Not Even Disdain, But Simply Incomprehension

Last updated: 5/10/2026 | Originally published: 5/10/2026

A building in Financial District on a sunny day

So this past week I finally read C.P. Snow’s “The Two Cultures and the Scientific Revolution”, the paper that you have to cite if you start talking about the sciences and the humanities. It is, in fact, a very good paper! And you can find a PDF right here.

Snow was a mid-century physicist who later became a novelist and, as a result, had a foot in both worlds, science and literature — worlds that he felt, in the late ‘50s, had diverged into two separate cultures that looked at each other with, not even disdain, but simply incomprehension! Probably the most famous anecdote he relates is a group of writers thumbing their noses at the illiteracy of scientists, only to be baffled when Snow asks them about the Second Law of Thermodynamics.

That thesis has certainly aged — and his real target, originally, was the British educational establishment of the 1950s — but it’s still referenced so often because it does speak to something real.

A few things that jumped out at me:

  • Today the two cultures I’d reference aren’t necessarily “science” and “literature” but probably something more like “West Coast tech industry” versus “East Coast media industry” — a split in culture between (mostly Brooklyn-resident) journalists and novelists and (mostly Bay Area-based) “techies”. And neither group understands or cares much for the old school, academic literary or scientific cultures — so we almost have four cultures?
  • But there are points of overlap, across the twentieth century. Pynchon famously includes rambles on Maxwell’s Demon in his novels, and Helen DeWitt has a long-standing interest in statistical modeling in R, and there’s plenty of tech workers who left to become novelists (not just in science fiction!).
  • Most people that quote “The Two Cultures” only reference the first half — about the eponymous two cultures — but the second half of his paper turns into a robust defense of industrialization, which I almost found more interesting. In particular, he argues that, firstly, industrialization is simply a net good — with reference to his Russian peasant ancestors and their rather limited lives — and, secondly, that industrialization is like the atom bomb — the hardest part is knowing that it’s possible — so the rest of the world will rapidly catch up. From the perspective of 2026, it’s interesting to note that’s both totally true — East Asia and China in particular really did just go for it — yet also clearly much more difficult than Snow predicted. And it once again brings to mind No Other Choice and the question of whether industrialization was “worth it” or even possible to stop at all, a question that I find strangely undertheorized as compared to, say, the literal centuries of capitalist-vs-socialist debates. (A topic I will, perhaps, return to another time.)

Anyway, it’s pretty short (50 short pages, so it took me maybe a half hour to get through it) and highly recommended despite its age.

Recently Sherry and I ran a salon night, in the tradition of Parisian Enlightenment salons1 Note: relationship to Parisian Enlightenment salons tenuous at best; it was mostly just inspiration. , where we asked a bunch of our friends to present on some niche topic of interest. To my surprise, ten people (!) signed up to present (plus Sherry and myself), on topics ranging from drugs to pop culture conspiracy theories to the 2008 writer’s strike to women’s health to Costco,2 And almost all of us made powerpoints, too! and another twenty decided to cram into our apartment to watch the presentations. So, a highly recommended event format — it turns out that people love to talk about their favourite topics and other people love to hear about it.

Warning: this section is pure navel-gazing and probably best skipped.

I recently found myself in possession of a list of my “50 favorite albums” that I wrote back in 2020. So, hang with me a moment as I run through it:

  1. Kid A, Radiohead
  2. 01/10 (OK Computer/In Rainbows), Radiohead
  3. A Moon-Shaped Pool, Radiohead
  4. Minecraft: Volume Alpha, C418
  5. An empty bliss beyond this world, The Caretaker
  6. Acts I-V, The Dear Hunter
  7. Entertainment!, Gang of Four
  8. Q: Are We Not Men? A: We Are Devo, Devo
  9. The ArchAndroid, Janelle Monae
  10. Mezzanine, Massive Attack
  11. Heligoland, Massive Attack
  12. Untrue, Burial
  13. Game of Thrones Season 6 Soundtrack, Ramin Djawadi
  14. Kind of Blue, Miles Davis
  15. Best of Victor Jara, Victor Jara
  16. Solid State Survivor, YMO
  17. Public Pressure, YMO
  18. BGM, YMO
  19. Gymnopédies, Erik Satie
  20. The Disintegration Loops, William Basinski
  21. Remain in Light, Talking Heads
  22. Selected Ambient Works, Vol. 2, Aphex Twin
  23. The Suburbs, Arcade Fire
  24. Tomorrow’s Harvest, Boards of Canada
  25. For Emma, Forever Ago, Bon Iver
  26. Broken Bells, Broken Bells
  27. Trilogy, Carpenter Brut
  28. Something, Chairlift
  29. Crystal Castles, Crystal Castles
  30. Crystal Castles II, Crystal Castles
  31. Discovery, Daft Punk
  32. Breakup Song, Deerhoof
  33. Endtroducing…, DJ Shadow
  34. Clair de lune, Claude Debussy
  35. The Entire City, Gazelle Twin
  36. Meliora, Ghost
  37. Holy Ghost!, Holy Ghost!
  38. Cross, Justice
  39. Deep Cuts, The Knife
  40. Silent Shout, The Knife
  41. Lauren - Single, Men I Trust
  42. Aromanticism, Moses Sumney
  43. Loveless, My Bloody Valentine
  44. Ghosts I-IV, Nine Inch Nails
  45. In Utero, Nirvana
  46. Paramore, Paramore
  47. Spiderland, Slint
  48. Flood, They Might Be Giants
  49. The Social Network, Trent Reznor & Atticus Ross
  50. The Velvet Underground & Nico, The Velvet Underground

If I wrote such a list today, it would probably have a lot of the same albums, but some things jump out at me from a 2026 perspective:

  • wow is this list reflective of my race/class/gender/nationality/date of birth/etc
  • Radiohead tops the list — Kid A and the 01/10 playlist that combines OK Computer and In Rainbows are #1 and #2, just as they still are. But, curiously, I also included A Moon-Shaped Pool, which I’m genuinely not sure I’ve listened to since 2020.
  • There’s not a single St Vincent album (!) even though I was definitely a fan pre-pandemic. I have no explanation for this.
  • I had a big They Might Be Giants phase back in college, which probably explains the presence of Flood, but they haven’t really stuck since then. Similarly, I had a Holy Ghost! phase in high school, but I don’t think I’ve listened to their debut in ten years.
  • Obviously I included Daft Punk3 Though much lower than I would have expected — Discovery really should be top ten. but now that I know that Random Access Memories is really, definitively the last Daft Punk album, I would probably include it as well.
  • I still love Quebecois indie dream-poppers Men I Trust, but for a top 50 list I’m surprised I included not just an album but a specific single.
  • A few of these are definitely subject to recency bias — I’m quite fond of Slint, Moses Sumney, Ghost, and Gazelle Twin, but their presence on the list probably speaks more to pandemic-lockdown-era repeats. Similarly, I almost definitely included the Game of Thrones soundtrack because I was writing a fantasy novel at the time. Today I would probably include the Succession soundtrack instead 😉
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