on the charge of corrupting the youth of Athens. These dialogues are dramatic and highly readable. They aren't meant for specialists, because specialists didn't exist when Plato wrote them.
They deal in the kind of questions that laypeople expect philosophy to take up: whether it's okay to lie to serve some larger end; whether we ought to obey the law, even when it seems unjust; whether we have souls that will outlive our bodies; what it means to live a good life.
They don't require prior philosophical knowledge, whereas almost everything that follows them requires at the very least knowledge of Plato. (A famous quote from Alfred North Whitehead holds that all of European philosophy is just “footnotes to Plato.”) For Plato, Socrates was the model of the philosopher, as he has been for many others over two thousand years. These dialogues are our best surviving picture of him, and this fact alone makes them a great place to start.