Cate Hall: Agency, Goddess of Cancer, Cat's Cradle, The Egg, Dream Mashups, Bukowski, Sasha
Welcome to a new issue of Words That Matter! Each week, we invite a guest curator to share the reading that matters most to them.
Cate Hall (@catehall) is the author of the Useful Fictions (Ben’s favorite Substack of the past year) and the forthcoming book You Can Just Do Things, co-written with her husband Sasha Chapin. Cate is a former Supreme Court attorney and the ex-#1 ranked female poker player in the world. She co-founded Alvea, a pandemic medicine company, and was CEO of the Astera Institute, a multibillion dollar foundation for scientific moonshots.
[Ben’s note: Hold up! Before you go further, take 90 seconds to pre-order Cate’s book. It’s going to be a big deal, and you’ll probably want it when the book tour starts, but what you may not know is pre-orders are ~2x-5x better for authors than day-of-release sales (because of things like print runs and retail placement)… so, do it now and be a force multiplier for a book that is going to help lots of people live with more agency.]
Without further ado, please enjoy these works and words that have mattered to Cate!
Cate’s Picks
The Goddess of Everything Else
Scott Alexander | 2015
A gorgeous allegory of the forces of cooperation and competition, as personified by the title character and the Goddess of Cancer. I love this piece because it reminds me that everything good in the world doesn’t just arise in spite of the bad, but in a perverse way because of it. I’m so envious of Scott’s ability — it doesn’t seem like the same mind should be able to produce The Goddess of Everything Else and Meditations on Moloch and Unsong and The Toxoplasma of Rage and Samsara and a dozen other world-historically good pieces of writing across multiple genres, but here we are.
Cat’s Cradle
Kurt Vonnegut | 1963
I think I’ve read this book five times, which is 2.5 times more than my next-most-read book. It is both a totally straightforward, easy to read short novel and a work of incredible inventiveness and wisdom. “Live by the harmless untruths that make you brave and kind and healthy and happy” is as close to a personal ethos as I have — it’s from this and “all models are wrong, but some are useful” that I took the name of my blog, Useful Fictions.
The Egg
Kurzgesagt / Andy Weir | 2019 / 2009
Originally published by Andy Weir in 2009, rendered in its canonical animated form by Kurzgesagt a decade later. A work of great beauty that has exerted a buffering effect on my sanity throughout different eras of my life, acting like a psychedelic during my most grounded times and a grounding influence during my most psychedelic (psychotic) times.
The Book of Hours: Love Poems to God
Rainer Maria Rilke | 1905
The only good poetry about God I’ve ever found. (You are welcome to point me to better.) My favorite of the bunch is Go to the Limits of Your Longing.
Dream Mashups
Malcolm Ocean | 2021
A psychologically load-bearing blog post for me. Though it’s worth reading in full, you can download the thesis from the first paragraph: “Everyone is basically living in a dream mashup of their current external situation and whatever old emotional meanings are getting activated by the current situation. Like dreaming you’re at your high school but it’s also on a boat somehow.”
[Note: this link sometimes fails to open in Chrome but works fine in Safari.]
No Hard Feelings
The Avett Brothers | 2016
A perfect song. Better listened to than read, as songs tend to be.
For Jane: With All the Love I Had, Which Was Not Enough
Charles Bukowski | 1962
I always feel a little weird saying I love Bukowski’s poetry because he had a habit of hitting women, and people reasonably don’t like men who hit women. But the truth is I feel a lot of … not sympathy, but camaraderie with him. Bukowski is the patron saint of alcoholics and degenerates, and I’ve been both. This poem, written six months after the horrifying, alcoholism-related death of the great love of his life, is the best poem about love or grief I’ve ever read.
Anything by Sasha Chapin
Sasha Chapin | Various
It’s good to be married to your favorite writer. Romeo Stevens has said, of much writing on meditation, something like “it sounds like poetry before it happens to you and an instruction manual afterward.” Sasha’s writing is the only work I know of on spirituality / awakening that consistently avoids this trap — we are lucky to have him as a translator. Some recent examples:
Spotlight on Cate’s Work
Cate’s book about personal agency, You Can Just Do Things, is coming out July 21. You can order it here. People like Tim Urban, Arthur C. Brooks, Lori Gottlieb, and Charles Duhigg have said very nice things about it.
Cate wrote a revealing post about the process of writing the book – Writing a book is a labor of love – and I also recommend Sasha’s reflection – Pre-order our book, or, what’s so special about Cate?.
Some of Cate’s other writing on agency:
You Can Just Do Things is a prison break instruction manual — a wildly empowering how-to guide for getting out of your own way so you can realize your true potential.
— Tim Urban, creator of Wait But Why and bestselling author of What’s Our Problem?
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I love Cat's Cradle and thought of including it in my list too!
And Rilke is wonderful. Great list.
Amazing! Cate, you’re always transparent about your context, but it’s still really cool to see the specific sources that you consider most influential. “psychologically load-bearing” is such a good phrase. Thank you for sharing!