Politically Homeless & Intellectually Adventurous
Anna Gát and Interintellect are reinventing French salon culture in the 21st century.
I’m very excited to introduce this week’s Reason Interview with
, the founder of , a platform that seeks to reinvent French salon culture in the 21st century, and host of the Hope Axis podcast. Scroll down to listen or watch immediately, or spare me a couple of minutes to explain why I really dig what she’s doing.If you were at all like me in high school, you dreamed of a world filled with egghead versions of the party scenes from The Great Gatsby and Prufrock (I was not mature enough to realize the satire in such works, or the desperation and phoniness being depicted). Or you’d read passages from Kerouac’s On the Road like this one and scream out yes yes yes, wanting to be part of a scene where everything was lit up all the time, even in the blackest of nights and the most windowless of rooms, where you would sit knee to knee with your closest friends or people you just met at parties and talk until the sun started coming up: “The only people for me are the mad ones, the ones who are mad to live, mad to talk, mad to be saved, desirous of everything at the same time, the ones who never yawn or say a commonplace thing, but burn, burn, burn, like fabulous yellow roman candles exploding like spiders across the stars and in the middle you see the blue center light pop and everybody goes 'Awww!'"
In high school, I wanted to, you know, talk endlessly about the readings we were assigned in English and history classes—or better yet, find a group of like-minded bookworms who were ready and willing to plunge into the great mysteries of literature, science, and philosophy that we would never be taught at school. Instead, we’d read cleaned-up versions of Chaucer that took out all the humor and the dirty bits and the anti-Church stuff and we’d be forced to read contemporary English versions of Milton—who defended chopping off the head of Charles I!—but then discuss only in the most hushed, reverential tones, as if we were part of a tour group visiting a museum or a church in the Holy Land. It was worse than going to Mass.
Somehow I stumbled across a copy of Camus’ The Stranger one day in my sophomore year while weightlifting in my house’s cramped, unfinished cellar that only had a 7-foot ceiling (no standing presses allowed). I’m still not sure how the paperback ended up there, in a box along with a bunch of paperbacks, mostly self-help books (e.g., Royal Canadian Air Force Exercise Plans: The Tried and True Method for Improving and Maintaining Your Overall Physicall Fitness, Psycho-Cybernetics: A New Way TO GET MORE LIVING OUT OF LIFE!) and Travis McGee novels memorable for purple prose and titles featuring colors (The Turquoise Lament, The Dreadful Lemon Sky) . While resting between sets of bench presses, there amidst the washer and dryer and the coughing and sputtering furnace, probable carbon monoxide leaks and certain mold exposure, and cramped by the clothes strung up between two thick metal support poles that I suppose kept the entire house from collapsing, I read: “Mother died today. Or maybe yesterday, I don't know…."
Two hours later, I had finished the book, having no idea what it meant but somehow knowing my world was irrevocably changed. There was no going back. When I walked the five short steps back up into the family room, it might look familiar but it was no longer the same reality. Like Meursault being sent to the far end of the world he grew up in, I felt psychically exiled from the only home, town, and friends I had grown up in and with; I would walk among them but was somehow also inhabiting a shadow realm at the same time, where all easy truth, knowledge, and even pleasure had been dismissed. Teen angst hit me like freight train. The next day, I rode my bike to the my surprisingly well-stocked hometown library and checked out more stuff by Camus—The Fall, Exile and the Kingdom, The Rebel—and devoured them without understanding them, fueled only by the conviction that it would all eventually make sense, especially if I could only talk with likeminded souls about all the questions these works raised. How could one imagine Sisyphus happy, Camus? How, how, how, you fucking idiot! I had no idea.
Those dreamed-of intellectual conversations weren’t going to happen at school, that was for sure. I went to a cheap and academically mediocre parochial Catholic high school in Middletown, New Jersey called Mater Dei (“Mother of God”) that was clearly inferior not only the other Catholic schools in the area but to my hometown’s two public high schools. How bad was Mater Dei? When I attended, the most advanced math class offered was pre-calc. The school offered just two years of Latin, taught by a well-meaning but oddball nun who would choke up recounting Roman myths and who clearly dug the Saturnalia festivals she hosted in the cafeteria more than anything related to Jesus, Mary, or Joseph. Founded in 1961, Mater Dei first announced it was shutting down in 2015, got a temporary reprieve, but cashed out for good in 2022. Imagine how bad you must be not to flourish in a super-Catholic part of New Jersey amidst increasingly wealthy people.
Intellectually, my saving grace came in my junior year, when the school’s athletic director—also an English teacher—invited me to join a “reading seminar” that he’d been running for years (my older sister had attended). He was simultaneously a jock (he was the A.D., after all, responsible for scheduling the school’s mostly disastrous sports teams) and an “intellectual,” meaning he had been caught reading sections of the newspaper other than the sports pages and the comics. The rumor was that he had maybe studied for a while to be a priest, which was seen to be as intellectually demanding in my subculture as studying to be a doctor, but he also carried the whiff of scandal around him—maybe he had married a woman who had studied to be a nun? Or who had actually been a nun? No one knew, for sure, and no one would ask for definitive answers, even our parents.
Every few weeks, he invited ten or so students over to his house, tiny and cramped in a low-rent part of the neighboring town (Keansburg, whose symbol was and still may be a cartoon pig) behind a discount men’s clothing store and near a busy divided highway. He’d make “gourmet” hot dogs—coating a pan with butter and then slow cooking the all-beef frankfurters in sauerkraut that came in a bag rather than a can. They were delicious and unlike anything I or my classmates had encountered in our own homes. He would lead discussions on books we would never have otherwise encountered: Kazantzakis’ The Last Temptation of Christ, Lagerkvist’s Barabbas, Silone’s Bread and Wine, and B.F. Skinner’s Walden Two are among the titles I remember arguing about into the wee hours on school nights. I still tremble just listing these titles, because they catapulted me out of a world I was already feeling constrained by, even if they offered no easy path forward. They just flung me out to the far reaches of the universe, into the vast, solitary blackness between all the planets and the stars. They solidified the transcendental homelessness I’ve come to equate with the human condition, for good or ill; they replaced young adult novels and Marvel comics as my canon. In an era decades before cell phones, I’d arrive home at 2A.M. to semi-frantic parents who nonetheless believed me when I said we just couldn’t stop talking about the multiplicity of selves in Herman Hesse’s Steppenwolf and how don’t we all have a wolf hidden inside our breasts, just waiting to run wild through streets and then into the forests, howling at the moon and scratching the rocky soil on which civilization is built.
Thankfully, when I got to college, that after-school reading “seminar” (a word that seemed more magical and forbidden than pretentious) became the norm. The whole point was to argue the universe, wasn’t it, in every class session and trip to the dining hall, to float like a barely tethered hot air balloon as far above the two- and three-bedroom tract homes in which you were raised and gain a perspective that never would have occurred not only to parents trying to stay one step ahead of mortgage and dental and car payments but to teachers and nuns generally committed to the notion that people who read too much developed unfixable mental problems? Books that made you cry, or dream, or scream—what’s the use of them, really, they would ask, not without empathy or wisdom.
I thought of that after-school reading seminar a lot in preparing for this week’s Reason Interview because Anna Gát and Interintellect, the platform she’s built, delivers hundreds of great salons a year. While some of them feature superstars like Harvard psychologist Steven Pinker, relationship guru Esther Perel, and economist
, all of them are built around civil yet engaging discussions on interesting cultural ideas.Interintellect's stated ambition is to reinvent French salon culture for the 21st century, and the platform is increasingly hosting in-person events too. I talk with Anna why she started Interintellect, how it grew to have tens of thousands of participants all over the world, and how her new podcast, The Hope Axis, fits into her vision of a future marked by optimism (guests on the podcast have included economist Noah Smith, online-culture analyst
, and Quillette founder ). We also talk about how her early years in post-communist Hungary shaped her worldview and ambitions.We live in a world of mostly unacknowledged wonders, enabled by the very technologies that we seem to hate more and more as they remind us that we, like Camus’ protagonists, are forced to create our own meaning every goddamn day, whether we feel like it or not. Maybe the smile is optional, but pushing the rock uphill is required. It’s a good thing, then, that we have people like Anna and platforms like Interintellect that help us connect across time and space and talk and laugh and cry about everything that is human.
“Politically homeless and intellectually adventurous” sounds like it belongs in a dating profile.
Psycho cybernetics? Please say more